The so-called "Help America Vote Act" of 2002--as evil and nefarious a piece of legislation as there ever was--did many terrible things to our voting system, nationwide. It flooded the system with money--with millions of dollars in unregulated lavish lobbying, and a $4 billion federal boondoggle with which to bully, bribe and entice hasty purchase by the states of untested and extremely hackable electronic voting systems. The money did its work. We now have entrenched corruption among local/state election officials from one end of the country to the other. (And where election officials are not purchasable, they are threatened--as with Ion Sancho in Florida--or driven from office--as with Kevin Shelley in California.) Prime examples of this corruption are Connie McCormack (Los Angeles) and Cathy Cox (Georgia)--public officials in charge of elections who do sales brochures for Diebold.
But a subtler form of corruption also occurred: the culture of secrecy that was created around our elections, by the introduction of private corporations whose PRIVATE interest in voting technology takes precedence over election integrity, for instance, in the demand by these corporations for the STATE to protect THEIR TRADE SECRET PROGRAMMING in the voting machines. No one--not even our secretaries of state--is permitted to review this TRADE SECRET code.
The culture of corruption involves money and laws, but also involves the PSYCHOLOGY of election officials. I'm thinking of a particular incident that sticks in my mind. A public voting rights advocate in California, Kim Alexander, who runs a public information web site on electronics in government, criticized paperless electronic voting systems (which are un-auditable, un-recountable and thus unverifiable). Connie McCormack, head of elections in Los Angeles (and a Diebold shill), replied, "She's not an expert."
She's not an expert. Think about the EXCLUSIVENESS of this remark. Even if Alexander were NOT a citizen expert on technology, and highly knowledgeable about voting systems--say, she was just your average Jane voter, who thought that an UNVERIFIABLE election system was, oh...unwise? undemocratic? real stupid policy?---what should it matter that she is "not an expert"? She's a VOTER. She's a CITIZEN. She's an AMERICAN. She PAYS TAXES. She is HAVING WARS COMMITTED IN HER NAME. Why should she have to be "an expert" in order to understand how her vote is being counted?
And what has this GREAT DIVIDE between the voters--the theoretical sovereigns of this land--and "the experts," who perform the electronic voodoo of vote counting, behind a curtain of corporate secrecy--done to our election system and to our democracy? It is corrosive in the extreme. I'm sure it was intended--by the criminals who engineered HAVA (Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Christopher Dodd and assorted Bushites and Bushite electronic voting corporations), and it results in items like this, in the CA-50 recount effort...
The voter who requested "chain of custody" items on the CA-50 election, in order to prepare for a recount, wrote the following to the San Diego registrar of voters:
"I requested the public examination of a number of relevant materials in my original request for the manual hand count, dated July 5, 2006. **You state that your staff is continuing to examine the request to determine which materials are relevant to a recount.** Even cursory review of Secretary of State McPhersons 2006 directives regarding the use of DRE voting technologies, and the relevant federal regulations, make it clear that all materials requested by me under the authority of Elections Code section 15630 are plainly and obviously relevant to a recount." (emphasis added)
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3055You state that your staff is continuing to examine the request to determine which materials are relevant to a recount.
The "materials" of an election are being treated as PRIVATE PROPERTY--and the election officials involved are ACTING LIKE PRIVATE PARTIES, as if they have a right to WITHHOLD, to be selective about, to control and to determine the relevancy of the components of an election. As if it were no longer a PUBLIC MATTER. It's almost as if, somehow, national security and terrorists were involved. And we, the voters, are the terrorists.
The secrecy, of course--always, and without exception--is masking corruption. That's what secrecy is FOR. Not to insure the integrity of an election--or any good. But to hide what corrupt officials are doing. There is simply no other reason why election materials should be the PRIVATE POSSESSION of the county registrar and NOT INSTANTLY AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC, on demand. You shouldn't have to write a legal letter or institute a lawsuit, to see election materials.
But that's what HAVA has done. It has created a culture of secrecy in which we, the voters, are the ENEMY. Hostility to the public is by no means a new thing. The more that corporations have taken over our government, the more hostile our public officials have become to US, the people who pay their salaries. I've seen it in California on other issues. But "the voter as enemy," and the secrecy around our most fundamental right and duty--the bottom line of our democracy, voting--has been newly enforced and promoted by this brand new, direct corporate control of the voting technology, engineered by the Anthrax Congress. And it is an alarming development, to say the least.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
