You want an indication of what the Corporate Rulers fear most, re their electronic voting coup? See this WSJ article. It's the ABSENTEE BALLOT voters--ordinary citizens BOYCOTTING the machines in huge numbers. This IS the revolution, friends. And we need to get on it, focus it and LEAD it--to put pressure on LOCAL election officials to HAND-COUNT Absentee Ballot votes and post the results BEFORE any electronics are involved. These common sense demands CAN be achieved--locally!
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110009167 Trying to get rid of Diebold and ES&S, and their billions of dollars in contracts, and the corrupt officials who are protecting them ISN'T WORKING. Ordinary citizens--in their desperate effort to get their votes counted, by voting with an Absentee Ballot--are pointing the way to a DIFFERENT strategy for getting verifiable elections. A LOCAL strategy of getting the Absentee Ballots counted properly!
The Dark Lords don't care about scandal and malfeasance and exposes--as long as the people keep voting on their machines! They know that MONEY and CORRUPTION will keep these machines in place, no matter how much scandal there is. MONEY and CORRUPTION put these machines in place. MONEY and CORRUPTION is going to keep them there--and the MOST that can be accomplished by exposing Diebold scandals (if the corrupt and collusive leaders of our own Party are any guide) is getting rid of the touchscreens and paperless voting, leaving in place an optiscan/central tabulator system that is ALSO run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by private Bushite corporations. A "paper trail" is nearly worthless if they still control the central tabulators! Ergo: The ONLY way around this system is Absentee Ballot voting combined with forcing LOCAL election officials to count the AB votes and post the results BEFORE the AB votes are entered into the rigged electronics.
We can battle Diebold and brethren all we want, on a national level--and I'm certainly not against exposing them--but the truth of the matter is that our own Dem Party leaders voted en masse for the election system to be rigged in this way. (All Dem Senators, with two exceptions*, voted in favor of it, as did all but sixty House Dems.) This means that we cannot expect even a Dem majority in Congress to enact real reform. ALL of them are beholden to Diebold and ES&S for their (s)election. (Some may have been elected anyway, but that's the not the point--Diebold/ES&S can unelect at will.)
We--the election reform movement--have no STRATEGY for achieving transparent elections in this circumstance. We know what we want--what's needed--but we have NOT come up with any way to get there. Ordinary voters are GIVING us a strategy--handing it to us on a silver platter--by their Absentee Ballot voters' revolt against the machines. It's up to 50% and 60% in some places. At least half of California is voting by Absentee Ballot this time--and AB voting has increased exponentially--quintupled in some places--all over the country, in direct proportion to the cancerous spread of these rigged electronic voting machines.
It's like Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott! One day, an ordinary person, fed up with segregation, sits down in a seat where she is not allowed to sit because she is black. Then others join that individual protest by BOYCOTTING the buses--and WALKING miles to work. This didn't change the system instantly--but it created a fundamental sea change in how the system was viewed by OTHER ordinary people.
Boom! Public consciousness takes a quantum leap forward. Why the hell should black citizens have to sit at the back of the bus?!
If the electronic machines are rigged--and almost everybody now realizes that they are--why the hell are we voting on them? Why are we endorsing these bad actor corporations ECONOMICALLY by USING their crapass, hackable PRODUCT?
We are cooperating with our own oppression every time we vote on one of their machines. And millions of voters are realizing this and voting by Absentee Ballot as a PROTEST!
The WSJ, AP, the NYT, the Sacramento Bee, all say it's voters choosing "convenience." That is BULLSHIT. They NEVER MENTION voter distrust of the machines even as a possibility. They are doing their Corporate number on us, all in concert, with the same talking points--to PROTECT their rigged election system from this massive voter revolt, so that WE don't realize, and ordinary people don't realize, what it's REALLY all about, and the potential power of this citizen revolt.
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*(The two dissenting Senate votes on the "Help America Vote Act" were Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. I'm not inclined to attribute these "no" votes to Clinton's and Schumer's belief in democracy. I think it may have more to do with New Yorkers' attachment to their old, reliable, and virtually unriggable, mechanical lever voting machines. New Yorkers have resisted e-voting, even in the face of bullying by the Bush Junta. But I have to say that their "no" votes have given me pause, in my kneejerk leftist reaction to both of these Senators. They voted for the Iraq War, for instance. How can they believe in democracy, when they didn't even uphold their oath of office to defend the Constitution? Still, these two "no" votes do stand out.--the ONLY Senate votes against HAVA. Go figure. It has given me a bit of hope that if Hillary is Diebolded into office, we might be able to get rid of these rigged machines, even so.)