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Democratic Party leaders' SUPPORT for the Iraq war, and also their support for--or devastating silence with regard to--Bushite voting machine companies tabulating our votes with SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code.
Thank you for this post, Ian_rd! You are right on!
I think the two things are related--Dem leaders' support for the war and their malfeasance on our non-transaprent, Bush partisan-controlled election system.
Let me tell you a little story about what opened my eyes to the problems with our Dem Party leadership. I started finding out about electronic voting a year before the election. I'm a Californian, so I looked into it here, and found it was bad--but that our new Secretary of State, Democrat Kevin Shelley, was on the case, was suing Diebold and decertifiying the worst of their election theft machines, and was making real efforts to curtail the crappy, unreliable, hackable, voting systems that had been authorized by our prior Sec of State, Repub Bill Jones (who then went to work for the Sequoia voting machine company!). Shelley was also doing things like providing Californians with a paper ballot option for the 2004 election. (He also banned "revolving door" employment in his office.) I took out an absentee ballot myself, and felt that at least we had someone closely watching things in California, that we would probably have a fairly honest vote count here, and so I could devote my time to helping out (remotely) in other states, where things were not so well.
I hardly gave another thought to California (Kerry won the state by a 10% margin). In late summer 2004, some mysterious corruption charges against Kevin Shelley appeared in the SF Chronicle. They said he was "misusing HAVA funds," for instance (money from the fed electronic voting boondoggle bill). Turns out, what he was doing was WITHHOLDING those funds from the counties to prevent purchase of uncertified Diebold touchscreens--voting machines concerning which Diebold had lied to him. That's why he'd sued them. In the course of that suit, he demanded that they disclose their secret, proprietary source code (which I think is important to what happened next). (Imagine if we'd been able to review some of their secret source code just after the election!)
Shelling was not "misusing HAVA funds"! He was doing his job! He was looking after the interests of voters.
The story went away for a while--through the election--then re-emerged in January '05. There were a few other charges--all of which evaporated upon examination (as to any culpability on Shelley's part). The CA legis held hearings, and that's when my eyes began to open. One of the testifiers was Los Angeles county elections head Connie McCormack--a Democrat and an advocate of Diebold and paperless voting, and one of these career types who sneers at citizen activists as "not professional" (even citizen activists who are experts in electronic voting--as if citizens should have to be!). Turns out McCormack's best friend--who she wines and dines and takes vacations with--is Deborah Siler, formerly the chief salesperson for Diebold in California. What McCormack said at the hearing on Shelley is that she wanted to "drive a bulldozer" into the Sec of State's office, to bust loose the HAVA funds (to buy these crappy, hackable machines). She led a group of county officials (some of the worst in the state) who opposed Shelley's reforms, who actually filed a lawsuit against him to stop his reforms, and who, in every sense of the word, had become lobbyists for electronic voting companies, against the public interest!
Let me repeat. McCormack is a DEMOCRAT. The Bush Cartel black ops effort in the SF Chronicle (the substanceless charges against Shelley--I'm going on instinct here--demand Diebold source code, step on a Bush buddy's toes and you get black opped) combined with McCormack's big professional interest in electronic voting and--I presume--POWER over elected officials because of hers, and other county officials', CONTROL over the vote count, resulted in the CA leg Democrats complete abandonment of Shelley, to the point that some Dems, who wanted to support him, had to hide in their offices to avoid the order of the leadership to vote against him!
And he had done nothing wrong! He had merely been doing his job! --unlike so many other election officials in California and across the country. He was one of the good guys--one of the few who were trying to protect the voters against election theft.
The fed election commission (under Bush Cartel control) then started threatening Shelley with investigations. Shelley had no legal fund. He had no personal money (tells you something about Shelley). He had no means to defend himself with. And, lacking the support of the Dem Party leaders, and lacking in legal funds, he resigned, in Feb. '05--to be replaced by an UNELECTED Schwarzenegger appointee who immediately stacked his office and advisory group with Diebold advocates and other Bushites.
This is the most shocking thing that I have ever seen happen in California politics--since the destruction of CA Supreme Court Justice Rose Byrd (over the death penalty). And it tells us where WE, the justice-minded, anti-Iraq war majority in this country, stand, with regard to the Democratic Party. Nowhere is where.
They PERMITTED these criminals to gain control over our election system. They aided and abetted them with venal corruption among county election officials and others, on what is now the big business of selling our right to vote. Many of them--especially the top leadership--support Bush's war, and were not about to let Kerry get elected, because he would have been beholden to the anti-war grass roots--the people who worked their behinds off, and achieved a blowout success over the Repubs in new voter registration in 2004 (nearly 60/40!), as well as keeping Kerry competitive with the Bush money machine throughout the campaign, via thousands of small donations--and who, in fact, gave Kerry a landslide victory (by somewhere between a 5% and 10% margin). (--estimating from the exit poll east coast time zone curve, all the votes that were flipped over or outright manufactured by Diebold's and ES&S's secret vote tabulation formulae, and all those who were prevented from voting via voting roll purges--a million black voters, according to Greg Palast--and other massive Voting Rights Act violations.)
WHY were our Dem Party leaders SILENT about Bushite control of the tabulation of our votes? Why could they hardly even bring themselves to object to the massive violations of the Voting Rights Act in Ohio (and didn't even do that until EIGHT months after the election!)? Because it suited them! And they are now laying back like the snakes they are, planning to USE this huge anti-war movement that is developing, to put a WAR DEMOCRAT in the White House, to run a "better war" in the Middle East, and to get a Draft (which Bush can't do).
What we are looking at is the War Party, comprised of all the Republican leaders and most of the Democrats, and...? And the few honest politicians who have somehow survived, and who are still working on our behalf within what I can only call a fascist coup.
58% of the American people opposed the Iraq war BEFORE the invasion--way back in Feb. '03. Before all the lies were exposed; before the full horror and costs of it were known. Across the board in all polls. 58%! That's a BIG majority! And those are corporate news monopoly polls--always weighted toward the rightwing--so that figure was probably even higher. The American people NEVER supported this war. Never!
Now it's pushing 80%! And STILL we can hardly find a Democrat in the country who is willing to represent the interests of the MAJORITY on this vital matter--certainly none among the established leadership.
The story of the destruction of Kevin Shelley taught me a lot about the innards of the Dem Party leadership and our problems with it. At first I thought that the CA Dems were just cowardly--fearing black ops against themselves--just as many of us have thought about the Dems failure to fight the stolen election, or their failure to condemn torture, or their failure to condemn Bush's lies and Bush's war. They feared being Wellstoned. They feared being anthraxed--and all that. And, yes, I do think fear is a factor in this crippled and faltering democracy. But I think that corruption, and war profiteering (in which I include campaign contributions from backers of Israel's rightwing), are much the bigger factor in the utter malfeasance of the Democratic Party leadership. (And the stupidity of thinking that a fascist America, and the presence of 15 permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, and the torture and deaths of Arabs and Muslims at U.S hands, and the invasion or nuking of Iran and Syria, is going to "help Israel" is beyond my comprehension. But it's part of the political reality that we must face. Our foreign policy is way over-influenced by Israel's rightwing.)
This is a big, complex country, and it is not easy to generalize. There may be pockets of honesty in some places. But there are damn few elected politicians who are willing to tell even the no-brainer truth that Bush partisans shouldn't be counting our votes with secret formulae!
I mean, COME ON!
We need a BIG BROOM, my friends. And the Republicans are not the only ones who need their house cleaned.
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More specifically, we need...
Paper ballots hand-counted at the precinct level (--Canada does it in one day, although speed should not even be a consideration, just accuracy and verifiability)
or, at the least...
Paper ballot (not "paper trail") backup of all electronic voting, a 10% audit (automatic recount), strict security, and NO SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code! (...jeez!).
...and we need to get this done at the state/local level, where the power over election systems still resides, and where ordinary people still have some influence. The electronic voting corruption is a formidable obstacle, but election reform is absolutely blockaded at the Fed level (and we wouldn't want them meddling any more anyway). And we MUST get this done! Our democracy is hanging in the balance.
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