The best LTTE we can write is one about the electronic voting machines.

[Stevepol]

Recently I sent the following to the local newspaper here. I don't know if it will be published, but I think it captures the essence of what we should be demanding if we want to have any influence in politics in the future. Many thanks to Land Shark and others who have refined the message.

Maybe you can use it as the basis for a letter you send to your own paper. This LTTE is 171 words, so it is brief and to the point, something that all newspapers value. Here it is:

Editors:

The most bipartisan issue in any democracy should be the fairness of the vote. No matter what party we belong to, we want to feel sure that our vote is counted fairly. Without that, it's impossible to even have a democracy. Yet today, when we vote using electronic voting machines, we are in effect handing a blank ballot to the owners and programmers of the machines and telling them, "Here, you fill in my vote for me and go ahead and use invisible ink." Is that the kind of democracy we want? At the very least it leads to immense suspicion and distrust. Recently on the internet I typed in "Election Fraud 2004" on Google and got 1,090,000 hits. Try it yourself. By now that number is higher I'm sure. If we want to restore trust and integrity to our voting system, all of us, regardless of political affiliation should demand a voter-verified paper ballot print-out and manual audits for all elections where electronic voting machines are used to count votes.

[wli]

1. "bipartisan" is bunk

Clone-resistant summable Concorcet voting systems need to be used to counteract gerrymandering and the spoiler effect. My favorites for this are Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping (CSSD), RP (Ranked Pairs), and Cardinal Weighted Pairs (CWP).

Also, parliamentary-style election methods should be used for the legislative branches of government.

[Peace Patriot]

2. This is THE most important thing we can do, and MUST DO, to begin

restoring democracy in the U.S.A.: get rid of electronic voting machines, or, at the least, subject them to stringent auditing, and a paper ballot backup, and forbid secret, proprietary programming code!

I'll admit, my first thought on reading the above was: bipartisan, my ass! The electronic voting machine companies are owned and run by Bushites! --one of them (Diebold) by a Bush-Cheney campaign chair who promised to "deliver" Ohio to Bush-Cheney in 2004! I mean, come on! THIS *IS* A PARTISAN MATTER! *THEY* MADE IT PARTISAN! They could have created an honest voting system. *THEY* DIDN'T WANT ONE!!!

Bushites, counting all our votes in secret! My God, what has this country come to!

Then I calmed down. In truth, I strongly suspect that a rather large component of the votes that were stolen in 2004 were REPUBLICAN votes against Bush! Bushites, I don't care what they think--thugs, greedbags, bigots, traitors and "know-nothings," that's what they are. But Republicans who voted for Kerry, against Bush--that is another matter. These are folks with whom we could form a democracy.

And that's what we must do.

And don't wait for Bush's "pod people" in Congress to do something about it (har-har). They are the ones who gave us Diebold! It must be done at the state/local level, where the power over election systems still resides, and where ordinary people still have some say.

And we must do it NOW--before we get a whole new layer of Bush "pod people" in Congress in 2006, and another "pod" president in 2008.

("pod people" = mindless repetition of someone else's "talking points").

(i.e., "Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

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Great letter, Stevepol!

[Stevepol]

3. I should have put "nonpartisan" rather than "bipartisan,"

but the idea is to help people to see that this is indeed the basis of our whole democracy, not some partisan "talking point."

What is so maddening about this whole thing is that the Repubs can never be called to task for anything they say or do. They can't lose because of the machines, and so they start to imagine that the American people support what they are doing and saying. And all we can do if we disagree is gnash our teeth and keep trying.

I know the American people are basically progressive and if the voting machines were fairly counting votes there would be a Democratic majority in both houses and a Democratic president.

But how can you tell that to someone after an election?