Good afternoon from Tennessee, the front lines of the Republican Party's never-ending war to dismantle democracy. If you are a regular visitor to DU's "Election Reform" forum, you have likely been following the most recent "glitch-apalooza" that was Tennessee's recent August primary. If you aren't, just check out today's review of the nation's voting news. My home state has six separate entries in there today. None of them are pretty.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x516165The problems we are experiencing in Tennessee are well-known to anyone who has followed the "vapor-based" voting saga for the past six years, as I have. In Maury county (where I live), vote totals began to count backward on election night as the computerized vote records from DREs were totaled in our central tabulator. In Davidson county, a very close state Senate race came down to counting (and recounting -- four times, with four different results) a relative handful of absentee and provisional ballots, because they were all that were available for that purpose. (BTW, the DINO won.) In county after county, reports of vote-flipping, missing machines and general disarray have flowed in and that flood hasn't diminished yet.
And then there is Shelby county (Memphis), the birthplace of the blues. In one of the bluest cities in America, the entire Republican slate of local offices "won" in August, aided by vote-flipping, hacked voter rolls and 7,000+ more votes recorded in the DREs than there were voters who actually (you know) voted. As one election integrity researcher was recently quoted whose efforts at reconstructing the Memphis melt-down have been blocked at every turn: "This is like watching a two week long bank robbery."
None of this is new. All of it is worrisome. We cannot fix it ourselves because the mechanism for correcting a floundering ship of state -- the ballot box -- no longer exists. What we are left with is a "vapor-ballot" based voting system and a "move along, nothing to see here" Secretary of State who is in his position because the Republicans "won" control of our state legislature in 2008 by winning every open seat from Memphis to Bristol on these same machines. In order not to mess with a winning formula, that Secretary of State (Tre Hargett) moved immediately in 2008 to repeal or delay implementation of Tennessee's Voter Confidence Act, a law that passed unanimously in our Senate and gained all but four Republican votes in our House, a law that banned DREs for a paper ballot-based optical scan system AND mandatory random manual audits of all elections in all counties. With the help of the new Republican majority and a handful of clueless DINOs, Hargett succeeded in doing just that.
So it is time for federal intervention. President Obama, please send in the troops. We do not (yet) need the National Guard or the Army to prevent (or help us prevail in) another Battle of Athens. But we do need an army of FBI agents, trained in interrogation and well-armed with computer software analytic skills, to come here, confiscate every single DRE and literally tear them apart. If the voting machine company Diebold (or Premiere or Dominion or whatever it calls itself this week) cries "foul!" and demands that its trade secrets be protected (despite the risk of our franchise), tell Diebold to sue the federal government. And mean it.
While you're at it, prosecute every Tennessee election official (or Republican party hack) who has engaged in voter caging, improper voter registration purges, voter intimidation and any of the other campaign tactics that Republicans are now so well known for, and that violate the Voting Rights Act. Lock them up, or better yet, export them to Gitmo. They all represent a greater threat to our way of life than any 15 year old grenade-thrower ever did. They have turned our voting booths into anti-democratic IEDs and our elections into reich-wing kangaroo caucuses. Enough is enough.
I know how dangerous this request is. I know what happened to another charismatic Black leader who deigned to come to Memphis four decades ago to help us with our troubles. But without some immediate federal intervention, Tennessee is lost to this union and its pestilence threatens the entire national body politic. We have tried, lordy we have tried, to save our democracy in our state, a state proud to have cast the deciding vote for women's suffrage, the home of Baker v. Carr (one man, one vote), a place that still reveres the (first) Battle of Athens (TN) where WWII veterans of all political stripes rose up and waged a pitched gun battle in 1946 against a corrupt (Democratic) machine who had once again kidnapped the ballot boxes but (that time) did not survive the crime.
It is time again, in Tennessee, to protect and secure the consent of the governed as the bedrock foundation of our government. It is time to treat well-orchestrated election fraud as the treason it is, and to deal with the perpetrators using the remedy called for in the Constitution for such offenses. It is time to wipe the grins off the reich-wing election-stealing, corrupt country-club crackers in Shelby county who want the world to believe that the birthplace of the blues is now deep-red. If you believe that, then you believe that Elvis still drives a catfish truck and that Beale Street belongs in Beverly Hills. As ludicrous as all this is, it is decidedly not funny.
Send in the troops, President Obama.
Democracy is dying in Tennessee and we need all the help we can get.
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