by Madeline Zane, Unknown News
July 16, 2004
The good news: Despite the fact that the mysterious
"U.S. Election Assistance Commission" is meeting with
the spooky Homeland Security people next week, Bush
administration officials are saying that they have
absolutely no plans to postpone or cancel the November
elections.
The bad news is that the Bush
administration also keeps saying that Saddam Hussein
has ties to al Qaeda, that the world is safer since we
invaded Iraq, and that the PATRIOT Act is necessary to
fight terrorism. In other words, you can tell exactly
when these guys are lying: Their lips move and sounds
come out.
And let's look at the name of that commission again in
context. If "Leave No Child Behind" completely screws
over poor kids, and the "Clean Air Act" increases
pollution, then the "U.S. Election Assistance
Commission" must actually be there to, well ...
hmmmmm.
Bush administration officials are
cultivating an electorate willing to suspend what's left
of our democracy by issuing warnings as vague and
useless as they are urgent and dire. Tom Ridge could
pretty much create the same effect by quietly
crouching down behind the podium, and then, when no
one's expecting it, jumping up suddenly, waving his
arms and yelling "Boogity-boogity-boogity!!" directly
into the cameras.
Meanwhile, the corporate media barely finished
reporting on this alarming turn of events before they
started printing the reassuring follow-ups saying that
of course nothing this awful could ever happen.
Those wacky alarmists on the left! They always say
the sky is falling!
I mean, just because the head of
this unheard-of election commission is saying that any
state should be able to either cancel their elections
or appoint delegates directly despite the vote totals,
what does that have to do with anything? Move along,
people. Nothing to see here.
Do actual real-live journalists really believe that
it's far-fetched to think this administration might
try to postpone an election? Are they really in that
much denial about what our government has turned into?
The Bush administration has locked up hundreds of people in
secret jails, according to the Red Cross. They've held
U.S. citizens for years now, without charges or trials
or lawyers. They've been writing each other memos
justifying torture. Just the other day they were
forced to scrap a plan that would assign a
security-threat rating to every single American
citizen setting foot in an airport. They just
arrested an artist for possessing biological
materials ... after admitting that all the materials
he had were completely legal. Congressional
Republicans violated their own voting rules last week
in order to keep the part of the PATRIOT Act that lets
John Ashcroft look at your library records.
Okay, I've wandered a little off my point. My point
is that this administration is a bunch of crazy-eyed,
Constitution-shredding freedom haters.
Postponing an
election, maybe even canceling an election, is not a
paranoid fantasy. It is exactly, precisely, in
keeping with the character of this bunch. Anyone who
says otherwise either hasn't been paying a damn bit of
attention or is telling you (and themselves, probably)
a fairy-tale so we all can sleep better at night.
This is how the Bush administration is. This is what they do. They
prevented a free and fair election last time. There
is absolutely no reason to think that they wouldn't,
given half a chance, stop this one, too.
That being said, it doesn't seem likely anymore that
the upcoming election will actually be postponed
because of a terrorist attack. The reason: there has
now simply been too much bad press. Once every paper
from the Washington Post to the Podunk Times-Gazette
has written editorials about how the elections must go
on as planned, it's going to be a whole lot harder to
justify putting them off.
In fact, it's probably a good thing for all of us that
the head of this election commission made the fatal
mistake of setting his anti-democratic plan to paper
and circulating it around. If there had actually been
some kind of a terrorist attack on or near election
day, and if we hadn't had this public discussion ahead
of time, it's easy to imagine the White House putting
off the election until their poll numbers were high
enough without much fuss from a patriotic electorate.
I mean, can you imagine how much different the 2000
election would have turned out if we had actually
discussed ahead of time what we would do in case of a
tie? Say some bureaucrat started circulating a memo
in July 2000 proposing that if any state's vote count
was too close to call, that the Supreme Court would
get to arbitrarily stop a re-count halfway through and
declare a winner at that point. We all would have
laughed and laughed and laughed. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
So no, now that the idea has been publicly
discredited, it doesn't look very likely anymore that
the White House could get away with postponing the
elections. So everything's fine. The elections going
to be fine, right? Right??
Sorry, but no, not hardly. Because while every paper
in the free world has weighed in on whether the
elections will get postponed, and how many bombs would
have to fall, and where they would have to hit, and
who gets to decide, and whether we should be slightly
concerned or completely terrified, the REAL threat to
the election remains firmly in place. It isn't
getting all the sexy headlines, but it's just about
dead certain to mangle the votes of thousands, perhaps
millions, this November.
What poses a much bigger threat to our election than
any group of fictional mad bombers? The new,
unreliable computer voting machines that are going to
be used to "count" votes all over the country this
November.
No time like the most important election in recent
memory to start beta-testing new software, right?
Everyone knows that new computers always work
flawlessly right out of the box.
The companies making these new voting machines have
proven to be both incompetent (posting internal memos
on public internet space) and great big liars (using
unauthorized software in California's last elections).
They absolutely refuse to let anyone, even election
officials, look at the software running the machines
to see how (or if) the votes are counted.
Worst of all, the new voting machines completely
prevent ANY RECOUNTING AT ALL. (They're like little
computerized Antonin Scalias that way. Teach them to
shoot ducks with the people who have cases before them
and no one would know the difference!)
These machines
produce no paper record. If the system crashes -- and
what computer system doesn't eventually crash at some
point? -- there is essentially no backup. There is no
way to do a hand-count to verify that the computer is
coming up with numbers that bear any relationship to
the buttons people have been pressing all day long.
The companies that make the machines say it isn't
feasible to have them print out paper receipts as
people cast their votes. This is complete and obvious
horse doo-doo. Even gas pumps are able print out
receipts these days. Is pumping gas more important
than casting a vote? (Put your hand down, Dick
Cheney, it was a rhetorical question.)
And why exactly are we conducting such a dangerous
experiment? It's brought to you by (get those conspiracy theory
hats on) the EXACT SAME legislation that created the
election commission that is now trying to appoint
itself in charge of canceling elections! And the
people who are famous for naming legislation the
opposite of what it actually does call this law the
"Help America Vote Act." Is anyone else getting a
little woozy?
Paperless voting machines might not be getting all the
exciting press, but they are much scarier, more
dangerous, and more real than any obscure bureaucrat's
attempted power-grab.
Some members of Congress are
working hard to pass a bill that would force these
machines to all create a paper trail, therefore
minimizing the damage that will be done when (not if)
the computers crash.
We should all be trying to get those
rules in place before this election. Because if we
don't make sure this election is accurate, WHO KNOWS
IF WE'LL EVER HAVE A NEXT ONE?!?
Boogity-boogity-boogity!
For more information: www.verifiedvoting.org/
For background: Vote fraud.
© 2004, by the author.
What do you think?
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What poses a much bigger threat to our election than
any group of fictional mad bombers?
The new,
unreliable computer voting machines that are going to
be used to "count" votes all over the country this
November.
No time like the most important election in recent
memory to start beta-testing new software, right?
Everyone knows that new computers always work
flawlessly right out of the box.
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The new voting machines completely
prevent ANY RECOUNTING AT ALL.
These machines
produce no paper record.
If the system crashes -- and
what computer system doesn't eventually crash at some
point? -- there is essentially no backup.
There is no
way to do a hand-count to verify that the computer is
coming up with numbers that bear any relationship to
the buttons people have been pressing all day long.
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The companies making these new voting machines have proven to be both incompetent (posting internal memos on public internet space) and great big liars (using unauthorized software in California's last elections).
They absolutely refuse to let anyone, even election officials, look at the software running the machines to see how (or if) the votes are counted.
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Paperless voting machines might not be getting all the exciting press, but they are much scarier, more dangerous, and more real than any obscure bureaucrat's attempted power-grab.
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