MJ,
Thanks for your post. I found it to be quite a bit more lucid than what most Republicans seem to be able to manage to write on SI today. It's nice to think that the GOP isn't a party completely devoid of any redeeming qualities.
That said, I'll comment on a couple of points:
Re: If dissent can be sown early then people who are not aware of the process of elections are led into believing that the election is not being run fairly and correctly.
Well, at least that sentence has an Orwellian newspeak cast about it. The result of which, I presume, is your desire to get your readers to engage in doublethink. Back in reality, it works exactly the opposite. People generally have been reassured that the process is being run fairly and that they can trust the County Clerks and Secretaries of State to run honest, fair and secure elections. That is the norm.
In the year 2000, I was naive in my belief that the problem with the vote in Florida was the "hanging chad" issue. That is because we have a lazy, indifferent and ultimately failed corporate media that obsessed over this issue to the exclusion of any other.
Only by ferreting out obscure information from alternative media and the foreign press, such as BBC did I become aware of the overall scope of irregularity and outright intimidation, corruption and cheating involved in the Republican campaign to steal the Florida election.
What I discovered was the great research of Greg Palast into the illegal voter scrub ordered by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush. gregpalast.com
Further research into allegations made by the NAACP among other groups indicated that there were at least 1,000 separate complaints filed in Florida regarding voter intimidation, attempts to suppress black voters and other illegal activities. You might be aware that blacks in Florida had the unfortunate luck to Attorney General John Ashcroft representing them against Ashcroft's ally Jeb Bush. An unlovely and unwholesome arrangement. After initially consolidating the 1,000 complaints down to a mere 3 causes of action, the Justice Department dragged its heels as long as possible and only successfully completed the litigation about 18 months after the election. The State of Florida stipulated to the charges, the case was closed on a late Friday afternoon and after the briefest of mentions of this in the press, the matter was hidden from the public by the State of Florida and by a compliant media.
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Furthermore, it was only after the debacle of the 2000 election that I became aware of the great opportunity for mischief making that is presented by Direct Recording Electronic devices (DREs). These are more commonly known as "touch screen" voting booths.
As you must be aware by now, there is generally no paper audit trail from these DREs. Which makes them completely suitable for fraud. Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the software running the DREs is proprietary and subject to scrutiny by any public official. This is a completely idiotic situation. The three main vendors of DREs are Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia Systems. Each is owned by a Republican partisan and therefore cannot be considered to be honest, without verification.
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Re: THERE IS NO SCHEME TO DEFRAUD AMERICA------
I find your assertion here to be utterly naive. Of course there is a scheme to defraud America. It is abundantly clear. The corporate elites in America are doing everything in their power to suppress voting. For decades it has been planted in the minds of the lower rungs of our society that voting is futile, so they shouldn't bother. This is an active campaign of suppression being run by the very people who prosper due to low voter turnout, i.e. the corporate elites.
Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that DREs are prone to any number of fraudulent manipulations and in general have been sold to County Clerks without any audit possible. That is a travesty in a democracy. And as far as I can tell, America is the only nation on the planet with such an embarrassingly obvious way for those who count the votes to cheat.
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Additionally, I am deeply concerned by the thuggish approach that the GOP seems to be taking states such as Ohio where they've hired about 3,500 thugs for $100 on Tuesday to harass voters in predominantly urban, black neighborhoods in cities like Cleveland, Cincinnati, Akron, etc. What the GOP is setting up to do is to gum up the works with grotesquely irresponsible challenges to voters for the opposing party. The idea here is simply to frustrate the will of the people as voters are forced to abandon the long lines created by this skullduggery or may indeed not get to cast a ballot by the end of the voting hours in the state. This active suppression of democracy by the GOP can be easily anticipated. We have the "Caging" lists to prove that the scoundrels in the GOP are doing this harassment on a multi-state basis.
Frankly, I don't see how you can feel that the GOP is acting ethically, legally or morally. Everything I see about the way the Karl Rove and his minions are preparing to handle election day indicates that their approach is more akin to what a criminal mafia would be doing, rather than what the honorable party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt would be doing to assist in getting as many people to participate in the process as possible.
Shame on the Republcan faithful for believing the lies of George Bush and Karl Rove and for doing so little to correct the obvious aberration that is destroying the very soul of the Republican Party. |
