|
Add in document copying costs, transportation, P.R., care and feeding of volunteers, and god knows what else, and it will certainly reach $300,000, if not more. This is obscene!
And all these election systems in our country, which have (or are now adding) a paper ballot, but are routinely NOT COUNTING THE BALLOTS (New Hampshire and many others), or (the better states) are counting only 1% as an automatic audit (woefully inadequate), are destroying our democracy--with uncertainty, doubt and chaos. Where are all our tax dollars going? Into vastly expensive electronic systems designed for election theft (run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code, owned and controlled by Bushites), and WE are forced to PAY FOR any effort to verify the results of these goddamned machines?
I can't believe how much effort has gone into just re-establishing the principle of having a ballot TO count. Then they don't count them! Jeez.
New Hampshire may not reveal fraud, even if it has occurred. "Chain of custody" was broken, on ballots and other components of the system. And, given the stakes involved, as to corporate profit--both from our election system itself, and from who it (s)elects for office--and we're talking trillions and trillions of dollars over time--the incentive to commit fraud, and to hide it well--and to go to great lengths to do so--is very great.
And the problem could be entirely solved, by, a) banning paperless voting (still going on, in many states), and b) COUNTING ALL THE BALLOTS, upfront.
The resistance to this OBVIOUS NECESSITY is a measure of just how corrupt our election system and our political office holders have become. You want to know how fucked we are--and how much work we have yet to do to get unfucked by these fascists and corporatists? Just take a gander at our entirely fucked over vote counting system! It says it all.
They profit in every conceivable way--selling us billions of dollars in crapass technology, getting paid again to fix it or replace it when it breaks down, getting paid again to add ballots or other safety factors to assuage citizen outrage, getting paid on a continual basis for "maintenance" and emergency repairs, for a vote counting system that nobody but technical experts CAN understand or fix, then having us poor people pay to have the ballots actually counted, and then having their war stocks and their slave labor stocks improve, as the war/corporate office holders that they (s)elect do their thing. They profit on multiple fronts, and WE pay, and pay, and pay.
Well, I'll say one thing for the disaster known as the "Help America Vote Act." It is an eye-opener.
And one of things it opens eyes to, is the collusion of our own Democratic Party leadership. Really, I thought I was unshockable, until I learned that every Democrat in the U.S. Senate voted FOR it, except two. And it's rather a surprise who they were--Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. Long story--and much thinking by me as to why. But basically I have concluded that it was to prevent NY voters--who live at the center of the nation's news media, and who are an ornery lot--from becoming alarmed, early on, and alerting the nation--by, for instance, pressuring the NY Times to expose it. The feds have been slow to pressure NY to switch from their old, reliable, and virtually unriggable lever voting machines to electronic voting. Now they're pressuring them--and New Yorkers are fighting it tooth and nail. But back during the 2002 to 2004 period, when it was entrenched nationwide, NY was kept out of the big push, and Clinton's and Schumer's votes against HAVA--in the confidence that everyone else was voting for it, and it would pass--were part of that strategy. The alternative is to believe that Clinton and Schumer have some special, high-minded love for democracy and for the "rabble" (ordinary voters, the poor, etc.), and that is demonstrably untrue.
They passed HAVA in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution. October 2002. You want a date for the end of our democracy? That's it.
|