Reply #50: Well, I think we need a REAL 'Boston Tea Party,' not this "Madhatter Tea Party" thing out of "Alice

[Peace Patriot]

in Wonderland." First, the voting machines. And, as we can't just seize them and dump them into 'Boston Harbor' (so to speak), without bringing the violent corporate state down upon our heads... --I mean, they are OUR machines. We paid for 'em, though we have no control over their 'TRADE SECRET' code. But so is the U.S. military. We have to be realistic... --We need a nationwide citizen movement, active in local/state jurisdictions, to demand a return to paper ballot vote counting IN PUBLIC VIEW, or possibly conversion of the 'TRADE SECRET' machines (and central tabulators) to OPEN SOURCE software with a substantial audit. (Venezuela does this--open source--with a whopping 55% audit--more than five times the minimum needed to detect fraud in an electronic system. Half the states in the U.S. are doing NO AUDIT AT ALL. They have no paper trail. The other half are mostly doing a meager 1% audit--with 'TRADE SECRET' code machines!)

Personally, I think this is an essential first step. We have to be able to verify our elections. And it is still doable. There is NO federal law requiring electronic voting. It was all done with corruption--$3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle from the Anthrax Congress and intense and very corrupt lobbying of our state/local legislators and election officials. So it can be UNDONE at this level. Local/state jurisdictions still hold the power to decide on voting systems. And that's really the only level at which ordinary people still have potential power. Forget Congress.

Until we strip private corporations out of our vote counting system--and, really, we're talking about mainly about ONE corporation (ES&S/Diebold)--and can be sure that the person who takes office was in fact elected, we can't even properly analyze our political system and decide on firm strategies. What if the people are, in some cases, actually voting for assholes? That's a different (but of course related) problem.

Transparent vote counting is the BOTTOM LINE of democracy. We MUST restore it. And doing this--kicking the corps out of the tabulation of our votes--also has big symbolic value, for these mega-corps are the problem everywhere we look. But we've got to have that bottom line of democracy before we can do anything else.