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Gore Vidal Savages Electronic Voting
gribbly writes "aging author and social critic Gore Vidal savaged electronic voting in an interview with the LA Weekly. The interview deals mainly with (what's wrong with) the Bush Administration, but halfway down he says: 'We don't want an election without a paper trail...all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. Is this not corruption?'."
Given that much of the media is similarly controlled?
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Sign the HR 2239 petition. It requires electronic machines to produce a receipt which is deposited in a lock box in case of a recount and mandates .5% of districts at random do a recount to verify accuracy of the machines.
Keep the freedom to vote.
From that point the ballots should be counted in the traditional manner and used to audit the eletronic reports. If there is any significiant discrepency the paper ballots should take precedence. This procedure should continue until the eletronic voting process is as reliably accurate as the ballot method for a period of years.
After that point we can take the electronic method as the primary method, witht he printed results being automaticly placed into a ballot box connected to these machines.
If there is ever a time the printed ballot form should cease to exist i cannot for-see it right now. If there isnt physical evidence of the voting process somewhere, i feel highly dubious as to the integrity of the entire system.
--vision
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
led away to his Guantanamo relocation center, he was quoted as saying ...oh, wait. The Official Information Minister has informed me that reporting Vidal's final statement would make me an enemy combatant, and would mean that the terrorists had won. And that would be doubleplusungood.
Why do I care what a popular salon owner says about this issue?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Bad code on a voting machine = potential to steal the election, but until you have proof please keep your fingerpointing to yourself.
Proof? No, but what looks like frightening bugs in one of the most critical tasks of a democracy, from companies whose owners are heavily involved in politic. Now, that does not necessarily mean that election-rigging is under way, but IMHO it is cause enough for public scrutiny.
Both sides of the political debate here in the States and abroad would love to steal an election.
So what? Should we let them do it, trusting that some sort of balance will be kept by the rigging on both side?
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The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.
:o)
Really? The PATRIOT act was written in German?
Or maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps the USA already is a despotic state but with better PR. After all the last election wasn't actually won by Bush, and there was that scene of Republicans battering down the doors of the Democrat offices where they were holding ballots. You wont know if you're living in a dictatorship until you test the boundaries. But if the voting machines get in then you'll lose your chance.
Gore also mentions the partiot act part II which he condemns utterly. An old quote I came across recently now seems frighteningly prescient:
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I live in Mississippi, where they're still untangling a mess made by malfunctioning electronic voting machines that do have a paper reciept deposited in lock boxes. As just an example of things that can still go wrong:
-Some poll workers didn't put reciepts in lock boxes.
-Some poll workers decided to "manually enter" data from back-up paper ballots once they got the machines working.
-Some reciepts/machines did not make it back to the main office until two days after elections.
-State law requires initials on paper reciepts. Some unititaled ones were counted anyway.
And before you come down too hard on Bush, it's the Dems who are benefiting here. From a developer standpoint it is clear to me that the problem is poor system design. Every company is trying to design an electronic equivalent to a paper process that is already suprisingly flawed. For example, because of civil rights issues, it is illegal to require a voter ID here. Which means in the electronic world, you cannot store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote. What needs to be done is a standard design process: gather requirements, design the system, and implement it. Because state and federal laws come into play, legislatures should be envolved in the whole process and revamp laws where necessary. In the end, it all comes down to poor design.
The only corruption here is the horrible corruption of the English language that somehow lead to CmdrTaco thinking "to savage" meant "to ravage."
:to attack or treat brutally
:to wreak havoc on : affect destructively
From m-w.com:
savage v.
ravage v.
Seems like either of these is just fine in the context provided.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Wally O'Dell has sworn to deliver Ohio's electoral votes for G.W. next year. That's well beyond the level of the generality you've just expressed.
And no, companies and industries don't give money equally. In some industries they do, in some there's a much more slanted bias. Think the energy industry's giving money to Howard Dean much? Trial lawyers give money to Democrats. HMOs give money to Republicans. For some mysterious reason, there's a very real Republican slant among these vote-counting companies. We're not talking about them covering their bases both ways, we're talking about openly advocating for one party while selling machines that count votes.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?
This is mixing two issues. Motor Voter is about allowing you to submit for voter registration *at* the DMV. It is not about giving the right to vote to people with drivers licenses. They are two entirely different processes. Motor Voter was a _huge_ success in increasing voter registration by making it convient for the average person.
Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.
From what I've been reading. O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, has been reliably quoted as saying that he will deliver states to the Republican party.
Chuck Hagel, a republican senator, was at one time (and probably still is) a part owner of Election Systems and Software (ES&S).
It does not matter if they *are* being evil, what matters is that they should not even be _close_ to voting companies. It is a clear conflict of interest and smells bad no matter how you put it. I'd go further and say that all voting machines should not be done by companies at all -- too much at risk.
This has nothing to do with conspiricy theory, it has everything to do with common sense. You lock doors of your house, not to keep bad people out, but to "keep honest people honest". Power corrupts. And these people should not be putting themselves in to places where they could be corrupted, or even give the appearance of being corrupt. Its just wrong.
The only reason 95% of Americans wouldn't like Hitler is because they KNOW about Hitler. If Hitler was starting today, he'd be Bush's campaign director, or Secretary of Defense (since he came from the military initially - and with the Iron Cross to boot).
A large number of Americans supported Hitler in the 1930's - including Prescott Bush, George's grandfather who eventually had his bank taken away from him by the US government for supporting the Nazis.
Bush is at least as much a raving rightwing religious lunatic as Hitler was (he has allegedly been found face down on the Oval Office floor praying) - and he has much more power and much less control and much less opposition in this country than Hitler did in Germany.
Finally, Bush's cronies, the neocons, are mostly neo-Troskyites. It's amusing to me that the rightwing Christian Zionists are all supporting people who follow other people who were essentially ex-Communists! It doesn't get more bizarre than this.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If you don't believe that the U.S. is a now a dictatorship and
:
are not operating under Plan G, after you read this, you WILL believe
the U.S. is a dictatorship and implement Plan G:
Despots in the Whitehouse
We are the patriots
How is it possible for the US to engage in
wars without the consensus of a large part of
the American people? Gore Vidal places the
question within a historical perspective that
reveals the remarkable foresight of Benjamin
Franklin
I belong to a minority that is now one of the smallest in the country and, with every day, grows smaller. I am a veteran of World War II. And I can recall thinking, when I got out of the Army in 1946, Well, that's that. We won. And those
who come after us will never need do this again. Then came the two mad wars of imperial vanity--Korea and Vietnam. They were bitter for us, not to mention for the so-called enemy. Next we were enrolled in a perpetual war against
what seemed to be the enemy-of-the-month club. This war kept major revenues going to military procurement and secret police, while withholding money from us, the taxpayers, with our petty concerns for life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.
But no matter how corrupt our system became over the last
century--and I lived through three-quarters of it--we still
held on to the Constitution and, above all, to the Bill of
Rights. No matter how bad things got, I never once
believed that I would see a great part of the nation--of we
the people, unconsulted and unrepresented in a matter of
war and peace-demonstrating in such numbers against an
arbitrary and secret government, preparing and conducting
wars for us, or at least for an army recruited from the
unemployed to fight in. Sensibly, they now leave much of
the fighting to the uneducated, to the excluded.
During Vietnam Bush fled to the Texas Air National Guard.
Cheney, when asked why he avoided service in Vietnam,
replied, "I had other priorities." Well, so did 12 million of us
sixty years ago. Priorities that 290,000 were never able to
fulfill.
So who's to blame? Us? Them? Well, we can safely blame
certain oil and gas hustlers who have effectively hijacked the
government from presidency to Congress to, most
ominously, the judiciary. How did they do it? Curiously, the
means have always been there. It took the higher greed
and other interests to make this coup d'Ttat work.
It was Benjamin Franklin, of all people, who saw our future
most clearly back in 1787, when, as a delegate to the
Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, he read for the
first time the proposed Constitution. He was old; he was
dying; he was not well enough to speak but he had
prepared a text that a friend read. It is so dark a statement
that most school history books omit his key words.
Franklin urged the convention to accept the Constitution
despite what he took to be its great faults, because it might,
he said, provide good government in the short term. "There
is no form of government but what may be a blessing to
the people if well administered, and I believe farther that
this is likely to be well administered for a course of years,
and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done
before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to
need despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Think of Enron, Merrill Lynch, etc., of chads and butterfly
ballots, of Scalia's son arguing before his unrecused father
at the Supreme Court while unrecused Thomas sits silently
by, his wife already at work for the approaching Bush
Administration. Think, finally, of the electoral college, a piece
of dubious, antidemocratic machinery that Franklin
doubtless saw as a source of deepest corruption and
subsequent mischief for the Republic, as happened not only
in 1876 but in 2000.
Frankli
The EFF is running an action alert on the Voter confidence and Increased Accessability act of 2003 which mandates public review of the machines (i.e. opening the source for review) and including paper recipts for recounts. U.S. Citizens can go here to submit a letter to your congressional rep.
What's a few minutes of your time for democracy?
Look, you may disagree with him, but Gore Vidal is one of the country's foremost writers and public intellectuals. He's been writing and publishing a sustained and articulate critique of the current directions of American political leadership -- from a decidedly patriotic, and small-r republican, perspective -- for decades. He was one of the most prominent intellectuals in this nation before I was born. Disagree with him all you like, but calling him an "idiot" like that betrays an incredible depth of ignorance.