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Senators Clinton and Kerry Submit Open Voting Bill
An anonymous reader writes "DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an 'open-source' voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. " Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.
The article indicates that Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are the primary proponents of this bill - though I'm sure Kerry also supports it.
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Two TWO YEAR OLD BILLS that have already been introduced in the House and Senate would do JUST THIS, namely, require permanent, voter verified receipts and open source all code on e-voting machines. See my post here.
Also, Diebold already has the capability to add paper receipts, WHICH WERE NOT REQUIRED UNDER HAVA, to all of its e-voting deployments. They're just a contractor. They'll build and deploy whatever local governments will buy. But if you're one of those people who thinks that Diebold, a multi-thousand person corporation that prides itself on reliable customer interface systems, is literally conspiring to rig US elections on the basis of offhanded campaign quotes in the context of GOP fundraising by Diebold's CEO, however inappropriate they were, then I suppose none of what I just said will matter to you.
I read you post and checked the status of the previous bills. They both died in committee two years ago.
It looks like someone did let it die, and Clinton and Boxer are now trying resurrect the protections in the bills.
I guess that renders almost your entire post as both FUD and moot.
Bush & Co. outspent Kerry by more than $40 million dollars. It took me 60 seconds to verify this.
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Bush has cut corporate and high-income taxes, weakened legislation that protected the environment, patients' and consumers' rights, and tried to push an amendment banning gay marriage (which I don't oppose). He may have spent more than Clinton ever did, but Clinton also managed to pay the bills off, Bush is letting them collect into the trillions, which will badly hurt the US economy in the long-run.
Bush has been right in the war on terror? Is this a troll? He blocked the formation of the 9/11 commission, then stalled for months, refusing to create the national intelligence chief position until after the election. His administration rounded up over 3000 Muslims and denied them access to lawyers. He took the advice of Israeli hardliners and refused to negotiate with the Palestinian authority. (Palestinian oppression was one of Bin Laden's main stated reasons he declared war on America, if you remember. Letting the situation over there fester doesn't help, and waiting for Arafat to die could have taken forever.) He invaded Iraq on the faulty premise of WMDs, making our allies turn away from us. His administration (who he has promoted since), ignored international treaties and conventions, legalized torture and created Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, which has not-so-secretly tortured detainees. The Abu Ghraib scandal really ruined the "War on Terror" as now no Muslim country supports America. What are Bush's plans to fix the situation? He claims there is no problem, as he was re-elected, and is threatening Syria and Iran. NATO isn't going to contribute any troops to stabilize Iraq, and neither will any country in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, casualties mount in Iraq but the administration isn't saying what it will do, and recently pushed through a cut of veteran's benefits.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Indeed, an example where an actual communist party was elected (if you people out there think that Stalin represented actual marxism/communism, then I'm not sure I can break through that ignorance) and was deposed by forces quite decidedly undemocratic. (Anyone sketchy on the facts can brush up on them somplace like wikipedia). The sad truth is, the factions and people that believed in Communism as an actual expression of what is best for the people, well, they were often put down by heavy-handed measures on the parts of their opponents. The ones that espoused the ideology but really were just in it for power, those were the successful ones (and when they weren't, afterwards they were taken care of by those that were; Trotsky actually believed in what the Soviets claimed to, but Stalin, in it only for himself and unencumbered by any ideology otherwise, easily ousted Trotsky).
Note, also, the times that communists have been cheated out of elections; in the Weimar Republic in germany, near the end, both the Nazis and the Communists were making significant gains in the elections. The Nazis spread fear about the Communists, burned down the Reichtag building and blamed it on communists, and just generally used underhanded methods to manipulate people into handing power over to them.
And sometimes communists (or movements that started out as communist, but later became just power hungry regimes, a common story with revolutions in general, the French Revolution being a shining example of good intentions gone bad) had no option of democratic elections, because there were none in the country in question. So the fact that few communists have been elected worldwide is not that much of a strike against them; the number of examples when fundamentally different systems were elected to power are few as is, it's hardly a show of superiority when the status quo is re-asserted.
Although, to go to the literal wording of the grandparent: name a communist that was elected in a real election. Well, that isn't very hard at all, there are even communists elected at this very moment around the world, maybe not as the ruling governments, but if you're looking just at communists that have been elected in real elections you don't have to look very far. I searched for about half a second and already came up with some evidence of communist activity and success in the democratic process.
Methinks the grandparent is perhaps a tad irrationally biased, to make such blanket statements.
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