Why in the HELL does it have to be this way? Voting...

[Nimrod2005]

Why do we have to be talking about this today? Voting irregularities reported EVERYWHERE!!!

Why can't this God damn country, the richest, most innovative, most powerful in the history of the world put an end to this nightmare?

Who the hell do we need to blackmail to get this done?

I demand we the people setup permanent protest sites - Cindy Sheehan's style - outside the politicians' houses, blocking them from going out to eat, until they FIX this for good.

Is this not OUR fucken's country? Democracy? elections? votes? future? We really need to act right now, before the 2006 elections.

[bullimiami]

1. planned confusion = stolen elections = no proof

again.

[kenny blankenship]

2. They have to have an excuse to privatize the counting of ballots

Technology--that magic wand waving in the hand of the dapper man whom you know is out to deceive you--was the answer. The old way couldn't be tolerated anymore. We watch television on giant flat plasma screens beamed in by satellite now and trade stocks on the internet. It was so easy to persuade a people conditioned to upgrading their PCs and entertainment gear on a yearly basis that new means better and democracy had to have an injection of new technology, or it would just wither away.

Never mind how insecure our Microsoft run PCs are, or that 999 channels of satellite doesn't mean there's anything better to watch than before. When the ads roll out telling you to buy new shit, you just do it.

With new technology comes the companion idea that it's brought to you by, and only made possible by Brand X Corporation. The vendor is the sine qua non for the whole category of thing vended. Before Microsoft there were no computers. Before Apple online music wasn't possible. Everyone "knows this" nowadays. The megacorporation is the message of all new technologies. Democracy 2.0 brought to you by Diebold. And so it was impossible for Americans to propose the category "electronic balloting" without it instantly becoming the proprietary technology and product of a company or cartel of companies who could make e-balloting systems. Some corporation had to "bring us" this. We couldn't do it for ourselves through the res publica--it had to be given to us by some listed company. Never mind that high school students with just a semester or two of scripting language instruction would be perfectly able to program it--we had to have corporate expertise! Never mind that these companies might have their own political affiliations and agendas. Never mind that the "technology" involved is just elementary school arithmetic and nothing more powerful than a PDA microprocessor or that nothing more more expensive than old stock pentium 586s would be needed to run it: it had to come in a corporate approved package deal. It could not be dissassembled, reverse engineered, inspected or auditted for defects, or de-bundled the hardware from software, or programmed with software developed by academic projects or non-profit foundations. That would not be sufficiently corporate in provenance to be taken seriously in post-Reagan America! It had to be corporate owned, corporate controlled and it had to stay a proprietary black-box. Citizen ballots went in and Republican victors would come out and the corporate agenda would roll forward forever with the ratifying seal of popular approval. How do we know the right person won? Diebold certified the results. That's what it comes down to, trusting corporations because they've set themselves up as the only source to trust, and that's how they privatized our democracy.

[damntexdem]

3. It's very simple really: if we fixed all the voting 'problems,' then ...

the GOP would have to come up with new ways to steal elections.