Mods..permission has been granted to print in full. Excellent article by Landshark!
THE STAIN OF CONG DUKE CUNNINGHAM IS THE STAIN OF SECRECY, NOW IN OUR ELECTIONS
by Paul R Lehto
As one of the attorneys (along with Ken Simpkins) investigating the June 6 Busby/Bilbray election in California's 50 th Congressional District, it's interesting to see such clear parallels between the criminal convictions of Congressman Cunningham and the issues regarding electronic voting. The problems with both grow out of secrecy, because secrecy makes impossible the checks and balances our system relies on.
On July 24, 2006, an independent investigation found that imprisoned former Cong. "Duke" Cunningham specifically took advantage of the secrecy surrounding the House Intelligence Committee panel to slip in items that would benefit him and his associates.
http://tinyurl.com/n3ecp "The lack of oversight" of the Intelligence committee's secret processes is the secrecy that enabled $2.4 million in bribes.
Secrecy creates and allows unaccountable government. Whether you call what's missing in overly secret government "transparency" or "safeguards", our system of government is not designed to work on trust, it's designed to work on checks and balances -- a form of distrust and of "power checking power."
When checks and balances are incomplete like in the San Diego Registrar's office, systems are riddled with loopholes and opaqueness. These holes in checks and balances are papered over by setting high prices to obtain basic information about elections (like charging $150,000 for a recount, and 30 cents/page for copies) and by stonewalling records requests.
Today, secret and invisible computerized vote processing renders ballots into invisible electrons the voters can never see, and then counted secretly and unaccountably on corporate hard drives using processes that are claimed as proprietary, confidential or "trade secret." Totals just pop out of these secret vote processors; we're required to take them on faith.
Given this invisibility, the simple reason that computers are so dangerous in the context of elections is that computers do precisely as they are told to do, without any regard for law, morality or ethics, or fear of going to jail.
This fact reveals the folly of the government's talking points about the testing and certification they sometimes do. The ONLY thing that matters is what the computers were asked to do under Election conditions and on Election Day. Because voting computers can store commands for later execution, voting machine "sleepovers" multiply risk exponentially. In any event, it takes only two minutes by a single person on a single machine to tell a voting computer to alter an entire election even on a non-networked computer, allowing a single person to cheat on levels never before possible. www.nosleepovers.org
This inappropriate faith required for electronic results flies in the face of anomalous June 6 canvassing returns, where voter turnouts in many absentee precincts are thousands of percent higher than the number of registered voters for those precincts. After we stated this on the radio, the ROV's website went down, and it came back up without the conveniently formatted 288 page official canvass report showing those impossible absentee precinct results, but readers can still find it at www.electionfraudnews.com. No matter what, the number of voters is not being reconciled with the number of votes for both polling place and absentee voters – a critical check and balance against ballot box stuffing.
San Diego County changes as planned to 100% touchscreens this fall, which makes the secrecy total. At that point, voters won't get to see their votes recorded, much less counted properly. Because it's not a solution to have the government determine its own power and money via secret elections, the only solution is to open up the process to complete transparency, using sunlight as disinfectant.
The only way we can lose something as precious and popular as Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people and for the people" is by letting checks and balances be falsely redefined as "sore loser." As voters, we're all either winners or losers in every political race. Winners can't sue themselves, so if losers are shamed into not challenging, democracy is left without defenders. The numerous groups already defending democracy would love your support. www.velvetrevolution.us
Secret vote counting, shuttled in undemocratically without debate, is a form of absolute power. It's quickly asserting control of our elections nationwide, and it is too late to safely put checks and balances in place when the tyrants are fully in power, re-electing themselves electronically. Soon, the stain made possible by secrecy with Cunningham will set in as the stain on democracy.
Ask yourself: "O Say Does That Star-Spangled Banner Yet Wave, O'er The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?" A land of free and brave citizens will never allow their elections to disappear behind walls of secrecy and unaccountability, stripped of public oversight. When both soldiers and civil rights activists over the years have chosen democracy over life itself, can we just let a real, verifiable democracy slip away on our watch?
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