Right now there is widespread criticism of the new Holt bill, H.R. 811, which is supposedly an amendment to reform HAVA. But the guy who wrote HAVA, the Honorable convicted felon Bob Ney is in prison. Why aren't we repealing his criminal law instead of amending it?

Maybe people don't understand the audit scam yet. So here's a simple explanation for anyone who hasn't figured it out.

Pretend that you're a store clerk and I'm a customer. I buy something for $3.00 and hand you a ten dollar bill. You count out $7.00 in change and hand it to me. I take it from you, recount it, agree that you gave me the correct change, take my receipt, and turn to leave. The entire exchange is on film because a security camera is placed so that it can clearly film all transactions at the cash register.

But before I can put my money away, the guy standing behind me stops me and says, "Wait. That clerk has cheated people before. You might not have gotten the correct change. I have a super-duper change counting machine that can verify that you got the correct amount. Here, give me the change you got from the clerk and let me put it in my super-duper machine to make sure you weren't cheated."

He grabs the money out of my hand and puts it into his counting machine, which digests the $7.00 and spits out $8.00. He now starts yelling for security and tells the store manager that you and I are crooks, that he caught you giving me a dollar too much in change, and that we're trying to cheat the store. You, the clerk, and I, the customer, object strenuously, but we're hauled off to court on charges of cheating the store.

We're confused and angry, but we're not too worried because we think that we can use the videotape of the transaction to prove that we hadn't cheated and had counted the money correctly. But when we go to court, the machine guy has his own scientific experts who argue that we miscounted deliberately and our word can't be trusted, the videotape was doctored, and that only his machine count is 100% accurate. When we ask to audit his machine, it turns out that only certain experts have the qualifications necessary to audit his machine, and they all agree that his machine is 100% accurate, so there's no way for us to refute them. You're just a store clerk, I'm just a customer, and he has a line-up of highly credentialed mathematicians and computer experts testifying that his machine is accurate and that you and I are both liars and crooks.

The judge (and jury if there is one) isn't sure what to believe, and the verdict could go either way. The matter is out of our hands, and all we can do is wait for the verdict. If the court finds that we were correct in the first place, we both breathe a sigh of relief and I vow never to listen to anyone like that again. But juries sometimes are overly impressed with expert testimony and sometimes judges have been known to take bribes. There's a lot of money to be made with this scam, so a large bribe to a sympathetic judge could be considered a good investment. If the court decides that the machine count was correct, and that you and I and the videotape were wrong, you lose your job, we both could go to jail, all the machine experts collect fat fees for their audits and expert testimony, and the machine guy, on the basis of having proven that his machine works, goes out and sells his "security" system to a million stores.

How does this apply to elections? If we have hand-counted paper ballots at the precincts, with full citizen oversight including videotaping, and everyone agrees that the count was honest and accurate, but then a machine audit is allowed, the machine audit can cast a cloud of doubt over the hand count and take the election out of the hands of citizens, giving it to the experts and the courts to decide. Meanwhile, the wrong candidate may have been sworn into office on the basis of the machine count, and even if we later prove that the hand count was correct, that candidate cannot be unseated. In the CA50 case a candidate was sworn into office even before all the votes were counted and before the election had been certified. It has been proven that both Gore and Kerry won their elections, but Bush is still in office. We know that voting machines are unreliable, as they have had little "glitches" like subtracting 16,000 votes in Volusia County and losing 18,000 votes in Sarasota, while central tabulators have counted 4,000% more votes than registered voters. So trusting machines to count our votes and relying on audits to see if they were accurate is like leaving your kids with a known child molester overnight and saying that it is okay because you'll take them to the doctor to have them examined tomorrow to see if they've been molested. Proving after the fact, by audit or examination, that the damage was done, cannot undo the damage.

Our elections are as precious as our children, because the laws our legislators make will effect our children's future. Machine counts are invisible to the naked eye. There is no way to verify if a machine printout is the same as what the machine has tallied internally. If we want to protect our votes, we have to keep all aspects of elections visible so that they can be overseen by every citizen who is interested. The more open the process and the more people watching, the less chance there is of fraud.

Let's not give up on paper ballots, hand-counted, at the precincts, with full citizen oversight including videotaping. Let's not give up on honest elections. Let's not give up on honest government. Don't let crooked politicians tell us that our only choices are between continuing the war or escalating the war when we want to end the war.   Don't let the crooked elections industry tell us that our only choices are between these voting machines and those voting machines, when we know that no voting machines are reliable.

We've been robbed. We've been swindled. Our government didn't protect us because they were in on it. The media didn't protect us because they were in on it. We don't have to let them do it to us again. We now have huge detention camps all over the country sitting empty. There's room in them for every member of the Bush administration, every incompetent Bush appointee, every member of the Supreme Court, and every member of Congress. They've destroyed out national reputation, looted our treasury, and they're still trying to pretend that they have some legitimacy even though it has been obvious for a long time that they no longer have the consent of the governed.

Isn't it time we stopped being suckers?
 

 From: poster Mark E. Smith - "Experts"

The citizens, cannot be trusted…you need experts to help you vote and to make sure you did it correctly

Do you remember when legislation was passed to prevent us from buying antibiotics over the counter here the way people could in Mexico another countries? We believed the scam that we could not trust ourselves to choose the right antibiotics, because you needed to run lab tests those which ones worked before prescribing them, and we might not take the right dosages, so we could create resistant strains of bacteria. Turned out that the doctors never ran those lab tests, they guessed at which drugs to prescribe (if this doesn't work, come back in two weeks and we'll try something else) and THEY, not we, contributed to the development of resistant strains -- and they made a fortune doing it because we needed to ask them every time we needed an antibiotic. Trust the experts, they know better than you.

It's the machines that do the secret vote counting and are unreliable, and both proprietary and open source code can be hacked. It is just as easy for insiders to hack either one, and just as easy for their own inside experts to cover it up. You think that it doesn't matter if outvotes are counted secretly inside black box voting machines, so long as experts can audit them. You can't audit them, but why should you--you're not an expert so you can't be trusted. You're helping build the elections bureaucracy and the elections industry, and you're insisting on leaving elections out of the hands of the people because people aren't experts.

We are all interdependent. Anybody allowed to audit the machines is getting paid, is working for somebody, and can be bought if you pay them enough. There is no such thing as sufficient, because even if you audit every single vote, if the wrong candidate has already been sworn in on the basis of an incorrect machine count, finding it out later is just an interesting sidelight for historians. And open source code has to run on machines, which means invisible, secret vote counts with no possible citizen oversight.

 You're selling our birthright for a mess of pottage.

(We're) the one who wants government of, by, and for the people, and elections of, for, and BY THE PEOPLE, not the elections bureaucracy or the elections industry. I'm the one telling you the heresy that you're just as good as any expert any day of the week.


Direct Democracy...Mark E. Smith 17 Feb 2007

So our forefathers gave us representative rather than direct democracy simply because they couldn't imagine the advent of the horseless carriage, of heavier-than-air flight, or the telephone, and by the time these infernal inventions came along, we'd forgotten what the problem was and how they could solve it?

The way you stop people from insisting on frivolous votes is that nobody bothers to vote on them. Nobody is forced to vote. People vote only when there is an issue that effects them and that they have an interest in. The question is whether we are allowed to vote on such issues. Jumping from no direct votes at all, to the possibility of too many direct votes, is even worse than the slippery slope domino theory. I find the status quo, where innocent people are being tortured and killed in our name against our will, and we have no say in the matter, totally unacceptable, and if it would stop the torture in Guantanamo, I wouldn't be too concerned that it might also stop the torture everywhere else. Even if we have to vote on each and every secret prison that Bush has established overseas as they are uncovered, I'd say it was worth it to stop the torture.

In neighborhood citizen councils, you wouldn't have to be concerned about the volume of voting because neighborhoods are not cities or nations. When all voting is done locally, by neighborhood, you simply limit polling places to no more than the number of paper ballots that can be quickly and easily hand-counted. Large neighborhoods might need several polling places, while small ones would need only one.

As I see it the problem is not the logistics of how we would manage the voting if we had a voice in government, but how do we get a voice in government. How do we get rid of a Congress that refuses to impeach The Decider, bows to, supports, or refuses to oppose all his decisions, cannot themselves be impeached or recalled, and refuses to listen to us when we ask them to represent us? We can't do it through voting, even if we had honest elections, as the two parties now in power will not allow their stranglehold on U.S. politics to be weakened by anything as subversive as direct democracy. We tell them how we'd like them to vote, and they vote however they feel like and there's nothing we can do about it. We can't do it through third parties, as they are not strong enough to compete with the corrupt corporate two-party system. Neither party is willing to give us the same Constitutional rights as corporations, take our will into account as much as they do the will or corporations, or even consider putting any teeth into laws designed to protect us from corporate crimes. We're told that if we don't have and cannot afford health insurance, the profits of the health care industry and the health insurance companies are more important than our measly worthless lives, so we can drop dead, and thousands of us do every year from treatable diseases we cannot afford to treat. And so long as big pharma and the insurance companies contribute more the the Democrats and the Republicans than we do, that's how things are going to stay. To the Democrats and Republicans, national health care is a Commie-pinko-leftist idea, even if every other country in the world considers it no more than centrist and has had such a plan for decades.

Don't you think that if we had a voice in government, we'd act to save our own lives? Don't our lives matter, or are we as irrelevant as those innocent torture victims?

Yes, it was a good show, Paul, and I'm grateful for you, Steve, Ken, Linda, Jim & Shar, and everyone else involved in putting it together. But when you ask if this is a democracy, don't be too surprised if somebody not only agrees with you that it is not, but also points out why it is not and what a democracy would entail. I'd be interested in knowing, as your tour progressives, how many other Mark E. Smiths you encounter along the way, and if you ever succeed in silencing us. Because our numbers are growing, we are finding our voice, and once we realize that the game is rigged, we stop playing by the rules. As you yourself said, these rules were made by crooks, Jesse James is President of the bank because he robbed it fair and square, and he and his gang don't take kindly to citizens trying to run them out of town.

Progressive Democrats don't quite get it...optical scan ballots are not paper ballots - lets get it straight.  Mark E. Smith

The bad news is that they are, however, misusing the words "paper ballots."

By paper ballots, they mean something that can be recounted or audited, which we all know is of no use whatsoever after the fact, once an unelected candidate has been sworn in on the basis of a machine count.

Like Brad, they are willing to allow optical-scans, the most easily hacked machines around, along with the central tabulators that optical-scan schemes require. They seem to feel that all they need is a paper "ballot of record," which could, if Congress, the courts, and local elections officials allow it, be audited or recounted to prove that the wrong candidate was sworn in.

They appear oblivious to the fact that this knowledge can be of no consolation to voters, or to the families of the innocent people that a wrongly sworn in candidate may have ordered to be tortured or killed under the authority of an office to which they were not properly elected and from which they cannot be removed, recalled, unseated, or impeached, no matter how atrocious their abuses of power.

Once again, it is clear to me that "progressive Democrat" is an oxymoron. You cannot be a Democrat, i.e. a member of a party that is dependent upon and beholden to the military-industrial complex, and still be progressive in any sense of the word. PDA does seem to be sincere, but they are extremely naive if they think that Democratic members of Congress, who have reaped the benefits of having the defense investments in their stock portfolios double and triple in value every year that Bush has been in office, would ever vote to stop the war that is profiting them so greatly. Congress members vote their wallets, not their constituents' wishes. The millionaires and billionaires in Congress, whether Democratic or Republican, are part of Bush's base, "the haves and the have-mores," as he put it, and they give him standing ovations because by conceding to him and then voting for everything he wanted, they have doubled and tripled their wealth in every year of his term. Unlike the majority of the American public, Congress members believe that Bush is doing a heck of a job, and he is -- for them. But not for us.