Remember when this (Election Reform) forum was as popular as General Discussion?

[garybeck]

Man it's sad.... in 2004, I found DU because of my concern about Diebold. This forum was probably the #1 forum on all of DU. You'd regularly see as many recs here as you do in General Discussion.

Nothing has changed in regard to the problem. In the coming election nearly all the votes will be counted by computers, on proprietary software, and we have no idea if they will count votes properly. They could all be rigged. Whether or not fraud will occur we don't know, but we do know one thing absolutely: It COULD take place right under our noses. That alone is bad enough. In an open democracy, things like this should not be possible.

What has changed is that many of us who have been here since 2004 have had to go back to our real lives at some point. We have jobs, families, and we can't stay up until 4 am every night working on election reform. (note, some awesome people haven't gone back to their real lives, and I say KUDOS and THANK YOU to those who are still working on the front lines here).

Myself, I decided it was better to focus on the state level where I could possibly have an effect. Our group has made some baby steps in Vermont but not much has changed.

We've been squashed by the media, and no one really knows about the problem anymore.

I do think that most people care. But they just don't know. They figure, if there was a problem, CNN would tell us about it. Well for a while we had Lou Dobbs at CNN doing just that, but now he's gone too.

Somehow we need to break through. I'm very concerned about the coming election. We can't break through ourselves. We've been trying for 8+ years and look where we are. We need something high profile. We need Jon Stewart or Michael Moore, or Move On, or someone like that to light a fire under the people's asses and let everyone know our democracy is in big trouble. We need a big splash that will hit the MSM. We know the candidates aren't going to do squat. Maybe Anonymous and the Occupiers could help. Bill Maher...? Is there anyone out there with a big voice who cares?... I don't know....

Any ideas?

[TheMastersNemesis]

1. I Do Not Know Either. The Media Has Become So Bad ----

that they have suppressed so much news. They do not report anything of significance anymore. And most of our severe problems are now just buried.

I feel the same way that you do and I find the level of ignorance around me stunning.

[OSPREYXIV]

2. Corporations are...machines. Humans are...

Corporation are machines made of paper.
just parts. From the beginning of the industrial revolution, theories of self identity and human psychology used their era's technology to explain the mind or behavior. Reverse and perverse but it still happens. Most of us are just lazy.

"Economic contraction" is a polite way to say:
"The game's musical chairs. We paid the band to stop. Go away." Boom/bust is back, courtesy of the "people" who've figured out how to rig the latest version of the system. (High speed trading, LIBOR, banks TBTF, are examples of how a small number of sociopaths behave when they find any opening wide enough to squeeze through. Narrow-headed rats, weasels and reptiles dressed in pinstripes aren't new. Now they've stolen the keys to the wheelhouse and the PA system. That's leverage but their strength is their weakness.

Every community has alternate media. Start now!
Contact them in your community. Even if every talking head who isn't not a parrot with reading skills starts screaming at the top of their lungs, at the national corporate level, NOTHING will be done. Hundreds or thousands of people with signs marching AFTER an election will be news.
Even better: BEFORE AND AFTER the election. That has never happened before.

If the system is challenged at just the right time,
there may be enough consciousness raising to wake the sleepers and scare the status quo who think they're entitled to misrule.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING.

[marions ghost]

3. Causes too much discomfort

--people like to think that their vote is sacrosanct. Voting is the basic of Democracy and if you think we are being manipulated this way, then where is Democracy? Denial, denial.

But after what we've seen, the corruption and criminal abuse--how can we not imagine the possibility?

And yet plenty of intelligent people will close their minds to this. Too disturbing, too dark. And obviously this helps the perpetrators tremendously. I would be wary of anyone who tries to argue too strenuously "this could never happen." That just defies logic.

I think we're going to see some issues in these elections. Yet again. But I do think others are watching, analyzing, gathering data on how they do it. More than ever before.

This is not something that will go away. Yes we need a break through. It may take time to overcome the massive resistance to the issue, and we have some pretty overwhelming problems in general that further help the "see no evil" attitudes.

[Coyotl]

4. Likewise, I came to DU via electionn theft coverage in 2004 (under a different alias)

Let's hope this forum does not become any more popular next month!

[Bill Bored]

5. First, DU Management Has Supressed This ex-Forum...

Secondly, the major parties probably want to keep things as they are because they both think they can steal the next election. Like a defeated ball team, they think "We'll get 'em next year!" and they go back to business as usual as the opposition (which may not be that opposed to anything the winners want to do anyway, except for those on the fringes).

What will change this?

1. Big campaign donors demanding that the system be fixed. This is no different than any other issue nowadays. You have to pay to play. I hope I'm wrong of course, but it seems to work.

2. Lawsuits could work but the right ones aren't being filed and when they are, the courts are not yet educated about the risks of computerized vote counting, so they punt to election officials and legislators i.e., "It's not my yob man!" Some cases drag on for years and when there's a favorable decision, nothing happens and it's appealed. A long-term effort to educate lawyers and judges is needed.

3. The movement is still hopelessly divided. Torches and pitchforks don't get the respect of academics and scientists. Most lawyers are clueless! More collaboration is needed.

4. Finally, this is a really hard problem to solve! Audits are complicated, but they're the only way to know who won other than full hand counts. No one wants to do the math or the work. So entrepreneurs selling more automation may get the business by lobbying officials who don't want to count by hand. Less auditable forms of voting are also being popularized such as National Popular Vote, Instant Runoff, etc., etc. Again, no collaboration among advocates for this stuff. If there were, we could have hand-counted Presidential elections based on the Popular Vote.

And then there's Internet voting....

[upi402]

6. Dems did nothing after we gave them a majority

Seems futile.
See my sig for WA

[Cliff Arnebeck]

7. The tide has turned

1) In response to two televised personal attacks by Karl Rove, Jill Simpson stepped up to expose Rove's election theft empire. She did so with a power point presentation at a NYC press conference, and then with a map of that empire presented at the National Press Club on October 24, 2012. See http://electionprotectionaction.org

2) Shortly after OpSec first appeared, Simpson exposed it as a Rove's 2012 variation of the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack upon John Kerry. OpSec fizzled.

3) Columbus, Ohio based FreePress.org produced a series of first rate investigative reports: a) exposing Romney family ownership interests in Hart Inter-Civic, b) exposing secret patches being attached to ES&S county tabulators in 25 of the largest population counties administered by ES&S in Ohio, and c) exposing the influence by funding of the partisan electronic voting machine companies of academic institutions.

4) Professional mathematician Richard Charnin integrated his model of U.S. Voting patterns with the unadjusted exit polling data sponsored by the media consortium on file at the University of Connecticut. Rove's pattern of systemic "red shifting" of American elections from 1988 forward can now be documented by reference to data of which a court can take judicial notice. See http://richardcharnin.com

5) We submitted reports/complaints to the FBI in regard to the evidence of election fraud being gathered by Jill Simpson and Bob Fitrakis an Gerry Bello of the Free Press. We filed complaints in state and federal courts in Ohio seeking to block the utilization of secret patches to red shift Ohio votes in the 2012 election.

6) Main Stream media: Forbes Magazine, Fox TV of Cincinnati, and others reported with favor the merits of the Free Press reporting on the ES&S patch and the vulnerability of the election process to fraudulent manipulation. In sharp contrast to 2004, the Free Press with a rare exception of an alternative media source, was not criticized as seeking to generating "conspiracy theories."

7) The U.S. Department of Justice announced before the 2012 election that it would be monitoring for evidence not only of voter suppression but also election fraud, and fielded attorneys and FBI agents around the country to do so.

8) ABC television's Scandal has begun to reveal the story of the 2000/2004 theft of Presidential elections by Karl Rove. The cat is out of the bag when it's playing on prime-time broadcast TV.

Cliff Arnebeck

[garybeck]

9. thank you Cliff

for all you do.

[Stevepol]

8. Indeed I do remember.

I still have hope that some of this stuff will come to light.

About the only hope is if some perhaps well-known name gets involved and literally gives his life to the effort.

Since there's almost no way to know what the actual results of any given election in the US are, I've quit worrying about this ever being proven except by statistical means.

But it seems obvious to me that electronic voting and e-voting are incompatible, as the German high court for constitutional matters decided a few years ago.

WHEN THE VOTE IS COUNTED IN TOTAL SECRECY WITHOUT VERIFICATION, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE A DEMOCRACY.