I hope my title steers you to the diary below. I’d been anticipating the HBO feature Recount. Here are our community’s diaries on it so far:
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I read reports in the press about the HBO feature prior to its airing and was not surprised to find nothing mentioned in regards to what ought to be done now based on what we clearly know to be true today. The reason for a government is to administer to the needs of a society. That’s not happening. When something isn’t happening, isn’t it silly to talk about things in general as if it is? If you’re on a road trip with family and friends, and the driver mentions the car is on empty, where does conversation gravitate?
Private entities will "tally" up to 50% of all votes cast later this year. Whether your thinking about this is conspiratorial or not, it’s still unreasonable to accept the counting of votes by private entities. An election is a public matter, not a private matter.
The legislative branch, or the Congress, is tasked with legislating solutions to problems which face the nation. It has been several years now, and the Congress has not only failed to solve the problem, it has actually exacerbated it. When the legislature fails to act and/or prevent harm, a convention of state delegates, held on the authority of Article V, may be called to propose amendments to the Constitution which can and will reverse any trends fatal to representative governance.
Since consensus is a natural component of the human condition, if/when a convention is convoked and convened, the inevitable result will be a 28th Amendment which secures the electoral process from private interests. The solution being to standardize The Vote, to make uniform the manner in which votes are cast and tallied. If the U.S. Congress were not gridlocked by/with corporate interests, it would have proposed such an amendment immediately following the "debacle" that was the 2000 presidential election.
What is disappointing is that out of all the diaries listed above, I couldn’t find one comment (and I may have missed them) which addressed the fact the country has been flooded with a mélange of computerized voting machines--not vote counting machines, as pictured in the HBO feature, but machines upon which votes are cast.
The information surrounding the situation is well documented. So how is it people can go on and on about how upsetting the HBO feature is, yet not comment on the need to standardize the voting process? Isn’t that the take-away of the feature? That we need to standardize the various antiquated voting laws? It’s a states’ rights and equal protection issue: if you have fifty people depending on one another to accurately account for something which affects everyone, it’s common sense to create a standard by which the accounting is done.
Many of the Americans we remember today for their sacrifices made them for a reason, and the common sentiment found in the threads of these diaries is: "...we can’t allow another election to be stolen like this...." This is where our leaders come in.
Where are our PodPeople (Tim "the networks giveth, and the networks taketh away" Russert et. al.)? Where is Obama on this? Where is Kos on this? Where are you on this?
http://www.foavc.org
http://www.articlev.org
http://www.article5.org