They won't be on the cover of Time Magazine in the coming year. The corporate media has forgotten their existence.
President Obama needs to be reminded from time to time of the role they played in the 2012 election...
It might be that Anonymous is responsible for their being counted.
The Voters of 2012 who stood in line for hours and hours in the scorching sun, in the cold and wind and rain, on Tuesday, November 6, 2012, to make sure that they got to vote.
The anonymous voter who broke her leg on that day but refused to be evacuated until she voted.
The anonymous man who died in line waiting to vote on that day, but on being revived from the dead his first question was:
Did I vote?
The people who made me proud to be an American while I, I'm a damned coward, I'm not sure I could have done what they did, while I voted in the comfort of my home on the Left Coast and mailed in my ballot at my leisure.
Heroic Americans, thank you for letting me bask in your reflected glory and for allowing me to enjoy the victory that you struggled for.
But, who were the anti-heroes, the villains of 2012?
F stands for Fail, for Flop, for Florida in 2012. Its villainous governor Rick Scott should have a big F tattooed on his lily white forehead for shorting voters of voting equipment such as ballots, ballot scanners, and the necessary personnel to staff polling places. Loading the Florida ballot with multi-page initiatives to unconscionably prolong the process of voting and make Florida voters standing for hours in line stand even longer as individual voters struggled through the initiatives.
O stands for Obscenity, for Outrageous, for Ohio for its strange history of a sudden turnaround despite all indications of a John Kerry win in 2004:
Then the clock struck 11:14pm, and the servers counting the votes in Ohio crashed. Election officials had planned for this sort of thing to happen and already contracted with a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee called SMARTech to be the failsafe should the servers in Ohio go down.
.... Sixty long seconds later the servers came back up in Ohio, but now with vote rerouted through SMARTech in Chattanooga. And, coincidentally, Bush’s prospects for re-election were suddenly a lot brighter. The vote totals that poured into the system from SmartTECH's computer in Chattanooga were flipping the exit polls on their head. The lead Kerry had in the exit polls had magically reversed by more than 6%, something unheard of in any other nation in the developed world, giving Bush the win in Ohio and the presidency for another four years.
And, in 2012 there is Ohio Secretary of State
Jon Husted whose conduct during this election cycle has been reprehensible and incorrigible in his denial of the extension of early voting hours in Democratic stronghold districts and extending them in Republican area, besides mucking around with "provisional ballots" to subvert democracy in the voting booth.
We must not, however, ignore the anti-voting cabal assembled in True the Vote:
True the Vote, ... founded in 2009 ... based in Houston, describes itself as a nonprofit organization ... that aims to protect “the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party.” ... it was founded by ... Tea Party activist, Catherine Engelbrecht..
Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from ... Hans von Spakovsky... Von Spakovsky ... is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book “Who’s Counting?,” which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis.
.... thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.” In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, “Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system.”.
The personnes of the cabal mentioned above are devotees of their movement’s deceased saint,
Paul Weyrich - "I don't want everybody to vote".
Interesting. Catherine Engelbrecht, Hans von Spakovsky, Paul Weyrich... They've all got something of a Teutonic ring to their names haven't they? The 2012 Election Ring Cycle, shades of Wagner. Karl Rove can sing the role of an evil gnome. Greta Van Susteren could flit around as a Valkyrie.
And. speaking of villains, I haven't even gotten around to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- and possibly Indiana. Too exhausting. Too many right wing villains named Scott or Rick or Ryan or something Teutonic.
Let's just toast the Heroes, the footsore, the sunburnt yet wet and cold, the weary warriors of the ballot who braved sunstroke and pneumonia simultaneously, the much more colorful, the much more real American Heroes of 2012, the resolute, intrepid collective of the American voter.