Time for National Paper Ballot Initiative.
Something not right here. Everyone knows how I feel about Obama, NDAA and all that. But I must say I'm disturbed by the one-sided pummeling Democrats are taking from the right-wing talking-nuts, and they are hitting hard and shamelessly. Today both Rush Limbaugh and that real psycho, Jeff Kuner, were challenging the Republican Party to sue over, of all things, vote fraud in Ohio.
Excuse me? You mean where Karl Rove and Kenneth Blackwell stole the election from John Kerry in 2004? Across the state but especially in the very county Limbaugh is talking about? Cuyohonga County? This is really too much. Do Democrats have a pulse? Are they really setting themselves up to fail just like cynics say they are?
If you want to pass your agenda, you want most of the American people, if not with you, at least not against you. And just because they are nuts don't think these right-wing talking heads don't have influence, or don't need to be answered. This will subtly poison the body politic against Obama by invoking a felony and impeachable charge. The kicker is, it is so the pot calling the kettle black it is breathtaking. Yes, I have no words. And this rubbish is now entering the mainstream blogosphere.
The Republicans, as always, are making the issue to be voter identification, naturally, because it disenfranchises old and poor people who can't afford a state ID card. This is especially brassy because they know full well that how you steal elections is by flipping code in computer programs.
What can be gained that is positive out of this is a national initiative to institute an honest vote, as honest as it can be made, anyway, by returning to all paper ballot voting. Computers are good for many things, but voting is not one of them. If we want to save paper this is not where you do it.
A paper ballot that can be seen, held, and examined, the numbers of which can be known and counted before they enter a polling station, is the best system yet devised for guarding against fraud. It requires a bit more doing to walk boxes in and out the back door than to press a few keys on a computer keyboard.
Maybe OWS can lead it. The Democratic Party can actually do something which will be wildly popular across the board. Why not?
Addendum to comments:
Come on everyone remembers the long lines outside the polling stations in black precincts in Ohio being reported on election day of 2004. I was in Copley Square, Boston, the Kerry HQ street party, at 11pm when people were still celebrating until the numbers started to change. Through all the noise you couldn't hear the news, but you knew something was wrong because the crowd was getting quieter. We were there, remember?
There was the lawsuit and now a Diebold programmer testifying under oath that he did it. What is the rebuttal to all this. Can you provide a link? I'd sure like to see that and I will read it carefully.
Programmer Testifies About Rigging Elections With Vote Counting Machines
Jul 6, 2012
Clinton Eugene Curtis testified under oath, before the Ohio State legislature, that he wrote a program to rig elections. This program would flip the total vote from the real winner to the candidate who had been pre-selected to win by the electronic vote counting machines....
Truthout: New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked
A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.
The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.
Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system....
Wikipedia entry: Michael Connell:
Michael Louis Connell (November 30, 1963 – December 19, 2008) was a high-level Republican consultant who was subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 U.S. Presidential election and a case involving thousands of missing emails pertaining to the political firing of U.S. Attorneys. Connell was killed when the plane he was flying crashed on December 19, 2008.
Request for protection
In July 2008, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell case, Cliff Arnebeck, sent a letter [3] to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey seeking protection for Connell as a witness in the case, saying he had been threatened. Arnebeck wrote, “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to 'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations." [4] Arnebeck claims that months later, his source called back and warned that Connell's life was in danger.[5]
He was served with a subpoena in Ohio on September 22, 2008,[6] in a case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, was a website designer and IT professional and created a website for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were tabulated. At the time, Blackwell was also chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio. Connell refused to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections, lawyers said.[7]
Death
At about 6 p.m. on December 19, 2008, Connell was killed, at the age of 45,[1] in the crash of a single-engine 1997 Piper Saratoga private airplane, which he was flying, which occurred in Lake Township, between 2.5 and 3 miles short of the runway at the Akron-Canton Airport near Akron, Ohio.
On December 31, 2008 it was reported that air traffic controllers had noted prior to the crash that Connell was off course, that they had been in communication with him regarding this, and that he had been trying to get back on course at the time of the crash. There were reported to have been no signs of mechanical problems with the plane.[9]
The National Transportation Safety Board published its final report into the accident that killed Connell on January 28, 2010. The board concluded that Connell had lost control of the aircraft as a result of disorientation while turning in cloud. During a pre-flight briefing Connell had commented that he wanted to return to Akron before the weather "went from bad to worse". Several other pilots in the vicinity had reported severe icing at the time of the crash; Connell's aircraft was not equipped or approved to fly in icing conditions.[10]
A January 2010 article in Maxim Magazine speculated that because Connell possessed knowledge which, if revealed, would be damaging to high-level Republicans, his death may have been the result of sabotage of his aircraft,[11] particularly as his cell-phone was never recovered.[12] Project Censored, a small non-profit organization, has called for a Federal criminal investigation; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called the case "more serious than Watergate."
