FAITH-BASED VOTING; Yet where's the Reverence for the Voting Process???

I'm severely embarrassed to be posting this my self, but I will get over it. Soon.

Here's the latest column by Chicago Tribune Network Services reporter Robert Koehler. www.commonwonders.com is his personal website where his syndicated columns are posted. This out today....

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Faith-Based Voting
'Without procedural integrity, you have nothing'

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

March 30, 2006

Oh, those glitches!

For some reason we tolerate them a lot more in an election — that is to say, in the mechanics of democracy, something we affect to believe in so fervently we're willing to go to war to make sure other countries have it — than we would in, let's say, our banking system.

{snip}

Most infuriating was the scattershot use of the trivializing, blame-avoidance word "glitch," which reduces disenfranchisement to oh well, gosh, just one of those things. The media can live with glitches. They still get their numbers to report. They still get "results," which, in our world of breathless headlines and two-second sound bites, are all that matter. Voting - democracy — is the booster engine that produces winners, then quietly disappears.

{snip}

This, of course, is preposterous; every line of code in a voting program was written by a human. Our vote is hostage to a flawed, secret system of counting that almost no one understands.

{snip}

Nor, as Ion Sancho, election supervisor of Leon County, Fla., learned, do the companies even tolerate having their equipment tested. (Sancho demonstrated that you can modify an election without leaving evidence, which Lehto called "the nuclear bomb of election fraud.")

"In the suit, I'm saying if you hide the ball from the public, the contract is void," Lehto said.

{important snip, MUST reading at www.commonwonders.com }

"Without procedural integrity, you have nothing," Lehto said. What's missing in faith-based democracy is a sense of reverence for the process.


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full article at www.commonwonders.com

:kick:

woudldnt have had to be embarrassed! But you will live thorough it and it's a good enough column that it deserves two threads! so go K and R the one I just posted. OR at least R it.

:patriot:

thing called faith based voting. te he.

no need to go to the polls & put up with those pesky machines.

if you're a fan of Blue Lagoon and movies like that (or Lee jeans commercials)

:rofl:

Cheers :toast:

Way to go, Land Shark! :applause:

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

The issue is really this: do we want a democracy or not?

If the vote is counted by private companies using secret software that the companies and the courts guarantee will remain secret, and if there's no real way to verify the results of the vote counting, you cannot have a democracy. It's as simple as that.

Since the vote is counted by private companies using secret software that the companies and the courts guarantee will remain secret, and because there's no real way to verify the results of the vote counting, you do not have a democracy. It's as simple as that.

Our whole democracy starts with the vote. All the elections and all the laws passed by those elected gain their basis from the vote. Take away the power of the vote from the people and there remains not one shred of democracy.

And yet, most of DU goes on pretending that their support for this candidate or that, is palying a part in democracy without a realization that private companies using secret software to count their vote have killed democracy before they even cast their votes!

I think it's kind of like the Whos in Whoville still gathering around the (missing) Christmas tree (stolen by the Grinch) and singing Dahvu Doray Dahvu Doray ...

The right to vote can be Denied,
But it cannot be taken away

So even if you're in a jurisdiction where you think it will be stolen, it's civil disobedience to force them to steal it

steal it?

will occur)

Man, this guy is good!

:)

questioning the results.

Seems like years ago, doesn't it?

:thumbsup:

I don't understand why, in a so-called "democracy", this should be an issue. If they get away with this permanently we can kiss the last of our democracy good bye.

"What's missing in faith-based democracy is a sense of reverence for the process." K & R

the faith requested is not in the integrity of the process, but in something else

YOu should link to that here.

As some of you did too!

Hey, I've tried to email Bob, using the email posted at his common wonders site. It always bounces back.

Does anyone else have this problem? Or, an alternate email address?

If you have a better address, would you PM me?