That being the case, I believe I want to raise another topic for a minute.
Voting machines.
There's still people who feel voting doesn't change anything. Best line I heard along thos likes was, "If voting could change anything, they wouldn't let you do it." Yet Republicans made vote suppression a central part of their electoral strategy. It turns out, if voting was meaningless that wouldn't try so hard to stop you.
We've seen Republican partisans running the companies that build those things deliver machines that appear to be designed to be hackable. We've seen bizarre explanations for it, like bad interactions with antivirus software.
Diebold changed its name to Sequoia but still ships broken systems after having promised to deliver votes to Bush in 2004.
Voting machines are essentially spreadsheets with special input method, methods that have been proven in other areas, like touch screen ATMs and scoring those #2 pencil tests. There's no reason for all this failure, and his cannot continue.
We're going to have to get new voting machines and adjust our voting procedures. That's a simple fact. But we can't deal with the broken, hackable machines we've seen shipped all over the country as a result of the HAVA act. And because low turnouts favor the incumbents, we can't expect any party, even our "beloved" Democrats, to take the lead on this.
So we citizens need to do it.
The problem, of course, is that electoral rules vary from county to county, much less state to state.There is a means of approaching this, though. Voter referendums. We
Take a look at this map at State Initiative and Referendum Institute, which was set up by The University of Southern California. Most of the states west of the Mississippi have procedures for citizens to start referendums, and ALL of them allow their state legistures to throw the question to the voters. And all of them are open to having their job threatened.
We need electoal systems that work, nationally. We need 50 state committees to get this fixed.
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