Restoring our American democracy

It will be a long, tough struggle to restore our American democracy from the gang of Republican thugs who have just rigged, hacked and stolen the 2004 Presidential election. Their many-pronged subversion of the election process also include massive disenfranchisement of poor, African-American, Latino and student voters. In the Ohio election, the Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, employed many dirty and illegal tactics to help Bush steal the Ohio vote. Mr. Blackwell also sabotaged the election recount by rigging the required random selection of precincts for recount by preselecting certain precincts. These illegal actions are currently being litigated in the Ohio and Federal courts.

Our democracy is dependent on the honesty and good will and fair play by election officials. When the Republican Secretaries of State choose to cheat, rig and act in an illegal manner, as did Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State in Florida in 2000 and as did Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio in 2004, then our democracy has been destroyed and replaced with a partisan theocratic war-mongering right-wing dictatorship.

If the Republican party, which is currently run by election-stealing thugs, is unwilling to act in a decent civilized manner, then we will have to simply make it impossible for them to rig, hack, subvert or steal elections in the future. The first thing that we must do is to return to the traditional use of hand-counted paper ballots in the upcoming elections.

Any future use of electronic computerized voting machines and electronic computerized vote tabulating machines will constitute too big of a temptation for Republicans to refrain from rigging, hacking, subverting and stealing elections.

In 2002, the Republican Party staged their test run of controlling the new Diebold computerized paper-trail-free electronic voting systems that were installed in every precinct in the State of Georgia. It worked like a charm. Two popular Democratic incumbents, the Governor Roy Barnes and Senator Max Cleland, were both "defeated" by Republican challengers. The Democrats were both ahead by several points in both the pre-election voter opinion polls and in the election day exit polls, yet the Diebold voting machines declared the two Republican challengers as winners. The local media claimed to be "amazed" by this election "upset." They should have been horrified and outraged. These elections were stolen electronically. There was no paper trail, no recount was possible and for good measure, Diebold Corporation "accidentally erased" the disputed 2002 election returns data from their computer hard disk drives a few days after the election. How convenient, how clean, how slick and how crooked is Republican election theft in the 21st century.

The 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were both stolen by Bush & Company. The 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections will suffer the same fate unless we institute a complete and total return to traditional, verifiable hand-counted paper election ballots.

The Republican Party will never lose another Presidential election as long as we allow their corporate buddies to "count" our votes in secret.

To summarize, we need to accomplish several major actions before the November 2006 elections:

1. we need to return to the traditional use of hand-counted paper ballots in the upcoming elections.

2. we need to dump all of the electronic, computeried voting machines and vote-tabulating machines into the nearest bodies of water, sort of a 21st century Boston Tea Party.

3. we need to have state elections administered by a non-partisan civil service commission, instead of having partisan Secretaries of State interfering with elections.

4. until all of the problems associated with Republican partisan interfere in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections are eliminated, we need to schedule automatic 100% hand-recounts of all state and federal elections. It may be a little expensive, but it will be worth the cost to get our democracy back.

Yours truly,

James K. Sayre

19 January 2005

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Web page last updated on 19 January 2005.