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Perhaps You Don’t Quite Understand the Problem
This was lifted from an email discussing a conference call by citizen activists.
There was a lot of discussion this morning over a 12-principles statement on what a fair voting system should include, and whether to endorse pure paper balloting, or the Open Voting Consortium plan for a triple-check system of machine that issues paper ballots as well as bar-coded records, or both. There were other discussions about international fair elections standards, and perhaps getting the Carter Foundation involved with USE, and Lora Chamberlain vowed to do a crash research project on paper balloting in Canada, France, Germany, with goal of arriving at a coalition consensus on what voting method we should endorse. Jonathan Simon checked in for a discussion about exit polling and Mitofsky's release of a 70-page critique of its own performance. Too soon to tell exactly what it means.
It was surprising hearing how many of these nice ladies in charge of respectable voter integrity organizations, in private discussion frankly admit that the Democratic Party deliberately threw the election and is deep in a corporate fascist pact with the GOP and ruling industrial conglomerates. I'm feeling better about the coalition partners all the time.
One of the best developments was the addition of Kathy Dopp, of USCountVotes.org. I called her number at 10:25, she answered, I invited her, and she was in the conference by 10:30. A lot of the participants had never heard of her foundation or its big plan to collect and analyze voting data from every precinct in the US. When they heard that, everybody wanted to ask her questions, and Lora Chamberlain proposed and everyone seconded putting out funding appeals for USCountVotes in their organizational e-mails. There was also agreement to share lists of the top computer voting and security experts, and compile a combined list for posting at the votersunite.org forum.
One of the main actions discussed the previous day was sending MoveOn an Ohio documentary by a videographer named Penny (who most of the others knew).
Gary Krane the fundraiser is trying to persuade MoveOn to use the video to anchor a national house-party event, possibly raising major funds to help this coalition get rolling.