Towards a Green Future

Hello fellow voters! If you are voting on a touch-screen type machine, there were concerns in 2004, 2006, and now in 2008 about vote-flipping. What is vote-flipping? It is where you touch the portion of the screen for candidate X, but your vote flips over and it appears that you touched the screen to indicate candidate Y.

Poor screen calibration, or malicious tampering can be the culprit.

Your recourse may be as close as your cell-phone. If it takes video clips, you may want to film yourself voting for.....oh, I don't know.....Obama, just to make sure you have documentation to show poll-workers if your vote ends up flipping to.....oh, I don't know......McCain.

Film those votes! if yours flips, you now have proof to share with the poll workers, election monitors, your Secretary of State, and the Federal Elections Commission.

Protect your vote. Document your vote.

So, come election day, I will get to vote here in Alexandria, VA - my new home. I was checking out the Alexandria voter registration site (because I'm a political dork, and that how I roll), and found out the following.

1. Alexandria has an electronic voting system (new to me - I was always an opti-scan voter in Iowa).
2. Virginia law requires you to produce a valid ID or sign an affidavit testifying to your identity prior to voting (new to me)
3. The company that makes the voting machines that Alexandria uses is Hart InterCivic.   A comparison of their officers to the OpenSecrets.org donor database shows no contributions to any candidates in the 2008 cycle.

On election day, I will bring every form if ID with me from Drivers license to my student ID, to my Green Party and ACLU membership cards (ok - maybe not those last two, in case or Republican poll thugs watchers).

In other news:

Not so surprisingly, the Washington Post has endorsed Obama.  The cliff notes version of the article: Obama is pretty cool, and could be a great president. McCain is pretty cool too, but has run a crappy campaign and his economic plan of yet more tax cuts for the rich is monumentally bad.

 Source: American Political Science Review Vol 58, No. 4, December 1994.

This confirms what I suspected all along. Negative ads/Attack ads serve only one purpose, to suppress voter turnout. This serves to reduce the electorate to two small, extremely partisan, cynical camps. The rest of America turns away in disgust. 

Can you blame them?

What's more - are you willing to be an agent of change to end this systematic threat to our democracy?

I'll start:

"I love conservatives and hope they turn out, participate, and vote, in vast numbers."

To all the alleged "liberals" that think the above statement is a problem, too damn bad. If you really want to make a difference, reach out to people who are disenchanted with politics, or think they don't matter.

Much thanks to Political Forecast for tipping me off to this story.

It seems the neanderthal wing of the Iowa KKK is getting its collective white sheet up in a twist about same-sex marriage. The Des Moines Register reports that some kluckers will descend on Des Moines to possibly protest this abomination of Gods law. Gods law.......hmmmmmm......   Seems just about every nut case says they have the inside scoop on exactly what God's law is. Now, I am no theologian, but the statement by the Grand Poobah of the northern Iowa Klan "‘In fact, we don’t think they have the right to exist’’ seems completely contrary to any concept of moral behavior. If someone or some group does not have the right to even exist, then there is little that stands between them and persecution. For historical reference, Hitler believed the same about the Jews.

In a different marriage perspective, there was a time when states did not regulate who could and could not get married- that was the duty of the church. While any given church might deny same sex couples their marriage vows, religious ideas change over time. Even the concept of marriage changes over time. In some states, inter-racial marriage was illegal up through the late 1960's.

So, to the hate-filled, gay-loathing, white-sheeters from northern Iowa, I would like to pass on some words of wisdom from the famed redneck comedian, Ron "Tater Salad" White: "The next time you have a thought like that, just let it go."

Meanwhile, in Georgia, the reactionary bigots in the state legislature are working to disenfranchise poor voters by a stealth poll tax. This is another clumsily contstrued attack by racist and classist right-wing legislators to stop poor people, especially poor people of color, from voting racist lunatics out of the legislature. The worst part is, you could already use established forms of ID to prove your identity at Georgia polling places, but this bill would undo that. "The law eliminates the use of some other forms of identification to vote, including

Social Security cards, birth certificates and utility bills. Supporters, including Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue, argued that the measure would help prevent fraud."

Governor Sonny: fraud is when someone deliberately breaks the voting law to vote twice, or somehow tamper with the integrity of the election system. Fraud is NOT when someone wants to vote for a candidate other than the ones annointed by the Republican leadership. Remember when Republicans were the champion of the common man?

As a Green, I believe that voting is a fundamental right of all citizens, and I stand opposed to all forms of poll taxes, unreasonable verification systems, and structural impediments to the voter. If the right to vote is not held in the highest regard, our democracy is morally, and funcationally bankrupt.