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

[Land Shark]

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