Electronic Voting Machines Undermine Democracy

Electronic voting machines and voting machine corporations came under sharp criticism in a report issued last Friday by the Ohio Secretary of State. http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/EVEREST/00-SecretarysEVERESTExecutiveReport.pdf

Cuyahoga Country was singled out in the report as needing to scrap its Diebold corporation-manufactured machines prior to the March, 2008 elections. The county Board of Elections met on Monday to hear from the Secretary of State’s office, voting machine corporation representatives, and the public.

The real issue before the Board of Elections was the issue of authority – one of maintaining public authority to ensure that public officials and institutions are in complete control in the collection, counting and reporting of public votes during public elections in the democratic selection of public officials.

Voting machine technology is private. It’s trademarked. It’s private property.

Corporations manufacture the machines.
Corporations program the machines.
Corporations service the machines.
Corporations “trouble-shoot” any problems with the machines.
Corporations possess the proprietary “keys” to the machines.
Corporations have the bottom-line authority over the machines.
In short, vote counting has become privatized or, more specifically, corporatized.

In the Project EVEREST report issued last Friday, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner stated on page 73 under the General Conclusions and Background section, 3rd paragraph:

“It has been said that elections belong to the people. Excessive dependence on any voting machine company to operate the state’s elections, when that company’s voting system is subject to trade secret or propriety information claims, result in a loss of transparency that should exist to assure election officials and the public that a fair and accurate process has been implemented for democratic self-governance.”

Exactly.

She concludes that same paragraph by saying:

“The information available to the scientists who performed the assessments of this study is some of the most comprehensive information available to date for any such study. This was not accomplished without the assistance and cooperation of the voting machine companies whose equipment and software were studied”

This is precisely the problem – having to rely on or depend upon the assistance and cooperation of voting machine corporations.

This is not public. This is not democratic. This is the main problem. Public “oversight,” public “monitoring,” public “advising,” public “watchdogging,” or any other word to describe the passive and deferential role the public has under the current vote-counting framework is unacceptable. It’s undemocratic.

Issues of Touch Screen vs Optical Scan is akin to choosing between paper or plastic at the check-out line and calling it a real decision to save the environment – while SUVs and smoke stacks are destroying the Earth’s ozone. Obviously we need verified voting with a paper ballot but the choice as presented is a secondary concern.

The real issue is public authority. The real issue is whether or not the public, via Boards of Elections, can actually be in control of the voting machine technology, proprietary program “keys,” servicing and counting. In other words, can public entities be actively in charge rather than passively watching what’s going on. There’s a profound difference.

Public entities need to take over and totally control this technology. Public elections are too important to have private for-profit business corporations in charge. Vote counting needs to be open, transparent, and verifiable.

The real choice is not paper or plastic. It’s authority. Citizen authority or corporate authority.

Hopefully, all county Board of Elections across Ohio will be wise enough to make the right choice.

Our Problems are Artificial

Many, if not most people treat the problems we face as though they were a force of nature. Something inevitable, inexplicable, something that "just happens" or "has always been." Think of how poverty in the "Third World" is dealt with – when it is considered at all – "Here is $20 for Oxfam, poor devils, can't do much else." But Third World poverty did not fall out of the skies, it is the result of avoidable practices such as an the imposition of large-scale crop exportation rather than emphasizing local food crops, unwillingness to support the institution of land reform, the education of women and birth control. And the solutions to overcoming the worst of this poverty – providing everyone with potable water, decent living quarters, education and basic medicine, would cost only a fraction of the wealth squandered on military nonsense.

Homelessness did not exist back when rents were cheap and such housing plentiful. Nor is the solution to it any great mystery waiting for some povertycrat Einstein to reveal its resolution. Take basic housing out of the corporate "market." Use a fraction of the wealth wasted on idiocies like the Olympics or other forms of corporate welfare and apply it to building housing coops. Eliminate by-laws that restrict the building of basement suites and back-yard cottages. Drug addiction? Only a crime-causing problem in a system that is so criminal and/or stupid to treat addiction as a crime instead of a medical/social problem. Unemployment? Only a curse in a system that refuses to guarantee employment or income to its work force and is criminal enough to treat a problem of political economy as an individual problem. (As though it was the workers fault the plant closed and moved to China!)

I could go on and on but I think you get the point. Virtually every major problem humanity faces is artificial and solvable. These problems and the failures to resolve them are the result of deliberate choices made by the minority that holds political and economic power over us.

That our problems are artificial in nature is something very positive. It means the possibility exists for overcoming them if we have the intelligence and will to do so. Were our problems rigidly determined, like a force of nature, our situation would be hopeless. That they are the result of choices on the part of the powerful means they could be overcome and permanently resolved if we can eliminate the authoritarian and undemocratic structure that allows a small parasitic minority to dictate how we should live.

One of the ways the minority dominates us is to convince us that our problems are natural and irresolvable. Part of our struggle must be to break the hold upon the populace of this mentality.

Robert Hawkins And The Perils Of the Shopping Mall

The old fashioned "Main Street" was an open-ended public space. People did not congregate in any number, but spread out along the sidewalks, or were inside the multitude of small shops that comprised the commercial area. In part a desire for totalitarian control, the corporations that promoted and developed shopping malls eliminated public space and herded the onetime citizens, now consumers, under one roof. By corporatizing what was once public space, the developers sought complete control - no more undesirables - like buskers, pan handlers, street sellers, propagandists for this and that cause, or even people whose attire (protest tee shirts) was offensive to the authoritarian mentality. (1) A happy-face little white bread world now coming apart through the actions of a single deranged young man.

What surprises me, is not that someone went berserk with a gun in a mall, but that it didn't happen sooner. Herd masses of people together under one roof and they become sitting ducks for anyone with a real or imagined grievance against the world. The authoritarian need to centralize everything into vast agglomerations, instead of maintaining natural, human-scale, decentralized units, not only destroys community, but is also physically dangerous. Time to abandon the malls and go back to Main Street!

1. Not to mention that all business are now rent slaves and no one lives in/above their shop in a mall. The corporations have thus ratcheted up their control of small, independent business through the invention of the shopping mall.

Hugo Chavez and the Failure of Social Democracy

The failure of the Chavez government of Venezuela to gain a majority approval of its constitutional reforms - empowering the people, reducing the work week and giving legitmacy to collective property – shows the limitation of social democracy. Once again, it is impossible to introduce revolutionary change via the capitalist form of democracy. Chavez, a typical social democrat, had given the class enemies of working people the right to vote on issues that concerned those same working people. As though the oligarchy, its middle class toadies and wannabees, would ever support such changes, let alone that they should have any right to make decisions for the exploited and oppressed. That the bully should have a vote on whether to cease abusing his victim! Working people have to act on their own and TAKE the power they need to make those revolutionary changes. If the oligarchy, its butt-kissers and the CIA haven't begun a process in Venezuela that ends up turning Chavez into Allende Version # 2, maybe the working population will do precisely that. For if the right-wing gets back in power, they will be its chief victims.

Peak Oil And The Suburbanites

One of the fears generated by the coming Peak Oil crisis is that the suburbanites, those stereotypically SUV-driving MacMansion dwellers will go fashy, attacking scapegoats like immigrants and environmentalists and demand wars to steal other folks remaining oil.

I suspect that some of this would be true in the US context, but I don't think this will be quite as likely for the citizens of Canuckistan. I checked the election results for the major suburban areas of the province of British Columbia where I reside. The findings are interesting. While most burbs go right, some chose the social democratic NDP. In at least two suburban ridings (electoral districts) the NDP and the Greens are a majority, yet lose to a right-whiner because of the split vote. In all others, where the NDP loses, the Green-NDP minority is significantly large. Even the most knuckle dragging, evolution-denying, First Nations-hating burb, 37% of the electorate vote left.

This means that in the worst case scenario, four out of ten people will have some sort of awareness and thus able to confront fascist ideology as it arises and help lead their lost, bewildered and frightened conservative neighbors.

Another factor is that the authoritarian personality - the psychological basis of the right-winger - leads in most cases to passivity – the famous "silent majority." We see evidence for this constantly. Tens of thousands of peace and environmental demonstrators – and yet a pathetic handful of counter-demonstrators. Other factors are cultural. We live in a culture of solipsism and narcissism, and thus many people reduce social and economic problems to personal ones. Add to this the guilt which accompanies authoritarianism, and you have people who think in terms of personal failure if things go wrong and look for personal, not social solutions to these problems. The education system and the media constantly preach a reified world-view. That which is man-made, by the conscious choice of powerful hierarchies, is made to look natural, like an unalterable, overwhelming force of nature. (Think of the "inevitability" of so-called free trade, of the need to destroy living standards "in order to compete" – all hogwash, yet sold as though it was a basic law of physics.) Our conservative neighbors swallow this propagada whole.

There are also the examples from recent history when neo-liberal policies have laid waste to large sections of the well-paid work force. Millions have lost their jobs, thousands of lives destroyed by deliberate government policies creating recessions, cut-backs, piratizations, job-exportation and down-sizing. The results? Some resistance, indeed spectacular resistance like the Great Coal Strike in the UK, but in the main, far less than you might hope. As for the seig-heilers, yes, there has been some support among poor white youth, but hardly a threatening mass movement.

Passivity has been the main response to the neo-liberal attacks, the misery and poverty of which give us a fore-taste of the Peak Oil crisis. (Passivity was also the response during the first five years of the Great Depression.)

Nevertheless it is up to us, the more aware section of the populace, to make Peak Oil an issue among our neighbors and start right away to make the changes necessary to move to a post-petroleum, post-internal combustion world.

New Anarchist Journal in Ontario

Common Cause, the new Ontario anarchist group

has launched as web site and journal, both named

LINCHPIN, available at http://linchpin.ca/

Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule Part one

Short Film About the Security and Prosperity Partnership