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Originally Posted by Bill O'Rights
^^^ubertuber saved me a lot of typing.  This is, after all, why we have term limits and elections every four years. |
Bill O'Rights, I suggest that you research the circumstances of the lawsuit against Diebold by the State of California that was settled for $2.6 million in Nov., 2004, and visit these sites to keep up to date on disclosures and controversies related to electronic "voting":
http://www.votersunite.org/news.asp
http://http://blackboxvoting.org/
http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...2/ai_n16019546
Oakland Tribune, Jan 22, 2006
..... For more than two years, Diebold Election Systems Inc. has hit one political or technical snag after another trying to reap more than $40 million in voting-machine sales in California.
Now only a collection of tiny software files on Diebold's latest voting machines stand in the way of those revenues and more. Last summer, a Finnish computer expert using an agricultural device found he could rig the votes stored on Diebold's memory cards and rewrite one of those files to cover his tracks.
The revelation posed a double problem for Diebold: Not only could its optical-scanning voting machines be hacked, but state and federal rules for more than a year have forbidden those files in voting machines. ........
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...and decide if these were an "isolated" incidents:
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http://www.unionleader.com/columns.a...9-b71df3b7f0cc
MORE KA-CHING
More than $2.8 million.
That appears to be the new total of the Republican National Committee’s legal bill for the defense of convicted 2002 Republican phone-jamming conspirator Jim Tobin.
We reported two weeks ago that the RNC’s year-end financial report, on file with the Federal Election Committee, contained a $1.7 million payment to Williams and Connolly, the Washington law firm the RNC hired to represent Tobin. ..........
......In November 2004, the GOP Virginia paid 33 Democratic lawmakers $750,000 to settle an eavesdropping case, which, according to a Virginia news report at the time, had “bedeviled Republicans for more than two years.”
It seems the former Virginia GOP executive director had eavesdropped on private conference calls of Democratic officials who were discussing political and legal strategies. Reportedly, he eventually pleaded guilty to intercepting a wire communication, a felony. ........
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The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions,
that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when
wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little
rebellion now and then. -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787
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[W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned from time to time that [the] people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
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"I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as
necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787
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"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.
Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise
their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to
dismember it or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln, 4 April 1861
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The sentiment on this thread is a far cry from Jefferson's attitude, in a time when the citizenry had recently put down existing government via a violent revolution, that <b>government officials are scoundrels who must be intimidated by an angry, suspicious, volatile electorate with a reputation of being capable of a violent reaction, if provoked.</b>
Look at <b>yourselves</b>....and your words here, in reaction to all that has taken place to undermine representative government, transparent, fair elections, your right to know the deliberations of an open and accountable government, and then tell me that I am wrong to advocate leaving this country as soon as possible. Do you really believe that your demeanor would change in time to counter current political trends, when you, even now, show know signs, with your nearly universal, blind faith in an election process that may no longer even exist?