Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Got Democracy? FEATURED ARTICLES - Covering the city with 'got democracy?', SF Chronicle - National Organization For Women Urges Absentee Voting - Working Assets "Your Vote Matters" Campaign - Gambling on Voting, The New York Times - The Paperless Chase, Mother Jones - Black Box Backlash, Seattle Weekly - One Million Black Votes Didn't Count in the 2000 Presidential Election, by Greg Palast - Indians Face Obstacles Between the Reservation and the Ballot Box, NY Times QUOTE OF THE DAY "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage." - - Lao Tzu KNOW YOUR HISTORY - JUNE 1968 -- Vietnam becomes the longest war in U.S. history. 1972 -- Life magazine publishes photos of South Vietnamese children running from napalm. RHINO HERE: The focus of today's blog is voting. I begin with a few ponderings such as: 1) Half of the American public who are eligible to vote, are not registered. 2) Half of those registered to vote, don't vote. 3) In the climate of recent elections, the country's voters are split just about in half, resulting in approximately one eighth of eligible American voters actually having voted for the winners. So given the above, Rhino asks the following questions: 1) Why do any Americans think it's a good idea to send our youth to kill & die for democracy when most Americans don't even get off their asses to vote. 2)  If there is not a huge groundswell of new voters registering & if there is not a record number of Americans voting in November, and if the shrub is elected again by whatever means, will the American public get what they deserve? 3) Shouldn't each one of us be sticking our necks out in conversations with nearly everyone we come in contact with to challenge them to register & vote? There's a lot of reasons to distrust the electoral system, but the Rhino thinks the best plan to overcome all the shenanigans is for American voters to come out in droves. So here's a potpourri of  info regarding voting, including 2 pieces for today's BOTTOM LINE  regarding the systematic denial in the U.S. of voting rights to American Indians & African Americans.  But first a piece which resonates with the ponderings on American democracy above. Covering the city with 'got democracy?' posters, writer confronts our ideals, questions Iraq policy by Jonathan Curiel, SF Chronicle, 6/19/04 In the past five days, the posters have appeared mysteriously on walls and buildings across San Francisco. They feature the most enduring image of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal -- the Iraqi man, hooded, his hands tied with electrodes -- but this time, the prisoner is set against an American flag, and this time, the image is juxtaposed with a headline that reads, "got democracy?"  The poster is designed to make people question whether the United States is adhering to democratic ideals if American soldiers have been guilty of widespread prison abuse, if the Patriot Act continues to trample civil liberties, and if Washington continues to instigate questionable policies, says the poster's co-creator, San Francisco novelist Robert Mailer Anderson... MORE: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/06/19/DDG7R781041.DTL National Organization For Women Urges Absentee Voting The National Organization of Women is suggesting that we all vote by absentee ballot. It is the only way to ensure that our vote is counted honestly. Bush stole the election once and will do it again. Cal Tech did a study on the new touch screen voting system and determined that the only system more faulty than the original chad system, especially in terms of accountability, is the new touch screen system. There will be no paper trail and the data can easily be manipulated. Logic points out that there has just not been enough time or money to work out all of the kinks. Please vote by absentee ballot and SPREAD THE WORD. Each one of us must act as a community organizer to bring about true change.  Thanks! http://www.now.org Working Assets "Your Vote Matters" Campaign Can one vote make a difference? Just ask the folks in Florida, where the margin of victory in the 2000 presidential election was a mere 537 votes. Your Vote Matters from Working Assets offers an easy way to register to vote, update your name and/or address on the voter rolls, or change your party affiliation. Also, as a politically active person, you may already be registered to vote. But are your friends? With 30-40% of the voting age population not registered to vote, you can make a big impact by making sure your friends and family are registered to vote. It's easy to help them register to vote or update their voter registration.  If we each register just one other person, we'll double our voting power. Working Assets "Your Vote Matters" Website: https://www.workingforchange.com/vote/ "SEND THIS ARTICLE TO A REPUBLICAN!" Gambling on Voting The New York Times, June 13, 2004 If election officials want to convince voters that electronic voting can be trusted, they should be willing to make it at least as secure as slot machines. To appreciate how poor the oversight on voting systems is, it's useful to look at the way Nevada systematically ensures that electronic gambling machines in Las Vegas operate honestly and accurately. Electronic voting, by comparison, is rife with lax procedures, security risks and conflicts of interest. MORE: Gambling on Voting The Paperless Chase By Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Mother Jones,  May/June 2004 ...And yet these 19-year-olds are locked in a high-profile showdown with electronic voting-machine manufacturer Diebold. Their legal battle is illuminating serious problems with paperless voting and could forever alter the corporate practice of keeping embarrassing material off the Internet by invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Not bad for two kids who haven't even declared their majors yet. The adventure began in spring 2003, when a hacker broke into Diebold's computer system and unearthed 15,000 internal emails. MORE: http://www.motherjones.com/news/hellraiser/2004/05/04_403.html Black Box Backlash by George Howland Jr., Seattle Weekly, 3/10/04 Bev Harris of Renton created a firestorm with her national Internet campaign against electronic voting. Now she's trying to persuade people in the real world that their democracy is on the line...  Since September 2002, Harris has battled a U.S. senator, large corporations, and election officials across the country in her effort to ensure our votes are counted fairly and accurately. At first, she focused on the problems with computer voting. Since then, the name of her Web site (www.blackboxvoting.org) and her book devoted to the subject-Black Box Voting-have become shorthand for concerns about computers and elections. Moreover, her astounding discoveries on the subject have resulted in damning research by distinguished computer-science professors and numerous articles in major newspapers across the country. Secretaries of state, including Republican Sam Reed of Washington and Democrat Kevin Shelley of California, have responded by proposing key changes in how we will cast our ballots in the future... MORE: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0410/040310_news_blackbox.php 8:59:35 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - Lost Votes and Violations One Million Black Votes Didn't Count in the 2000 Presidential Election It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost by Greg Palast, GregPalast.com, June 21, 2004 In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.  This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-'round.  How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It's easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost... MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0621-11.htm Indians Face Obstacles Between the Reservation and the Ballot Box By ADAM COHEN, NY Times, June 21, 2004 ...South Dakota has a long history of anti-Indian voting rights violations, involving many of the same tactics that were employed against blacks in the pre-civil-rights-era South: county officials who try to prevent Indians from registering, district lines deliberately drawn to keep Indians from being elected to public office, and harassment and intimidation of Indian voters and candidates. These battles have traditionally been local, but they have begun to reverberate beyond South Dakota. The state's roughly 16,000 Indian voters, who lean heavily Democratic, have become an improbable national political force. Tim Johnson was elected to the United States Senate in 2002 by 524 votes, on the strength of late returns from Pine Ridge. Another Democrat, Stephanie Herseth, won a hard-fought battle for the state's at-large Congressional seat this month by less than 3,000 votes. This fall, when the re-election battle of Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, will likely be the highest-profile Senate race in the country, the Indian vote will again be pivotal. The Indians' struggle for voting rights in many ways parallels the experience of black Americans. In the Dakota Territories, the law originally restricted the franchise to white men. After the 15th Amendment was passed, removing racial barriers to voting, the Dakotas still regarded most Indians as noncitizens, and therefore ineligible to vote. As late as 1939, South Dakota law prohibited Indians from voting or holding office. Even when the laws changed, South Dakota still found ways to deny Indians political rights... READ IT ALL AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/opinion/21MON4.html "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 7:44:24 AM    comment

© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.