Though I was nursing a miserable stomach flu that had me using my DVR to catch spots I missed in rushing to worship the porcelain goddess, I saw rapt through HBO’s “Recount”.

As honest as it was (and I thought it avoided some of the most fiery yet since proven true material), I realized there was probably no production that could completely tap my sick outrage at what happened in the Gore/Bush 2000 election.

Ironically, I was very ill on Election Day 2000 but I’d dragged myself out of bed, completely dazed, because I never felt like my vote was more important. And yet, at the same time, it never, ever permeated my consciousness that Bush could be named president. My partner voted Nader - and I let him have it for his decision - at least in part for how nasty the so-called left got toward Ralph for running, but though I never thought Bush could steal it, I felt the election was just too important to “waste” a vote.

Late in the day, I was very surprised at how well I heard Bush was doing. But it still did not dawn on me that what was about to happen ever could (and yet his stolen re-election in 2004 also surprised me because I could not fathom that we’d let him get away with it twice). After that, we made a concerted decision to turn off the media until 10 or 11 PM ET when at least some real count was in.

It was around 2 AM when Florida was turned from a Gore win, to a too-close-to-call one, and then around to a Bush victory. We were already hearing some stories about the Palm Beach and poorer Floridians having big problems either with nonsense design or broken voting equipment or being challenged as being on a felon list (and some 500-1,000 or more people were kept from voting for every “felon’s name” listed on the stuff that came from ChoicePoint, who has since been awarded much of the control for our terrorist watch lists, etc).

This is how feverish sick I was, both physically and from the news: around 2:30 am, I started telling God that he’d be welcome to “take me” if only he wouldn’t let Bush win (and I’ve been a little pissed at Him/Her ever since).

As outrageous as that night was, what followed was worse. The media kept telling us we were all tired of the fight to get the recount (I only recall the Bushies being tired) because we were eager to focus on the holidays (sheesh!). But the people I spoke with, while they wanted it over, certainly didn’t feel Gore or anyone else should just capitulate to suit the MSM. And some of these folks were Bush voters. Thus, long before 9/11, we’ve been letting the media, probably at the direction of the politicos it supports, tell us what should happen because of what appears to be an INACCURATE read of where the American public is.

So “Recount” could not quite recapture the terrible dawning horror of that first Tuesday in November of 2000. But could anything, especially knowing the great ruination of our country ever since?

And what was your reaction to “Recount”?

You want to see this (Sunday, 9 PM EDT, HBO).

Just in time to make us (appropriately) very worried about November’s presidential vote comes the star-studded HBO docu-comedy-drama “Recount” about the Bush v. Gore 2000 Florida contest. HBO airs it tomorrow (Sunday) at 9 PM EDT.

Just the Laura Dern-as-Katherine-Harris bit looks deliciously worth the watch, IMHO. Might bring a few laughs along with a reminder of the great injustice and tragedy done when Bush was allowed to steal the White House.

While I think it’s a full-blooded guarantee that WHOEVER John McCain picks to run with him on the Republican presidential ticket for November’s election will be a 325% right winging whackjob with an agenda as big as his (or her, since SuckSecretary of State Condi Rice’s name keeps coming up in relation to McCain’s VP choice) ego, hearing former GOP challenger Mitt Romney is on the relative short list of potential veeps leaves me stone cold (and dyspeptic!).

Well, we’ve rarely seen such concentrated wealth in one party’s Prez/VP combo. Cindy McCain alone is worth a very conservative $200 million.

But, unless one or both of these folks wants to just write a personal check to pay off the national debt (and they’re welcome to write that check if they don’t get elected, too), I don’t think we need more over privileged, under taxed, rich emperor wannabees in the White House.

While the right just LOVES to depict Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as elitists out of touch with the people due to their money and celebrity, BHO and HRC at least earned their money, and not on the bloodied backs of so many broken Americans and laborers worked to death in factories propped up by our fair trade pact agreements that are growing, rather than curing, poverty and the unsustainability of declining resources.

On another sour note, if McCain is willing to consider Romney and Huckabee and Sam Brownback as VP possibilities, there really isn’t any hope that he would align himself with a sane, moderate type that might provide our only lifeline if the GOP steals this presidential election for a record three in a row.

That’s exactly how the Times Argus of Vermont, hardly a liberal rag (believe me!), characterizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s rubberstamp of states who’ve decided to force voters to pay fees other than directly at the ballot to cast a vote. And I heartily agree with them.

… voter ID laws have proliferated not because of a surge of voter fraud. They have been adopted by Republican-dominated legislatures as a method of discouraging voting by groups likely to vote Democratic. Ethnic minorities, the poor, the elderly — these are the people not likely to have a driver’s license as a matter of course.

What will happen now is that elections will take place, and election officials will forbid some voters from voting. At that point, new plaintiffs will have been created, and new lawsuits will proceed. In the meantime, elections will have been corrupted by unnecessary voter suppression measures.

Voter suppression is a tactic employed by Republicans in recent history, as in Florida where police went to the homes of blacks to frighten them from voting and voter rolls were stripped of names by the overenthusiastic purging of the names of felons.

The remedy is for state legislatures to reject these Republican tactics. The court now has made the reinstitution of the poll tax into a political fight. It is a fight the American people thought they settled in 1964 when they adopted the 24th Amendment.

My grandmothers could not vote until they were well into their 20s because law did not consider them full citizens solely because of their gender. Now someone else’s grandmothers will be restricted from voting because they don’t hold a driver’s license (something neither of my grandmothers had; lots of poor rural women in the first half of the 20th century did not) or just feel it’s wrong to force this effective poll tax at the polls.

God forbid the American people, rather than politically connected special people, decided an election. And before Dems started hating the concept of superdelegates, we hated the Electoral College more. That Douglas is a Bushie (yes, Vermont has (too) many rightwingers) makes his bid all the more transparent since Boy King George never won the popular vote in America, despite his two terms.

Gov. James Douglas is “not enthusiastic” about a proposal to have Vermont join a coalition of states calling for the election of the president by popular vote as opposed to the electoral college system now in place, his spokesperson said Monday.

A bill that would have Vermont join Maryland, New Jersey and Illinois in a compact to use the “one person, one vote” system instead of electoral votes to elect a person to the country’s highest political office has passed both the Vermont House and Senate.

The bill is expected to land on Douglas’ desk soon, but his spokesperson Jason Gibbs said the governor has serious philosophical and practical concerns over that proposal, opening up the possibility that he could veto the legislation.

“The governor is very concerned that this bill would put small states like Vermont at a disadvantage and decrease our influence in the election process,” Gibbs said Monday afternoon. “Fundamental changes such as altering the way we elect the process ought to be accomplished by amending the Constitution.”

Despite the numerous problems citizens have experienced with voting machines and the lack of paper trails in the last two elections, Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted against a new method that would help the problem a bit. The new proposal would send help from the federal government whenever a local government has an issue with electronic voting.

From Politico:

Under the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act, the federal government would help localities switch to paper ballots or attach printers to their electronic voting machines in time for the November elections. To overcome states’ rights objections, [Representative Rush] Holt crafted the bill as an opt-in: Nobody would be required to switch technologies or conduct audits, but federal funding would be available to offset costs for those who did.

Without the passage of this proposal, local governments will have to pay for everything they want. However, many smaller local governments rarely have the means to conduct such measures.

It’s not wonder that voting rates aren’t as high as they could be. When people don’t think their vote counts, they won’t vote. Sketchy electronic voting machines are too unsettling to not have something done about them.

I’ve posted numerous times about some very odd questions that arose out of the New Hampshire presidential primary (the one Hillary Clinton for Democrats and John McCain for Republicans reportedly won) that brought Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich and GOPer Albert Howard demand a hand count. BradBlog has covered it even more extensively.

On the very first day of the hand count last week, we saw some big irregularities. Examples: Diebold-made machines registered no count on hundreds of optically-scanned paper ballots when the ballots themselves clearly marked a candidate; Hillary only maintained the higher votes in counties where electronic voting was used while Barack magically came out ahead in paper/hand-counted areas. All this played out WHILE New Hampshire’s Republican Secretary of State - and the red media, said everything was A-OK.

Yet, just a week later, with only one NH county examined (and even that, not fully examined), New Hampshire has stopped the recount because “funds ran out”. The Republican recount is supposed to start before this week ends (and we can only assume this count will also magically stop for funding issues, too).

And, through it all, the MSM pays no attention, as if a problem with voting in a small primary in a tiny state in January doesn’t bode for what’s to come in November when huge states will be relying even more heavily on electronic voting by machines already proven to be corrupt, fallible, and weighted toward anyone named Bush and those who serve King George.

To compliment Kate’s post on electronic voting memory cards, here in Ohio, things are not looking very good either.

Back in mid December, Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, released the EVEREST Voting System Review entitled “Study: Voting Systems Vulnerable.” It concluded that “Ohio’s electronic voting systems have ‘critical security failures’ which could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State,” the most disturbing of which was “the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant.” Hey, I’ve got a magnet and a PDA!

Unfortunately, the recommendations of the Secretary of State to avoid disemboweling our democratic voting process is seemingly not enough alarm raised for the Republicans: Ohio Board of Elections deadlocked 2-2 to institute optical scanning machines by ES&S. You guessed it: Republicans against, Democrats for.

Brunner will most likely break the tie in favor of the Democratic vote, but to what avail? The Colorado Secretary of State’s office also released a study, this one on several models. ES&S?

The optical scan devices (M 100 and the M650) both failed because of an inability to determine if the devices work correctly and an inability to complete the testing threshold of 10,000 ballots due to vendor programming errors. The electronic voting machine (iVotronic) failed because it is easily disabled by voters activating the device interface, and the system lacks an audit trail to detect security violations.

We should probably make a reservation now with FEMA for November. This is going to be a disaster on many, many levels.

As you may already be able to tell, and I should also add that many/some consider me fairly expert in IS hardware and software which only increases my anxiety on this subject, I take our ability to vote, and have our ballots ACCURATELY COUNTED and REPORTED very seriously. Dirty tricks happened before the digital age, but on top of the “user errors” that are inherent in any data system, it’s incredibly easy to cheat in the electronic realm. So few understand the process that you don’t have to be a guru or a super-cracker to change results and yet make it look like everything is kosher. All of this is why you’ve seen me looking so hard at the New Hampshire primary results; that and that Vermont’s system are similar.

THUS, when I read things like this at Bev Harris’ forum, that memory cards and cartridges are NOT routinely kept and, in fact, are not even always included in any true “chain of custody” to make sure those data devices do not have their contents altered, I KNOW our voting is guaranteed to be invalidated by the process:

Bev,

I believe that MOST, if not all of the country, has decided that menory cards or cartridges do NOT fall under the 22-months retention laws.

Cards and cartridges are ROUNTINELY reused in just about jurisdiction I am aware of. I think this is made possible because the paper report from each machine was legally held to be the “official record”, not the card. If you think about it, in a way that makes a lot of sense, since it is a copy of the paper record that is posted at the precinct. Any difference between a card and the printout would be held that the paper printout is the official word. A card is by its very nature changeable after the fact. The printout is static once done.

Bradblog is all over some of the irregularities already found with New Hampshire Democratic Primary votes recount (Republican recount to come after the Dems); I visited Brad AFTER I saw this happy horseshit on WMUR (a New Hampshire TV station’s Web site). From WMUR (for MURky fact-gathering, perhaps?):

The continuing Democratic primary recount in New Hampshire has not found any voting problems.

As of yesterday, even TINY counties were noting that optical electronic scanners had reported HUNDREDS of ballots were blank (thus not counted) when they were indeed marked for a candidate.

Something really doesn’t meet the stink test here. And Diebold may have changed its (bleeping) name, but it sure hasn’t changed its rigged machinery.

Last week, I reported that Ohio Congressman - and still Democratic presidential hopeful - Dennis Kucinich (along with a Republican few know) demanded a recount in New Hampshire to carefully recount the votes cast there last Tuesday. But what’s gone under the radar is the WHY: that in the Democratic primary alone, whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama won, on the surface, depends on how the votes were counted. Specifically, the hand-counted votes seemed to go to Obama; the electronic machine counted ones seemed to favor Hillary.

I very much applaud Kucinich for making the demand; we NEED to know if there is a problem and, if there is, whether it’s willful or a deliberate cheat. While our (already, if not always so fairly or appropriately) elected leaders have already kissed away true voting reform until 2012 at the same time that those in the know indicate that, even if verified voting reform were enacted TODAY, we can’t even be sure the 2012 vote will be who we actually elected.

As you might imagine, there is HUGE doubt as to this November’s validity of vote. And if you aren’t paying attention to this, you may deserve what YOU get, but I don’t think the rest of us do.

Well, I was glad to see he got 8% of the vote, but if Dennis thinks there is cause for a recount in Tuesday’s primary, I say give it to him!

With many of the reports, including that provided here by Ricky Shambles, about the dirty tricks that may have been played in the Iowa Caucuses to drive the anti-Hillary/anti-Clinton vote in favor of others, I can’t say I’m surprised. But I’m far from happy.

This year, perhaps more than ANY other, we need to combine our commitment to be active, informed citizens who demand the best (and hold them to account when we get less) from our elected leaders at the same time we dearly need to elect a president honestly, fairly, and without any of the nasty stuff we’ve seen in previous elections, especially that of the Bush-Cheney/Republican-Win-At-Any-Cost Sleaze team (and I do not believe most normal Republicans like this kind of thing anymore than the rest of us) in 2000 and 2004.

From here on, we can’t just sit back and let Washington work as it does, because we know that the way it works is pretty corrupt, pretty nasty, and pretty much slanted at billionaires and fatcat/corporate interests rather than in the “Mom and Dad America” politicians like to talk about at election time. So we’re going to have to work a great deal harder to get Washington working right again and we have to be pretty damned selective about who we put there. No more “anybody but (this person)” mentality and no more dirty games.

Mind you, Democrats (and others) have pulled nasty tricks, too. But we don’t want them from ANYONE. I want the people I elect (and those who help elect them) to operate better than that. You should, too.

Also, every American with the right to vote not only should vote, but should NEVER be kept from voting by dirty tricks like we saw in Florida in 2000 (and ever since) and in Ohio in 2004.

So I ask myself, as I ask you, to do your best to keep dirty tricks away from the process, even at our lowly voter level and, should you see someone kept from voting who has the right to vote, don’t just shake your head and walk away. Stand up, speak out. We may not always be able to depend on Washington to behave itself so, until we can force them to do better, WE have to be the better people. It can start one American at a time. And it must.

I’m game. Will you join me?