If Ohio was going to be hacked, and it didn't happen, thank DU.

[bleever]

Eight years ago, right around this time, a bunch of people starting discussing their suspicions about the 2004 election's many suspicious anomalies. Here, on DU.

Couldn't do it at Kos. You'd get banned as a "fraudster".

DU's Election Results and Discussion Forum (as it was then called) became a place where a lot (and I mean a LOT) of work happened around this issue. It was a dark time. Many of us believed we had witnessed a crime of incredible proportions. It was the theft of the United States of America, and in time it would lead to one of the most disastrous wars in our country's history, to the subversion of our Constitution in the form of warrantless wiretapping, torture, and more, and (via a blind eye to financial mis- and mal-feasance) the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Consequences so bad, it's difficult to even take it all in.

This year, it looked like things were being set up to happen the same way, with vote suppression, unverifiable electronic voting, and GOP control of elections in key states, starting with Ohio and Florida.

It didn't happen.

Mark Crispin Miller wrote this the day after the election:

It’s time to put an end to such complacent jeering; because people need to know—and want to know—what’s happened here, and what they can do about it. That growing public interest is the reason why our work has finally broken through, with Brad, Victoria, Bob, Gerry and Harvey Wasserman, Jonathan Simon, Sally Castleman, Richard Charnin, Michael Collins, Greg Palast, Bev Harris, John Ennis, Sheila Parks, Paul Lehto, Marta Steele and so many others (and please do forgive me if I didn’t name you here—I’m really tired!) finally seeing, if not their names in lights, their vital findings resonating through the public sphere.

My point here is that of the above names, at least four were DU stalwarts, regular and heavy contributors to the ERD forum. I am proud to call some of them friends.

Yes, DU. Democratic Underground.

Thank you, and may god bless you, and god bless the United States of America.


I believe.

[tblue]

1. Amen! It's because we all knew about it

that it didn't happen again. So to everyone saying we shouldn't discuss the fraud we feared, witnessed, and read about, the fact that it became a widespread topic through us to the media is why it didn't succeed this time. Heads in the sand solve nothing!

Great post. Did not know there are DUers on the list. So proud of them!

[Botany]

2. We had the best people working on "it" in Ohio

BTW the tea bagger showed up @ my precinct even though he was not allowed in because
they filled out the paperwork wrong I walked up to him and called him by name ......

man did he leave PDQ.

[bleever]

4. I can't count the number of people

from DU who made serious and unflinching contributions to this cause.

But I'll start with you:

[Gregorian]

3. Those were good days. I want DU to return to being more serious.

It's looking rather frivolous these days. I know that will offend people. I know there are many examples of how serious we can be. It is not the same now. I don't see serious questions being rec'd like they should. The discussion is there, it just isn't being promoted.

Phew, 4 more years to recover from a Bush.

[bleever]

5. We were seriously "underground" back then.

It feels like life during wartime, in retrospect.

[texpatriot2004]

6. Hello Bleever

Nice to see you here after all these years.

What was that quote, on a sig line here at DU,

"The wheels of the gods grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine..."

I believe now more than ever. Thanks Bleever and DU for helping me through some very dark days here in America.

Peace.

[bleever]

7. Hey,

good memory. That was indeed my old sig line.

For all the monumental discouragement and despair we went through, I almost can't believe where we are now.

It feels good, doesn't it?

[texpatriot2004]

8. It feels great!

oh Bleever, you have such a way with words, "monumental discouragement and despair" - that is exactly what it was. It feels great now though! So grateful we made it through those dark times to emerge in brighter days. Back then hoping for a better future was hard to imagine. I appreciate your being there letting your light shine in the darkness.

How are you feeling these days? Btw, your old sig line seems so true now that truth and justice have surfaced again.

Peace be with you Bleever.

[bleever]

9. It was a great source of strength

to find out that other people were having the same devastating doubts and same kinds of questions. It was definitely a lesson for me in the power and meaning of community.

And I'm feeling pretty good about the old U.S. of A., compared to how it was back then.

Peace and happiness to you!

[New Earth]

10. hi bleever

It's strange I just stumbled upon this post because earlier today I was randomly remembering the eternal, everlasting "I Believe..." thread. I used to be "Faye" if you remember at all. That thread lasted FOREVER!

I was SO scared it was all gonna happen again.........thank God we got Obama

[bleever]

11. Faye!

Sure I remember. I hope you're well. It's nice to believe that the person who gets the most votes can actually win, especially when it's an exceptional guy like Obama.

[Skee]

12. Then There's This

The blackbox problem persists.

It's time for even more effort to restore real ballots.

[Stevepol]

13. If Germany can ban electronic vote counting, we have at least a little hope.

I was hopeful at the time that this 2009 ruling would have a strong effect in other countries, namely, here in the US. Here are a few lines from an article about the ruling:

"They reasoned that electronic voting is not verifiable because citizen votes are counted in secret. It is obscured a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates. Most importantly, the German high court noted, electronic voting machines don't allow citizens to "reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner" Mar. 3, 2009.

The written opinion effectively bars electronic voting in future elections based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. This raises the bar of acceptability well above the meaningless solutions offered by "paper trails" for touch screen voting or the so-called "paper ballots" for computerized optical scan voting machines, the most popular form of voting in the United States.

Germany's 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots."

The reasoning of the justices would apply equally to elections in the US.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0910/S00187.htm

[truckin]

14. There has been progress but

we still have a long way to go. Bleever makes a good point about Ohio and MCM rightly credits all the activists who continue to fight this largely unknown battle. It still saddens me though that tens of millions of US citizens still vote on paperless, electronic voting machines. And I also miss the days on this DU forum after the 2004 election. This was one of the only places you could talk about the election issue and this site, led by its unofficial leader Andy Stephenson, inspired me to get involved in my state of Connecticut. We were days away from getting DREs for the whole state of Connecticut when the group I was part of, TrueVoteCT, held a press conference and we were able to get the state to purchase opscan instead. Here in Connecticut we still have problems in the election process but we do audit the machines and have a paper ballot. Far from perfect but much better than what we almost had.

[Kurovski]

16. Defenders of the sanctity of our vote put up with a lot of vicious verbal attacks.

Odd and suspicious attacks, and it didn't stop them from working and speaking up.

I think at one point, any discussion of election reform was banned from GD due to the inflammatory nature of the discussion.