The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Dear readers,

On November 2, 2004, my neighbors and I stood in line for nearly an hour in order to vote, even though we arrived before the polls even opened. We waited, and waited, and waited, while the election workers scrambled to get the machines working, using their cellphones to call for tech support. Finally they got one of the two machines for our ward rebooted, and only then did we get to vote.

While we stood there in the darkness, we started chatting. "We'll never fix this problem if we only pay attention to it one day every four years," one of my neighbors said.

Our ward, precinct, county, state and region voted overwhelming for John Kerry, voted into a black box with no paper trail, with no way to recount if the election had been close.

This is not about who won. This is about restoring the basic building block of our democracy: the integrity of the vote. I want my vote to count, and it want it to be recountable if necessary. I want everybody else's vote to count, too, even if their vote might cancel out mine. I want to have confidence in my democracy again.

Tomorrow the House of Representatives and the Senate will meet in a joint session to certify what has yet to be verified. A recount of only 3 percent of the vote in Ohio found significantly fewer votes for Bush than had originally been counted, and so far every error discovered was in favor of Bush. There has yet to be a full recount in Ohio. A statistician who studied the discrepancy between the exit polls and the election results concluded that there was only a one in 250 million chance of that being due to "random error."

As they did in 2000, members of the Congressional Black Caucus* will rise to report on the problems with the vote, problems they took the time to look into by going to Ohio and holding hearings, hearings that not a single Republican would attend. Hundreds came forward to testify about the problems they experienced or observed. Unless at least one senator has the backbone and the decency to sign their complaint, they will not even be allowed to speak.

I am urging my two senators to sign, not because it would change the outcome of the election. I want them to sign because we need to do exactly what my neighbor said that November morning. We need to pay attention to this problem now, when it's not election day, when it doesn't change the outcome, rather than waiting until we're standing in line in the cold four years from now to vote once again into a black box.

Those boxes, and the votes that go into them, or get lost in them, or don't even get cast because there aren't enough boxes, mean a lot to us voters. They ought to mean at least as much to the people who get their jobs, or lose their jobs, because of them.

If you sign, Senators, George W. Bush will still be chosen President by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. But at least we can look into the problems with the November election and start doing something about them in time for the next national elections.

Want to contact your own senator about this (or any other) issue? Do it here. Several senators have reportedly said they might sign the complaint if they get enough calls from constituents.

*co-founded by Rep. Shirley Chisholm

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @4:53 PM

5.1.05