I want to share a video with you that I just came across on YouTube. Now, be forewarned, this is not an exciting video. This is not Lindsay Lohan licking Ecstasy off Kim Kardashian's naked thighs. This is not the final sweaty episode of Survivor, and it does not feature that delicious hunk from the Old Spice commercials (sorry, girls . . . and some guys). As a You Tube video, it's really lacking: no UFO documentation, babies scared of their own farts, or even Kittens Falling Asleep.

However, this video is exactly what I claim: little old laides biting the head off democracy and eating it in front of us. It's ugly, creepy, and wrong. 

I suggest you watch it. Because this exact aberration has been taking place all around the United States for decades. You'd probably be shocked to know just how many little old ladies are actually in charge of democracy in America. Much of our elections system has been in their surprisingly strong grip -- just try to pry it from them! -- since before most of Occupy Wall Street was in nappies. The League of Women Voters and tens of thousands of poll workers are all sweet, well-meaning, responsible gray-haired ladies who, as this video proves, will lunge madly for your jugular and have you arrested and imprisoned if you so much as question the nature of their work (which, btw, is your legal right).

The nature of their work, in case you didn't know, is to provide secure, transparent, publicly observable elections for their fellow citizens. That's all. It's simple, but difficult. Election day is a tiring affair, and these public servants deserve our respect and gratitude . . . 

. . . if that's what they're doing.

But it's not.

What our elections officials -- and all these sweet little grandmothers puttering around at elementary school precincts on election day -- have ACTUALLY been doing for the past 40 years is SELLING US OUT WHOLESALE TO EVIL CORPORATIONS WHO BOUGHT OUR DEMOCRACY FOR BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SO THEY COULD DESTROY IT.

Increasingly we are hearing the call: Upgrade democracy for the 21st Century! If we bank online, why shouldn't we vote online? Let's use our smart phones and iPads! This will make voting easy, not to mention super cool! We can even have a Democracy app!

This well meaning but, I'm sorry to say, woefully misguided sentiment has found strong support among many young techies, now most recently within the Occupy Wall Street movement, some of whom are also supporting the total replacement of representational democracy with "direct democracy." Online voting, they reason, could allow for decentralization of our process, with citizens drafting their own bills and the public at large voting on them directly via computer.

The truth is, for those of us in the Election Integrity movement who have spent decades fighting the spreading cancer of electronic vote counting, this idea makes us .  . . how should I put it . . . insanely, desperately frustrated? Tear-your-hair-out, final straw, gonna lose it, can't take it anymore, hold me down, crazypants? Or maybe I just speak for myself . . . 

Today, I just want to lay out the fundamental argument against Internet voting and the final destruction of our actual ballots . . . and for that, I'm going to wisely use the words of someone else! Someone smarter than I am, who says it so clearly and unemotionally that I certainly can do no better.

Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting.org, has been one of the most tenacious, effective, knowledgeable computer election fraud investigators of the past 10 years. Here is her response in an online debate to an OWS member who writes:

“as for my personal goals… I want an online voting system …”

(my emphasis is added in bold -- VC)

Ah, raging, frantic paranoia. It's always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, how about you?

Fevered panic gripped the Internet (and, I admit, my brain) over the holiday weekend as word of the next great stride toward the looming American Police State went viral, this time in a shocking ACLU article: 

Senators Demand the Military Lock Up American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window

According to author Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, Senate Bill 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act —  a “must pass” piece of legislation that will be on the Senate floor on Monday, November 28 — was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.

But most appallingly: 

It contains the provision allowing for worldwide indefinite detention of citizens without charge or trial provision, including American citizens.

How odd to discover that the language of the bill seems to state the exact opposite of this terrifying claim:

(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens-

(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.

The most maddening thing about this article is not so much that it appears, at least on the surface, to be inaccurate, but that it’s suspiciously so. When you click on any of the 9 links to learn more about S. 1867, they only take you to the ACLU petition to support Mark Udall’s (D-CO) amendment, which Anders vaguely promises us “will delete the harmful provisions and replace them with a requirement for an orderly Congressional review of detention power. The Udall Amendment will make sure that the bill matches up with American values.” 

And even more head-scratchy: apparently the Udall Amendment objects to the parts of the bill that would center more Homeland Security power in the Defense Department, rather than the Justice Department. Great but, where is the language stating opposition to the fundamental, ongoing violations of American civil liberties through the Homeland Security apparatus? How exactly is this bill now matching up with our "values"? Granted, I am no legal scholar, but this is confusing.

I thought I was getting a little wacky from too much turkey tryptophan, but apparently it wasn't just me. On liberal and libertarian websites, people confusedly pointed to the bill itself, warning everyone to actually read it before hysterically forwarding the related ACLU petition to everyone you know (too late for me on that count). Of course, we give money to the ACLU so we don’t have to read and interpret this kind of monstrously complex legislation. We count on them to analyze the data appropriately and report back to us, clearly.

Meanwhile on the ACLU Facebook page, posts to their Wall demanding an answer are immediately deleted.

So . . . what the hell is going on around here?

I was once walking through a less than ideal section of Brooklyn; a grim, gray, sad street with shuttered stores covered in obscene graffiti – the iconic American landscape – and on a front stoop was a flowerpot. The only flowerpot on this sad, sad street. It was big, and it was literally chained to the stoop. A thick heavy metal bike chain was wrapped around it and threaded through the iron stair railing. Because clearly, in this part of town, whatever isn’t chained down will be promptly carried off – even a bunch of half-dead daisies.

Meanwhile, far to the north in a similarly ill-favored area of Washington Heights, I once saw three men nearly kill each other over the accusation of stolen hubcaps. Right in the middle of the street, with half the neighborhood watching, they came close to summarily executing some poor dude next to a stripped low-rider.

Americans protect their shit, we know this. From the hubcaps of the downtrodden to the obscene home entertainment centers of the suburbs, to the obscener estates and multi-billion dollar investments of the upper classes – we protect what’s ours with chains, guns, complex home alarm systems, even basement “panic rooms” where the wealthy can hide in a personal lockbox with the family jewels when the barbarians arrive at the gate.

We protect our borders with fences and cameras and military drone planes. We protect our airplanes with full body scanners and free-massage groping at the gate. We protect our kids with vaccinations, our pets with implanted chips, our merchandise with bar codes, our ideas with patents.

Such obsession with protecting what’s ours . . . except in one fascinating instance. Our vote. Our ballot. The one physical mechanism of our democracy.

That? We don’t give a shit about that! We don’t even think about it – not once, never.

Excuse the delay, everyone, on blogging regularly  --I can hear the cries and rending of garments -- but I'm still lacking the capacity to clone myself.

I'm building this votescam.org website as a resource for the hopefully nascent, abnormally powerful, ultimately unstoppable national Election Integrity movement, and there's a lot to do.

My general plaintive calls for help on Facebook have so far yielded only a few raised hands -- not because my fellow EI activists are lazy bastards, but because we're all busy fighting life and death battles on a million fronts while trying to raise our kids and keep our spouses from leaving us.

Clearly people must be told exactly what's needed to help, and I need to keep that simple.

Yesterday we witnessed an increasingly rare phenomenon: We the People won at the ballot box.

In Ohio and Mississippi voters successfully killed two bills that furthered the Union-Busting, Women-Hating agenda of the extreme right. Senate Bill 5 was defeated by a massive statewide labor coalition, fighting to reclaim their right to collectively bargain in the Buckeye State. In the Bible Belt, women  -- and more than a few good southern men -- stood together to defeat an initiative that would have defined life at the beginning of fertilization, a head-on challenge to Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose.

We're happy, of course, for the workers of Ohio who still own their voices, and the women in Mississippi who still own their bodies. But there's a real downside to yesterday's news for progressive-minded Election Integrity activists.

It's 3 a.m., I'm pretty much completely exhausted from sitting in front of this screen for three 18-hour days straight, and feeling crazy and reckless enough to say YA BASTA! and launch this absolutely unfinished website into the Webiverse, and this blog into the Blogosphere, where it may spin nebulaic (is that a word?) taking shape each day alongside the growing global revolution -- hopefully with as much chaotic hoopla, deep meaning, and random magic.

Let this possibly incoherent post serve -- if nothing else (which seems likely) --  as a small blessing on this website and the effort and intention it represents; a baptismal language font, benevolent and loving if generally confused, which aligns well, I think, with the energy of our times.

We're all a little confused these days, but something is carrying us. We're feeling the pull of it stronger every day, and learning to trust it.

So here's to this website, to my father and uncle to whom it is dedicated, and to the millions of people around the world engaged right now in the greatest struggle of our times: against the Global Corporate Empire and its abuse of power and all things sacred; for Democracy, Liberty, Justice and Peace.

May we prevail.

Welcome to my newborn blog. Stay tuned . . .