Volunteers for a Better America has consistently fought for clean elections at the local, state and national level. We need voting machines that provide an auditable record that can be verified by the voter. We need politicians who are beholden to the voters in the aggregate rather than to particular fat cats or corporate coffers. In particular, we need restrictions on campaign financing by corporate interests that are essentially buying future legislation in their favor.
We will not achieve such clean elections by merely standing by and letting state legislatures hand contracts for voting equipment over to cronies or the lowest bidder. We cannot continue to stand by and let money so taint elections that the voice of the people gets lost. We need a concerted effort across each state, from hamlet to hamlet, county to county and city to city, to clean up the election process. If the politicians can't get with the agenda, then we should kick them all out and start over again until they get the message.
There is a "clean elections" campaign going on now across the country. The goal is to have states enact legislation that uses public funding at reasonable levels to finance all state-wide offices so that politicians can spend their time campaigning and talking about the issues that face the state rather than sitting in smoke-filled back rooms with big-money donors talking about their agendas.
This means we won't stand for continued dirty tricks during elections. Remember the Bush campaign (and one time Republican National Committee) person who jammed phones in order to prevent Democratic get-out-the-vote drives? Read the story here. Those are the kinds of dirty tricks that cannot be tolerated. Let's hope Mr. Tobin goes to jail, as a good lesson for future dirty tricksters. And let's hope that states like Illinois pass a "Clean Elections" law to ensure that state offices are not sold to the highest bidder.
It also means that we need a Justice Department that considers its charge to protect civil rights, including the right to a vote that counts, as one of its most sacred duties. Sadly, that is quite clearly not the case in the current department headed by Attorney General Gonzalez.
The Washington Post carries a story, here, about the politicization of the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. Historically, the analysis of career civil rights attorneys has been a highly regarded input into the decision process as to the position to be taken by the Justice Department. No more. In the Texas redistricting case, career attorneys interested in protecting the one person-one vote rule unanimously agreed, in a written memorandum, that the DeLay redistricting plan amounted to a plan to ride roughshod over voters and discriminate against minorities. Political appointees in the department ignored that advise and supported the plan anyway. Similarly, in the Georgia case requiring photo ID that for the predominantly poor black voters amounts to a modern-day version of the banned poll tax, career attorneys objected that it was a discriminatory provision that should not be allowed under the Voting Rights Act. Again, political appointees overruled.
Now we learn that Justice has nixed such analysis to ensure that political hacks can make their partisan decisions without the annoyance of sound legal analysis concerned with the protection of civil rights. This is not justice. This is politicization of the most important cabinet department in the line of fire protecting the civil rights of individual American citizens.
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