Why Do Americans Need a Machine to Vote?

By Lloyd Hart

So they can have a consumer product involved in the process of being screwed. You know so it feels normal like going to the mall and shopping. Just kidding. Really.

Its actually so they can control the election process. Who's them? The two party monopoly system or as Ralph Nader would call it, the duopoly. It's actually more of a Trilateral Commission, I mean triopoly when you factor in the corporate bosses who own both parties and trade them like stocks and bonds and whom I might add own most of the media outlets where the American public gets its information. Hell they even bought the debates.

A kind of top down form of triocracy, I mean democracy. A vote for the lesser scum bag system. You know, to maintain the stability of the rich conspiring to get richer.

Out of all the western industrialized democracies only America uses machines to vote. This allows for all elections from the local dogcatcher to the president to be held on the same day. The first tuesday in November. And when you've developed a culture of party line voter registration party loyalty becomes paramount to maintaining the triopoly and of course alienating everyone else in order to keep voter turn out low.

Why have all elections local, county, state and national held on the same day?

To force party line voting. In other words if you have only 10 minutes to vote as you do in Massachusetts by law and your voting for everyone from the dogcatcher to the president not to mention the ballot initiatives you'll probably vote party line up and down the ticket. This allows the party to slip people into elected office at lower levels of governance that the public might have some problems with but who have proven their loyalty to the party bosses and the triopoly and of course this alienates everyone else and keeps voter turn out low.

Add to this the difficulty a fledgling party can have getting on the ballot in the first place and you begin to understand why it takes a national known figure like Ralph Nader or a very wealthy one with deep Washington connections like Ross Perot to succeed in getting their names on ballots state by state. In other words it would take decades for a party to be able to organize to play on the same seemingly unreachable field as the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and of course this creates alienation that keeps voter turn out low. .

If the same triopoly system were in place 150 years ago slavery might not have been abolished until the early part of the 20th-century.

In fact the recent history of advances the Green Party has made can be directly tied to a national renowned figure who gave the Green Party national branding. That person of course was Ralph Nader.

So it only makes sense that the political culture that was against slavery, the Dixiecrats would take over the abolitionist party, the Republican party, steal elections and then come up with a paper less computerized touch screen voting system with absolutely no way to audit or recount the results. Now that would more accurately be called at duopoly. I mean who needs the other party messing up elections by winning.

Where I'm from, that is Canada, we have all our elections local, provincial and federal separated and on different dates. This allows the public to choose freely candidates not necessarily along party lines and of course ballot access is an absolute breeze for anyone who wants to run. It also allows elected politicians on all levels to call elections more strategically in order to renew their mandate and for opposition politicians to demand new elections when the elected politicians have messed up without the distractions of elections going on at the same time for other levels of government.

This flexibility when elections can happen has resulted in only requiring a simple paper ballot. The closest we've gotten to machines is the optical scanner (which scans a paper ballot) for large municipal elections like those in Toronto where there are lots of candidates running for a large number of offices.

Oh and candidates are only allowed to campaign for a month prior to any election. It has been my experience that as a result of this short campaign period the Canadian public focuses briefly but very sharply on the issues of importance, the candidates carry a more sharply defined message then the public votes in very large turnouts. Easily 20 to 30 percent larger than the U.S. per capita and as a result Canadians are 20 to 30 percent healthier. Now that is what would be called democracy.