Any grade-schooler can tell you about the brilliant system of checks-and-balances established by the founders of the United States.  Ours is a brilliant system whereby the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial systems are kept separate and independent.  Add to that another supposedly independent force -- the media -- and what we you have is a strong, sustainable system that is resistant to authoritarian, non-democratic rule.

What our Founders failed to anticipate is that all of that could be undermined through a single point of failure: the inability for the public to verify election results.  Instead, we are expected to trust the likes of Diebold, a pro-Bush Corporation which makes electronic voting machines that do not produce a verifiable paper trail.  In other words, a small group of insiders have the obvious means to tamper with the machines they made, and rig the election results.  If the vote can be rigged, then a band of thugs (the NeoConservative Bush Administration) can easily take over the Presidency, Congress, and finish us off by appointing like-minded judges.  And the brilliance of this plan is that the people won’t even know what hit them.

In the aftermath of the Nov. 2nd election, it is becoming more apparent by the hour that massive vote fraud took place.  Years of hard work and millions of dollars went down the drain within just a few hours on election night.  We sat helpless, completely dependent upon the mainstream media's report of the secret, hidden electronic tallies.  Evidence supporting the likelihood of vote fraud is piling up around the web at places like www.blackboxvoting.org and www.democraticunderground.org, and even on MSNBC's Coutdown.  And all the while, the powers-that-be are busy doing everything they can to make sure that we citizens aren't allowed access to the data that is the very foundation of our supposed democracy. 

Regardless of what can be proven, as long as we have unverifiable voting machines, we no longer have democracy in the USA.  The truth is, we don't know who won on November 2nd, 2004...and as long as these machines are in place, we never will know who actually wins any election.  And yet rather than being offered a solution, we are asked to trust that which we know we cannot: unaccountable, corrupt politicians and self-interested corporations.