The Arc of History Bends Toward Justice: A Triumph of Grassroots Activism Against Dire and Unspeakable Odds -- The Boxer Rebellion, January 6th, 2005
A warm breeze filtered through the hallowed halls of Congress, and gathered itself into a heady rush of hot air in the well of the U.S. House of Representatives, as Republicans from all corners of the country rose in support of several vital constitutional principles, among them the following:
that poor folks in the cities of the nation should wait fifteen to twenty times longer to vote than well-to-do folks in the suburbs;
that the nation's electoral mechanism should be governed by antiquated technicalities involving the weight of a piece of paper and which street a voter happens to live on;
that voting machines and other electronic voting equipment in
that such machines should record votes in an untraceable fashion, without even so much paper trail as an automatic-teller machine;
that poor folks should make do with outdated, malfunction-prone voting equipment when their communities find they can't afford the top-of-the-line, nearly foolproof equipment purchased by well-to-do communities;
that critical election decisions such as the placement of voting machines should be executed by high-ranking officials in the respective major parties' campaigns;
and, above all, that the power to elect a President is not a vested right in America, but a privilege which can be lightly and easily lost through mistake, error, bias, prejudice, ignorance, or even willful deceit.
It was a great day to be an American.
It was an even greater day to be a Republican.
Unfortunately, mainstream media coverage of national Republicans' earnest pleas for unstandardized, unaccountable, untraceable voting systems was slight at best…
The Advocate notes that it is people like you -- the readers of this and similar on-line articles -- who made the above news story possible. You did it without substantial media coverage of any kind, at any juncture. You did it without having substantial numbers, substantial institutional inertia, or even substantial support from anyone with a megaphone large enough to stand up and be heard above the national din. Nevertheless, when the challenge came, your efforts saw their fruition heralded across a broad spectrum of worldwide and national media…
Moreover:
Your efforts led to a recount and a contest of election in Ohio.
Your efforts have led to an ongoing investigation into the November election by the non-partisan Congressional General Accountability Office.
Your efforts led to an ongoing investigation by the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute.
Your efforts led to an ongoing investigation (with a one hundred-page report) by Members of the House Judiciary Committee -- and will lead to future bi-partisan hearings before that same Committee…
