Commonweal Institute Blog

Almost everyone who’s been even half awake for the past eight years is aware that there are a number of problems with our voting system, ranging from disenfranchisement to harassment to allegations of vote fraud to widespread use of those electronic voting machines that just might not count votes properly.

Stealing America, Vote by Vote, a newly released documentary by Emmy-winning filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman, is one of the best I’ve seen. I strongly encourage every patriotic American, every concerned American, every person who cares about our democracy, to get out and see this film as soon as possible.

Click here to see the film trailer, clips, and the latest schedule and locations for upcoming public showings of Stealing America, Vote by Vote. As of today, upcoming cities include Irvine and Beverly Hills, CA; Denver; Royal Oak, MI (Detroit); Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Cambridge, MA; Santa Fe; Portland; Berkeley and San Francisco, CA; Austin, TX; Seattle; and Columbus, OH. DVDs are not available yet, but you can let the film-maker know if you want to get one as soon as they are.

And then don’t just roll over and play dead. Get out and DO SOMETHING to help protect the upcoming November election, one of the most critical in our nation’s history. Visit the film website to take action as well as check the latest schedule.

Here are a couple of other sites with election protection facts and action possibilities:
Verified Voting
Black Box Voting
Working for Democracy
Election Defense Alliance

Go on. Click here. Now.

Some more pictures from Netroots Nation, many featuring my friends from the Commonweal Institute.

Commonweal Institute: Dave Johnson, Barry Kendall, Katherine Forrest	Commonweal Institute Conversation: Patrick O'Heffernan, Kay Lee, Kate Forrest, Mustafa (Vic) Uzumeri
Bloggers and the Green Economy: Dave Johnson, Susana Almanza, Larry Joe Doherty, Jeff Sharp, Adam Siegel	Space Panel: Andrew Hoppin, Chris Bowers, Patti Grace Smith, Lori Garver, George Whitesides
Gina Cooper, Jeffrey Feldman	Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Gina Cooper
Ask the Speaker: Nancy Pelosi	Congressman Lloyd Doggett introducing Nancy Pelosi
Virginia & Kay Lee	Kay Lee
Katherine Forrest, Patrick O'Heffernan, Virginia Lee	Meta Panel: Chris Bowers, Cheryl Contee, David Waldman (Kagro), Raf Noboa, Amanda Marcotte
Nancy Pelosi	Al Gore, Rep. Doggett (D-TX), Nancy Pelosi
Media Panel: Digby, Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman, Duncan Black	Recipe for Change: Natasha Chart and Margaret Krome

Why does the public flock to conservative / corporate policies that generally run against their own interests? Take tax cuts for the rich, or the current offshore-drilling campaign as examples.

Here is my opinion of the reason: Conservatives have a huge outside-the-party infrastructure devoted to persuading the public to support their policies and progressives do not.

Conservatives recognize the value of movement-building and work steadily to create popular demand, which then gets their candidates elected. This is why so many terrible Republicans are able to get elected just by pointing their finger at their opponent and shouting, "Liberal, Liberal!"

Progressives instead for decades have believed that a candidate will come along who will be so popular that he or she will lead them out of the wilderness, and convince the publi of the rightness of all of their ideas. Therefore almost all of their money and effort goes into short-term election efforts, candidates and the party instead of to ongoing outside-the-party organizations that work over the long term to build lasting demand for their ideas.

Discuss.

I want to write about something Al Gore said yesterday about energy prices, at the Netroots Nation conference.

Oil is limited. There is only so much, and the amount you can get it out of the ground and refine on any day is limited. That means that the more you depend on it and use it the more the more the price goes up. It just has to go up and eventually run out.

Solar power, on the other hand, is a new technology, so it is expensive today. But the more demand there is, the more factories are built. That means that the more we depend on it and use it, the more the price goes down.

Let me add that once you install solar your ongoing cost is very low.

Blogging from Netroots Nation (NN) in Austin, sitting at a table in the first row waiting for speakers Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore to show up. Gore is going to be the mystery, unannounced guest, . Looks like just about all the seats in this cavernous hall are occupied and there’s a big rack of media folks toward the back with their cameras. There are a handful of costumed demonstrators, but mostly the bloggers are looking like themselves, casually dressed, but intensely engaged mentally despite the early hour and more than a few hangovers following the parties last night.

Continue reading "Gore, Pelosi Call for Netroots Action" »

Natasha and Jill (OrangeClouds115) moderated a wonderful panel today called A Recipe for Change. The topic was how do we find a way to have healthier food and what are the obstacles from getting that. The panelists were great and covered a broad range of interests and knowledge.

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap talked about the connection to hunger and poverty and the problem of how terrible, cheap food is undermining the health of our country. One of the real problems for so many poor communities are food deserts, communities where the closest grocery store is up to 20 miles away while KFC is on the neighborhood corner. One other issue he talked about was how often policies that are handed down by the bureaucrats are too heavy-handed. A few years ago there was an E Coli scare that arose around apple cider. The proposal from the bureaucrats would have put most of the small farmers that produced apple cider out of business so in his state they worked with the state agricultural council and came up with a much better solution: providing education for cider makers so they could manufacture cider with better and cleaner practices. Working with the agriculture councils can be a good way to influence farming policies in the state.

Michele Simon is a public health attorney and author of Appetite for Profit. She explained how food corporations have been controlling the message about food and are trying to convince the public and government that they should not be regulated. However, voluntary self-regulation doesn't work and it is essential that our politicians do not believe that they can ignore this problem. And she says that we need to realize the problem is not that people aren't making the right choices because of some "personal failure." Instead of blaming people for bad decisions we need to make clear how the corporatization of food has created the systemic problems that have created our current problems. Finally, she noted that people today have access to much better and healthier food, but it isn't available for many people and it is a moral obligation to make sure everyone has the same good access to nutritious and healthy food.

Judith McGeary is an organic farmer outside of Austin and someone who has proven that you can make a living as an organic farmer. She debunked the lie that organic farming practices cannot feed the world. In fact, organic farming practices actually is more productive and more nutritious than the current petroleum based agriculture. She encouraged people to learn about and use CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) to find better locally grown food and to encourage local farming.

Margaret Krome who leads the Michael Fields Agriculture Institute talked about food policy and how we need to use the farm bill to support better food policy. Natasha had met Margaret last year when she was working as an intern with the Institute and was blogging about her experience in the Congressional Farm Committee meetings. Margaret talked about how they were able to get some long needed policy changes and money in the last farm bill. And she noted that we need to continue to be involved in what's happening in Congress and let our representatives know what we need them to do. She told us that we need to know in regards to farm policy many of the programs hit all states, but when contacting someone about farm policy in the government, it often is much better to have the contact be local, but because it is local you can influence the outcome. Finally, she asks us to provide feedback about what are the critical focus areas they should prioritize first - because they can't cover everything and they would like to make sure they cover the right things.

It was a very informative and educational session which left me with much food for thought.

BTW: Natasha and Jill announced that they have launched a new blog called LaVidaLocavore to talk about food issues. Check it out here.

I am writing from the Netroots Nation convention in Austin. I saw this view of the capital building while crossing a street on the way to dinner the other night. I ran back to get the picture but you can figure out why it looks like it was taken in a hurry while running:

It is a very busy convention with multiple hour-long panel sessions -- up to thirteen -- on at the same time. I always want to be at three of the panels, of course.

Commonweal Institute has a "booth" in the exhibit hall. Here is a picture of the booth:

Left to right: Senior Fellow Patrick O'Heffernan, Executive Director Barry Kendall and Board member Andrew Byrnes. What's with the dark suits?

Recently OnTheMedia had an interview with Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. As a former religious reporter for the Dallas Morning News as well as being raised as an evangelical she was seen as an ideal person to investigate what was going on with the evangelical movement. What she found was that rather than being the powerhouse movement the media and Rove say, it is actually a religious movement that was shrinking and losing clout year by year as followers fall away. As a matter of fact, Evangelical churches are experiencing the same thing other traditional religions are: people are leaving their religions and seeking new spiritual homes.

However, even more surprising for the Evangelicals, she found that they never could have been the force that they claimed as they never did have the numbers reported. Here's a gist of her thesis from a sermon she quoted by Pastor Davidson Loehr, pastor at the First Unitarian/Universalist Church of Austin:

Evangelical Christianity in America is dying. The idea that evangelicals are taking over America is one of the greatest publicity scams in history, a perfect coup accomplished by savvy politicos and religious leaders, who understand media weaknesses and exploit them brilliantly. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. ix)

The facts are that about a thousand evangelicals walk away from their churches every day and most don’t come back (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. xiii). As a whole, American Christians lose six thousand members a day – more than two million a year. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 123) The real figures are that fewer than seven percent of the country are really evangelicals – only about one in fourteen, not one out of four. The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals. And since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, I suspect the real figures are higher. You don’t read this in the media because there are no powerful groups pushing the story.

In another sermon, he notes that the reason evangelical children leave the church is because the modern world is winning the culture war:

Who’s to blame for all this? Not the bible, not God, and not the churches. Modern life, changed circumstances, the new realities that we live among are to blame (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 4). Evangelicals tried to fight the modern world and the world won.

What’s eroding Christianity is the rise and victory of the more scientific and humane worldview we’re a part of: a worldview that incorporates almost all the basic assumptions of liberalism. It affects all religions, but in different ways.

I’ve heard for 25 years that 95% of Unitarian kids leave the church after high school. I don’t think anyone has actually done a methodical study that could produce reliable numbers like that, but I suspect that it’s probably in the ballpark. Why? Because evangelical youth are leaving at about the same rate. Josh McDowell, who has worked for Campus Crusade for Christ since 1964, says that 94% of high school graduates leave the faith within two years. The Southern Baptists estimate that 88% of their kids leave the church after high school. So this is not an indictment of liberal religion; it’s a description of American 18-to-20-year-olds. On the surface, it looks like we’re all in the same situation.

But when you look at why evangelicals or religious liberals leave their church, it gets more interesting, and suddenly we’re not all in the same situation.

The world evangelical kids enter when they leave the control of the church isn’t much like the world the church has offered them. There’s more freedom to question, no subjects declared off-limits, less self-righteousness, more science, more independence. And nineteen out of twenty of them find the real world more appealing than the world the church had given them. Evangelicals lose their kids to the modern world. But we don’t lose our kids to the modern world, because we’ve worked to prepare them for it. It’s the worldview they learn in churches like this. We just want them to find more depth of fulfilling meaning and purpose within it than the soul-killing “market value” idols offer.

This thesis conforms with what I had found in some of the articles I had read as well.

So what's been going on? Wicker explains that the aggrandizement of the religious right has been a concerted effort which gave evangelicals an outsized platform in the news.

How did it happen? As Digby writes, it started because the Religious Right decided to take up abortion as their cause. And as Digby says, this was not from any deep theological commitment, but it was a political decision to pick up a cudgel that could be used to gain power.

This was one of the key strategies for the Radical Right to take over our country. Don't forget that the incestuous relationship with between the Republicans and the Religious Right came out of the machinations of Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Today, it is not surprising to see that making common cause with the criminal conspiracy instigated by the Rove, Norquist, et. al, has come to naught for the Evangelicals. Now can we make the media realize the truth about the religious right and that it is not the main voice for religion in America? Naw. That might be expecting too much thoughtfulness on the part of the pundits.

x-posted at PacificViews

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.

I have been looking at the issue of computerized voting machine security for several years, and want to write about it today.

Many people have pointed out that there are a number of problems with the new touch-screen voting machines. They fear that these machines can be used to rig an election. Others feel more confident about the machines because they are "hi-tech" and computerized and make voting easier.

Computer experts warn that the machines cannot be trusted. Meanwhile, I have a relative who believes that computers can't make mistakes, so these machines will guarantee accurate vote counting.

I can give you my position on these machines in just a few words: "Prove it." Here is what I mean: The standard for trusting the results of an election should be based on what an average citizen can believe about the election results. If the election system that you set up is able to prove to an average citizen that the election results are accurate, then you have the right system in place. Elections are about average citizens making decisions and trusting the results, not about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be. The whole "trust me" thing hasn't worked out so well in the past so people came up with "prove it" systems so everyone could see for themselves how the elections turned out.

Yes, I have an election system in mind that meets the "prove it" requirement. It's simple. I say that it simply doesn't matter what kind of machine (or no machine at all) is used in the voting booth or to count the votes later, as long as the voter can put a printed ballot in a ballot box. (The voter, of course, is expected to look over the printed ballot to be sure it has the right candidates and ballot measures marked. Just like with the old pen or punch card systems.)

Everyone understands printed ballots with marks on them, and putting the ballot into a ballot box. Time-honored methods for holding secure "prove it" elections with ballots have been worked out. At the start of the election day you check the ballot box to be sure it is empty. Each voter gets one ballot, marks it, and puts it in the box. At the end of the day the ballots are counted and the total is reported. Etc. I work in elections and I know the system well. It can be trusted.

If we use touch-screen computers as input devices to help the voter mark the ballot, all the better. This helps prevent mistakes like those in Florida in 2000. When the voter is ready the machine prints out a ballot with clear markings of the voter's choices. After the machine prints that ballot it doesn't matter if the machine has been hacked or is just making mistakes because you look at the ballot before putting it into the ballot box. And it doesn't matter how the count is reported because once you have a printed record of each voter's intentions, you can count them by hand if necessary. The voters or a trusted representative can watch the counting.

There is one safeguard that I think is very important. You must randomly test the reported vote counts against the paper ballots they are said to represent. And I am very strict about this part. If the count is off by even a single vote it means something is wrong with the counting system and the entire election needs to be counted by hand!

The controversy about touch-screen voting machines started because they do not use printed ballots that can prove the election's results to the average person! The machines come from private companies. Some of these prohibit anyone - even election officials - from knowing how they count the votes. There is no way at all to check whether the machines are reporting correct results. It is a matter of trusting these companies and not of proving to the average voter that the results can be trusted. We are just supposed to trust that the companies are telling us who won the elections! Remember what I said about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be?

If these machines make mistakes or just break down, there is no way to figure out who really won the election. And if someone is able to rig the machines to change the vote counts, there is no way to know that, either. History tells us that this is a concern. People have gone to great lengths to rig even local elections. So with the huge stakes in today's election -- trillions of dollars and wars -- we certainly should understand that highly-skilled and well-funded attempts to dictate election results are likely to occur.

There are a number of ideas for making voting machines more reliable and harder to hack into and change results. One idea is that the public should be able to examine -- and experts allowed to repair and improve -- the source code for the programs used in the machines. This is called "open source" and the Open Voting Consortium has done a lot of great work in this area. (Send them some a few $$ to help their effort.) Open-source systems will help make the machines more reliable and easier to use and will reduce the chances that someone can try to rig an election. This is a great approach, but in the end it fails the "prove it" test. The average person doesn't understand the complicated programming involved. And there is no way to prove that the open-source code is the code that is actually running in every single voting machine on election day.

Other ideas involve elaborate security to test and guard the machines. This again fails the "prove it" test. Unless average people can see for themselves that the results are accurate, no security is sufficient.

I say that the system I describe above -- involving a paper ballot that the voter can check and put in a ballot box -- makes the reliability and security of any voting machines themselves less important because you can "prove it" by counting those paper ballots. You can test a sample of ballots against the reported counts, making it useless to try to hack the voting or counting machines themselves.

California's Secretary of State Debra Bowen understands these issues and is working hard to make sure that our state's elections are safe, fair and provable. Let's hope that the rest of the states can catch up to California.

This post originally appeared at Speak Out California

This column by Newt Gingrich is really bothering me: Bobby Jindal, America's Most Transformational Governor - HUMAN EVENTS. Near the beginning of the column,

The principles that motivate his Louisiana Revolution are the same pro-innovation, pro-competition, anti-bureaucracy and anti- big government principles that I urge each week in this newsletter - the same principles that are so desperately needed in Washington, D.C.

Pro-innovation. Fine. Pro-competition. Fine. But let's look at what "anti-bureaucracy" and "anti-big government" actually mean.

In a democracy we have openness and transparency. The use of our money and resources is accountable to the people. And how do we make sure that government is open and accountable? We have careful procedures and oversight in place to ensure that the money and resources are used as they should be used. This means you have to make sure that every i is dotted and every t is crossed before you approve something. Otherwise you get politicians giving contracts to their brothers-in-law, department heads taking trips to luxury resorts, and other corruption that history has taught will always occur.

Conservatives like to complain about "bureaucracy" and claim that corporations are more 'efficient" than government, but what they are really complaining about is openness and democracy. Yes, it is more efficient to have one executive making decisions and telling us how it is going to be. And yes, it is less bureaucratic to just ram projects through and award them to your friends. But let's take a look at the results of the conservative revolution in government of the last few years. We have seen so many "no-bid contracts" awarded to well-connected companies, with no oversight and no accountability at all. Reporters who can get past the secrecy have discovered that literally billions upon billions of our tax dolalrs have been stolen, can't be accounted for at all! This is what the conservatives meant when they said they wanted to get rid of bureaucracy -- they meant they wanted to take off with the money!

And what about "anti-big-government?" Just what do they think government IS? The first three words of our Constitution are "We, the People." THAT is what government is. We, the People make decisions about how we will invest our resources and how we will distribute the return on that investment. Those resources include our minerals, oil, coal, water, as well as our people, companies, laws and intellectual property. We, the People making the decisions.

So when they complain about government they are really complaining that We, the People are in charge. And "big government" means We, the People in charge of more of our own destiny. If they don't want We, the People in charge -- what DO they want? Think about that. The alternative to big government is big corporations making the decisions about our resources, people, oil, coal, laws, etc. That is what this really means. And this has proven itself out, hasn't it? As we have lived through the conservative revolution, we have seen more and more of the control of our resources and our desitiny shifted away from QWe, the People and into the hands of the few who control the big corporations.

So don't be fooled by shiny words. When you realize what these conservatives really want you see that it is about taking control away from you and me and giving it to a wealthy few.