Why Ron Paul is America's Best Hope for an Honest Presidential Election
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Ron Paul
If Ron Paul runs as an Independent Presidential candidate he may help restore the trust of voters destroyed in the last two national elections.
The reason is that Dr. Paul will likely draw enough votes so that there won't be another nail-biting photo finish between the Democrats and Republicans.
Which party he would draw from is a matter of opinion. His Libertarian message of less government might attract Democrats unhappy with whoever the nominee is, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards.
Then again he might siphon off votes from the Republicans with his positions of less government and tax fairness.
And, of course, there's a chance that Dr. Paul could mount the greatest third party campaign since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and win the Presidency.
Roosevelt's Progressive Party (Bull Moose) movement, local historians note, started right here in Bay City with a riot at the Republican state convention. The GOP uprising moved to the national convention in Chicago whereupon Teddy pulled out of the Republican Party and called his own convention. He took enough votes from GOP incumbent William Howard Taft that helped put Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson in the White House.
The American people are sending unmistakable signals that they are dissatisfied with the two major parties and are dead set on changing the direction of the country.
Another reason we hope for a Ron Paul third party run is that both parties need his independent ideas to remake the country we voters are demanding.
Jobs, secure borders, a sensible foreign policy, fair taxes, less government -- those are Dr. Paul's watchwords. And most of his ideas are being embraced by the self-appointed "change agents" of both parties.
But a great concern persists because they apparently haven't fixed the voting machines in Ohio and elsewhere that messed up the count in the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections.
About a third of the nation is expected to use the quirky electronic touch-screen voting machines that obviously can't be trusted to produce a verifiable count.
In November 2007 the machines in Cleveland crashed. Then the printers jammed so that 20 percent of the machines involved in recounts lacked paper copies of the votes. Duplicates could be printed but without positive veracity they were valid.
"In the last three election cycles, touch-screen machines have become one of the most mysterious and divisive elements in modern electoral politics," observed The New York Times writer Clive Thompson.
Here's how bad it is: In tiny Waldenburg, Arkansas, one mayoral candidate got no votes even though he surely voted for himself, Thompson reported, asking the pertinent questions:
"What happens if the next Presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a Presidency decided by ballots that weren't backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don't?"
Hanging chads in Florida in 2000 were bad enough and were replaced by the electronic machines made mostly by technology giant Diebold, a maker of safes and ATMs. Then in 2004 it was Ohio where the winner was decided on a contested count. Diebold has suffered a PR disaster so bad it tried, but failed, to sell its voting machine division.
The company changed its name to Premier Election Solutions (a misnomer from the get-go). The name change didn't help when a new round of glitches arose recently across the country.
A main problem with the electronic machines is that Diebold and other vendors won't allow computer experts to assess the devices for accuracy, supposedly protecting their "trade secrets."
The problems with voting in the Cleveland area continued last fall even though the director of elections since 2003, Michael Vu, was fired early in 2007.
In November 2004, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which has more than 1 million registered voters, was among the counties with long lines and complaints over provisional ballots. The election ended with Ohio giving President Bush the electoral votes needed to narrowly win the White House over Democratic U.S. Sen. John Kerry.
Cuyahoga county has a history of election problems with absentee ballots,ballot shortages, misplaced ballots, unregistered voters casting ballots and voters who were not informed of a change in polling places.
A local TV station reported that in May's primary, when electronic voting began to be used in the county, poll workers were not prepared to operate the machines, some poll workers didn't show up to work and vote-holding memory cards were lost.
Two elections board workers were convicted of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount to avoid scrutiny of how votes were cast and counted.
Election experts predict that Pennsylvania will be the 2008 problem spot because 40 percent of counties have electronic machines. And, incredibly enough, state law bars use of any machine that would make it possible to figure out how anyone voted.
If the 2008 Presidential race comes down to a recount in Pennsylvania, as some experts predict, it would be impossible to validate the vote. It would be deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra famously said.
What a country!###
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