Remember when this (Election Reform) forum was as popular as General Discussion? [View all]
Man it's sad.... in 2004, I found DU because of my concern about Diebold. This forum was probably the #1 forum on all of DU. You'd regularly see as many recs here as you do in General Discussion.
Nothing has changed in regard to the problem. In the coming election nearly all the votes will be counted by computers, on proprietary software, and we have no idea if they will count votes properly. They could all be rigged. Whether or not fraud will occur we don't know, but we do know one thing absolutely: It COULD take place right under our noses. That alone is bad enough. In an open democracy, things like this should not be possible.
What has changed is that many of us who have been here since 2004 have had to go back to our real lives at some point. We have jobs, families, and we can't stay up until 4 am every night working on election reform. (note, some awesome people haven't gone back to their real lives, and I say KUDOS and THANK YOU to those who are still working on the front lines here).
Myself, I decided it was better to focus on the state level where I could possibly have an effect. Our group has made some baby steps in Vermont but not much has changed.
We've been squashed by the media, and no one really knows about the problem anymore.
I do think that most people care. But they just don't know. They figure, if there was a problem, CNN would tell us about it. Well for a while we had Lou Dobbs at CNN doing just that, but now he's gone too.
Somehow we need to break through. I'm very concerned about the coming election. We can't break through ourselves. We've been trying for 8+ years and look where we are. We need something high profile. We need Jon Stewart or Michael Moore, or Move On, or someone like that to light a fire under the people's asses and let everyone know our democracy is in big trouble. We need a big splash that will hit the MSM. We know the candidates aren't going to do squat. Maybe Anonymous and the Occupiers could help. Bill Maher...? Is there anyone out there with a big voice who cares?... I don't know....
Any ideas?