Election Reform

Though Venezuela uses electronic voting, it is OPEN SOURCE CODE programming--code that belongs to the PUBLIC and that anyone may review--and they do a whopping 55% audit (comparison of ballots to electronic totals)--more than five times the amount necessary to detect fraud in an electronic system.

Jimmy Carter recently said that Venezuela has the "best election system in the world."

Compare it to ours: ALL voting machines in the U.S. are run on 'TRADE SECRET' code--code that belongs to PRIVATE corporations, and the the public is FORBIDDEN to review. Half the states do NO AUDIT AT ALL (e-voting, no back up ballot) and the other half do only a miserably inadequate 1% audit.

This is WHY Venezuelans now have universal free medical care and "we" are still arguing about whether poor people should be kicked off the island--allowed to die in the gutter of illness and old age.

Anyway--though the election system here is even worse than I've described above (for instance, something like 70% of U.S. voting machines are controlled by ONE, private, FAR RIGHTWING-CONNECTED corporation (ES&S, which bought out Diebold), not to mention Citizens United and all the rest)--I just wanted to point out that the highly successful leftist democracy movement, of which Venezuela was a pioneer, is based on concrete, fundamental democratic principles and systems, beginning with HONEST, TRANSPARENT vote counting.

And we need to learn from this. They have horrible RW/corporate media, too--in some cases worse than ours--but have been able to elect strong leftist leaders in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Nicaragua and other countries, in addition to Venezuela. How? Honest, transparent vote counting and the other critical component, grass roots organization.