Don't Bother to Vote

It's Election Day here in the good ol' U.S. of A. and I for one will be exercising my Constitutional right NOT to vote this year. Why not, you ask? "Why bother?" is the more appropriate question.

Already this morning there have been problems with voting machines and poll workers who don't know how to operate the equipment. And let's not forget that the president of Diebold Corporation, the largest manufacturer of computerized voting machines, promised in a 2003 fund-raising e-mail to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004. Mission Accomplished, indeed.

The United States is one of the only democracies in the world that hires private, partisan companies (3 out of 4 have close Republican ties) to tabulate votes with little or no oversight from the government. These voting machines are easily hacked and there are no paper records to recount in case of machine errors.

Since the elections in 2000 and 2004 were both completely rigged by the Republican Party (a federal judge in Ohio actually ruled that the Republicans had violated the public's Constitutional rights to have their votes counted properly), I have no faith whatsoever in the electoral system in this country. It is all controlled by greedy corporate interests who seek only personal gain.

So, you may participate today in the charade we call a democracy. Just say a prayer to those brave souls who worked and died to build this country into the most respected and admired nation in the world. And then see what a mess we've made of it.