Anti-AV Campaign Distributes Blatant Falsehood
In Run Up To UK Referendum On Election Reform
Everyone Should Oppose Electronic Voting Systems
But The 'Alternative Vote' System Does Not Mean The Introduction Of Electronic Voting
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/avfalsehood.htm
Computer Programmer Testifies Under Oath
How He Was Asked To Write Vote Rigging Software For Electronic Voting Machines In US

"The AV referendum has produced the most idiotic political debate in living memory.... the AV referendum has offended the basic rule of an educated democracy: that politicians can insult each other's intelligence as much as they like, just so long as they don't insult ours... I resent being told, as the 'no' campaign insists, that AV is too complicated. Sometimes, when they're ordering a pizza, my children say they'll have a pepperoni, but if the restaurant hasn't got any they'll have a margherita. They've got the basic idea of rank order. I think we'll cope. Please don't tell me, either, that AV is too expensive. As we don't need electronic voting machines, AV wouldn't cost anything."
Philip Collins - Hot AV news from Oz: it's not an issue, mate
London Times, 22 April 2011, P31

electronicvotingcurtis.jpg (21489 bytes)

Above, Computer Programmer Clinton Curtis
Preparing To Give Sworn Testimony Before Members Of The United States House Judiciary Committee

Clint Curtis testified in 2004 on how easy it is to rig elections without detection by rewriting the programme code of electronic voting machines to produce a marginal (and therefore credible) victory for an otherwise losing candidate. He claimed that in the run-up to the US elections of 2000 he had been asked to write such a programme by his employer. He resigned from the company concerned. He considered the intended use for the programme, which he says was the rigging of voting results in Florida, to be fraudulent.

Particularly as Britain's Labour Party already has a track record of postal ballot voting fraud, public concerns about such matters are absolutely valid, and indeed crucial.

But they are not a legitimate argument against the introduction of the Alternative Vote (AV) system for electing MPs to Parliament in Britain, as may or may not result from the referendum to be held on 5 May.

Contrary to misleading 'No Vote' campaign literature AV is not tied to the introduction of electronic voting machines. Australia has deployed AV for years without using such machines.

Everyone should therefore ignore this false issue when making their minds up about how to vote on 5 May.

Watch Clinton Curtis Give Testimony About Electronic Vote Tampering On YouTube - Click Here
Read His Affidavit - Click Here

"Nick Clegg has authorised a bare-knuckle political fight to try to rescue the faltering Yes campaign for the alternative vote [in Britain], in a strategy that risks inflaming tensions in the coalition ahead of next week’s referendum.... Chris Huhne, Lib Dem energy secretary, even hinted at taking legal action against Tory cabinet colleagues if they continued to tell 'blanket untruths' about the alleged Ł130m cost of buying electronic voting machines to deal with a new AV system.... Mr Cameron has been forced to come out fighting after initial polls suggested that Britain might vote to ditch the traditional first-past-the-post voting system at Westminster in favour of the alternative vote. But as the polls have moved in Mr Cameron’s favour, the Lib Dems have become angry at the tactics used by the No campaign. Mr Huhne said the cross-party campaign was 'a Tory front organisation because they are funding it and running it'. The ferocity of the No campaign has left the Yes camp trying to fend off attacks and struggling to make headway in explaining the supposed advantages of a new system. Simon Hughes, Lib Dem deputy leader, said he would ask the Electoral Commission to investigate the 'dishonest' claims by the official No campaign. He said Lady Warsi, Conservative party co-chairman, was 'inventing facts'."
Clegg takes gloves off over AV
Financial Times, 24 April 2011

"The vast majority of people in Britain are represented by someone they had no part in voting for ... one third of the electorate no longer vote Labour or Tory.....
The Liberal Democrats think they will gain under AV. The Tories think they will lose. Labour isn't sure and so it's split."
Philip Collins - Hot AV news from Oz: it's not an issue, mate
London Times, 22 April 2011, P31

"Campaigners against reforming Britain's voting system today refused to publish details of the multi-millionaire donors who are bankrolling them. At the launch of the No2Av campaign in London its director Matthew Elliott said he wanted to see more 'transparency' in politics and not a political system 'conducted behind closed doors'. But when pressed on whether No2Av would publish details of who was funding its campaign before the planned referendum in May Mr Elliott refused. Later the No campaign claimed that the Yes Campaign were also refusing to publish a list of their major donors. However a spokesman for the Yes Campaign said it had so far raised Ł2 million of which 95 per cent had come from two donors: the Electoral Reform Society and Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. In an uncomfortable press conference for Mr Elliott he also came under pressure over claims made by No2Av that a ‘yes’ vote in the May would cost the tax payer Ł250 million. The estimate was based on Ł82m to hold the referendum, Ł9m for voter education ahead of the plebiscite the cost of electronic vote counting at Ł90m-Ł130m and Ł26m for subsequent voter education. But critics pointed out that Australia uses the Alternative Vote system without the need for electronic voting machines and there are no plans to introduce them into Britain."
No2Av campaigners refuse to publish donor details
Independent, 15 February 2011

"The NO campaign’s claims on the cost of AV have fallen apart as Australian election expert Antony Green revealed that the country – which has used the system for over 80 years – has never used voting machines. The No campaign’s central claim at their launch today was that AV would force the UK to spend Ł130 million on electronic counting machines, but it is undermined by one simple fact – there will be no electronic counting machines used with AV! This is a desperate claim that the NO campaign simply seem to have just made up. Antony commented: 'We’ve used AV for 90 years at all levels of government. And Australia has never used voting machines to conduct its elections. ' They need to get their facts right about Australia and AV. The point is you get better representation. That’s what AV is all about.' In fact, all the major claims the NO campaign make unravel at the slightest scrutiny. The cost of the referendum is incurred whether there is a Yes or a No vote. So there is no saving from voting No in the referendum planned for 5th May. And they wildly exaggerate the cost of voter education with AV, basing the cost of the adoption of a different system – the Single Transferable Vote for Scottish Council elections – that is much more complex than AV.”
Alternative Vote referendum: Desperate NO campaign claims unravel
Yes to Fairer Votes, 15 February 2011

The Conservatives and Labour no longer dominate British politics like they used to, with increasing numbers of people voting for third parties in elections despite the country still operating a 'first past the post' electoral system for parliamentary elections.

This means that few candidates ever win more than half the votes in any constituency, which also means that most people end up being represented in Parliament by someone who they didn't vote for at all.

In two thirds of seats these days nobody actually gets 'past the post' at all in terms of securing a majority of the vote. So in practice 'first past the post' is now actually a misnomer. For exceeding a 50% majority threshold is now the exception rather than the rule.

There will be a referendum on 5 May asking the country whether or not it wishes to change to the 'Alternative Vote' system for electing Members of Parliament whereby candidates can only be elected once they have achieved more than 50% of the vote (except in the unlikely event that there are insufficient alternative votes to take any candidate over the 50% threshold).

In simplified terms, this system essentially works by allowing voters to indicate on the ballot who they would like to vote for instead, should their preferred choice not be successful in gaining 50% of the vote.

Sometimes this system is called 'instant run-off voting' (IRV), as it avoids the need for voters to go to the polls again (as happens in some elections around the world using a more standard 'run-off' election system) should no candidate win a majority.

The referendum on AV is a result of negotiations that took place when the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties sought to form a coalition government following the inconclusive result of the last general election. However, neither the Conservatives nor (really) the Liberal Democrats want AV. The Conservatives wish to remain with the current 'first past the post' system, whereas what the Liberal Democrats really want is proportional representation (PR).

These positions are driven largely by what each party thinks the impact will be on the number of seats it might win under the different systems.

As things stand at present it is thought unlikely that the 'fudge' of AV will in fact change election results greatly. However, for those who really want PR, voting for AV is one way of trying to demonstrate an appetite for electoral reform generally even if AV itself is not regarded as satisfactory.

In that sense a strong vote for AV (a system currently used in very few countries globally) is a considered by many to be a necessary step on the way to PR (a system widely used around the world).

The web site of the 'No2Av' campaign (an organisation which the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has accused of being a front for the Conservative Party) claims an AV system of voting would incur additional costs associated with 'voter education' and the introduction of electronic voting machines.

The colour leaflets which the 'No' campaign has also being putting through letter boxes show this figure broken down between the two elements - Ł26 million for voter education and up to Ł130 million for 'electronic vote counting machines.'

But the proposal to introduce AV does not require the introduction of electronic voting machines (as has proved to be the case in Australia), and nor does the referendum include any proposal to do so.

nlpwessex.org

Clinton Curtis And Why The 5 May British Referendum
Is Not An Opportunity To Campaign Against Electronic Voting

"A government watchdog group is investigating allegations made by a Florida programmer... Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.... Staff members for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) met with Curtis last week to discuss the election allegations. Representatives for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) inquired about other allegations from Curtis that his former company spied on NASA. The FBI in Tallahassee, Florida, has set up a meeting with Curtis, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said it was trying to corroborate his claims about possible election fraud and NASA spying. The group hopes that even if the election allegations aren't proven, they will inspire legislators to pass a law requiring voting software to be open to public inspection to help deter fraud and restore public confidence in the election process. The software code used in voting machines is considered proprietary and it is protected from public examination -- an issue voting activists have been trying to address. 'I think Mr. Curtis helps make that issue a little more difficult to shunt aside,' said CREW Executive Director Melani Sloan. 'You don't even have to believe what he says (in order to be concerned about voting machines), just that he created a program. If he can do it, anyone can.'"
More Questions for Florida
Wired, 13 December 2004

"Shortly thereafter [a meeting in the autumn of 2000], as directed, I created the vote fraud software prototype... If the candidate they selected is leading the race, nothing happens. If the other candidate is leading the race, the vote totals are altered so that the selected candidate is now leading with 51% of the vote. The other candidates then share the remaining 49% in exact proportions to the totals they had previously.... In an actual application, the user would receive no visible clues as to the fraud that had just occurred.... No amount of testing or simulations would expose the fraud as its activation and process is completely invisible to everyone except the person programming the vote fraud routine..... I gave the software program, which was on a CD disc, and the report that was on disc and paper to [my supervisor].... if they allowed blind (already compiled) code to be used (no source code provided) and there were no paper receipts, the votes could be flipped from one candidate to the other without any possible way for the deception to be detected. I explained that this could be done with a touch screen or automatically. She [my supervisor] immediately stated, 'You don't understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in South Florida.' "
Clinton Curtis
Sworn Affidavit, 16 December 2004

"Late last year, Congress heard sworn testimony from Florida programmer Clint Curtis, who created vote-rigging software in 2000 at the request of Tom Feeny, a Bush Family factotum. Feeny wanted Curtis (a fellow Republican) and his employer, Yang Enterprises, to produce untraceable programs that could 'control the vote' as needed, investigator Brad Friedman reports. Feeny also told Curtis of Bush plans to 'suppress the black vote' with 'exclusion lists.' This is exactly what happened. BBC investigator Greg Palast has shown that tens of thousands of legitimate African-American voters were deliberately 'purged' from the rolls by a Republican-controlled private corporation hired by Jeb Bush. Afterwards, Feeny – who had been Jeb's running mate in his first gubernatorial campaign – was rewarded for his dutiful service with a plum Congressional seat. In 2002, Raymond Lemme, a Florida state government inspector, took up Curtis' charges, which included other corruption allegations involving Feeny, Yang Enterprises, and a Yang employee charged with peddling military technology to the Chinese. In June 2003, Lemme told Curtis he had 'tracked the corruption all the way to the top' and that 'the story would break in a few weeks.' On July 1, 2003, Lemme was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just across the Florida border. Local police ruled that Lemme, a happily married man eagerly planning his daughter's wedding, had suddenly decided to slash his wrists. At first, they said there were no photos of the death scene; but then the pictures turned up on the Internet, and were confirmed as authentic by the embarrassed police. The photos clearly contradicted the original suicide report at several points – including evidence that Lemme had been beaten before his death. The investigation was re-opened after Curtis' Congressional testimony – then abruptly shut down after local police spoke to a never-identified 'someone' in the Florida state government."
The Big Fix
Moscow Times, 8 April 2005

Don't Get Confused
The 5 May Referendum Is Not An Opportunity To Campaign Against Electronic Voting

In Britain on 5 May there will be a referendum about the possible introduction of the 'Alternative Vote' system for use in parliamentary elections. Some of those who are against this system have been putting out false statements on the web and in leaflets that the introduction of AV will involve the introduction of electronic voting.

This is absolutely untrue. There is no such proposal. Nor is electronic voting used in Australia where AV has been the system in use for decades.

All people who are interested in maintaining democracy should be absolutely opposed to the introduction of electronic voting systems - for one simple reason. They are are not transparent.

An electronic voting system can be programmed to produce any result its programmer wants.

It really doesn't matter what the system of election is if your vote is going to be 'counted' electronically. You or the election monitors will have no way of knowing:

* Whether your vote has been included in the total
* Whether your vote has been added to the correct total
* If any candidate has been allocated 'phantom' votes by the machine, or had real votes removed

In December 2004 American computer programmer Clinton Curtis appeared before Democrat members of the US House Judiciary Committee, who were holding hearings in Columbus Ohio on alleged Election 2004 voting irregularities and to whom Curtis gave sworn oral testimony.

Curtis stated that he had been asked by his employer in the autumn of 2000 to write a voting machine programme which "would flip the vote 51-49 to whoever you wanted it to go to", and that the process would have been completely undetectable by election officials. "They'd never see it", said Mr Curtis.

At the time the request was made Curtis had been a life long registered Republican. According to Curtis, the ultimate source of the request came from within the Republican Party.

A video recording of his oral testimony and a separate sworn affidavit of his claims are both available via Brad Blog.

Based on own his experience and the difference between the official results and exit-poll data, Mr Curtis believes the Presidential election vote in Ohio in 2004 was electronically 'hacked'. Later Mr Curtis's experience formed the foundation for the story line of a film which won 'Best Documentary' at the New Jersey Film Festival in 2008.

Whether or not the details of Mr Curtis's particular claims are correct is not of central importance. For however great their implications might be, it is nearly impossible to establish the degree to which the methods he describes might have already been deployed.

This is because, by their very nature, the way electronic voting machines count votes is not transparent.

And that is why they must not be permitted.

Every genuine opportunity to campaign against electronic voting machines should be taken, especially because the last British government was flirting with the idea of introducing them.

That possibility must not be allowed to resurface. Otherwise, where it hasn't been rendered so already by other means (such as the corrosive role played by money in politics whether at home or abroad), democracy will be at additional risk of becoming a fraud.

However, don't let these particular concerns influence your decision one way or the other about whether, or how, to vote in the referendum on the potential adoption of AV in Britain. They are not relevant.

The 5 May referendum is not an opportunity to campaign against electronic voting.

nlpwessex.org

Watch Clinton Curtis Give Testimony About Electronic Vote Tampering On YouTube - Click Here

The World Was Stunned In 2004 When It Learnt That America Had Voted For George W Bush Twice
But Had It?

"Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said. Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio. In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to alter the vote totals while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code would not show its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled. Curtis said he wrote a prototype program for Feeney, and that he believed the program might not only be usable on touch-screen voting machines, which some counties - predominantly in South Florida - now use, but also on optical-scan machines, which most of the state's counties used in the 2004 elections.... Democrats and independent groups are challenging presidential election results in Ohio, and have claimed that irregularities in some precinct results might have been caused by tampering with electronic voting machines."
Feeney implicated in vote fraud
Seminole Chronicle, 16 December 2004

New Statesman
Did Dubbya rig the election?
Published 29 November 2004

Michael Meacher

Michael Meacher smells something fishy in Bush's return to office. The evidence of fraud is not yet conclusive but, given the Republicans' record, it is all too plausible.

The great mystery of the US presidential election was that the exit polls, which had been reliable guides in all previous elections, did not tally with the final results. Tony Blair, it is said, went to sleep on 2 November thinking John Kerry had won, but woke in the morning to find that George W Bush was the victor. Many Britons and Americans had the same experience. Nobody has advanced a satisfactory explanation. Now allegations are surfacing that the use of electronic voting systems and optical scanning devices may have had a significant influence on the result. Computer security experts insist that such systems are not secure and not tamper-proof, yet they were used to count a third of the votes across 37 states. Though the Democrats remain strangely coy about the whole subject, academics and political analysts are now drawing comparisons between areas that used paper ballots and areas that used electronic systems. Is it possible that results in the latter were rigged?

An analysis of the poll by different states points up inconsistencies that cannot be explained by random variation. In Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, Iowa, New Mexico, Maine, Nevada, Arkansas and Missouri, where a variety of different voting systems were used, including paper ballots in many cases, the four companies carrying out exit polls were almost exactly right and their results were certainly within the margin of error. In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire and North Carolina, however, where electronic or optical scanning machines were used (though not exclusively), the tracking polls were seriously discrepant from the published result.

Two aspects of this are immediately striking. One is the large size of the variance, and the other is that in every case it favoured Bush. In Wisconsin and Ohio, the discrepancy favoured Bush by 4 per cent, in Pennsylvania by 5 per cent, in Florida and Minnesota by 7 per cent, in North Carolina by 9 per cent and in New Hampshire by an astonishing 15 per cent.

Moreover, extensive voting irregularities have been reported across the US - including intimidation, exclusion of black voters from electoral rolls, touchscreens that consistently registered support for Bush when the name Kerry was touched, and a large number of county precincts (including in Ohio) where the number of votes cast exceeded the total number of registered voters, sometimes by large margins. In Florida, for example, the number of votes reported for all the candidates exceeded the maximum possible voter turnout by 237,522, so that a minimum of 3.1 per cent of the votes must be fraudulent, and possibly considerably more. Florida uses electronic voting machines in 15 counties, and these account for a majority of the state's residents.

None of this is conclusive evidence of fraud. But an independent inquiry is surely needed to expose what really happened in Florida and several other states. Some Americans are already demanding such an inquiry. Court hearings, held in public in Columbus, Ohio, will very likely lead to at least a partial recount in that state. Ralph Nader, the Green candidate, may have secured a recount in New Hampshire, and is demanding recounts also in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. And a survey by the University of Berkeley, California, has shown that irregularities in Florida associated with electronic voting machines seem to have awarded 130,000 to 260,000 or more excess votes to Bush.

One's immediate reaction is that such large-scale fraud is implausible. But look at the history of the Republican Party, and its willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to manipulate the popular vote, and the idea seems all too likely.

The best-known example was the Watergate break-in of 1972, designed to get illicit access to Democrat plans for a presidential election that Richard Nixon feared he would lose. At the previous election in 1968, Nixon's aides were charged with persuading the South Vietnamese to delay their participation in peace talks to deny possible advantage to the Democrats, then in office.

But that was only a precursor for 1980. In that year, when Ronald Reagan was the Republican candidate trying to stop the re-election of President Jimmy Carter, a potentially treasonable plot was hatched, which came to be known as the "October surprise". To stop Carter getting the credit for securing the release of the 52 US embassy hostages seized after the Iranian revolution, members of the Reagan campaign flew to Paris to meet Iranian and Israeli representatives in October, less than a month before the election on 4 November. Several sources, including the New York Times (15 April 1991), confirm that not only did William Casey, the CIA director, attend those meetings, but so did the vice-presidential candidate George Bush (father of George W).

It was agreed with the Iranians that the hostages would not be released before the election. In return, the Reagan-Bush team promised to supply $40m of military equipment if elected. Military equipment started to flow to Iran from Israel on 21 October, the proffered release of the hostages was withdrawn, and Carter was defeated. The hostages were finally released on 21 January 1981, minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president.

The Iran-Contra affair followed in 1986-87. After the US Congress had passed the Boland Amendment in 1982 forbidding direct military aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration again ferried arms secretly to Iran (then subject to a US arms embargo), and then used the proceeds to fund weaponry for the Contras. Even when this deal, illegal at both ends, was later exposed, the administration's web of deceit managed to shield Reagan and Bush from the consequences of their conspiracy.

Once elected, Bush junior used his authority to keep this material hidden for ever. In November 2001, he signed an executive order that limited freedom of information by allowing either a past or sitting president to block access to White House papers. He then vetoed access to Reagan's papers, which would otherwise have been opened to public scrutiny in January 2002. Under this order, Bush's personal papers, detailing the decision-making process in the war on terrorism, could remain secret in perpetuity.

The most recent example of Republican manipulation is notorious. After the Bush-Gore race for the presidency in 2000, it later emerged that, under the governorship of George W's brother Jeb in Florida, around 30,000 black voters (overwhelmingly Democratic) had been illegally excluded from the voting rolls. When a stop was put to the recounts in the state, Bush was declared the winner by fewer than 540 votes.

So can we really be sure that this year's result was an accurate reflection of the popular will? It has emerged that the Diebold Gems software and optical scan voting machines used in counting a high proportion of the votes may not be tamper-proof from hacking, particularly via remote modems. Two US computer security experts, in their recently published book Black Box Voting, argue that "by entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes". After the Florida fiasco four years earlier, the US Congress voted $3.9bn to improve the quality of voting systems. Perhaps the latest revelations about what happened where electronic systems were used may become known as the "November surprise".

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton

US Election 2000 - A Key Move In Florida That Took Bush Into The White House
BBC Newsnight Report On Wiping Black Voters From The Electoral Roll In Florida In 2000
Click Here For Video - Click Here For Transcript

US Election 1980 - 'October Surprise' And Iran-Contra - Click Here

"Because of ballot access laws in the several states, it is virtually impossible to organize and operate a third party."
Third Parties, Third Ways, the Tea Party, and the GOP
RedState, 20 April 2011

"A group of technical, legal and political experts has begun a campaign to expose the use of unsafe electronic voting systems in Europe. Jason Kitcat, a programmer who helped to start the campaign, is concerned that voters' trust will be eroded as problems emerge with insecure voting systems, as has been happening in the United States. With most e-voting companies refusing to make their software available for public testing, and no current system offering a printed record of votes cast, it will now be easier than ever to hack into an election, Mr Kitcat told The Times. 'You could have fraud on a scale never seen before, and it will be completely undetectable,' he said. 'What worries me is that by rushing in we 'll actually turn more young people off voting. Instead of thinking that their vote doesn't count, they will now be worrying that no one's going to be counting their vote.' Critics of electronic voting cite early problems in the US, where President Bush last year pledged $3.9 billion (Ł2.3 billion) to modernise the ballot. Bev Harris, author of a book investigating electronic-voting companies, has catalogued what she alleges are electoral irregularities involving touch-screen and other computerised voting systems..... Last November, for instance, 6,300 votes changed overnight after an election in Alabama, handing the state's governorship to a Republican. At the same time three winning Republican candidates in elections in Texas all polled exactly 18,181 votes..... Diebold Election Systems, a US company whose software has been used in Greater Manchester e-voting pilots, has faced particularly close scrutiny. This year its programming code - which it refuses to disclose - was found on an unprotected website and passed to computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University. The scientists' analysis, published in July, found significant security flaws and said that a teenager could circumvent the system using equipment that can be bought for Ł70 over the internet. Voters could cast unlimited votes without being detected by mechanisms within the voting terminal, they reported, and votes could be overwritten in the system's logs. Poll workers could give passwords to their friends and alter the terms of an election."
Hackers Threaten to Short-Circuit E-Voting Plans
London Times, 15 November 2003

".... if you look around and see what the world is now facing I don't think in the last two or three hundred years we've faced such a concatenation of problems all at the same time.....[including] the inevitability, it seems to me, of resource wars.... if we are to solve the issues that are ahead of us, we are going to need to think in completely different ways. And the probability, it seems to me, is that the next 20 or 30 years are going to see a period of great instability... I fear the [current] era of small wars is merely the precursor, the pre-shock, for something rather larger to come... we need to find new ways to be able to live together on an overcrowded earth."
Paddy Ashdown, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina 2002 -2006
BBC Radio 4, 'Start The Week', 30 April 2007

Changing The Way We Think

On 5 May there will be a referendum in Britain on the possibility of introducing an 'Alternative Vote' (AV) for electing Members of Parliament, so that under most circumstances, by a process of elimination, candidates must win at least a 50% threshold of the vote to gain their seat at Westminster. Like all democratic systems it is far from perfect, but for those who really want to move to a system of proportional representation it will be necessary to support AV in the referendum.

Otherwise a 'successful' no vote will be used as an argument to claim that there is no appetite for electoral reform.

However, no one should be fooled into thinking that merely changing the voting system, into whatever format, will be sufficient to address the enormous challenges ahead that society faces. To tackle those effectively will require no less than a major change in national consciousness. Despite the current rhetoric in Britain about creating 'the big society', so far no government has brought forward tested proposals that might seriously address such a dimension.

Any country suffering from an incoherent collective consciousness will always produce poor government whatever the voting system, whether or not that system is transparent or electronic. Addressing this 'coherence' issue is where any nation's first priority should lie.

nlpwessex.org

Consciousness-Based Education - 'We Need A New Way Of Thinking'
Click Here

New Statesman Did Dubbya rig the election? Published 29 November 2004

New Statesman
Did Dubbya rig the election?
Published 29 November 2004