About

ProtectOurElections is a national collaboration of grassroots organizations that have joined together  to reclaim our democracy, providing oversight to rescue our elections from partisan politics and privatization. POE is registered as both a 501(c)(4) organization and a 501(c)(3) organization.

Five recent developments have harmed our elections in significant ways:

1) the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United allowing for unlimited, undisclosed corporate funds to be spent to support pro-corporate candidates; 2) the Supreme Court ruling in Crawford v. in Marion County, upholding Indiana’s draconian photo ID law for elections, paves the way for similar laws that threaten to disenfranchise millions of voters; 3) the MOVE Act included a provision allowing States to implement Internet voting pilot projects, which threatens to undo the substantial gains made in the states since 2003 to deploy paper ballot voting systems and ensure a verifiable vote count; 4) the targeting of voter registration groups and initiatives has helped to reduce the number of legal citizens who are able to exercise their right to vote. 5) the ever increasing privatization of our public elections by corporations using propriety “trade secret” computer hardware and software to cast and count the results in our public elections, outside of the view of the citizenry. To counter and offset these attacks on fair elections, we must quickly pass robust election protection measures. Specifically, we support the passage of legislation to combat voter suppression (such as voter caging, voter roll purging, the disenfranchisement of former felons and draconian polling place photo ID restrictions), increase transparency in vote casting and counting, and reform of campaign finance rules in federal elections. In addition, a strong, national paper ballot requirement, to be fully implemented by 2012, will protect the national electorate in time for the next presidential election and mitigate the growing threat from Internet voting. The recent attempted monopoly of our elections by the merger of ES&S and Diebold/Premier (which fortunately was overturned by the Justice Department) makes clear the need for the federal government to offer strong incentives for states to oversee their own public elections using hand-marked paper ballots without reliance on private corporations and vendors using secret software. On April 29, 2010, a bi-partisan group of Congress members from both houses introduced the DISCLOSE Act to mitigate the corrosive effects of unlimited corporate funding on public elections. The following day, President Obama issued a statement supporting the bill. We also strongly support this bill as a first step toward protecting the fairness and integrity of our elections on behalf of the citizenry — We the People. Building on the DISCLOSE Act, our campaign will support the passage of existing legislation to stop purging, caging, disenfranchisement of felons and much more that is needed to ensure the self-governance envisioned by our Founders in the U.S. Constitution.

5 thoughts on “About”
  1. I just started a MoveOn Petition. If you see fit to broadcast it to your email lists and post it on your web-sites, it will gain traction much more quickly than anything I can do alone.

    Demand GOP State Officials & Trump Stop Obstructing the Recounts!
    http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/demand-gop-state-officials?source=c.em.cp&r_by=4501132.

    You may also be interested in helping this one:

    Ask Clinton and the Democrats to Fund 2016 Recounts
    http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/sign/ask-clinton-the-democrats?source=s.icn.fb&fb_test=50&r_by=17172373

    Thank you for your terrific work and your help!

  2. https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/videos/10154934322417128/
    Demand a Re-vote, Demand an investigation into the stolen election. Seth Millstein in Bustle argues why an official revote is unlikely to be furnished by Republicans, but an unofficial but officially conducted revote could provide irrefutable evidence of vote suppression.

    Reforming the electoral college is important given the three million votes Hillary was ahead by in the popular votes that got counted. However what about the six million popular votes that did not get counted ?

    Citizens should demand a re-vote and an impartial external investigation. Too many questions are raised about electoral fraud perpetrated by Trump and his cronies as evidenced by journalist Greg Palast https://www.gregpalast.com

    in his book and film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits; the film is currently available for free online at https://www.facebook.com/GregPalastInvestigates/videos/10154934322417128/

    Also see Ari Berman’s article in The Nation House Republicans Just Voted to Eliminate the Only Federal Agency That Makes Sure Voting Machines Can’t Be Hacked : https://www.thenation.com/article/house-republicans-just-voted-to-eliminate-the-only-federal-agency-that-makes-sure-voting-machines-cant-be-hacked/ Of course the integrity of any agency founded by Karl Rove’s Help America Vote Act should be questioned.

    Is an old fashioned investigative journalist Greg Palast and the BBC British Broadcasting Corporation that he works for and represents, more lacking in credibility than the US monopolized corporate media ? Does the voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr also lack credibility ?

    Palast and Robert F Kennedy Jr believe that there were on the order of 6 million stolen votes by voter suppression using such methods as interstate crosscheck in which there were 7 million names on the crosscheck list where a John Edward Brown in Mississippi would get deliberately confused with John Emmanuel Brown in Rhode Island although they are different people with different social security numbers. It is hard to believe Trump is not aware of this when he talks about people “voting twice or three times”. Trump’s deception would seem outrageous. Palast estimates a million votes were purged using crosscheck, The method is blatantly illegal and yet the Republicans seem to have gotten away with it because the Democrats have used voter suppression themselves in the primaries Dem vs Dem and in the south where politicians don’t want to seem too sympathetic to the black voters and also perhaps the Dems don’t want John Podesta to look like an idiot. The REAL Election Hack Exposed… – YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVBextju7jY

    Is this massive voter suppression not a form of fraudulent theft of the vote and thus a form of electoral fraud ?

    Does that give Dems or Republicans the right to steal our votes ?

    Citizens should be demanding an external impartial investigation and a revote with ranked preference voting as advocated by Jill Stein, and with Bernie’s name back on the ballot, given the evidence of suppression of Bernie votes in the primaries.

    How is it that the Democrats and the corporate controlled media did not report this scandal ? The mainstream media gave more air time to an empty stage when Trump was 45 minutes late than they gave to Bernie Sanders in the whole election although Sanders had the largest audiences of any candidate ? Does the mutual silence, guilt and corruption of the Democrats, Republicans and the media give them the right to rob Americans of their vote ?

    There were thousands of votes that the machines were incapable of processing that a human eye could easily interpret that were recounted by the same faulty machines, not a legitimate recount at all. Then of course the recount was blocked in two states, so what are they hiding ?

    A decade ago Scientific American ran an article about mathematical ways to insure every vote counts using crytography etc. We should not rely on any one way or any machine but rather have mutliple redundant means including statistical methods to recount the vote along the ranked preference lines advocated by Jill Stein.

    Despite multiple challenges to the results in 10 different states by House Democrats from the Progressive and Black Caucuses, which admittedly were procedural technicalities that did not address the issues Palast is investigating, not one U.S. Senator (Democratic, Republican or, yes, Independent) stepped up to join them, as required by the Constitution, for an official challenge to the results. What is the reason for this silence and is it not a bit disgraceful ? Palast’s report from Michigan to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! ( By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted? ) at http://www.gregpalast.com gives one little reason to feel complacent.

    One recalls an article by Tom Flocco from 2004 about hacking the Presidency
    http://boards.cannabis.com/threads/hacking-the-presidency-tom-flocco.7162/
    “So now we have someone (Jeffrey Dean) who’s admitted that he’s been blackmailed over killing someone, who pleaded guilty to 23 counts of embezzlement, who is given the position of senior programmer of the (Diebold) GEMS central tabulator system that counts approximately 50 percent of the votes in the (Bush-Kerry) election, in 30 states, both paper ballot and touch screen,” said Stephenson. Has so much changed since then to give one faith in the integrity of the voting machines or the billionaires behind them ? Are Americans now to say Welcome to the banana republic of the United States, one nation under corporate greed and ignorance, with corporate dictatorship for all? Is that not Disgraceful ? We must not allow vultures who made millions ripping off victims of the civil war in the Congo of aid money meant for their medicines, ripping off indigenous peoples in the US and elsewhere and their billionaire friends, to buy the election so that they can make more billions ramming a filthy toxic Keystone tar sands pipeline from Canada to Louisiana.

    A joint congressional investigation which presently does not exist does not seem to be enough of a response when that same congress was not legitimately elected. Same is true of a Supreme Court decision when the Supreme court justices were appointed by coup. We must demand a revote !

    Are we to accept climate change deniers illegally taking power when there is the real possibility that
    Plankton Will Stop Making Oxygen By End Of Century – Russ George
    http://russgeorge.net/2016/06/17/plankton-will-stop-making-oxygen-by-end-of-century/ ?

    O2 Dropping Faster than CO2 Rising
    http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php

    If you please Senator, I would like an explanation for the silence surrounding the injustice and crime of potentially 6 million illegally purged votes in the 2016 election.

    And by the way, I have not yet received any answer to these questions from Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders and am wondering what it will take to get some ?

    I would like your thoughts on these issues,

    Thank you for your attention,

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