Time to figure out a better way -- a more American way -- to vote

"Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday."
-- WASHINGTON POST, 1/6/17


Shocking? Yeah, kind of, but the great surprise here isn't that Russia -- pretty much always a bad actor on the international scene -- would do something like this.

No, the real surprise is that conservatives -- Remember them? They're the guys who always hated Commies -- are in a complete state of denial about it. They hate Hillary Clinton so much that if they learned that Satan himself had done it and Donald Trump was a demon from hell, they would have found a way to justify it.

So they say it's no big deal. The Russians released Clinton's evil emails. Hey, the people had a right to know what she was saying.

What Republicans have been doing in recent elections is changing vote totals.

Exit polls have been extremely accurate. It's practically a science now.

In 2000, only one state exit poll was wrong -- Florida. The exit polls showed Gore winning by 1-2 percent.

In 2004, Only one state was wrong -- Ohio. But Ohio was much more insidious. There were 166 challenges of precincts sent to state attorney general Ken Blackwell. In every single one of those cases, Blackwell found for Republicans, either adding votes to Bush's total or subtracting them from Kerry's.

The exit polls had Kerry winning Ohio by 2 percent. Bush "officially" carried the state by more than 100,000 votes.

This is why all through the fall, I was saying that Hillary needed to be far enough ahead so that Republicans could not steal the election.

This is one of those things at which conservatives laugh and talk of conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats, but the fact is, they benefit tremendously from people believing, "Hey, this is Amurika. Nothing like that could happen here.

Well, the people who believe in this country aren't the ones who have been raping it for the past 37 years. The people who have been burning our fields and stealing our treasure don't believe in this country.

Many of them aren't even Americans.

Did you miss the quotes from the Koch brothers 2-3 years ago?

"Americans should be happy to be making (an average of) $35k a year. That puts them in the top 1 percent in the world."

"We lose one middle class job in America and we create five middle class jobs in Asia. That's a pretty fair tradeoff."

 It may be too late already, but politicians are not the real enemy. Cut the Kochs' strings and Paul Ryan is powerless. Cut Sheldon Adelson's strings and Newt Gingrich is nothing more than a mean old fat guy.

Want to make our elections more trustworthy?

It isn't easy, but it is very doable.

First, we get computers out of the equation. We have become far too dependent on machines and we cannot protect them from outside hacking. Even worse, if the people with access to the machines feel like changing the totals, there's nothing we can do about it.

We need to go back to paper ballots, and we need to protect those ballots in case recounts are necessary.

Second, we need to do a much better job of making sure that people who have the right to vote are allowed to vote. In Florida in 2000, the Republican election commission scrubbed 150,000 names off the voting rolls, and many of the people scrubbed were legitimate voters who had the same name as criminals.

Tens of thousands of black voters who had registered didn't get to vote, and George W. Bush won Florida -- and the election -- by 537 votes.

This time around, North Carolina Republicans bragged at suppressing the African-American vote with their new voter registration laws. They passed those laws right after the Scalia-led Supreme Court let them out from under the Voting Rights Act.

Some of the worst things in our history have been times when Americans tried in one place or another to prevent other Americans from voting. We didn't allow women to vote for president until 144 years after the Declaration of Independence. It was 100 years after the end of the Civil War that black people could legally vote in all 50 states.

Since the Supreme Court allowed some Southern states to get out from under mandates that made them allow black people to vote, states like North Carolina and Alabama, to name two, have made it much more difficult for American citizens of color to vote.

This really needs to end.

The generation now in their 70s grew up in the Jim Crow South, and one would certainly hope as they die off, things will change. But we certainly saw that electing an African-American president didn't put an end to racism. In fact, it seemed to wake up the racists for their last stand.

"I'm no racist, but ..."

Uh, yes you are.

"Some of my best friends ..."

Yeah, sure.

It's time to stop making it more difficult for people to be full-fledged members of our society. I'm not talking about people who sneaked across the border to get here illegally. I'm talking about people who are legitimate American citizens but are from a different ethnic or racial background.

Let's just say everyone who is 18 years or older and an American citizen is automatically registered to vote. Let them show up at any precinct they can get to and vote. W/hen they vote, their Social Security Number is registered. If it shows up at more than once precinct, they go to jail.

Anybody who tries to prevent them from voting? They go to jail too.

So third, we make it easier to vote. We make it your civic duty to vote.

Then maybe we get somewhere.