    
admin
Board Administrator
Username: admin
Post Number: 265
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 5:50 am: | 
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UPDATE: ACTIVATING THE EAGLES
Roll up your sleeves: Your workspace is right here at the dynamic Black Box Voting Forums: http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/discus.cgi
where you will:
- Collaborate with others to clean up elections
- Quickly find the latest news
- Locate state and local resources
- Question and answer pages
- Participate in "Help America Audit"
To use the forums: First-time visitors, click “Register”
ACTIVATING THE EAGLES: Here’s how Black Box Voting is helping to PERMANENTLY take back the vote.
"Doves, sparrows, and other low-flying birds gather together, but eagles soar alone and must be gathered one at a time."
You, as an individual citizen, are America's best hope to clean up elections. This does not always require a group. One person can make a real difference. Indeed, as anthropologist Margaret Mead said, "One person can make a difference. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
- If actions taken by Black Box Voting make sense to you, try similar things in your local jurisdiction.
- A Black Box Voting investigator may come to your area to meet with you or your group, to help educate you, share ideas, and fund-raise. For visits, we will select those who show initiative on their own, with creative ideas that make things happen independent of our organization.
- When we say "fund-raising," we are not talking about fund raising for Black Box Voting. We pay our own expenses to get to you, cover all our own costs, and whatever you arrange for fund raising during our visit will go to YOUR group, to empower action, purchase your local public records, and help your group succeed in cleaning up elections.
Black Box Voting is not using a top-down strategy. Typical national organizations issue directives to local chapters and affiliates. That is a corporate model itself. Grass roots activism, in the form that is most exciting, is activism that is not centralized.
We are more revolutionary: We encourage independent action that we do not control. We are looking for relentless, clever people, taking actions you figure out for yourselves, using your own common sense and whatever resources you can bring to bear. Our vision of democracy is not a pyramid, but a swarm -- impossible to decapitate, replace, or capture.
Before we will send an investigator to help you, you must show that you are taking action on your own. We are more interested in auditing and enforcing transparency than we are in holding rallies, and we are most interested in helping citizens who are self-directed, gutsy, sensible, and difficult to discourage.
If you are a computer person, like Jeremiah Akin or Leonard Schmiege below, do the things that your common sense tells you will be effective. If you are an attorney, like Daniel Vaughan, below, help a citizen file a lawsuit. If you are an organizer, organize, and if you are a mouthpiece, sound off!
Eagles fly outdoors. Whatever you do, don't limit it to the Internet. Go out into the real world and visit, meet elections officials, ask questions, get information you can't find on the Web. Few people do that anymore, and you'll be amazed at the results!
1. Visit the Black Box Voting Forums, check out current actions and post updates about what you are doing. This is leadership. By posting what you do publicly, you empower others to take action.
2. Make sure to register, so we can touch base when Black Box Voting comes to your area for training or investigations.
3. Link up with others -- Go to the forum for the state you live in, and post a "hello out there" so others can join you. Might be lonely for awhile. Invite your friends in. Scroll down for state by state forums
4. Be the media.
You can do it. Here are just a few people and groups Black Box Voting has identified already as "Eagles":
- Florida Fair Elections Coalition - Susan Pynchon - took the initiative to dumpster-dive Volusia County, examined documents, found a lawyer (Daniel Vaughan) on her own, filed a lawsuit to set aside the election.
- Palm Beach County citizens - took the initiative to drive all over the place getting election night polling results (which will be invaluable in the audit we are doing); took videotapes of police barricades; stubbornly waited until 2 a.m. (ultimately stonewalled) trying to obtain early voting records
- Vicki Lovegren, Cleveland Ohio - took the initiative to get information on Cleveland?s new Diebold voter registration system; analyzed the records and found evidence of arbitrary purging and strange data.
- Citizen's Vote Verification Group of Florida, and Leonard Schmiege, and Gyan from Pinellas County Florida - paid to conduct his own citizens test of Sequoia touch screens, pulled together local citizens to conduct a videotaped touch screen test for 12 hours.
- Al Kolwicz, Boulder Colorado: I picked up a large records request from the state of Colorado and saw just how much work Al has been doing -- there are records requests from him for one thing after the next, requiring transparency, focusing on auditability. He has done wonderful work, without waiting for anyone to tell him what to do.
- Jeremiah Akin, and Art Cassel, and Susan Marie Weber, and Linda Soubirous, of Riverside California. They emerged one by one, and converged. They are awesome. (Google them.)
If you are unsure how to become, or find, an ?Eagle? near you, have a house party. Start by assembling a group of people of varying skill sets whose judgment you respect and show the 30-minute video from Votergate.TV. Have a discussion, think of actions to take, and just do it.
Let us know what you're up to. If we can help, train, visit, empower you and your group, just ask -- but in order to qualify for a visit you must first show us that you have learned to fly, by taking effective, self-directed action on your own.
Our mission is to bring transparency and accountability back into elections.
Relentless.
Eagles.
You can make it happen.
We'll help.
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