Open letter to the Hon. Barbara Boxer, Senator, State of California, USA

Thank you very much!!! I was afraid that you would do as you did in 2000 and not question the fraud-ridden 2004 election. But you took the courageous step of signing the challenge to the Ohio votes. God bless you.

I am sure that there will not be a chance that the 20 electoral votes in Ohio will be overturned. Too many Republicans. But there will forever be an asterisk beside the results of the 2004 election. There will be an asterisk next to the second term of President George W. Bush...was he really elected by the will of the people, or were there shenanigans?

It is unfortunate that there will not be a revote in the US, along the lines of the revote in Ukraine in which the will of the people was finally heard, and Yuschenko elected by public acclaim. But this is at least something. Something which will point out to posterity that our electoral process went very wrong.

Hopefully the next step will be real electoral reform, including the universal banning of "black box" electronic voting and the mandating of Free/Open Source software solutions for voting that create a transparent, traceable printed audit trail. I suggest visiting The Open Voting Consortium's website at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ for a model of F/OSS solutions for voting. When the code is open for anyone with the prerequisite skills to read, there is no chance of partisans adding "backdoors" and other code that could be used to tamper with the vote. Voting needs to be made more transparent in America, not less. The OVC solution can run on low-end, commodity computers...even castoff Pentium computers could be enlisted for the effort. The computers that normally wind up going to the recyclers can be diverted to use as voting machines.

Again, thanks for standing up for the disenfranchised.

Take care,
Michelle