Stealing Democracy

With Ron Paul clobbering the competition in virtually every online poll, and getting an exceptional reaction in the face to face campaigning that I've done for him in resent weeks, it was a little disheartening to see that he came in 5th at the Iowa Straw Poll. But the exit polling and the buzz on the ground showed a very different result.

Iowa Straw Poll Exit Poll ...

Ron Paul______37.01%
M Huckabee___20.85%
T Tancredo____16.72%
Mitt Romney___10.03%
S Brownback___06.91%
T Thompson____04.35%
D Hunter_______01.34%
F Thompson____00.89%
Rudy Giuliani___00.67%
John McCain____00.56%
John Cox_______00.45%

These results are particularly troubling when the fact that the actual voting took place on the now infamous Diabold (now called "Premier") voting machines.

Paul himself is a forward looking man and has declined any attempts to challenge the results. This is probably a good move on his part, as any attempt to do so would likely result in him being smeared again as a conspiracy theorist. But it wasn't really Paul's votes that are alleged to have been stolen. Those votes belonged to "We The People", specifically the people who cast them.

Further, attempts to cast doubt on the exit polls by saying that they were conducted by "obvious" Paul supporters doesn't seem to match up with this eyewitness account:

"I was at the Iowa Straw Poll and I did vote for Dr. Paul. I don't believe that the exit poll is completely correct, I do believe that Paul supporters would be more likely to take and exit poll, but I have to say the exit pollers weren't obviously Paul supporters. They were with an organization called the Sunshine Petition. None of them had any Paul paraphernalia on. There was no way to tell who they supported by walking by them and none of them said any thing about any of the presidential hopefuls. All they wanted any one to do was to fill out a slip that stated who they were and who they voted for so once the money was being handed out that your money would go to the person you voted for. The republican party of Iowa even showed up with the Ames police department to have these same people arrested for just trying to verify voting results. Since when do we attack people for trying to make sure that we have fair and balanced elections? I feel more and more every day that we just need to change our name to the USSR, because we are living in a country where none of our freedom is real any more." ~ Chris

Since this spectacle in Iowa, Paul has come in a respectable third in the Illinois Straw Poll and first in a North Carolina Straw Poll.

I know that the media is not giving Paul a fair shake, but there are thousands of volunteers nationwide that are attempting to make up for that "oversight". But the security of our democracy and our election process should not be subject to the machinations and deceptions of electronic voter fraud. To that end, I support a national effort to banish the Diabold machines to the lowest rung of hell that we can find, for without an honest vote, our democracy is nothing but a sham.