Peacefully Protest Crimes Against Democracy

In the four years since the theft of the presidency in Florida the U.S. Congress has not restored confidence in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Instead, it has endeavored to spread and institutionalize the forms of corruption used by Governor Jeb Bush in Florida to secure the presidency for his brother.

A number of states in which Republicans control the electoral machinery used unlawful purges of the voter rolls to suppress the number of lawfully recorded Democratic votes.

A number of states in which Republicans control the electoral machinery now use voting machine technologies that are unauditable and unverifiable.

Republican Party organizations and affiliates nationwide have now adopted the voter suppression techniques used in Florida, including intimidation, misinformation, inadequately staffed and equipped polling places and the misappropriation of public resources in order to be able to claim to have won elections in which its candidates did not, in fact, win a majority of the votes cast by legitimately qualified U.S. citizens.

The Help America Votes Act (HAVA) made the problem worse by subsidizing the costs for local election authorities to purchase and deploy machinery that is more easily manipulated than the technologies being replaced.

We, the undersigned, have lost confidence in the legitimacy of the American electoral machinery, which we believe fails to meet the minimal standards necessary for a nation proud of its democratic heritage.

We believe that majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are more loyal to their political party than they are to America's democratic political traditions, and that they will block or redirect any efforts to institute free and fair elections in the U.S.

Therefore, we pledge to rally and gather lawfully in public places until and unless we receive an open and clear recount of the votes cast for President of the United States on November 2, 2004.

We call upon federal, state and local law enforcement officials to investigate these crimes against democracy, and to use their subpoena power and other investigatory tools to break the conspiracy of silence.

We respectfully request that should the evidence of direct and deliberate involvement in an attempt to mislead the American people into believing they had chosen a candidate who did not, in fact, legitimately secure the presidency, that the criminals who conspired should be charged with treason against the United States of America.

Further, we respectfully request that the provision in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on the disenfranchisement of citizens be invoked, so that states that deliberately prevented citizens from casting ballots for the presidency or deliberately miscounted or misreported those votes should lose representation in the U.S. Congress in proportion to the number of citizens disenfranchised.