BRAD FRIEDMAN: …We are not going to be protected by Congress, or the White House. No matter who is in charge of either. The government is not going to save us here. We are going to save us here. We are the only chance that we have.

In fact, I don’t entirely agree with the notion that we need to throw more money at this problem right now. But that seems to be the only idea that most elected officials, and intelligence officials, and election officials seem to have — more money for upgraded computers, many of which will have the exact same problems of the voting systems and the tabulation systems that we currently use.

I don’t necessarily think we need to throw money at the problem. I think we need to throw people at the problem. The public. These are our elections, after all. Are we going to overcome this issue? Or are we going to sit around and pout because others aren’t doing enough.

This is up to us, if you haven’t noticed.

This means fighting like hell to register to vote, and to help everyone else you know register to vote. It means making sure that your registration is accurate. If you haven’t checked it lately, you might want to do that — make sure you haven’t been somehow removed from the rolls entirely before November 6th.

That means pushing election officials to allow every voter to vote on a hand-marked paper ballot, since every jurisdiction in the country has such a system that it already uses for absentee voting. As we discussed with Marilyn Marks regarding Georgia on a BradCast earlier this week, that’s true everywhere.

That means fighting like hell to make sure that you cast your vote on a hand-marked paper ballot, even if that means you have to vote via an absentee ballot that you hopefully deliver in-person to your precinct on Election Day.

That means fighting like hell to make sure that all ballots are tabulated, publicly if possible, by human beings. Which also means volunteering to be a poll worker, or a poll observer. And/or showing up at your precinct on Election Night as the polls close, to take photos of those little computer tapes that are printed out by the computer tabulators — just in case numbers, for some reason, happen to change between Election Day and the time they’re printed out on Election Night, until those votes are reported from the central headquarters.

This is the stuff that we talk about every day here. And you need to be talking about it to everyone you know, and you need to be working on it, as well. Just listening is not enough. You need to share this information. Share our broadcasts, share the news from BradBlog.com if you like.

But, you guys listen to me enough. You guys know this stuff. You guys can tell this to your friends, your family, your neighbors. The government is not going to save us. We are going to save us. We are the only option that we have, it seems.

As the old saying goes, ;we are the ones we have been waiting for‘.

No more waiting. Let’s get to work, people.