This is Viewpoints for Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Paper trail

Ever since we, the Georgia voting public, started using the electronic voting machines, it was known that they have a serious Achilles heel. There is no paper trail to verify the actual vote. We can never have a realistic recount because there is nothing to recount. There is no backup system. If the electronic bits and bytes are tampered with, we can not verify what the vote actually was. We never know how our vote is recorded. That is unacceptable.

Georgia voting machines are an open invitation to hacking and fraud. No matter who wins Georgia in November, the election will be under a cloud of suspicion. The federal government. has offered to help states with outmoded voting machines protect against tampering. Georgia, a state without a paper trail, is considered to be the most vulnerable to abuse of all. Our Secretary of State Brian Kemp has spurned any change or help. That leads to several possible conclusions.

1. He doesn’t care if the system is compromised.

2. He already knows that the system is broken and is content with the results.

3. He prefers that there is no paper trail to verify the results.

4. He is totally incompetent and unsuited for his position.

Each voting machine has a paper trail of the votes taken. Those are compiled at each voting precinct and the paper record is submitted along with the electronic vote totals to the board of elections.

Unfit for office?

Hillary Clinton’s record of unfitness for public office has spilled over into her political campaign. She has repeatedly said that “half of Trump’s supporters” are “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic (fearful of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people), xenophobic (fearful of foreigners) — you name it.” The others are people such as those who feel that “nobody worries about their lives and their futures.” How can a person with such a bigoted, condescending and erroneous view of the American electorate be fit to hold the highest office in the land and to fairly take into account the interests of all the people? It’s not supposed to be a government by the president. It’s a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

My 9/11memories

It’s 9/11 again, and every year the Sept. 11 anniversary washes an array of emotions over me. In 2001, I had just joined South Dakota State University and was living in Brookings, a college town. On that September morning, I was at home and as I was getting ready for work the phone rang. “Hey, are you watching TV?” my friend Nitin asked. “No, what’s up?” I said. He told me a plane had struck one of the World Trade Center towers. I ran out to the living room and sat stock-still in front of TV with my wife, Nalini, watching in horror. But obviously, when the second plane hit, I knew this was no accident. We sat glued in front of TV for the rest of the day. That day was surreal.

My daughter, Silvia, had already left for school that fateful morning and cried at school, watching the towers fall. My youngest daughter, Nirti, was 2 years old, so didn’t know how to respond as dense smoke billowed through skyscrapers that punctured the light crystalline blue sky of New York.

In the days and weeks that followed, what stands out in my mind is the wave of patriotism that swept the U.S. I remember American flags been flown all over Brookings. I recall watching Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A” and Celine Dion’s version of “God Bless America” on TV. It’s been 15 years, but it all seems like it just happened yesterday.

Negative consequences

Many readers may think the goings on with the American Federation of Government Employees local at Robins are just a sideshow with nothing to do with them. They could not be more wrong. Robins Air Force Base is one of the single largest employers in Georgia, and remains the single largest driver our local economy. If Robins sneezes the state catches a cold, and Middle Georgia gets the flu. BRAC or not, the Department of Defense will downsize its infrastructure in the future.

Based on my prior position at Robins as one of the certifying officials for BRAC, I can assure readers the single greatest criteria for what stays and what goes is the installation’s military value to the AF/DoD mission. Nothing at Robins has more military value than the logistics mission, and no part of the logistics mission is more visible and impacting and employs more people than depot maintenance. Over the past several years the depot maintainers at Robins have produced sterling results. The C-130 production is better than I’ve seen in decades, and our Special Ops customers at AFSOC are elated. Do not miss the importance of that fact, or that it is due in no small part to the support of the AFGE leadership so recently ousted by the national union. Absent inside information, I cannot judge the merits of their action. What I can say is this: A return to the “union warfare” of the past regime has serious and negative consequences for all of us, not just the AFGE and its members.

God’s grace

In response to a sentence in the editorial of Aug. 26. As a resident of the Dempsey Apartments, not hotel, I find the services very accessible. First, bus route. Second, medical services. Third, eateries. Fourth, close to activities. It isn't my first choice, however, it is the first of two other HUD properties that I checked out. With 190 apartments there will always be people on the streets. Remember that but for the grace of God go you.

Source material

While the burial sites of few of the millions of people who died while enslaved in the United States of America can be located today, Macon uniquely has thousands of such interments in a city-owned public cemetery set aside for that purpose, before the end of the Civil War and can prove it. The handwritten, official Macon City Council minutes include almost month by month numbers of these burials between 1840 and 1865 (Books C, D, E) as excellent primary source evidence. These records are available at the Macon-Bibb Government Center at 700 Poplar Street.

This story was originally published September 12, 2016 at 9:00 PM with the headline "This is Viewpoints for Tuesday, September 13, 2016."