HW 30: Citizenship Symposium 1,2 and 3

The Symposium at Keene State College that I attended was called "Citizens Gone Wild" and the speaker was Nancy Tobi. Nancy first started off by talking about Moses who led his people to freedom by democratic law. Nancy grew up in Lexington, Ma which is know as the birthplace of liberty. Nancy's speech mostly discussed about how the state of New Hampshire votes, and how their votes are counted. In New Hampshire all votes are supposed to be counted and sorted in an open meeting, but most often are not. Eighty-one percent of NH votes are counted by a secret vote counting software, which is not good because the only things that are supposed to be counted in private are the ballots. There are two ways that she discussed on how votes can be counted, a hand count vote with community counters, which is only about nine percent of how NH counts, and then the Diebold count which is eighty-one percent of how the voted are counted. In 2003, a CEO Wally O'Dell created the Diebold count and said "It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes". However; the people that run the Diebold count are not able to be fully trusted for these reasons, one is an embezzler who was caught for alterating computer forms, another was involved with the Watergate burglary and another one was also a cocaine trafficker. So are the NH votes really be counted correctly? How can we be sure that the vote counts are not be changed? We can't be positive, but one way to get the votes to be counted in an open meeting is to bring it up with a petition in your town meeting. What I took from her speech was that votes are extremely important to the well being of our country and that the ballots should be counted by hand and not machines because they have a larger chance of having "the glitch" and needing to do a recount. There is a 4.4 error rate in using machines to count votes, which is unfortunate because that error rate is part of the eighty-one percent of the NH votes.

The second Symposium that I attended was "Citizenship and Responsibility" by Tom Lantos. Tom Lantos is a Holocaust survivor in which I think it was incredible just to hear him talk because although the Holocaust was such a terrible time, it is still interesting to meet people that could survive a time like that. Katrina Sweat, Tom's daughter introduced him as one of the only holocaust survivors to be elected to serve int he US Congress. The main topic of the speech was "America did not teach men the idea of freedom, she taught them how to practice it". At first i did not understand what he meant by that by by then end of speech i realized that he meant that in America everyone is free and welcome to their own beliefs and morals and are not forced to anything where as in other places in the world they are not as lucky. However, America did not create freedom but it is one of the places that it is allowed to be used. Throughout the speech Tom discussed America's history and how we achieved our freedom. At the end of the session, Tom closed the speech by mention the two main things our upcoming president may do. Bring our country together domestically and rebuild the prestige. In the whole speech, just by listening to him, you could tell that Tom was enthusiastic about everything he mentioned, he never made his speech boring and I was interested throughout the whole symposium.

The other Symposium that I attended was called "Iraq Body Count: Real people Fake numbers". I was interested in this speech because first it was by Steve Clark, an professor here at Keene State and because, while reading Baghdad Burning I realized that I do not know much about the issues going on in Iraq and that this speech would give me a little more information to what is happening. One thing that Steve said was that "Iraq is not as dangerous than our nations capital Washington D.C which was quite shocking to me to hear because it meant that both places are almost the same. He proved this point by showing the statistics that just as many people that die in Iraq from the war is about the same amount as people that die in DC.