ohio-ukraine connection, redux

so apparently african americans really, really like fringe third-party candidates. read here.

seems that a number of cleveland precincts voted much more heavily for the libertarian and constitution party whackos than ever before--when nader received a total of 8 votes in two counties, this year Peroutka and Badnarik together got 378 votes! Wow!

"The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them. In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry."

uh, what about ohio?

so you may have noticed--or not--that we still don't know about the total vote count in ohio. interesting, huh? three weeks later? what's up with that?

nytimes has an article on that here

more to the point, James Galbraith points out that the same electoral irregularities that are causing such an uproar in Ukraine have been largely ignored here in the US press. here's his column in salon.

we know that the distribution of voting machine was manipulated on a partisan basis.

why is no one angry?

taking a stand

hello all

i have been pretty quiet this week (getting some work done), but also mulling over the arguments being made, quite vociferously, by different camps of progressives about the election 'glitches.' some think that there are too many "anomalies" to be truly anomalous, and that we need to have a recount in ohio, at least, to find out the integrity of the election. others are saying "whoa! you are just in denial! we need to fix the party! there was no fraud." examples of both of these can be found at:
www.gregpalast.com and www.thomhartmann.com on the 'check the vote' side; david corn on www.thenation.com and farhad manjoo on www.salon.com on the 'get over it' side.

but, i guess i'm going to throw my hat in the ring after reading YET ANOTHER 'anomaly' story today. in this tale, the optical scan machines read the democratic column as liberatarian votes. that's right, and you know how we know? there is a paper trail with optical scans, so when they did the handcount, the local race changed from being won by a republican to being won by a democrat. that's right. and note, the machine was manufactured by... (drum roll)...diebold.

now, it's a local race. but we know that this happened here, and that mysteriously, thousands of votes got added for bush in a county in ohio, and that, mysteriously, the machines started counting backwards in florida, and that many, many people reported (in texas, ohio, florida and more) that when they pressed the touch-screen for kerry, their vote was recorded for bush.

i say, let's have a recount. and while we're doing that, could someone please, please, please fix the damn system! let's have a uniform ballot, non partisan election officials, and verifiable paper trails. let's pour just one-one hundredth of the money we are squandering in Iraq into our own democracy. let's have full public funding of election campaigns, with spending caps, and free airtime equally allocated to all candidates. let's get it right, for once.

possible fraud claims expanding

ok, so we should keep an eye on this stuff. i haven't wanted to jump on it too soon, given my propensity for conspiracy theories. the exit polls just don't add up to the results, and there are just too many anomalies. read and see for yourself. many think that we just lost on gay marriage, that rove is a superhuman genius, that the moral values thing worked. other analyses dispute that idea.

anyway, for me, the theories out there for why florida swung from "537" votes for bush to over 350,000 just aren't cutting it, especially not with exit polls predicting a big win for kerry.

anyway, see for yourself.

in nebraska: 10,000 'extra' votes in one county

olbermann of msnbc reports "remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters." also, reportedly, Warren County in Ohio was contacted by Homeland Security, told it was on high alert, and their election official 'locked down' the vote count, which meant that there were no observers of the count, at all. warren county is a fast growing conservative base.

press "John Kerry", but vote "George Bush" in Ohio: "Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG. This was reported immediately after the polls opened, and reported over and over again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines were inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY." and in florida too.

votes in florida disappearing: "Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."

hacking would explain the exit polls in florida: "Franklin County, with 77.3 percent registered Democrats, went 58.5 percent for Bush. Holmes County, with 72.7 percent registered Democrats, went 77.25 percent for Bush. "Yet in the larger counties," Hartmann noted, "where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry…. And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the 'anomalous' numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big."

election protection log of problems

former employee of ES&S reportedly on the computer mainframe in Ohio, against all protocol

MIT number cruncher finds a statistical probability of 50000:1 that Bush would carry all remaining states by more than 4% after the 4 p.m. exit polls. Cites 4 possible ways this could happen: (1) Significantly greater lying or refusal to speak to pollsters in Bush voters versus Kerry voters; (2) Consistent/systematic errors in weighting demographic groups; (3) A surge of Bush voters after 4 p.m., in all states; (4) Systematic tampering/hacking of reported vote totals, in Bush’s favor.

demand an investigation here

hacking the vote?

so many of you have probably now heard about the additional 4000-something votes that popped up for Bush in one Ohio town (with only 680 actual voters), and the 4200 votes that disappeared in North Carolina. Now, some are speculating that the exit polls were perhaps not so wrong, after all, and that the vote was hacked.

check out the story here.

bush is on a Man Date?

hee hee. got that from one of the blogs. anyway, here's some info about how slim this margin of victory was--and why this election was NOT a mandate. it reflects a still largely divided populace, and does not give bush the authority to claim his actions are 'the people's will.' not that that will stop him anyway...

from american progress report:

ELECTION – NOT SUCH A MANDATE: Following President Bush's victory over Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday, conservative media followed Vice President Cheney's lead in declaring the election "a decisive mandate for Bush's agenda, and mainstream media outlets have followed their lead." In fact, the president's popular vote margin was the smallest since 1976 (with the exception of 2000) and, according to the Wall Street Journal's Albert Hunt, the president's victory represented "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Percentage-wise, Bush's victory was the narrowest for any wartime president in American history. And while President Bush did win more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, "Kerry's vote total – 55.7 million – was still greater than any U.S. presidential candidate in history prior to 2004. That means more Americans cast their vote against Bush than against any other presidential candidate in U.S. history."

on red, blue and purple

it freaks me out to look at the US map when it's just red states and blue states. makes me feel outnumbered, small, and scared. so i really liked seeing this purple map--showing the relative leanings of a state, putting into perspective just how red or how blue any particular state is. and it confirms what we know: that most of america is really pretty much in the middle.

and, it warmed my heart to read this posting on dailykos.com, about shifting partisanship in various states. take a look:

We may have lost the election, but the country is getting bluer.
Chris Bowers developed the Partisan Index to gauge the relative partisan standing of any given state. So courtesy of Bowers, here are the states moving from pro-RNC Partisan Index to pro-DNC Partisan Index:
2004 2000
IA DNC +2.1 RNC +0.2
NV DNC +0.4 RNC +4.1
NH DNC +4.2 RNC +1.8
NM DNC +1.3 RNC +0.5
OH DNC +0.5 RNC +4.0
OR DNC +8.0 RNC +0.3
WI DNC +3.4 RNC +0.3

Here are other states in which we made significant gains:
2004 2000
CO RNC +3.2 RNC +8.9
ME DNC +11.0 DNC +4.6
MI DNC +6.4 DNC +4.6
MN DNC +6.4 DNC +1.9
PA DNC +5.2 DNC +3.7
VA RNC +5.6 RNC +8.5
VT DNC +23.6 DNC +9.4
WA DNC +10.4 DNC +5.1

bah! to the red and the blue 

on the youth turnout

so, don't believe all the bellyaching about the youth vote being lame this year. apparently the young'uns did turn out, and did have a significant impact. check this out : at least 20.9 million Americans under 30 voted on Tuesday. That is an increase of 4.6 million voters from 2000. Four years ago, just 42.3 percent of young people voted. This year more than 51.6 percent did. Young people were especially active in battleground states, with turnout at 64.4 percent of eligible voters.

got that? in battlegrounds, turnout rates of almost 65%.

why we need electoral reform

Kerry Won
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .
Kerry won. Here's the facts.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).
Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”
But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Impact Of Challenges
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.
But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.
What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.
I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.

don't mourn, organize

there's a lot of crying, and thinking, and strategizing that needs to be done. here's some perspective-giving writing of late.

remember, also: we are not alone. half of the country, at least, is against the bush agenda. we need electoral reform to make sure those votes get counted; we need a reorganization of the party and a new articulation of its principles to get more people out there.

copied from: dailykos.com
'Don't Mourn, Organize'
by Meteor Blades
Wed Nov 3rd, 2004

OK. I read thousands of comments and dozens of Diaries last night and this morning. And you know something? I'm going to forget I read most of them. Just erase them from memory along with the names of those who posted them. Chalk them up to adrenaline crashes, too much rage and reefer and booze.

Because what I found in my reading was a plethora of bashing Christians, bashing Kerry, bashing gays, bashing Edwards, bashing Kos, bashing America and bashing each other. As well as a lot of people saying they're abandoning the Democrats, abandoning politics, abandoning the country. This descent into despair and irrationality and surrender puts icing on the Republican victory cake.

Why were we in this fight in the first place? Because terrible leaders are doing terrible things to our country and calling this wonderful. Because radical reactionaries are trying to impose their imperialist schemes on whoever they wish and calling this just. Because amoral oligarchs are determined to enhance their slice of the economic pie and calling this the natural order. Because flag-wrapped ideologues want to chop up civil liberties and call this security. Because myopians are in charge of America's future.

We lost on 11/2. Came in second place in a crucial battle whose damage may still be felt decades from now. The despicable record of our foes makes our defeat good reason for disappointment and fear. Even without a mandate over the past four years, they have behaved ruthlessly at home and abroad, failing to listen to objections even from members of their own party. With the mandate of a 3.6-million vote margin, one can only imagine how far their arrogance will take them in their efforts to dismantle 70 years of social legislation and 50+ years of diplomacy.

Still, Tuesday was only one round in the struggle. It's only the end if we let it be. I am not speaking solely of challenging the votes in Ohio or elsewhere -- indeed, I think even successful challenges are unlikely to change the ultimate outcome, which is not to say I don't think the Democrats should make the attempt. And I'm not just talking about evaluating in depth what went wrong, then building on what was started in the Dean campaign to reinvigorate the grassroots of the Democratic Party, although I also think we must do that. I'm talking about the broader political realm, the realm outside of electoral politics that has always pushed America to live up to its best ideals and overcome its most grotesque contradictions.

Not a few people have spoken in the past few hours about an Americanist authoritarianism emerging out of the country's current leadership. I think that's not far-fetched. Fighting this requires that we stick together, not bashing each other, not fleeing or hiding or yielding to the temptation of behaving as if "what's the use?"

It's tough on the psyche to be beaten.Throughout our country's history, abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, anti-racists, antiwarriors, civil libertarians, feminists and gay rights activists have challenged the majority of Americans to take off their blinders. Each succeeded one way or another, but not overnight, and certainly not without serious setbacks.

After a decent interval of licking our wounds and pondering what might have been and where we went wrong, we need to spit out our despair and return - united - to battling those who have for the moment outmaneuvered us. Otherwise, we might just as well lie down in the street and let them flatten us with their schemes.
________________________________
from Howard Dean:
"Montana, one of the reddest states, has a new Democratic governor. First-time candidates for state legislatures from Hawaii to Connecticut beat incumbent Republicans. And a record number of us voted to change course -- more Americans voted against George Bush than any sitting president in history.

Today is not an ending.

Regardless of the outcome yesterday, we have begun to revive our democracy. While we did not get the result we wanted in the presidential race, we laid the groundwork for a new generation of Democratic leaders. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, 'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter' ...

We will not be silent. Thank you for everything you did for our cause in this election. But we are not stopping here."
_______________________________
from Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation:

Progressives, who were on the defensive two years ago, added millions of new voters as well, and tapped a new energy and activism that will last far beyond November 2nd. The extremism and incompetence of this rightwing cabal has sharpened our focus to a razor's edge. But for me, one of the fundamental questions about this campaign has been whether you could defeat a terrible but clear incumbent without a substantive policy alternative, and this time at least we couldn't. Kerry offered intelligence, a return to fiscal discipline, a bulwark against a rightwing court, and a health plan that few understood. He failed to use the moral message of "Two Americas" to erode Bush's edge. He mounted a late challenge to Bush's disastrous war in Iraq--
but he also talked about "staying the course." That wasn't enough of a coherent positive, populist or moral message to complement the impressive mechanics. We've got to build a politics of conviction, of passion and substance. It's there but it needs to be built and fought for. And the lesser lessons, if that's the big one, are:

1) People really are confused and manipulated (we have a mainstream media that continues to focus on irrelevant stories--Swift Boat, Rathergate and all the rest--abrogating its responsibility to focus on what's important and significant; and too much of it keeps giving head instead of keeping its head.) This makes an expansion of the progressive media echo chamber all the more important; And,
2) Neoliberalism is broken beyond repair and people need to be offered a real alternative not just despair at this point. This is truly a non-violent Civil War between those who think government is basically screwed up and that they're on their own, and those who believe....what exactly? We've got to be much clearer on the latter. But this morning, we woke to a country at war with itself--as well as Al Qaeda. As America fights Islamic fundamentalism abroad, progressives are re-fighting the Enlightenment here at home. (The two new Senators from Oklahoma and South Carolina are leaders of our homegrown Taliban.)

This is war at a very deep level about how this country will proceed and this war isn't over, it's just renewed.

The American Right understands we are two nations, and cares less about healing than about holding power. A Bush wins forces us to understand, in a very deep way, what that means for us and for the values and institutions we care about. Not that they are wrong, or rejected or weighed down by "identity politics" or some other rationale for surrender. But that they are in desperate danger and we need to start thinking along the lines of how to resist, delay, deflect, oppose and ultimately defeat the assault on our freedoms. As progressives, we will need to marshal at least as much dedication, purpose, strategic focus and tactical ruthlessness

And we should be thinking about the indispensable work of resistance. We need to identify legislative and administrative choke points where Bush's initiatives can be blocked, and make clear to both legislators and their constituents that the days of go-along in the interest of non-partisan comity have to stop.

In the end, this election is about what kind of people we are, what kind of country we'll be. Half of the electorate dissents from Bushism. The election still represents an expression of the strength of opposition to the radical and reckless course Bush has followed, despite the ugly campaign.

Unlike 1972, when Democrats were wiped out everywhere--in 2004 there is an emerging progressive infrastructure capable of standing and fighting. Progressives should build on those structures put in place in this last cycle and redouble their commitment to economic justice, peace and environmental movements that can make real change.

_______________________
from true majority

Before this year, political campaigns were like watching a bad movie on TV without a remote to turn it off. Our job as citizens was to watch the ads and vote. That was it. What a difference four years makes. For the first time in decades, the number of people voting went way up. The number of folks who actually got involved in the election went through the roof. But the change was far deeper than that. Big money was still monumental, but little money collected online from lots of people added up to big money. More important, the things that really mattered in the end were accomplished by an army of regular folks. Millions of doors were knocked on, and even more calls to new voters were made. Regular people who were never political activists held house parties to share their enthusiasm with friends. Quite simply, politics went from something we watched on TV to something we all did.

What made all this possible? There were many factors, but an important one was the rise of a bunch of online groups like True Majority that make instantaneous nationwide conversations possible with the click of a mouse. This emerging online communitywas able to offer you ways to get involved, such as volunteering to contact voters, raise money, distribute information and create your own projects -- all with a tiny staff and an efficient budget. Regular folks with an e-mail address have proven that they can pitch in what time and money they can to create a powerful wave of change.

It really worked. Just look at the unprecedented get-out-the-vote efforts that produced record turnout. We'll need all of these new skills and tactics as we take on an ever-more-hostile environment in Washington. It'll take a bit of time to rest and regroup, and then we'll continue the struggle for social justice. For the first time in a long time,we've helped fashion a path that can lead to a real change in America. And that's a reason for hope. The next phase may well involve helping people build local initiatives and organizations around leaders who have the strength and commitment to champion compassion, justice, sustainability and international cooperation. Conservatives rebuilt their activist groups through devotion to a set of values they believed in and could communicatewith passion to voters.

It's time for us to do that too. So our pledge to you today is that this is just the beginning. We at True Majority will keep an eye on what's going on in Washington and elsewhere for our 550,000 members, and we'll keep offering you different ways that you can make a difference. You've shown that this can really work. We're very proud to have taken this great journey with you.