Set your TiVo and Call Your Senator

Set your TiVo to C-Span. Tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, a joint session of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate will convene to receive and consider the Electoral College votes in the recent Presidential election. At that meeting, Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) intends to stand and object to the vote count in Ohio, based on several irregularities he outlines in this Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee (sure, it's 102 pages long, but the investigation found a lot of problems). However, due to the vagaries of the rules for Congressmen addressing the Senate, one senator out of a hundred must agree to give him the floor. Now, last election, no Senator agreed to do this for any of the many Representatives who wished to object to the Florida vote.

We have less than 14 hours to press one senator--again, it only takes one--into agreeing to let Representative Conyers be heard. Fortunately, we live in the electronic age, and every Senator has a convenient web form for fielding comments from constituents. Contact your senator is as easy as 1-2-3-4-5-6:
1. Go to www. senate.gov
2. Select your state from the drop-down menu
3. Click on a Senator's name
4. Find the "Contact" link on his/her website
5. Fill out the web form with your name, address, phone number, email, and comment
6. Click "Submit Form"
7 (Bonus Step). Repeat Steps 3-6 for your other Senator

Here's the text of the letter I sent to my two Senators. Please feel free to use it as inspiration, but Senate Staffers can sniff out a form letter, so when you write, please use your own words.

Dear Senators Voinovich and DeWine,
It has come to my attention that Thursday at 1:00 p.m., Representative John Conyers of Michigan will stand before you in the Senate and object to the vote count in Ohio, requesting that each and every ballot cast in Ohio in the last Presidential election be counted. According to the rules of your body, he requires the support of only one Senator for this objection to be heard.
I urge you to agree to allow him to have the floor. The idea of having every vote in an election is the foundation of American democracy, and Representative Conyers will come before you to advance that ideal. He must be allowed to speak. Is the idea of having every vote count so dangerous that the very discussion of it must be squelched?
For the sake of the credibility of the entire American government both at home and abroad, please be the one to stand up and permit Representative Conyers to speak Thursday.
Thank you.

You can read Michael Moore's open letter on the subject here. If we all get together and inundate our Senators with requests for this to be heard, maybe we can yet salvage the spirit of democracy in our republic. If we can get it straight here, then maybe there's a chance in certain other parts of the world where we are trying to instill democracy with a fair election. I seem to recall somewhere is doing that at the end of this month.