Hw 30 Two lectures at Citizenship Symposium

This week I attended two lectures at the citizenship symposium. The first one I attended was the introduction of the symposium then a speech by Nancy Tobi entitled “What kind of democracy do we want? It started off with the mayor declaring it citizenship day the Tobi took over. Tobi is the creator of blackboxvoting.org. and also a resident of New Hampshire. The theme of Tobi’s speech overall was distrust. Her speech mainly focused on how Diebold voting machines are making a lot of errors. She said that they make up almost 5 percent of errors in voting today. One thing that really impacted me was how dedicated Tobi was to the cause. She was very serious when she went through her power point and gave many examples of places where there were miscounts and where recounts had taken place. The example that everyone is familiar with is the presidential election where votes had to be counted several times in Florida. Numerous errors could have taken place and the recount ended in a different president being elected. Another good point she mentioned was that the more recounts that are taken the more room there is for error. Tobi really opened my eyes to a lot about our democratic government. She used the term glitch which meant in her words a mistake in the counting of yes votes. I found this interesting, glitch seems like such a small insignificant word when in reality a presidential election is a huge deal that shouldn’t be called a glitch. One quote I liked from the power point was “the ballot is stronger then the bullet” said by Abe Lincoln. This really fit in well with Tobi’s message and presentation.
The second seminar I attended was entitled “Citizenship and Responsibility”. Tom Lantos presented this who was a holocaust survivor born in Hungary. One point I found interesting was he will be the only person to serve on congress that was a holocaust survivor. A quote that inspired me was people whom we have done so much for forgot about all the positive things and are only remembering the negative things”. This quote meant a lot to me. It really explains was the United States is going through. The U.S. gets a lot of bad press but no one wants to show the good press about how the U.S. has helped so many countries. This was one of Lantos’s main points. Lantos speech overall was very inspiring he was a man who had nothing and got everything. Being a holocaust survivor is an incredible thing to accomplish and I have great respect for anyone who overcame such a horrible incident. One part of the symposium that really touched me is how his daughter introduced him. She discussed his background and Lantos went on to talk about his election in 1980 to congress. He was proud of the United States and still believes in our country.