About Steve

Steve Alesch has worked as a software engineer in the Illinois 13th Congressional District for over 29 years. He has lived in Warrenville for the last seven years. Steve has a BA in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University and a MS in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology. He also taught a computer science class for two semesters at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Steve is a co-chair of the DuPage County Green Party (DCGP) and an Illinois Green Party Coordinating Committee Representative for the DCGP. Steve is also the DuPage County Winfield Township 2nd Precinct (The fighting 2nd!) Green Party Committeeperson.

Steve is also a member of DuPage Against War Now (DAWN) and the DuPage Chapter of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project (D-IBIP).

Steve has pollwatched and observed the central tabulation of the vote in DuPage County during the 2004 general election, 2006 general election, the 2008 primary election, and the 2008 general election. Following the 2006 general election, Steve wrote a detailed report on the widespread election irregularities that occurred in DuPage County, when over 10% of the precincts did not deliver the computer memory cards to the central tabulation center the night of the election, but instead the memory cards were left overnight at the polling places and had to be retrieved over the next several days. Steve was a member of one of the teams that retreived some of the memory cards the day after the election. Steve's report details that a large percentage of the memory cards not delivered that evening, by 22 polling places, were not properly secured and could have been tampered with.

The following is the ten page report, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to determine if any election fraud occurred, and the DuPage County Election Commission's (DCEC), in essence, refusal to satisfy the FOIA request, by demanding exhorbitant fees, that are unprecedented compared to the fees any other county in Illinois charges for FOIA requests.

Click here to read Steve's observations of the Nov. 4th, 2008 DuPage County central tabulation of the 2008 General Election.

As a result of these observations and Steve's over 29 years of experience as a software engineer, Steve plans to draft legislation when he is elected to Congress to have the US join almost all other democracies in the world and stop using computers to collect and tally the votes nationwide and instead use hand counted paper ballots by multi-partisan teams of election judges. It should be against the law to use these electronic voting machines for any purpose other than to help the physically disabled to generate hand counted paper ballots. We should also outlaw the use of the proprietary Diebold GEMS software which has been proven to have security holes that can be exploited to change the results of the election. It should be a felony to privatize our most precious right, the right to vote.

Why run for Congress?

"I am running for Congress because of a deep concern that if we the people do not wrestle control of our government, media, and both the Republican and Democratic Parties, from the death grip of corporate and big money interests, our children's generation will not be able to enjoy a liveable planet and the same or better opportunities my generation has enjoyed!" - Steve Alesch, 2007

Many of us are already seeing signs of this. U.S. workers today, in 2008, make less, when adjusted for inflation, then they made when George W. Bush entered office in 2000, which is unprecedented since the great depression.

6% more U.S. citizens are in poverty since George W. Bush entered office, and at the same time huge tax cuts have been given to the wealthiest 1% of US citizens. George W. Bush has given $30,000 a year tax cuts to people making over a million dollars a year and a $6 a year tax cut for those making less than $50,000 a year.

Since Ronald Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers union in the 1980s, union membership in the private sector has declined from 25% of workers to only 7% today. A declining percentage of union works in the US inevitably means a declining middle class, as we are already seeing. Under this President's Justice Department, companies like Walmart are allowed to illegally intimidate and even fire workers for attempting to form unions and the politicized Justice Department refuses to prosecute.

As a result of reckless spending and deregulation of our banking and mortgage industries by Judy Biggert and both the Republican and Democratic parties, our nation is suffering an economic collapse and near bankruptcy. President Bush's administration and this current Democratic Party controlled Congress has continued to give George W. Bush a blank check to continue the carnage in Iraq, even though the U.S. national debt is increasing at a rate approaching nearly $1 trillion per year. Prior to Ronald Reagan, the total US national debt was $1 trillion. President Reagan and George H. W. Bush added $4 trillion to the national debt in just 12 years. This president has recklessly added another 5 trillion dollars to the debt in less than eight years in office.

Then we have the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq supported by both corporate controlled parties and the current attempts by both parties to force the Iraqi government to pass oil sharing laws that would guarantee U.S. and British oil companies obscene profits for the next 30 years amounting to 70% of all Iraqi oil profits, which is unprecedented throughout the rest of the Middle East.

Both corporate parties are also saying they would consider repeating the same mistakes of Iraq in Iran. This is another country that poses no threat to the U.S., but has oil reserves almost as large as Iraq, so the two corporate parties can't be trusted to resist their penchant for illegally invading sovereign countries and murdering innocent people in order to steal their resources and expand the U.S. empire that now spends more on our military then all other countries in the world combined and has more than 700 military bases in over 130 countries (2/3 of all the countries in the world). Even putting the immorality and illegal aspects aside, attacking Iran, a much more prosperous country and stronger military than Iraq, especially since Iran has not had to endure 10 years of UN sanctions that caused the death of over 1 million Iraqi civilians during a Democratic Party administration, would be reckless. Iran also has twice the population of Iraq.

I think it's time for a new perspective in Washington D.C., the Green Party perspective. A perspective that respects all human beings and does not support oppressing people all over the world in order to increase U.S. corporate profits.

Endorsements

This candidate is endorsed by the following organizations: