To the editor:

ALL American citizens everywhere, in my opinion, should have the opportunity to vote ON PAPER in coming elections and to have their ballots evaluated first and foremost by the eyes and brains of their fellow citizen volunteers (even if that will take a while). Run the paper through electronic systems as a backup, if you must, to evaluate the reliability of such systems and to detect tampering, where and if that has occurred.

“Back in the day,” as they say, just post-Sputnik, for self-preservation the American government invested quite a lot of resources in training young Americans, such as I was at the time, in Russian language and culture. It seems true to me that there is no culture that has contributed more to world culture than Russian culture, but, please, don’t be naive about what those wielding power over their fellow Russians have in mind for such as us Americans. I, in fact, love “Mother Russia,” having studied the language, literature, culture for a huge chunk of my life. I recently came across the book “Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union” by Robert Robinson, 1988, Acropolis Books, Ltd., which I believe is way out of print. Mr. Robinson “told it like it was,” over the decades. It seems what enabled him to endure was his firm Christian grounding. After my own multi-decade contacts with Russia, I have to conclude that “Russians” are anything but shy and tend to rush in when they sense a vacuum.

Don’t self-censor, please. Keep nourishing truth. Have blind faith only in The Man Upstairs. Two and a half years to go?

Shirley Iverson

New Ulm