the intention of the voters, or not, should not be a matter of belief, but of the hard evidence of COUNTING votes. The new electronic voting systems are designed to deny us that evidence.
After the 2000 stolen election, which the Supreme Court, in a highly unusual interference in state law, stopped the vote count in an election that Gore had won, the Bushites set out to install an election system, nationwide, that could not be recounted--with the so-called "Help America Vote Act" (H.A.V.A.), which encouraged and funded the use of highly insecure, hackable electronic voting machines, manufactured by rightwing Bushite corporations, who own and control the 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code by which votes are 'tabulated'--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. In 2004, the non-transparency of this system was compounded by there being no paper trail (let alone a real paper ballot backup) in one third of the country, and woefully inadequate audit/recount procedures everywhere else. The Bushites prevented a paper trail requirement in Congress--Tom Delay bottled it up in committee--and the Bushite companies lobbied against it in the states, their lavish lobbying to profit from the $4 billion H.A.V.A. boondoggle being one other scandalous aspect of this coup, producing serious corruption of election officials at the state/local level.
The Bush junta set out to compromise and corrupt our election system, and they succeeded. They deliberately underfunded HAVA's oversight group, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), to delay and obstruct even the inadequate testing and verification procedures that HAVA included.
My mantra: If they had wanted a transparent election in 2004, why didn't we have one? It's not that diffcult. They did not want it. They wanted an election system that could easily be manipulated by Bush's buds at Diebold and ES&S.
And they did not succeed in compromising and corrupting our election system without the help of some Democratic leaders--such as Christopher Dodd in the Senate, and Connie McCormack, head of Los Angeles elections, both of whom are advocates for paperless electronic voting and for citizens trusting private corporations to count their votes behind a veil of "trade secret" code, and furthermore behind a facade of esoteric computer gobble-de-gook that entirely obscures the act of counting votes and makes it incomprehensible to ordinary voters.
Connie McCormack once remarked of voting rights advocate Kim Alexander, "She's not a professional." Kim is an expert on electronics in government and runs a public information web site on the issue. That sneer of McCormack's--that lordly foot on the necks of peon voters and their advocates--was very telling. That is now the attitude of many election officials: 'you can't possibly understand how your votes are being counted; just leave it to us.' These election officials have become too powerful--with our elected representatives possibly even being afraid of them--which is inherently corrupt, but added to this are events such as took place at the Beverly Hilton this August (with McCormack as a featured speaker)--a week of fun, sun and high end shopping for election officials from around the country, sponsored by Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia.
Unverifiable elections and doctored exit polls
Added to this also is "revolving door" employment. Diebold's former chief salesperson in California, Deborah Sieler (McCormack's best friend), is now assistant registrar in San Joaquin county, and former Republican CA sec of state, Bill Jones, and his chief aide Alfie Charles, now work for Sequoia. (Former Dem CA sec of state, Kevin Shelley, whom these Diebold advocates forced out of office in early 2005--because he had sued Diebold and demanded to see their source code--forbade "revolving door" employment in his office.)
In addition to this utter fraudulence in the design of electronic voting systems (which do NOT have to be non-transparent--Venezuela, for instance, has electronic voting with open source code), we have the shocking phenomenon of the war profiteering corporate news monopolies acting in concert, late on election day 2004, to CHANGE their own exit poll results (Kerry won) to FIT the results of Diebold's and ES&S's secret formulae (Bush won), thus destroying the verification function of exit polls, and, in both cases--Diebold's and ES&S's secret vote counting software, and the doctoring of the exit polls--the American people were thus kept in the dark about the unreliability of the numbers that they are shown on their TV screens.
The legitimacy of the 2004 election 'results'
We're living within "The Matrix," in other words, with our election system having become one of the illusions by which we are manipulated. There is nothing at all legitimate about Bush's "re-election." It was non-transparent, unrecountable and invalid. It is legitimate only in the very technical sense, that secretaries of state produced 'statements of the vote,' the state's electors met and voted, and reported to Congress, and Congress 'accepted' their assertions of which candidate the majority of the state's voters had voted for. In this sense, Bush is the president. But it is a legal technicality whose substantive content is based on, literally, nothing. None of the people who declared the results of the election were privy to the SECRET programming code by which the votes were 'tabulated.'
The Democrats
I have a close friend, whom I hadn't seen in a while, to whom I was explaining all of this the other day, and she said, "But surely the Democrats wouldn't let that happen."
My reply is that they DID let it happen. Those are the facts of our election system. And the question is not "how could they?" but rather, "why did they?". Ignorance? Stupidity? Fear? Corruption? Inattention? They're too busy raising their own salaries, and collecting campaign contributions from their corporate sponsors, to care? They like Bush's war? What? (I think the answer is complex.) As for not saying that the election was a fraud NOW, I'm willing to give some of them some room (Conyers, for instance), because I think it involves serious crime, of a magnitude we have never before seen in this country, and investigating it--and going public with it--may be very dangerous.
I have never blamed John Kerry for conceding the election so quickly (appalling though the experience was)--and cannot blame him, and will not--until I know a lot more about that decision. He was opposing extremely dangerous people who would stop at nothing to gain and retain power. We have suffered four political assassinations of antiwar figures in this country: JFK, MLK, RFK and Paul Wellstone (in my opinion). Us ordinary folks don't have targets painted on our backs (that we know of), or on that of family members. Although Kerry wasn't exactly antiwar, he did represent the clear threat of removing the warmongers and war criminals from the White House--that is, to significantly reduce their power to cover up their evil deeds, and to intimidate those who would expose them. This is a consideration in my view of Kerry.
Also, one of the things I would like to know was Kerry's state of knowledge about Diebold and ES&S at that time, and about what the corporate news monopolies were doing with the exit polls, and who was advising him on these things. ModMom mentions 2002 as early warning. True enough. After Diebold defrauded Max Cleland of a Senate seat in Georgia, they should have all been alerted. Why weren't they? Whose assurances were they accepting about the new electronic voting systems, and why? (And if Kerry was consulting Christopher Dodd, then he was being misinformed--and why would he trust an advocate of paperless voting? What sort of "beltway" coziness was involved in all this -- if any--deliberate blindness, deliberate disinformation, traded favors?)
Certain facts about our election system are indisputable. Two rightwing corporations now control the nation's vote tabulation with secret programming. We have no effective system of verifying the vote, and the situation is worsening, not getting better. Diebold is now touting its touchscreens--the worst of its election theft machines--in California again, and in other states. There ARE citizen efforts to stop them, and I do think that, eventually, public consciousness on this matter will reach critical mass, and these machines will be thrown into 'Boston Harbor,' so to speak. But tremendous further damage to our country and to our democracy, and to the world, can be inflicted in the meantime.
"Proving" that Kerry won
In ADDITION to the indisputable fact that our election system is now owned and controlled by Bush partisans (accomplished during the 2002-2004 period), we know that their unverifiable 'results' for 2004 are the only indication of a Bush win. All other evidence points to a Kerry win--some of it external to the actual vote 'tabulation' figures (such as the real exit poll results, and the 2004 new voter registration figures, which was a nearly 60/40 blowout success for the Dems), and some of it internal (for instance, numerous reports of the touchscreens changing Kerry votes to Bush votes, with astronomical odds against that almost always favoring Bush, and expert statistical studies showing a big discrepancy in paper vs. electronic voting, always favoring Bush).
The Bushites seem to have gotten people like Kerry and Conyers into a bind. They can't "prove" that the election was stolen because the system was designed to hide and destroy evidence. And they have a very hostile corporate news monopoly press, which will gladly vilify them if they assert something that cannot be "proved" definitively and for which the actual perps--the hackers who did it, and those who paid them--have not been found, and may never be found. These news organizations routinely vilify or marginalize, or promote Rovian "talking points" about, truths for which there IS convincing proof. They would certainly destroy any politician--Kerry, Conyers, Boxer, Dean--who said the election was stolen.
These politicians spend much of their time and energy upon "the Matrix" of illusion that these news monopolies have created as our "political life," and feel they have to operate largely within its confines. So they end up saying something lame, like the election system needs reform, but most Americans don't know why, and the news monopolies are certainly not going to investigate or expose a crime that they were party to.
But our Dem party leaders (with Conyers excepted) have brought no urgency to election reform. It is not a priority of theirs (to appearances, anyway). Dean let Donna Brazile get away with a whitewash of Ohio, and a few buried statements about specific problems with electronic voting. To me, this is just mind-boggling, and inexplicable. Bush partisans controlling the vote tabulation should be a screaming banner headline on the tops of their reports and their press releases. But I have to say I don't know what they may be dealing with, nor their levels of knowledge or complicity, nor how they perceive the Bush crime cartel. It's possible that they are biding their time. That's very hard to know. But I do know this: We the people should NOT be biding ours.
What to do? What do we need?
We need "parallel elections," independent exit polls, statistical monitoring and other verification tools for '06 and '08, at least to gather evidence, at best to mount challenges of suspicious results. There has just been a referendum in Ohio on initiatives for election reform that had ridiculous negative results--60/40 in favor of reform in pre-election polls flipped to a 60/40 loss by electronic voting systems. This needs looking into--and exposure. And Rep. Bob Ney's connection to the HAVA legislation also needs to be investigated.
Meanwhile, there are battles going on in many state/local venues (where control over election systems still resides), where peole are trying to get at least some minimal verification procedures and to prevent the situation from worsening. The audit/recount procedures are designed for a paper system--not for the speed and massive vote stealing capability of electronics (which combine with the media's "instant results" and doctored exit polls, and with anti-public state rules, to make challenges almost impossible). You're lucky if you have a 1% automatic audit/recount. 10% should be required for electronics. And WHAT is being "recounted'? Electrons? What is the ballot? Where is it? The machine can't verify its own results.
Electronic voting stealing can involve switching tens of thousands of votes, untraceably, in a split second. State's have adopted these systems much too fast. They are not ready for prime time. We SHOULD go back to paper ballots, hand counted at the precinct level, until we have rock solid security in electronic systems. But there is so much money and corruption involved, that that is not very likely to happen. Removing "trade secrets" and private corporate control is probably the most urgent priority, along with a "voter verified paper ballot" (VVPB), or, less desireable, "voter verified paper audit trail" (VVPAT).
Even if you have a real ballot backup (VVPB), you still have the problem of getting a recount, which is not easy. Huge obstacles of cost and time--and the media's insistence on "instant results"--stand in the way. Getting a paper ballot backup is a pyrrhic victory if the ballot is never counted. They can still easily fiddle the election--although the threat of a recount might be something of a deterrent, if there is a VVPB.
Time should NOT even be a consideration. Transparency and accuracy should be the only criteria for election procedures. Canada counts paper ballots in one day. Why can't we? Is it not worth it to take a day, or two, or even a week or more, to insure accurate results? It is mind-bogglingly stupid to sacrifice accuracy to the glitz of electronics and TV news. If what I and others believe about the 2004 election is true, we have sacrified US soldiers lives, and the lives of others, and our own security as a nation, to our enchantment with speed. Our enchantment with speed was used against us to rush to the conclusion that Bush won--and to smear over and hide all evidence to the contrary.
We do NOT have transparent elections, and that is a problem that we MUST solve--on our own, without the help of the Dem Party establishment, it seems. Who ever would have thought that that would be the case?
Our Dem leaders mouth election reform as a platitude, but do little or nothing to achieve it, and in some cases are corrupt or fearful. This is a crisis of our democracy. If we DON'T get this changed, our democracy is over. It is teetering on the brink, as it is. So, what I would say is, be savvy, think strategically, find out who the good reps are, or those who are educable, and pressure them and buck them up. And put the fear of God into the bad ones. Diebold and ES&S cannot manufacture an election. What they seem to be doing is tweaking elections, 3% here, 5% there, and I imagine they don't want it to be too obvious (although in the recent Ohio referendum, they seem to have gone whole hog). So our votes and our support are still needed. Use them! Use every tool and method you can think of, to raise holy hell about this, to inform others, and to change it.
-------------------
See Bob Koehler's recent column on the highly suspicious--indeed, absurd--results in the Ohio referendum:
http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?custid=67&catid=1824For an easy to read pamphlet on the perils of electronic voting, designed for election officials ("Myth Breakers"):
http://www.votersunite.orgSee Amaryllis' post on the Diebold/ES&S/Sequoia event at the Beverly Hilton:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340For a project for expert statistical monitoring and challenges in '06 and '08 (they need donations), see:
http://www.UScountvotes.org 
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
