“He who casts a vote
decides nothing. He who counts the vote decides everything.”
- Joseph Stalin
Whether or not he said it, Stalin’s quote has entered into folklore.
For a vote to mean anything, those counting the ballots must have a
greater respect for the integrity of democracy than they have lust for
power.
Since Stalin’s time, the technology has changed. With electronic voting
machines, which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary
software, the count can be decided before the vote. Those who control
the electronics can simply program voting machines to elect the candidate
they want to win. Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote
electronically, you do not know for whom you are voting. Only the
machine knows.
According to most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call.
History has shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation
of a clear winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important,
the divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner,
and the stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those
who stole the election can easily put enough experts on TV to
explain that the divergence between the exit polls and the vote count
is not statistically significant or is it because women or racial minorities
or members of one party were disproportionately questioned in exit polls.
There have been recent reports that, because of costs, exit polls in
the 2012 presidential election will no longer be conducted on the usual
comprehensive basis. If the reports are correct, no check remains on
election theft.
Digital Votes In a fascinating article in Harper’s Magazine (October
26, 2012) Victoria Collier notes that in the old technology, election
theft depended on the power of machine politicians, such as Louisiana
Senator Huey Long, to prevent exposure.
With the advent of modern technology, Collier writes that “a brave new
world of election rigging emerged.” The brave new world of election
theft was created by “the mass adoption of computerized voting technology
and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that
operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability. This
privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge
or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood
crises in the history of American democracy. We have actually lost the
ability to verify election results.”
The old ballot-box fraud was localized and limited in its reach. Electronic
voting allows elections to be rigged on a statewide and national scale.
Moreover, with electronic voting there are no missing ballot boxes to
recover from the Louisiana bayous. Using proprietary corporate software,
the vote count is what the software specifies.
The first two presidential elections in the 21st century are infamous.
George W. Bush’s win over Al Gore was decided by the Republicans on
the US Supreme Court who stopped the Florida vote recount.
In 2004, George W. Bush won the vote count although exit polls indicated
that he had been defeated by John Kerry. Collier reports:
“Late on Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit
polling, and many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the
final vote tallies in thirty states deviated widely from exit polls,
with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but nine. The greatest
disparities were concentrated in battleground states particularly
Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should have
received 67 percent of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only
38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as
a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. To quote Lou Harris,
who has long been regarded as the father of modern political polling:
‘Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.’"
The electronic vote theft era, Collier reports, “was inaugurated
by Chuck Hagel, an unknown millionaire who ran for one of Nebraska's
U.S. Senate seats in 1996. Initially Hagel trailed the popular Democratic
governor, Ben Nelson, who had been elected in a landslide two years
earlier. Three days before the election, however, a poll conducted by
the Omaha World-Herald showed a dead heat, with 47 percent of respondents
favoring each candidate. David Moore, who was then managing editor of
the Gallup Poll, told the paper, ‘We can't predict the outcome.’”
“Hagel's victory in the general election, invariably referred to as
an ‘upset,’ handed the seat to the G.O.P. for the first time in eighteen
years. Hagel trounced Nelson by fifteen points. Even for those who had
factored in the governor's deteriorating numbers and a last-minute barrage
of negative ads, this divergence from pre-election polling was enough
to raise eyebrows across the nation.”
“Few Americans knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had
been chairman of the company whose computerized voting machines would
soon count his own votes: Election Systems & Software (then called
American Information Systems). Hagel stepped down from his post just
two weeks before announcing his candidacy. Yet he retained millions
of dollars in stock in the McCarthy Group, which owned ES&S. And
Michael McCarthy, the parent company's founder, was Hagel's campaign
treasurer.”
Vote theft might also explain the defeat of Max Cleland, a Democratic
Senator from Georgia. As Collier documents:
“In Georgia, for example, Diebold's voting machines reported the defeat
of Democratic senator Max Cleland. Early polls had given the highly
popular Cleland a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss,
a favorite of the Christian right, the NRA, and George W. Bush (who
made several campaign appearances on his behalf). As Election Day drew
near, the contest narrowed. Chambliss, who had avoided military service,
ran attack ads denouncing Cleland a Silver Star recipient who lost
three limbs in Vietnam - as a traitor for voting against the creation
of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days before the election,
a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a
three-point advantage with the same group.”
Rigged Game
“Cleland lost by seven points. In his 2009 autobiography, he accused
computerized voting machines of being ‘ripe for fraud.’ Patched for
fraud might have been more apt. In the month leading up to the election,
Diebold employees, led by Bob Urosevich, applied a mysterious, uncertified
software patch to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in
May.”
"We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which
it didn't do," Diebold consultant and whistle-blower Chris Hood recounted
in a 2006 Rolling Stone article. "The curious thing is the very swift,
covert way this was done. . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they
were trying to keep it secret from the state. . . . We were told not
to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly
from [Bob] Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company
would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
When the Republican Supreme Court prevented the Florida recount in the
deciding state between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 presidential
election, the Democrats’ response was to acquiesce in order not to shake
the confidence of Americans in democracy. Similarly, John Kerry acquiesced
in 2004 despite the large disparity between exit polls and vote counts.
But how can Americans have confidence in democracy when voting is not
transparent?
For now Republicans seem to have the technological advantage with their
ownership of companies that produce electronic voting machines programmed
by proprietary software, but in the future the advantage could shift
to Democrats. Early voting aids electronic election theft. Successful
and noncontroversial theft depends on knowing how to program the machines.
The victory needs to be within the range of plausibility. Too big a
victory raises eyebrows, but if the guess is wrong in the other direction
theft fails. Early voting helps the voting machine programmers decide
how to set the machines.
Voting 2.0 The absence of transparency is a threat to whatever remains
of American democracy. In the Summer 2011 issue of The Trends Journal,
Gerald Celente made the point that “if we can bank online, we can vote
online.”
Think about it! Across the globe, trillions of dollars of bank transactions
are made each day, and rarely are they compromised. If we can accurately
count money online, we can certainly count votes accurately online.
The only obstacles blocking online voting are entrenched political interests
intent upon controlling the ballot box.
The lack of transparency has given rise to election litigation. The
Washington Post recently reported that “thousands of attorneys,
representing the two major presidential candidates, their parties, unions,
civil rights groups and voter-fraud watchdogs, are in place across the
country, poised to challenge election results that may be called into
question by machine failures, voter suppression or other allegations
of illegal activity.”
Voting online, if property arranged, can provide the transparency that
the current system lacks. While the GOP might remain active in voter
suppression, the Democrats could no longer vote graveyards, and the
count of those who do manage to vote would not be subject to secret
proprietary software.
In 2005 the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded
that the integrity of elections was compromised by those who controlled
the programming. Proprietary private ownership of voting technology
is simply incompatible with transparent elections. A country without
a transparent vote is a country without democracy.
To schedule an interview with Gerald Celente, Trends Journal publisher,
or Dr. Paul Craig Roberts please contact:
Zeke West
Media Relations, The Trends Journal
zwest@trendsresearch.com
(845) 331.3500 ext. 1
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