The great vote grab

I hate reading about our election process in a foreign paper. Here we are, a self-proclaimed super power democracy, and our voting system is now in total disarray.

This story out of the UK comes right out and admits what our strangely pro-government national media refuses to directly address: that the 2004 election was stolen:

Writing in the New Statesman way back in 2004, reflecting on criticisms of the electronic voting systems used in the presidential election that year, Michael Meacher MP pointed out that statisticians, academics and political analysts had highlighted significant voting differences between electoral districts that used paper ballots and those that used electronic systems. These cannot be explained by random variation. The investigators found a much larger variance than expected and in every case it favoured George W Bush over John Kerry. In Wisconsin and Ohio, the discrepancy favoured Bush by 4 per cent, in Pennsylvania by 5 per cent, in Florida and Minnesota by 7 per cent, in North Carolina by 9 per cent and in New Hampshire by a whopping 15 per cent.

Research by the University of Berkeley, California, revealed election irregularities in 2004 in Florida. These irregularities, all of which were associated with electronic voting machines, appear to have awarded between 130,000 to 260,000 additional votes to Bush.

Funny -- everyone in the world knows it happened, and they're all discussing it with great interest. But we don't talk about it. We wave our flags and shout 'we're the greatest democracy on the earth,' without even considering the fact that - without clean elections - we are no longer a democracy at all. The planet is littered with banana republics that have 'elections,' wink wink.

Computer programmer testifies about writing a program to hack the votes:



A few other interesting tidbits in this story. Did you know that we are one of the only democracies that allows private - partisan - corporations to secretly count our votes using their own proprietary software? What the hell? Add to that, the fact that most western democracies have independent election commissions that oversee their entire voting systems and verify results. But of course - we don't.

What the hell kind of democracy is this, anyway?

Most election ballots will be counted or scanned by only four private companies - Sequoia, Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Hart InterCivic. According to Robert F Kennedy Jr. (who has been doing the work Democratic leaders won't do,) three out of the four companies have close ties to the GOP:

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004."

Kennedy exposed all of this well ahead of the 2008 election. But of course, very little was done. Here in Indiana, those voting on election day will have to use these 'black boxes.' Apparently those who vote early can use paper ballots. Is it any wonder we have had record early voting this year?

The people of this country want change. More than even that, we want a return to fair elections -- to actual democracy, not that sham that we've been told is the 'best we can do.' Bullshit. Our ballots were counted for 200 years before these shady electronic devices, and democracy - government of the people - is just too damn important to be opened up to partisan hacking.

It better not happen again. Not this time. The entire world is watching, and everyone knows Obama is far, far ahead in most state polls (even if desperate, GOP-connected pollsters won't admit it.)