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code, with virtually no audit/recount controls, is not an election. It is tyranny.
Add the rightwing political connections of ES&S, Diebold and Sequoia, and you'd be a fool to trust their results.
And that's even BEFORE you look at the evidence that specific elections were stolen.
This is not a "conspiracy theory." This is common sense.
And I would have to say that anybody who ACCEPTS the results of elections, under these conditions, has been very successfully propagandized.
When a political establishment acts to hide the manner in which votes are counted, and fast-tracks a fraudulent election SYSTEM all over the country (along with prosecuting an unjust, heinous war), they are setting up a situation in which anyone who cries foul cannot obtain slamdunk evidence that the election was stolen, because the "evidence"--the votes and how they were "counted"--is hidden away and unobtainable. The "votes" have become manipulable electrons. The "counting" is done with "trade secret" code--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. That's no. 1: the system is fraudulent on its face. It was furthermore achieved by filthy, unregulated lobbying of federal, state and local officials, eager to have that $3.9 electronic voting boondoggle from the Anthrax Congress run through their fingers. Money is power. Greed itself kills accountability and transparency, and does not care if our democracy is fucked into the bargain.
THEN--if you have any sense--you look at inferential evidence concerning elections conducted under these conditions, for instance, the fact that grass roots Democrats blew the Bushites away in new voter registration, nearly 60/40, in 2004 (where did all those votes go?), combined with the lame Rove/Cheney "explanation" of how they "won" (their GOTV "in the churches"--there is no evidence of the success of any such an effort); or, the exit polls and how and why the consortium of war profiteering corporate news monopolies who conducted the exit polls, using one exit pollster, CHANGED the polls (Kerry won), late on election day, 11/2/04, to force them to FIT the results of Diebold/ES&S secret formulae (Bush won)--an extremely suspicious circumstance; or the fact that Bush's numbers were falling at the time of the election (and Kerry's were rising)--Bush/Cheney did NOT have the oomph to overcome Democratic registration numbers combined with declining numbers which hit 49% on the very day of their second inauguration (unprecedented!) and have been sinking like the Titanic ever since.
I won't go into all the evidence here. I think it is an overwhelming case for fraud--and WRONG results in several elections--starting in 2002 in GA--the first all-Diebold state--where a 15 point lead for Cleland was reversed on election day, amidst a Rovian narrative that the TV ads questioning this paraplegic vet's patriotism were successful. That was nonsense. What was successful was Diebold's "trade secret" code in an all-electronic voting system that didn't even have the possibility of a recount (no paper trail whatsoever). And consider who was in charge--yet another corrupt state elections head, Cathy Cox, who did sales brochures for Diebold! How vigilant is that?
GA/Cleland was a test of the system, for foolproof election theft. The thing then spread like a cancer (via the $3.9 million boondoggle) all over the country, in two years time, so that, in 2004, EIGHTY PERCENT of the nation's votes were "counted" by private, rightwing Bushite corporations, using "trade secret" code, with ZERO audits in many cases, and very inadequate 1% audits in others.
I've gone back and forth about whether the voter purges and blatant vote suppression against black voters in Ohio (and some other places) was a distraction--a deliberate Rove tactic to distract from the fraudulent vote counting system all over the country--or was necessary to defeat an overwhelming nationwide vote to oust Bush/Cheney, in which the voters were outvoting the machines (which likely have to be pre-programmed to certain percentages of vote theft). I tend toward the latter theory--that Kerry won by a landslide, and that the highly corrupt Republican political machine that had been put in place in Ohio (Kenneth Blackwell et al) had to be utilized, in COMBINATION with stealing--disappearing or switching--votes all over the country, to produce a Bush/Cheney "win." Another possibility is that the old "dirty tricks" pols like Rove simply didn't trust the promises of the new fascist techies that the "trade secret" code with no audit would be sufficient--and created the Ohio vote suppression machine just in case, and triggered it just before and during the election, as a failsafe plan, or (another possibility) that Rove simply enjoyed stomping on black voters, and did it gratuitously, because he COULD.
Ohio was a clever business (for all its bludgeon appearances), because it in fact did become the focus of the few Democratic politicians who bothered about the blatant fraud in 2004 (Conyers, Boxer and a few others). And the "trade secret" code just rode under the radar of most Americans, where it still remains.
It is hella convenient now for Democratic leaders who won't challenge this privatized vote counting system, out of fear or collusion, to lament Ohio and pity those poor black voters who were disenfranchised, while ignoring--nay, actively helping to cover up--the disenfranchisement of the whole country. Suppression of black voters, of course, violates EXISTING law--the Voting Rights Act of 1965--and that there has been no accountability for THAT is a symptom of who's still in charge in the White House (and in Congress). But to disenfranchise EVERYBODY took a new act of Congress--the so-called "Help America Vote Act" of 2002--which failed to require ANY controls over this new voting system, run by rightwing Bushite corporations, and innumerable state laws permitting "trade secret" software with the public LOSING the right to review it, and any right to SEE their votes being counted.
The magnitude of this fascist coup--"trade secret" vote counting--needs to sink into our heads. It was enacted in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution, October 2002--at a time when 56% of the American people opposed the Iraq War. 56% is a significant majority. It would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was). The IWR guaranteed unjust war; HAVA provided the means to shove that unjust war down the throats of the American people. You may not have noticed that 56% against the war, back then. But our political establishment surely noted it, and took measures to deal with it. It was to defeat that great, peace-minded, justice-minded American anti-war MAJORITY--which has now grown to an overwhelming, epoch-making SEVENTY PERCENT--that the "Help America Vote Act" was passed. It was, in truth, the "Help America Vote for War" Act!
And every Democrat in the U.S. Senate (save two*) voted FOR it (HAVA). Talk about arm-twisting. Talk about fear. Talk about dirty politics and corruption. Talk about the "military-industrial" octopus and its need for oil, and its need for war. They betrayed the American people in that vote. They gave up on democracy in that vote. They have been the "Betray us" Congress ever since that vote. And now, virtually none of them can prove that they were actually elected. They are as illegitimate as the monsters in the White House.
Here are the corporations they handed our right to vote over to:
DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by CEO Wally O'Dell, a Bush/Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer" right up there with Ken Lay), who promised, in writing, to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush/Cheney in 2004";
ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture) initially funded by rightwing billionaire nutball Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things);
SEQUOIA: The third election theft player--which printed the punchcard ballots in Democratic areas of Florida in 2000 on inferior paper, to guarantee "hanging chads" (see Dan Rather's "The Trouble with Touchscreens"), and which employs former CA secretary of state, Bill Jones, and his chief aide, Alfie Charles, to peddle their machines--in an egregious case of "revolving door" employment. (Jones and Charles wrote the book on "trade secret" code voting systems and loss of public oversight of vote counting.)
These are the people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy. And they're STILL "counting" our votes. That's how we have ended up with SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people opposed to the Iraq War and wanting it ended, and a Congress that is doing the exact opposite. You do the math.
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*(Surprise, surprise! The two "no" votes, on destroying American democracy with "trade secret" vote counting, were Hillary Clinton and her NY compadre Charles Schumer. But before you get any ideas that Clinton/Schumer have any fondness for democracy, consider that NY voters are very attached to their old, reliable, and virtually unriggable lever voting machines, and this likely accounts for Clinton/Schumer's "no" vote, which they could cast in the confidence that HAVA was going to pass. Neither has SAID anything about the blatant non-transparency and riggability of e-voting, nor about the inadvisability of having rightwing Bushite corporations "counting" all our votes with "trade secret" code. And their records are otherwise very pro-corporate and pro-war. Their "no" votes were likely a reflection of this local NY issue--the lever machines. Still, it's one of the very few positive things I know about Hillary Clinton.)
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