Standard practice was for the mayor and sheriff to hire “special deputies” (read: gangsters) to help “protect the vote” by taking it back to the jail for mass rigging out of the public's view.
On election day, in August 1946, things came to a head. Unarmed election watchers were beaten and one Black gent trying to vote was shot after beatings wouldn't dissuade him. It ended when the GIs retrieved guns from the local armory and pinned the criminals inside the jail – and then attacked the door with dynamite. No charges were ever filed, in large part because the captured jail also happened to hold voluminous evidence of election fraud.
By the 1948 and 1950 elections, the “GI Reform Party” swept Tennessee, supporting the forceful rebellion against corruption and threatening a repeat if necessary. One of the leaders in the post-battle period happened to be Al Gore Senior, who later led the re-merger of the GI Reform Party with a cleaned-up Democratic Party.
NEW INCIDENTS OF ELECTION OUTRAGE
The source of current citizen outbursts goes straight back to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Representatives shall be chosen by The People, they say. The People are sovereign over the government, they specify. Yet somehow, very large cracks appeared in the foundation of our country when votes, which had been counted in public, began being counted inside secret black boxes (computers), disallowing the citizenry from either participation or oversight. Predictably, when the government and its private vendors began controlling everything, trust evaporated.
61-year old knocks out voting computer
Pummeled Voting Machine
In Cleveland on May 2, 2006 a 61-year-old man named Marc Fenster was arrested after he beat up a voting machine. Outraged at being forced to put his vote into a machine that would count it only in secret, he reportedly pummeled the machine to the ground. (3)
Nowadays, the Tommy guns and hastily deputized crooks from the Battle of Athens era have been replaced with secrecy and a veneer of professionalism, hiding a process that is corrupt, incompetent and ill-managed.
Voting in America is supposed to control the most powerful nation in the world. It controls the public safety – the sheriffs, the judges (who are either appointed by elected officials or elected themselves), and the prosecutors.
And yet, no one can tell Anthony Sabo whether the voting machines he was forced to vote on are really authorized, or not. No one claims to know whether they are certified, or not, as required by law in Virginia to even use the machines.
What would happen if the Federal Aviation Administration admitted that it was impossible to tell if a given Boeing 747 was in an authorized flying configuration or not. The certification process between commercial airliners and voting machines is not dissimilar (on paper). But in the case of voting machines, not only have the most widely used models been found to be in violation of their own certification standards, and no one seems to be able to show us that the less widely used machine, the WinVote used in Virginia and Pennsylvania, is even certified at all!
And even if it was certified, it would still be counting Anthony Sabo’s vote in secret, without permitting citizens to oversee anything meaningful at all. And this is why Sabo decided it was so important to take a hammer to the situation.
THE CHARGES
Mr. Sabo was charged as follows:
