Imagine for example if you could:

• - secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software;
• - centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;
• - legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;
• - establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election – at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level;
• - get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control – removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans.

And imagine further that you;

• - install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in.

For the sake of argument most of the above can be taken as read - in fact each of these statements is demonstrably true in relation to the vast majority of the currently deployed vote counting machinery in the United States.

Back to "Sludge Report #154 - Bigger Than Watergate (July 2003)":

"Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum.

Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of your activities.

Such a system would enable you to target and remove individual political opponents who were too successful, too popular or too inquisitive.

And most importantly of all, such a system would enable you to accomplish all the above without the public being in the least aware of what you were doing. When confronted with the awfulness of your governmental program they would be forced to concede that at least it is the result of a democratic process.

Now lets project the above theory onto what actually happened in 2004.

In practical terms votes in all elections are always counted in some kind of predictable order. There is a pattern to these things:

• Small precincts report quickly.
• East coast precincts report early. Pacific ones at least 2 hours later.
• Precincts with some kinds of machinery (say touch-screens) may report slower than those with other kinds of machinery (say optical scans).
• Statistically observed voting phenomena in turnout in areas counted on the east coast can give you a fairly clear idea of what overall turnout is likely to be.

And so everybody who watched the last election can know this information and can project the result on that basis - this is what all the boffins are doing in the background on election night playing with their computers. (Lets leave aside for a moment the fact that the base figures from last years election may already be corrupted.)

Then if you also have access to the exit polls, you have an extra layer of information arriving during the day on election day.

The exit polls tell you precinct by precinct how people have actually voted and why.

With exit poll data picking election results for big presidential style elections becomes child's play.

This is why in the recent French Presidential election the result was announced as soon as the polls closed. While this may seem somewhat disrespectful to the voters America is one of the few places where multimillion dollar scientific exit polls fail repeatedly and spectacularly to pick the result.

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