All politics is local. Except the act of voting. Which may seem local when you go to your polling place and see your friends and neighbors and the familiar faces of your pollworkers. But the machines we vote on don't come from the machine shop down the street. They come from large corporations such as ES&S and Premier Election Solutions (formally known as Diebold - you can run Diebold, but you can't hide!) whose power structure runs deep.

The U.S. government has handed over the operation of our elections to private companies and by doing so have also handed over the fundamental fairness and equality of the system - without proper oversight and to the manufacturers of machines that do not even meet the same quality standards of gaming consoles, ATM machines, or lottery systems.

Want to know who is responsible for our messed up election processes? Follow the money"-and the power.