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- CLEAN
ELECTIONS?
by Stephen Crockett opednews.com
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- There is a growing sense in American politics that our system of
elections has failed in very fundamental ways in recent years. It has
become clear that the voter rolls have been seriously manipulated to
advance the political influence of the Republican Party in ways that
are certainly unethical and likely illegal. The vote counting process
has become corrupted in many ways. These issues gained national
attention in 2000 but the remedies proposed often were blocked or
twisted to make the situations worse.
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- The False Felon Purge Tactic, revealed by Greg Palast in his book, Best
Democracy Money Can Buy , may become common practice in future
elections. The tactic was employed by using the powers of the Florida
Secretary of State Katherine Harris to hire a politically connected
company to generate lists of possible felons that local voting boards
were suppose to kick off the voter rolls. The problem was that almost
everyone on the list generated were not felons but were legal
Democratic voters. The company was overpaid in a No-Bid process. The
Governor’s office under Jeb Bush seems to be involved. Government
records seem to be missing. Nearly, a hundred thousand legal voters
lost their right to vote unjustly and nobody has been jailed. Most of
these voters are still not back on the voter rolls. Katherine Harris
went to Congress in a safe Republican District that looks to have been
created just for her. The company that generated the “false felon”
list of Democrats to be illegally stripped of their voting rights has
received untold millions of dollars in government contracts from the
Bush Administration.
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- The Bush Republicans have pushed thru new legislation to give the
Secretary of State in every state much greater control over purging
voters from the voting rolls. Traditionally, local voting boards
controlled this process and representative of both Parties watched the
process careful in their local communities. The threat that partisan
Secretaries of States will use computer software to distort the voting
rolls in many states is very real!
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- Computer software issues are a growing concern nationally when it
comes to various types of electronic voting. The computer codes that
are use to count the vote are not public information in America unlike
other nations like New Zealand. They are seemingly more complex than
good government would deem prudent. Some critics think security
measures against tampering with the results are poor to nonexistent.
Some machines seem to be designed with a multiple set of books that
are difficult to explain.
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- The ties between ownership of voting machine manufacturers and the
Republican Right are alarming to Democrats. The role of Republican
Senator Chuck Hagel in the largest manufacturer of voting machines is
being heavily investigated by independent journalists and ignored by
both the Republican controlled government and Corporate Media. We can
expect little in the way of ethics investigations from the Republican
Senate. Almost nobody believes that John Ashcroft will really have a
serious Justice Department investigation into Senator Hagel. Democrats
expect little justice from the Justice Department in the Bush
Administration.
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