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TO LEFT-WING JOURNALISTS: YES, IT CAN HAPPEN HERE
This article responds to the damaging attempts by left-wing journalists to deny the possibility of right-wing electronic vote tampering - or any e-vote tampering - particularly in the 2012 election.
In the past week, Chuck Todd at MSNBC News has Tweeted that concerns about electronic voting machines are "conspiracy theory that belong in the same category as the Trump birther garbage."
ThinkProgress, the left-wing advocacy and news site, posted an article with the same blanket "conspiracy theory" dismissal.
And finally, Steven Rosenfeld wrote a similar opinion piece - posted by Alternet (as "news" no less) and then picked up by Salon and Snopes - to further "debunk" concerns about stolen elections.
What are these journalists railing against? A flood of recent stories warning of the potential for massive computerized election fraud in the 2012 elections.
In particular, the breaking news of the Romney family's financial ties
to voting machine company Hart Intercivic, exposed by the FreePress.org, is so alarming that it's been picked up by many online news sources, and
even Forbes Magazine.
My 7000 word cover story in this month's Harper's Magazine, "How to Rig an Election" exposes the fundamental security flaws in our current voting system, including the right-wing partisan ownership of major voting machine companies. I also discuss many suspicious "surprise upset" elections that have helped tipped the balance of power in America toward the far-right. The piece has been positively reviewed in The Atlantic, Esquire, the Daily Kos and elsewhere.
Radio interview requests are coming to me now from Canada to New Zealand. Why? Because the results of American elections, particularly in 2012, have life-or-death global implications, from war in the Middle East, to climate change negotiations. The whole world is watching with great concern, even as international election observers are being blocked from entering polls in Ohio and other states.
Meanwhile, Brad Friedman at the Brad Blog.org continues his 24/7 exposure of not just the insidious threat of computerized election fraud, but the GOP's ongoing attempts to disenfranchise millions of "likely Democratic voters" through voter suppression, polling place Photo ID restrictions, voter roll purges, and other dirty tricks.
Combined with electronic control of the vote count, this kind of coordinated assault worked brilliantly on behalf of the George W. Bush campaign in Ohio in 2004 (as I described in Harper's), and could work this time for Mitt Romney, or any other Republican favored candidate and ballot issue. Hart Intercivic tabulates votes in key counties in Ohio, as well as some 12 other states.
This is why exposure of these activities and conflicts of interests is vital right now to dissuade criminal activity on November 6th by shining a long overdue spotlight into the darkness of our now-privatized voting system. We might very well prevent massive fraud in this election, while drafting more American voters into the non-partisan election integrity movement where they can take action.
That
our privately-controlled electronic voting machines are prone to constant
malfunction, and vulnerable to insider rigging and outsider hacking, is a
national crisis, and no longer open to debate. The evidence is overwhelming and comes from a mountain of independent voter reports, academic and technical
studies, government studies, whistleblower affidavits, ongoing
lawsuits, and arrests and convictions of election officials - some who were sentenced last year to 156 years in federal prison for gaming elections, in part by secretly
manipulating computerized voting machines!
Yet, despite this deluge of evidence, the most aggressive critics of election integrity investigators are not found in the right-wing corporate press, as you might expect. Instead, for many years, our enemies have lunged from the shadows of left-wing flagships.
Clearly nothing is different in this election cycle, when the stakes for American progressives could not be higher.
