elections were entirely fair and accurate. If so, this was due solely to the
civic-minded decision of the Republicans who built the machines and wrote
the software ("source codes"), to "play it straight." They faced little
prospect of exposure if they chose to "fix" the vote totals. The machines
produce no independent record of the votes and, as noted, the software is
secret. In addition, as numerous public demonstrations have proven, the
machines can be readily "hacked" leaving no trace of the tampering.
So it comes to this: whether or not the past elections were stolen, the
voting technology is now in place (and expanding under the "Help America Vote
Act") that will allow its designers, the writers of its software, and
whoever might have access to the "back door" hookups to produce any election
result that they might desire. Short of a confession by a guilty culprit and
absent an arithmetic or programming blunder,
there is simply no way that fraud can be proven after the fact through an examination of
the polling and compiling equipment and software.
To those who demand verification of election returns, there is only one
answer: "trust us!" And to those who shout "fraud!" there is the familiar
response: "don't be paranoid."
But while there are no direct means to validate paperless e-votes,
statistical analyses of exit polling can provide external indications of
election fraud. And in fact they have done just that as, for example,
one such
study has calculated the probability of Kerry's loss at less than one in
a million. However, we all know how much impact
these statistical studies have had on the final "official" results.
Zilch!
RNC Chair, Ed Gillespie, has a straightforward answer: abolish the exit
polls which, he claims, have been "proven unreliable" in the last three
elections. In other words: "shoot the messenger."
Then how about legislation requiring a paper record of each vote to provide
validation? The Congressional Republicans won't hear of it. Which
causes one to wonder, doesn't it? Is it just possible that they
suspect (as I am convinced) that if we had a free and honest elections, the
GOP would be burnt toast?
The bottom line: Will the Republicans cheat in order to prevent defeat in
2006? They can if they want to, and as we have noted above, their motivation
to avoid defeat is extreme.
3) The Democratic Party, the media, and the law are unwilling to do
anything about it.
The Democrats: As we all know, John Kerry, who promised to see to it
that "every vote was counted," threw in the towel a few hours after the last
polls closed, even as an avalanche of reports of vote total anomalies, of
voter intimidation, and of voting machine malfunctions were incoming. The
Kerry Campaign, sitting on millions of dollars in their war chest, gave no
support to the challenges of the Ohio returns - these challenges were
pursued by the Libertarian and Green candidates.
The Democratic Party's continuing refusal to face up to grim realities was made evident in the DNC's investigation of the irregularities in the 2004
Ohio election - released just last month. As Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis of the admirable
Columbus
Free Press see it:
[The DNC report]is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn't fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.
The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic african-American voters were rampant in Ohio's cities during the 2004 presidential election...
But the DNC reports says those factors do not mean John Kerry won the election, nor does it mean that the new electronic voting machines are unreliable - even though some of the precincts with the highest percentages of reported problems were outfitted with the new electronic voting machines...
The DNC was denied access to the voting machines and software, and to the tabulating computers in Ohio. Apparently on the assumption that what they cannot examine doesn't exist, "the fraud factor" does not figure significantly into the DNC report.
And so the Democratic Party is cheerfully carrying on as if nothing has changed since Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996. They are looking
hopefully to taking back the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, as they fire up "the base," and solicit still more contributions. They uncritically assume that all they need to do is get more voters to the polls than the GOP, and that the voting machines and compilers will do the rest - reliably and automatically.
Those poor, naive, fools!
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