Data mining analysis is a lucrative business for political consultants. And LHS Associates is in it up to their eyeballs. They are collecting demographic
data for the neighborhoods whose votes they are counting in secret.
I don't know about you, but this doesn't make me feel too good.
In our relative darkness as citizens whose votes are counted without the benefit of sunshine and citizen oversight, let's consider what we know about these two lines of business.
There are two ways data mining intersects with politics: the good way, and the bad way.
The good way: Political campaigns use demographic data to help them plan their canvassing activities. It helps them identify potential supporters and potential opposition voters. This helps them to use their resources most efficiently. This is the legitimate area where census data collection and political campaigns overlap.
The bad way: There is only one area where census data collection and politics as expressed in elections overlap: ELECTION FRAUD. When electronic voting is part of the picture, the matter of wholesale fraud becomes significant. In the intersection of data mining and electronic voting, it is a simple matter of finding out where the opposition votes are, and programming the vote to deal with it. For instance, in the Florida 2000 Presidential Election, ChoicePoint, a data mining company, helped out George Bush's campaign by systematically stripping out (purging) 94,000 eligible voters - all identified as Democrat-leaning - from the voter registration rolls.
If there is a legitimate intersection between vote programming and census data collection, I'd like to hear about it.
ChoicePoint and LHS Associates are not the only two corporations in the nation that have married the two lines of business of data mining and election programming. It's not clear how large the trend is, but large or small, the obvious conflict of interest this marriage presents is troubling. All the more so when information about these private interests never seems to see the light of day. Where are the checks? Where is the balance? Where is the citizen oversight that fulfills the vision in our Declaration of Independence:
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
And why are 81% of NH voters agreeable to giving away their vote to Diebold Election Systems and to LHS Associates?
I suspect that most of them don't even know they have given away their American birthright of a free and open vote to private special interests. Ask the average NH voter how they vote, and they'll tell you "I mark my vote on a paper ballot." Ask them how that ballot is counted, and they'll say they don't know. They drop it in a box and that's it.
But if 81% of NH voters were to look at that "box" they drop their ballot in, they'd see it is not a box at all. It is a computer. An optical scanner programmed by anonymous people in Methuen, MA, to count their ballot in whatever manner they choose to program the computer to do so.
Things don't have to be this way.
If you live in a Diebold-controlled town, and you want to take back your vote, it's not so hard to do in NH. JUST DEMAND IT. For more information, see the Hands-on Elections Handbook.
It's easy to do. This is our country. This is our state.
This is our democracy. It's time to get off our collective butts and take it back. If you want to join us in taking back our democracy, contact the NH Fair Elections Committee at fec@democracyfornewhampshire.com.
San Francisco voters are not the only ones who should have all the fun. Let's kill Diebold in NH too.
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