Analysis of the US scene shows massive evidence of electoral theft from 1996
(Nebraska) onwards,
not just 2000 but
2002 (Georgia http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0091.html , Texas),
2004 Ohio, Florida and many other States, when Kerry won by sevenmillion
votes:
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/61/20209
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__060711_the_stolen_election_.htm
http://www.tpmcafe.com/discussiontables/books_table/2006/aug/06/was_the_2004_pre
sidential_election_stolen_by_steven_f_freeman_and_joel_bleifuss
and 2006
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_paul_leh_061111_exit_polls_showing_d.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2006/071106votefraud.htm .
One key archive is at http://www.crisispapers.org/topics/election-fraud.htm.
Of course election theft goes back a long way before 2000, e.g. JFK's dad
getting the mafia to fix the voting machines in a key precinct in Chicago).
By electoral theft I do not mean voter fraud, which the Republicans make a
big thing of, but for which there is hardly any evidence. I mean insider
theft by those controlling the elections. Three broad categories of activity
can achieve this, aways camouflaged as accidental phenomena, or claimed to
be random - though when the statisticians of the National Elections Data
Archive get to work on these 'random phenomena' a very clear pro-Republican
bias emerges!
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Presidential-Election-2004.pdf
1) Low tech traditional tricks:
As Greg Palast has consistently argued, the Republicans have perfected a
panoply of dirty tricks aimed at 'suppressing' the Democrat vote: e.g.
purging the electoral roll of likely Democrat voters, losing their
registration forms, intimidating poor whites and blacks from turning up,
frustrating them with long queues when they do, or challenging their right
to vote face to face, etc.
http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=2772&blz=1
'Muddles' in sending out postal votes, such as happened in Scotland, may or
may not be innocent and neutral in their effects, but they have previously
happened in US states with rabidly partisan election administrations. It is
worth remembering that New Labour has forced through huge relaxations in the
rules for obtaining postal votes, despite the widespread electoral fraud
which Labour supporters (predominjantly but not exclusively) have practiced
in Birminghan and many other places, and this despite being warned by the
Electoral Commission and the relevant Westminster committees of just such an
outcome. Over-ready availability of postal votes also breaches our human
right to a guaranteed secret ballot, nor is there any guarantee that one's
vote will make it to the polling station through the postal system, where
unscrupulous elements could intercept votes from certain postboxes or towns.
Steaming envelopes open to inspect their contents is possible, especially
when, as happened in Scotland, the huge numbers of people who applied for
postal votes found that the ballot forms wouldn't easily fit into the
envelopes supplied.
Designed to fail? Hard to say, and this also applies to the polling station
in Edinburgh where because of strangely defective ballot boxes the officials
were taking people's votes and stashing them in plastic bags behind their
tables! One further example on the theme of low-tech ambiguity: When I went
to vote in Craigie school in Perth my eye happened to light on a copy of the
front page of the Sun with a graphic about how voting for indpendence is
like putting one's head in a noose. When I complained that such material
should be lying around quite visible, the man in charge apologised, leaving
me to feel it was probably an accident. However Tricia Marwick, the winning
SNP candidate in traditionally Labour Fife Central, has alleged this was
happening at several polling stations in her constituency, and there is at
least one report of the Noose graphic being pasted to a wall inside the
polling station.
2) Confusing Voters:
Another category of election theft happens through confusing voters so that
their vote doesn't count, or is even given to the wrong candidates, e.g. the
confusing butterfly ballot which saw Jews voting for Buchanan not Gore in
one district of Florida. In this case the Secretary of State for Scotland
was repeatedly warned that combining two different elections (Scottish
Parliamentary and Council) on the one day would be likely to cause
confusion, the more so as it would involve three different electoral systems
(FPTP, Addditional Member top ups on a regional list - both using X's, and
Single Transferrable Vote for Councillors - using numbers). Although in the
past the two sides of the Holyrood ballot had each had their own voting
slip, on this occasion both sides were included on the one larger paper with
the instruction: 'You have two votes' ast the top of the page and only
smaller at the top of each column the words 'Mark one X in this column'.
Faced by a long shopping list of possible parties to vote for in the first
column (regional list), many voters used up both X's before coming to the
Constituency FPTP column. Others used numbers where they should have placed
crosses and vice versa. Altogether between 4 and 5 percent of ballots were
rejected, effectively disenfranchising 80-100,000 Scots and causing
widespread anger, including at the suspicion that different local standards
may sometimes have obtained for accepting or rejecting doubtful papers.
However it is unclear whether any party advantage will have accrued from
this massive problem.
This does not mean that this problem is of no significiance, nor indeed the
problems with postal votes, nor the problem with the failure/'failure' of
counting machinery in seven major counting centres, which had the immediate
effect of leaving exhausted activists feeling disempowered and cheated of
their late night hour of triumph. The possibility exists that the
significance of these hassles may lie precisely as distractions from
realising where the fundamental threat could be coming from.
3) High-tech Electronic swindling:
Outside some black communities, the largest strand of the dynamic Voter
Integrity movement in the US is the one which has focussed on the massive
evidence of electronic vote-theft, whether by compromised voting machines,
compromised counting machines or the transfer of count data via hackable
protocols on the Internet. A vast amount of work has been done on each of
these sub-categories, and increasingly the movement calls for hand-counted
paper ballots
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jgideon_061214_thirty_four_election.htm
because it realises that electronic technology is inherently hard to audit,
when much of the software is 'tested' using other 'software' and nobody
knows which 'expert institutes' are honest and/or competent nor which
further advances in E-swindling may be being dreamed up.
See also
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rady_ana_070117_annotated_bibliograp.htm
,
which gives synopses of 15 expert reports.
As computer professionals well know, most financial theft isn't wee people
pinching banknotes, it mostly happens by big insiders in big institutions,
and uses high-tech means. Why should things be otherwise with E-election
technology, which has been likened to a licence to print political money. In
her book of the same name, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/book.html, Bev
Harris of Black Box Voting has shown that the multi-billion $$ high-tech
election industry in the States is full of interlinked companies with many
close links to the ruling party, the CIA, the Pentagon, the
military-industrial complex, the mafia and/or fraudsters recruited out of
prison.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041129/corn,
http://forums.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?showtopic=106644
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.html
Take, for example, VoteHere, which led the lobbying post 'hanging chads' for
computerisation of the US election machinery, which sacked its test engineer
for identifying 250 security problems
http://www.whoscounting.net/TheCompanies.htm#VOTE%20HERE , and which was
brought in to help run an e-pilot in Islington in 2001
http://society.guardian.co.uk/internet/story/0,,498781,00.html as the
'technical partner' of Electoral Reform Services, Ltd (which gives around a
million a year to Electoral Reform Society). Harris reveals that Robert
Gates, ex-head of the CIA and now Secretary of Sate for 'Defense' , was on
the board of directors of Votehere.
The Pentagon is known to pursue stealth technologies and full-spectrum
technological dominance, including in space and cyberspace
http://www.whoscounting.net/PentagCIandCyber.htm.
A huge amount of Pentagon and other reasearch is done on a classified basis,
with the fruits of this research often being passed out for loyal
military-industrial crony companies and CIA-fronts to use first, thus giving
them a huge edge on foreign competition and lagging-behind regulatory
regimes. As for the CIA it has overthrown or destabilised scores of
democratically elected governments www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE3/ .
Sometimes these moves have happened in dramatic memorable fashion, e.g.
Allende under fire in the presidential palace. Other times US or Nato
intervention has happened in a way which only a few noticed at the time,
e.g. forcing the Socialists out of government in Italy in June 1964, see D.
Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies, pp 70 ff.
But just as the best economic fraudsters are the ones we never hear about,
so the best coups and interventions are those which happen so stealthily
that no one realises they/we have lost our freedom. (This indeed is the key
theme of an early Neo-con handbook, Coup d'Etat by Strauss pupil at Chicago
and leading neo-con Edward Luttwak.) The big lie and the noble lie and the
secret move - all these avoid the embarrassment which occurs when the people
get riled up and indignant and have to be fired on. Keep things cool.
Confuse potentially suspicious outsiders with lesser sub-plots, just as a
good stage magician uses his magic wand to divert attention from the main
move being made. Not only do the corporate media stroke the little person's
desire for a quiet life of denial with a steady diet of bread and circuses,
when embarrassing controversies arise the media can be relied upon to
prevent rational debate based on the presentation of evidence on and by
either side (or from many perspectives), but rather to close ranks by
publicly humiliating 'conspiracy theorists' as 'fruitloops' suffering from a
'conspiracist mindset'.
Yet when abuses of trust really are - or may be - occurring, it is blanket
denial not measured suspicion which merits psychological diagnosis. (Wihelm
Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism comes to mind; more recently feminist
work on widespread denial when it is precisely the one in authority who is
conducting the abuse; Daniele Ganser's Vital Lies - Simple Truths gives a
compassionate Buddhist-influenced account of the tendency we all share to
steer away from noticing things which could cause our anxiety levels to
rise - we even pre-notice what we know we mustn't see! It is this tendency
which has been relied upon by the people who stole the elections in Comal
County Texas in 2002. Not only did the conspirators type in the same five
figure number as the number of votes supposedly received by three
Republicans, a statistical absurdity, but they felt so confident that they
even chose neo-nazi numbers, 18181 (Adolf Hitler=AH= first and eight letter
of the alphabet).
(Nebraska) onwards,
not just 2000 but
2002 (Georgia http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0091.html , Texas),
2004 Ohio, Florida and many other States, when Kerry won by sevenmillion
votes:
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/61/20209
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__060711_the_stolen_election_.htm
http://www.tpmcafe.com/discussiontables/books_table/2006/aug/06/was_the_2004_pre
sidential_election_stolen_by_steven_f_freeman_and_joel_bleifuss
and 2006
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_paul_leh_061111_exit_polls_showing_d.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2006/071106votefraud.htm .
Of course election theft goes back a long way before 2000, e.g. JFK's dad
getting the mafia to fix the voting machines in a key precinct in Chicago).
By electoral theft I do not mean voter fraud, which the Republicans make a
big thing of, but for which there is hardly any evidence. I mean insider
theft by those controlling the elections. Three broad categories of activity
can achieve this, aways camouflaged as accidental phenomena, or claimed to
be random - though when the statisticians of the National Elections Data
Archive get to work on these 'random phenomena' a very clear pro-Republican
bias emerges!
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Presidential-Election-2004.pdf
1) Low tech traditional tricks:
As Greg Palast has consistently argued, the Republicans have perfected a
panoply of dirty tricks aimed at 'suppressing' the Democrat vote: e.g.
purging the electoral roll of likely Democrat voters, losing their
registration forms, intimidating poor whites and blacks from turning up,
frustrating them with long queues when they do, or challenging their right
to vote face to face, etc.
http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=2772&blz=1
'Muddles' in sending out postal votes, such as happened in Scotland, may or
may not be innocent and neutral in their effects, but they have previously
happened in US states with rabidly partisan election administrations. It is
worth remembering that New Labour has forced through huge relaxations in the
rules for obtaining postal votes, despite the widespread electoral fraud
which Labour supporters (predominjantly but not exclusively) have practiced
in Birminghan and many other places, and this despite being warned by the
Electoral Commission and the relevant Westminster committees of just such an
outcome. Over-ready availability of postal votes also breaches our human
right to a guaranteed secret ballot, nor is there any guarantee that one's
vote will make it to the polling station through the postal system, where
unscrupulous elements could intercept votes from certain postboxes or towns.
Steaming envelopes open to inspect their contents is possible, especially
when, as happened in Scotland, the huge numbers of people who applied for
postal votes found that the ballot forms wouldn't easily fit into the
envelopes supplied.
Designed to fail? Hard to say, and this also applies to the polling station
in Edinburgh where because of strangely defective ballot boxes the officials
were taking people's votes and stashing them in plastic bags behind their
tables! One further example on the theme of low-tech ambiguity: When I went
to vote in Craigie school in Perth my eye happened to light on a copy of the
front page of the Sun with a graphic about how voting for indpendence is
like putting one's head in a noose. When I complained that such material
should be lying around quite visible, the man in charge apologised, leaving
me to feel it was probably an accident. However Tricia Marwick, the winning
SNP candidate in traditionally Labour Fife Central, has alleged this was
happening at several polling stations in her constituency, and there is at
least one report of the Noose graphic being pasted to a wall inside the
polling station.
2) Confusing Voters:
Another category of election theft happens through confusing voters so that
their vote doesn't count, or is even given to the wrong candidates, e.g. the
confusing butterfly ballot which saw Jews voting for Buchanan not Gore in
one district of Florida. In this case the Secretary of State for Scotland
was repeatedly warned that combining two different elections (Scottish
Parliamentary and Council) on the one day would be likely to cause
confusion, the more so as it would involve three different electoral systems
(FPTP, Addditional Member top ups on a regional list - both using X's, and
Single Transferrable Vote for Councillors - using numbers). Although in the
past the two sides of the Holyrood ballot had each had their own voting
slip, on this occasion both sides were included on the one larger paper with
the instruction: 'You have two votes' ast the top of the page and only
smaller at the top of each column the words 'Mark one X in this column'.
Faced by a long shopping list of possible parties to vote for in the first
column (regional list), many voters used up both X's before coming to the
Constituency FPTP column. Others used numbers where they should have placed
crosses and vice versa. Altogether between 4 and 5 percent of ballots were
rejected, effectively disenfranchising 80-100,000 Scots and causing
widespread anger, including at the suspicion that different local standards
may sometimes have obtained for accepting or rejecting doubtful papers.
However it is unclear whether any party advantage will have accrued from
this massive problem.
This does not mean that this problem is of no significiance, nor indeed the
problems with postal votes, nor the problem with the failure/'failure' of
counting machinery in seven major counting centres, which had the immediate
effect of leaving exhausted activists feeling disempowered and cheated of
their late night hour of triumph. The possibility exists that the
significance of these hassles may lie precisely as distractions from
realising where the fundamental threat could be coming from.
3) High-tech Electronic swindling:
Outside some black communities, the largest strand of the dynamic Voter
Integrity movement in the US is the one which has focussed on the massive
evidence of electronic vote-theft, whether by compromised voting machines,
compromised counting machines or the transfer of count data via hackable
protocols on the Internet. A vast amount of work has been done on each of
these sub-categories, and increasingly the movement calls for hand-counted
paper ballots
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jgideon_061214_thirty_four_election.htm
because it realises that electronic technology is inherently hard to audit,
when much of the software is 'tested' using other 'software' and nobody
knows which 'expert institutes' are honest and/or competent nor which
further advances in E-swindling may be being dreamed up.
See also
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rady_ana_070117_annotated_bibliograp.htm
,
which gives synopses of 15 expert reports.
As computer professionals well know, most financial theft isn't wee people
pinching banknotes, it mostly happens by big insiders in big institutions,
and uses high-tech means. Why should things be otherwise with E-election
technology, which has been likened to a licence to print political money. In
her book of the same name, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/book.html, Bev
Harris of Black Box Voting has shown that the multi-billion $$ high-tech
election industry in the States is full of interlinked companies with many
close links to the ruling party, the CIA, the Pentagon, the
military-industrial complex, the mafia and/or fraudsters recruited out of
prison.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041129/corn,
http://forums.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?showtopic=106644
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.html
Take, for example, VoteHere, which led the lobbying post 'hanging chads' for
computerisation of the US election machinery, which sacked its test engineer
for identifying 250 security problems
http://www.whoscounting.net/TheCompanies.htm#VOTE%20HERE , and which was
brought in to help run an e-pilot in Islington in 2001
http://society.guardian.co.uk/internet/story/0,,498781,00.html as the
'technical partner' of Electoral Reform Services, Ltd (which gives around a
million a year to Electoral Reform Society). Harris reveals that Robert
Gates, ex-head of the CIA and now Secretary of Sate for 'Defense' , was on
the board of directors of Votehere.
The Pentagon is known to pursue stealth technologies and full-spectrum
technological dominance, including in space and cyberspace
http://www.whoscounting.net/PentagCIandCyber.htm.
A huge amount of Pentagon and other reasearch is done on a classified basis,
with the fruits of this research often being passed out for loyal
military-industrial crony companies and CIA-fronts to use first, thus giving
them a huge edge on foreign competition and lagging-behind regulatory
regimes. As for the CIA it has overthrown or destabilised scores of
democratically elected governments www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE3/ .
Sometimes these moves have happened in dramatic memorable fashion, e.g.
Allende under fire in the presidential palace. Other times US or Nato
intervention has happened in a way which only a few noticed at the time,
e.g. forcing the Socialists out of government in Italy in June 1964, see D.
Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies, pp 70 ff.
But just as the best economic fraudsters are the ones we never hear about,
so the best coups and interventions are those which happen so stealthily
that no one realises they/we have lost our freedom. (This indeed is the key
theme of an early Neo-con handbook, Coup d'Etat by Strauss pupil at Chicago
and leading neo-con Edward Luttwak.) The big lie and the noble lie and the
secret move - all these avoid the embarrassment which occurs when the people
get riled up and indignant and have to be fired on. Keep things cool.
Confuse potentially suspicious outsiders with lesser sub-plots, just as a
good stage magician uses his magic wand to divert attention from the main
move being made. Not only do the corporate media stroke the little person's
desire for a quiet life of denial with a steady diet of bread and circuses,
when embarrassing controversies arise the media can be relied upon to
prevent rational debate based on the presentation of evidence on and by
either side (or from many perspectives), but rather to close ranks by
publicly humiliating 'conspiracy theorists' as 'fruitloops' suffering from a
'conspiracist mindset'.
Yet when abuses of trust really are - or may be - occurring, it is blanket
denial not measured suspicion which merits psychological diagnosis. (Wihelm
Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism comes to mind; more recently feminist
work on widespread denial when it is precisely the one in authority who is
conducting the abuse; Daniele Ganser's Vital Lies - Simple Truths gives a
compassionate Buddhist-influenced account of the tendency we all share to
steer away from noticing things which could cause our anxiety levels to
rise - we even pre-notice what we know we mustn't see! It is this tendency
which has been relied upon by the people who stole the elections in Comal
County Texas in 2002. Not only did the conspirators type in the same five
figure number as the number of votes supposedly received by three
Republicans, a statistical absurdity, but they felt so confident that they
even chose neo-nazi numbers, 18181 (Adolf Hitler=AH= first and eight letter
of the alphabet).
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