"If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal,"
Political activist".Emma Goldman 1912
As the twentieth century was ending, a new iteration of election rigging was emerging. With the widespread adoption of computerized digital voting technology, and the outsourcing of election technology to a select few corporations that operate in shadows, with no oversight or accountability, our vote, our most important democratic right, the heartbeat of our democracy, has been hijacked.
Today, and for many years, by the means of propriety CIA owned corporate "cut outs," and their software, just one programmer can steal hundreds, thousands and millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It is the electoral equivalent of an attack by a drone, wiping out the popular vote.
The privatization of elections by gangster operations of The Pentagon and CIA has occurred without public consent, and has led to a dangerous crisis in American democracy. We have lost the ability to verify our own elections.
In the 21st century a new technology became ubiquitous. Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting, which establishes touch screen voting and does not require a paper trail. That is the system still used in some states, like Kentucky, that just re-elected the reprehensible right wing toadie Mitch McConnell. No paper trail for public verification, just the demonic digital vote. The virtual vote count can be and is manipulated in total secrecy by The Pentagon and CIA "black operations."
In 1996 Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska millionaire running for the US Senate hid his ownership of the voting technology company that was counting his votes. The company was then called American Information Systems and is now called Election System and Software (ES&S). Hagel easily won the election over the favored Democratic Governor of Nebraska Ben Nelson, by 15 points, handing the seat to the GOP for the first time in 18 years.
Charlie Matulka, who contested Hagel's Senate seat in 2002, requested an investigation into Hagel who had never disclosed his financial ties to ES&S, by the Senate Ethics Committee. His request was rejected. His request for a hand recount of the 2002 Nebraska Senate election was also rejected. Nebraska state law specifically stated that a recount had to be done by the same "vote counting device,"that was used initially, in this case, the ES&S optical scanners.
The new millennium did not deliver any sort of an idealized promise land, rather it brought us the fraud of the 2000 election, triggered by a faulty computer memory card. Late on election night, Al Gore's totals in Volusia County Florida when one precinct suddenly reported 16,000 negative votes. At 3am in the morning Gore discovered that he was actually ahead in Volusia County by 13,000 votes.
Gore was cast as a sore loser by the hostile right wing media, and the Supreme Court named Bush the winner, even though Gore won the popular vote.
In 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, (HAVA), which offered states 3.9 billion to help modernize their election administration and equipment, supposedly in response to the Florida hanging chad debacle in 2000. HAVA actually subsidized the fraud prone touchscreen voting systems, the electoral Trojan horses that have subverted our democracy.
HAVA's impact been immense, accelerating the deterioration of our electoral system. We are being disenfranchised by losing our ballot, the vital heartbeat of Democracy, the key physical veracity of our power as citizens.
In 2002, the GOP gained control of the thanks to the technical failures and anomalies of Diebold. In Georgia for example, Diebold's voting machines reported the defeat of of Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had held a solid lead over the Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian right, the NRA, and George W. Bush.
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