| by Paul Craig Roberts
Since Stalin’s
time, the technology has changed. With electronic voting machines, which leave
no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the count can be
decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can simply program voting
machines to elect the candidate they want to win. Electronic voting is not
transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not know for whom you are
voting. Only the machine knows.
“He who casts a
vote decides nothing. He who counts the vote decides everything.”
- Joseph Stalin
( November 03,
2012, Washington DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) Whether or not he said it, Stalin’s
quote has entered into folklore. For a vote to mean anything, those counting
the ballots must have a greater respect for the integrity of democracy than
they have lust for power.
 |
US President Barack Obama greets supporters after speaking at a campaign appearance
at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio Photo: EPA/DAVID MAXWELL
|
According to
most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call. History has
shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation for a clear
winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the
divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the
stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election
can easily put on TV enough experts to explain that the divergence between the
exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is because
women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately
questioned in exit polls.
There have been
recent reports that, because of costs, exit polls in the 2012 presidential
election will no longer be conducted on the usual comprehensive basis in order
to save money. If the reports are correct, no check remains on election theft.
Digital Votes
In a fascinating
article in Harper’s Magazine (October 26, 2012) Victoria Collier notes that in
the old technology, election theft depended on the power of machine
politicians, such as Louisiana Senator Huey Long, to prevent exposure.
With the advent
of modern technology, Collier writes that “a brave new world of election
rigging emerged.” The brave new world of election theft was created by “the
mass adoption of computerized voting technology and the outsourcing of our
elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little
oversight or accountability. This privatization of our elections has occurred
without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and
least understood crisis in the history of American democracy. We have actually
lost the ability to verify election results.”
The old
ballot-box fraud was localized and limited in its reach. Electronic voting
allows elections to be rigged on a statewide and national scale. Moreover, with
electronic voting there are no missing ballot boxes to recover from the
Louisiana bayous. Using proprietary corporate software, the vote count is what
the software specifies.
The first two
presidential elections in the 21st century are infamous. George W. Bush’s win
over Al Gore was decided by the Republicans on the US Supreme Court who stopped
the Florida vote recount.
In 2004, George
W. Bush won the vote count although exit polls indicated that he had been
defeated by John Kerry. Collier reports:
“Late on
Election Day, John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and
many considered his victory all but certified. Yet the final vote tallies in
thirty states deviated widely from exit polls, with discrepancies favoring
George W. Bush in all but nine. The greatest disparities were concentrated in
battleground states – particularly Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls
indicated that Kerry should have received 67 percent of the vote, but the
certified tally gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected
outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. To
quote Lou Harris, who has long been regarded as the father of modern political
polling: ‘Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.’”
The electronic
vote theft era, Collier reports, “was inaugurated by Chuck Hagel, an unknown
millionaire who ran for one of Nebraska’s U.S. Senate seats in 1996. Initially
Hagel trailed the popular Democratic governor, Ben Nelson, who had been elected
in a landslide two years earlier. Three days before the election, however, a
poll conducted by the Omaha World-Herald showed a dead heat, with 47 percent of
respondents favoring each candidate. David Moore, who was then managing editor
of the Gallup Poll, told the paper, ‘We can’t predict the outcome.’”
“Hagel’s victory
in the general election, invariably referred to as an ‘upset,’ handed the seat
to the G.O.P. for the first time in eighteen years. Hagel trounced Nelson by
fifteen points. Even for those who had factored in the governor’s deteriorating
numbers and a last-minute barrage of negative ads, this divergence from
pre-election polling was enough to raise eyebrows across the nation.”
“Few Americans
knew that until shortly before the election, Hagel had been chairman of the
company whose computerized voting machines would soon count his own votes:
Election Systems & Software (then called American Information Systems).
Hagel stepped down from his post just two weeks before announcing his
candidacy. Yet he retained millions of dollars in stock in the McCarthy Group,
which owned ES&S. And Michael McCarthy, the parent company’s founder, was
Hagel’s campaign treasurer.”
Vote theft might
also explain the defeat of Max Cleland, a Democratic Senator from Georgia. As
Collier documents:
“In Georgia, for
example, Diebold’s voting machines reported the defeat of Democratic senator
Max Cleland. Early polls had given the highly popular Cleland a solid lead over
his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian right,
the NRA, and George W. Bush (who made several campaign appearances on his
behalf). As Election Day drew near, the contest narrowed. Chambliss, who had
avoided military service, ran attack ads denouncing Cleland – a Silver Star
recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam – as a traitor for voting against the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two days before the election,
a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point
advantage with the same group.”
Rigged Game
“Cleland lost by
seven points. In his 2009 autobiography, he accused computerized voting
machines of being ‘ripe for fraud.’ Patched for fraud might have been more apt.
In the month leading up to the election, Diebold employees, led by Bob
Urosevich, applied a mysterious, uncertified software patch to 5,000 voting
machines that Georgia had purchased in May.”
“We were told
that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,”
Diebold consultant and whistle-blower Chris Hood recounted in a 2006 Rolling
Stone article. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.
. . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from
the state. . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I
received instructions directly from [Bob] Urosevich. It was very unusual that a
president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that
level.”
When the
Republican Supreme Court prevented the Florida recount in the deciding state
between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, the
Democrats’ response was to acquiesce in order not to shake the confidence of
Americans in democracy. Similarly, John Kerry acquiesced in 2004 despite the
large disparity between exit polls and vote counts. But how can Americans have
confidence in democracy when voting is not transparent?
For now Republicans
seem to have the technological advantage with their ownership of companies that
produce electronic voting machines programmed by proprietary software, but in
the future the advantage could shift to Democrats. Early voting aids electronic
election theft. Successful and noncontroversial theft depends on knowing how to
program the machines. The victory needs to be within the range of plausibility.
Too big a victory raises eyebrows, but if the guess is wrong in the other
direction theft fails. Early voting helps the voting machine programmers decide
how to set the machines.
Voting 2.0
The absence of
transparency is a threat to whatever remains of American democracy. In the
Summer 2011 issue of The Trends Journal, Gerald Celente made the point that “if
we can bank online, we can vote online.”
Think about it!
Across the globe, trillions of dollars of bank transactions are made each day,
and rarely are they compromised. If we can accurately count money online, we
can certainly count votes accurately online. The only obstacles blocking online
voting are entrenched political interests intent upon controlling the ballot
box.
The lack of
transparency has given rise to election litigation. On October 29, The
Washington Post reported that “thousands of attorneys, representing the two
major presidential candidates, their parties, unions, civil rights groups and
voter-fraud watchdogs, are in place across the country, poised to challenge
election results that may be called into question by machine failures, voter
suppression or other allegations of illegal activity.”
Voting online,
if property arranged, can provide the transparency that the current system
lacks. While the GOP might remain active in voter suppression, the Democrats
could no longer vote graveyards, and the count of those who do manage to vote
would not be subject to secret proprietary software.
In 2005 the
nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded that the integrity
of elections was compromised by those who controlled the programming.
Proprietary private ownership of voting technology is simply incompatible with
transparent elections. A country without a transparent vote is a country
without democracy.
