After 200 years, US forces have acquired massive training in how to rig elections, including corruption by means of poll books and easily rigged voting machines. The same skills have been effectively applied to the "Drug War at home."
After 200 years, the CIA brought another skill home to roost: "the use of electronics to overturn elections"--
"Under Ronald Reagan, it became available for use in elections here at home. In 1988, former CIA director George H.W. Bush became the first to benefit." But before this crucial point, which essentially begins the era of modern election corruption in the US, many steps--bullet points--were entailed, including the establishment of the Federal Election Commission, the Election Center, and any number of warnings from experts on the permeability and corruptibility of electronic voting systems. When Bush ran for president in 1988, in the New Hampshire primary, the first large-scale use of electronic voting machines, "the former CIA Director trailed Bob Dole by eight points in polls taken on Election Day. But when the votes were electronically tallied, Bush beat Dole by nine points. Such a 17-point turn-around qualifies among mainstream election statistical analysts as a 'virtual statistical impossibility.'"
More warnings from computer experts Roy Saltman and Ronnie Dugger are cited, along with other milestones of far-reaching election corruption, including 1996, when former Secretary of Defense and Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) stepped down from his position as part-owner of ES&S election systems to run for senator in his home state, where the company is located. He won by a landslide since the state nearly uniformly uses ES&S machinery. The authors warn that such systems, in use 10 years or longer, are too old not to malfunction, making space for even more illicit intrusions where it functions at all.
More crucial anecdotal information is shared, including the upset defeats of two popular Democrats, Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), who lost three limbs fighting in Vietnam, and Alabama's Don Siegelman, who was not only defeated by skullduggery at the eleventh hour, but has since then been imprisoned for trumped-up causes by opponents, Karl Rove allies, who simply want this champion of learning and education out of office, out of commission.
The Iraq invasion was invented in order to keep George W. Bush in office as a "war president," a category that historically has been re-elected.
Then we reach Election 2004 in Ohio, the ramifications of which, as a reincarnation of Election 2000 in Florida, occupy much of the rest of the book of these "Ohio heroes" who have labored exhaustively to exorcise still-dormant demons from what can easily be called one of the most atrocious elections ever. Their three books that background this section make them the magisterial authorities on the Buckeye State atrocities. Fitrakis and Wasserman had predicted this massive train wreck beforehand. To this day, thousands of votes remain uncounted but it is certain that Kerry won. The current Secretary of State took little interest in "making every vote count" even though this had been one of his oft-repeated campaign mantrass.
Fully 83 bullet points elaborate on the Ohio debacle. Skullduggery assumed more forms than in Florida 2000, by far. The secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, also, like Florida's Katherine Harris, co-chair of the Republican National Committee's campaign to re-elect Bush, freely resorted to countless devices to be sure that his former employer (in Florida in 2000) would win the race, a dedication echoed by Walden O'Dell, owner of Diebold, the other of the two largest voting machine vendors in this country (along with ES&S). "Wally" promised Bush that he would "deliver" the Buckeye State to him, without which, in the previous 100 years, no Republican has ever won the presidency.
Bush won Ohio, indeed, most notoriously by means of the man-in-the-middle structure discovered four years later by a Republican security expert, Stephen Spoonamore, who mapped out an elaborate path that the vote count took--down from Blackwell's office to the GOP server in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the count was altered from Kerry's column to Bush's by hundreds of thousands. This total was then sent back to Ohio while the system was supposedly down for an hour around midnight. Where Kerry had led by 200,000 votes he was now behind by 100,000, while Bush ultimate "won" Ohio by around 120,000 votes.
This is the closest scenario I have ever encountered where I can honestly say that everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It is truly an education in electronic voting and other forms of ingenious skullduggery. Read the bullet points and cry, or read them and die, but they are well worth the chamber of horrors you will discover and have trouble ingesting.
Similar "red shifts" occurred in 10 out of the 11 remaining swing states, states that can vote Republican or Democratic in federal elections, results hard to predict in many cases despite advance polling. The term "red shift" itself was born out of this morass, a coinage of exit poll specialist Jonathan Simon of the Election Defense Alliance.
Twelve additional bullet points are generated by the authors' lawsuit King-Lincoln-Bronzeville v. Blackwell, whose bottom line is the horrendous and multiple forms of corruption that kept blacks and Latinos who lived in the plaintiff neighborhood from voting. That case is ongoing, despite the very compelling evidence provided by Spoonamore and despite the subpoenas served on Karl Rove, boss of the late Michael Donnell, creator of the man-in-the-middle structure, by House Judiciary Chair John Conyers twice as well as lead attorney Cliff Arnebeck in New York City in full view of passers-by. Rove dropped the subpoena on the sidewalk, but it nonetheless "counted." How has he avoided incrimination after all that? "Clever lawyers," Fitrakis told me. "Clever lawyers." None that I can afford.
Further bullet points take us on a quick but fact-filled and crucial, incredible series of events that transpired between 2004 and 2016!
What was legal about those years? That somehow the people's choices managed to triumph a few times, but the wins are always detracted from by "fixes" to eliminate as many as possible of the classes of qualified voters guaranteed to vote mostly Democratic. The first chapter of my forthcoming (CICJ-published) Ballots or Bills: The Future of Democracy details how Obama's victory in 2008, though substantial, really represented an overwhelming landslide. Where a victory is won by more than 10 percent of the vote, skullduggery is less suspect and accuracy is grudgingly let through. Where the percentage of victory is lower, research is mandatory, though usually ignored. Elections 2010 and 2014 attracted historically low numbers of voters, thus awarding large majorities to the GOP according to Paul Weyrich's axiom that the fewer who show up at the polls, the more likely the GOP will win. In his historic speech in 1980, he makes fun of the Democratic preference for "good government," which he names "the goo-goo syndrome."
More power to it.
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