Dont know airplanes , So might as well try computers

Sir Arthur C.B.E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. wrote:

In article <bnfdmv$98h$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, President, USA Exile Govt.
says...

Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE):
Free Americans Proclaiming Total Emancipation and Working Towards
Democracy.   NOTE:  Thanks to truthout.org for this.   --  kl, pp

 A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
 By Victoria Collier
 t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 Saturday 25 October 2003

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" --Thomas Jefferson

 In the 2000 election, George W. Bush stole the presidency by
combining various forms of vote fraud, not all of which could be
concealed from the American public. The month-long battle in Dade
County ended with open slaughter of the democratic process, and the
occupation of the country by a regime of what may be accurately
described as corporate fascists.

 That's the bad news.

 The good news is, the 2000 election also marked a turning point in
American consciousness. Or, I might venture to say, an awakening.

 Before W's coup, most Americans were, for lack of a better
metaphor, asleep at the wheel. This metaphor works just fine, because
our electoral process is the wheel that guides our nation, the
mechanism that allows us to control the engines of power, and to turn
our country in a new direction if, for instance, we're nearing the
edge of a cliff.

 Nothing is more important to an American citizen than the right to
cast a ballot.

 But modern Americans have been abandoning the voting booth in
droves. Over the past fifty years, less than half of all eligible
voters went to the polls, sometimes less than 25%. However, far more
astounding is that those who voted rarely bothered to wonder if their
vote was counted accurately.

 A vote cast but not counted is meaningless. The only way to know
that your vote is properly counted is to watch the entire counting
process, which is why election law requires an open, public vote
count, and makes secret ballot counting illegal. However, most voters
have eagerly abdicated the responsibility of overseeing their vote
count to a handful of extremely dubious "experts" and "officials."
Human nature is largely to blame. November election night in most
states is cold -- and often wet. Those who manage to make their way
to the polls after work want only to go home, turn on the TV, and let
their local newscaster tell them who won. And yet, our natural
instinct to curl up on the couch cannot be wholly to blame. Recent
history has shown that the most avid political junkies -  even
candidates themselves -- have demonstrated a profound disinterest in
how the gears and levers work behind the scene on election night, or
who is controlling them.

 It should not surprise us that vote fraud has flourished in this
vacuum of electoral vigilance. Criminals of every stripe have
slithered through the unwatched gates and into positions of power in
America. It has not taken them long to corrupt the entire electoral
process itself, securing for themselves the gates of power. As I
write this article, America is on the verge of losing the last shreds
of its democracy, with the rise of ballot-less computerized voting
machines.

 One Machine to Rule Them All

 Thanks in part to the recent Bush approved Help America Vote Act
(HAVA), squadrons of shiny new Touch Screen Trojan horses are being
rolled into precincts across America. Not, as we are told, to make
voting easier or more accurate, or to help disabled people vote
privately, or to save America from the dangers of hanging chad and
butterfly ballots -- no. The real reason America is being flooded
with billions of dollars worth of paperless computerized voting
machines is so that no one will ever again be able to prove vote
fraud.

 These machines are not just unverifiable, they are secretly
programmed (their software is not open to scrutiny by election
officials or computer experts), equipped with modems, accessible by
computer, telephone, and satellite. They are the final product of
decades of work by the election rigging industry. When they are
installed in every precinct in America, our elections will finally
become completely meaningless, nothing more than charades behind
which criminal thugs will wield the power of this nation.

 That is the plan for America. But there's a glitch.

 The blatant and multi-faceted fraud of the 2000 election -- in
which the ultimate poster boy for corporate corruption stole the
highest seat in the nation -- woke the American people from their
dangerous slumber. The issue of election fraud is now smoldering in
the minds of millions. Of course the Touch Screens were immediately
offered as the solution to all our voting problems, but thanks to the
wonderful work of many new computerized vote fraud researchers, most
notably Bev Harris (author of Black Box Voting), Americans are
quickly recognizing that the "solution" is worse than the problem.

 Despite the best propaganda efforts of corrupt voting machine
corporations like Diebold and ES&S, even those with the worst
butterfly ballot jitters are coming to understand that destroying the
ballot altogether, erasing any verifiable record of the vote count
and making a recount impossible, is not the answer to our problems.
And, as the Touch Screen systems continue to openly malfunction,
increasing numbers of voters will begin doubting their safety and
accuracy.

 It's becoming clear to Americans that, just like the aftermath of
the Enron scandal, no real government reform is forthcoming in the
area of election security. The news is out that the same company that
was used in Florida to purge voter rolls of millions of African
American votes is now being hired by other states across the country
for the same job. As you will soon see, many of our Boards of
Elections and Secretary's of State will continue to blindly defend
their collusion with shadowy corporations, and spending billions of
tax-payer dollars on unreliable machines that patently subvert the
democratic process. Why? Because they have sold out. They have been
bought by corporate interests. It happened a long time ago.

 As political events at home and around the world continue to unfold
in one devastating disaster after another, our cry for honest
elections will only grow louder. The movement toward real election
reform, and what will, in the end, amount to a revolution by the
American people, is only just beginning.

 We the People are responsible for taking back the control of our
democratic process. No one else will do it for us. We cannot afford
to be naove, or uneducated, at this time in history. In order to
fully understand the extent of the corruption we are dealing with,
and to avoid making dangerous mistakes based on ignorance, we must
understand the history, and the power structure, behind vote fraud in
America.

 Votescam: The Stealing of America

 "One of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy,
questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote
count." --- Votescam

 I grew up with two men who spent twenty-five years investigating
vote fraud in America: James and Kenneth Collier, my father and uncle.

 Their book, "Votescam: The Stealing of America" was published in
1992 and immediately banned by the major book chains, which listed
the book as "out of print" and actively worked to prevent its sale.
Votescam chronicles the Collier brother's groundbreaking
investigation into America's multi-billion dollar election rigging
industry, and the corporate government and media officials who
control it.

 Before the 2000 election, Votescam was widely read (thanks to
independent bookstores and the Internet) by the minority of Americans
still engaged in the political process, mostly members of independent
and third parties trying to break the chokehold of the two party
system. The corporate media will not give their causes or their
candidates adequate press coverage -- if any. This censorship alone
effectively controls the first stages of our political races. If a
candidate can't get T.V. coverage, he or she has little chance of
even making it out the gate. These citizens were not surprised to
learn that the media has been complicit in rigging the final stages
of our elections - our vote counting and the reporting of results --
for decades.

 Down the Rabbit Hole

 The Votescam investigation began in 1970, in - surprise!-- Dade
County, Florida, where Ken ran for Congress (with Jim as his campaign
manager) against Claude Pepper, the "Father of Social Security."

 The Colliers were researching a book they were writing for Dell
Publishing titled: "Running Through the System: Ballots Not Bullets,"
an idea born from their involvement in the social upheaval of the
sixties.

 Jim and Ken proposed that if our Declaration of Independence,
Constitution and Bill of Rights were indeed the rule of the land,
real change could be made in America by working within the system --
more effectively, and much more safely, than waging bloody revolution
in the streets.

 Putting their ideals, love of country, and political savvy to the
test, the Colliers began their grassroots Congressional campaign  -
and discovered exactly why the bullet, not the ballot, was being used
to change the power structure in America.

 Ken was rigged out of the election through a vote scam, which the
Colliers later discovered was used throughout the country for
decades. It went like this: The local newscaster would announce
during the broadcast of election returns that election "computer has
broken down." Instead of giving official returns from the County
courthouse, the networks would be running vote "projections" for the
rest of the night.

 Jim and Ken, who had garnered 30 percent of the vote and were
excited about running again, noticed that when the vote totals came
back on the screen after the announcement, they had mysteriously lost
15 percentage points. They didn't get another vote for the rest of
the night.

 This piqued their interest.

 When they examined the "official" election results from the
Secretary of State's office for the September primary, October
run-off and November final election in Dade County, the record listed
a total of 141,000 votes cast for the Governors race - in each
election. The exact same number of total votes were cast for three
elections with a different number of candidates running each time.
The same identical figures were listed for the Senate race - 122,000
votes cast in the primary, run-off and final election.

 This, of course, is a statistical impossibility.

 When they compared the "official" vote results with a print-out of
the vote "projections" broadcast by the TV networks on the final
election night, they found that channel 4 had "projected" with near
perfect accuracy the results of 40 races with 250 candidates only 4
minutes after the polls closed. Channel 7 came even closer; at 9:31
pm, they "projected" the final vote total for a race at 96,499 votes.
When the Colliers checked the "official" number . . . it was also
96,499.

 "In hockey, they call that a hat trick," the Colliers write. "In
politics, we call it a fix."

 The networks then made the astonishing claim that the results from
a single voting machine somewhere in Dade County were run through a
computer program in order to get these vote projections.

 Elton Davis was the computer programmer responsible for the magic
formula that could convert one machine's vote results into near
perfect projected vote totals for 40 races and 250 candidates. When
Jim and Ken confronted Davis in his office at the University of
Miami, he responded: "You'll never prove it, now get out."

 Finally the networks claimed that members of the League of Women
Voters were out in the field on election night, calling in vote
totals to channels 4 and 7.

 When the Colliers confronted the head of the League, Joyce
Deiffenderfer, she admitted that there were no LWV members out in the
field that night. She broke down crying, saying "I don't want to get
caught up in this thing."

 But there's more.

 According to the print-out of the TV network's election night
"projections," the networks were not receiving any actual voting
results at any time during their broadcast, but had been using their
own projections from the moment the polls closed. When they claimed
that the courthouse computer had broken down, and they would no
longer be reporting actual vote totals, they were lying. They had
never been reporting actual vote totals.

 However, the final shoe dropped months later when an official press
release appeared from Dade data processing chief, Leonard White,
which stated emphatically: The county computer at the courthouse was
never down, and it was never slow.

 This was the beginning.

 The Collier brothers had slammed their boat into the tip of a giant
iceberg. As they continued to investigate, they were horrified to
discover vote fraud collusion among key individuals in every branch
and on every level of the American political system. Those who were
not benefiting from the fraud were too afraid to fight it. Their
search for justice led to dead-ends. Their lives were threatened,
they were vilified as conspiracy theorists by the mainstream press,
Dell publishing cancelled their book contract . . . and yet they
persevered.

 The next quarter century was spent compiling a wealth of FBI
documented evidence proving that elections in the United States have
come under the tight control of a handful of powerful and corrupt
people: Secretaries of State, Election Supervisors, Judges, owners
and editors of the major media outlets, voting equipment
corporations, and assorted key members of the elections
establishment, including the League of Woman Voters. These groups
have assured the dominance of the two party system, unfettered
corporate control over government, and media censorship of issues
most important to the American people, including the cover-up of vote
fraud evidence.

 "Now we understand why things have gone so terribly wrong in this
country. It's due to the corrupted vote. It is the stolen vote that
perpetuates corrupt city, state and federal governments. When those
corrupt power brokers in your town weed out that up-and-coming
politician, they are looking for a person who is willing to 'play
ball.'  Politics is 'playing ball.'  Suddenly you find property
decisions going against nature; land and water needed for the
perpetuation of life on our earth suddenly disappear. A handful of
developers get richer while the land, and the quality of life, get
poorer."  -- Votescam

 Jim and Ken both died young during the 90's, as heroes to many
thousands who read their book and heard them speak on the radio and
at political meetings across the country. They helped to guide
individuals and groups working for clean elections in their
communities -- some of them fighting against the first wave of
computerized voting machines.

 The Collier's last hope was that Votescam would be used as evidence
in a serious Congressional investigation into election fraud, if we
should ever see the day. Many people still in power have yet to be
held accountable for their role in aiding and abetting vote fraud.
I'll give you two important examples.

 When the famous Miami lawyer Ellis Rubin agreed to be Ombudsman for
the original Votescam evidence, he brought it to the Florida
assistant State Attorney at the time, Janet Reno. The evidence
included the shaved wheels of lever voting machines, forged canvass
sheets (the sheets that poll workers sign to verify the final vote
count), and pre-printed vote tally sheets that were used in
conjunction with a lever machine vote rigging device called the
Printomatic.

 Reno refused to prosecute, claiming falsely that the statue of
limitations had run out on the crime. Years later, Rubin would tell
my father that behind closed doors Reno had stated that she could not
prosecute. Why? Because she would bring down many of the most
powerful people in the state.

 Would the 2000 election fiasco in Florida have been avoided if Reno
had agreed  to do her job thirty years earlier and root out the vote
fraud thieves?

 Another notable Votescam criminal can now be found sitting on the
bench of the highest court in the nation. Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, while still a Federal Appeals Judge, single handedly
destroyed what would have been an historic lawsuit filed against
Justice Department lawyer Craig Donsanto, who had refused to
prosecute the extensive vote fraud evidence brought to him by the
Colliers. The evidence included videotape of the League of Women
voters tampering with ballots in a close door vote "counting"
session. The women were illegally punching holes in already cast
ballots. When confronted by Jim and Ken, just minutes before the two
were bodily thrown from the building (which they had snuck into), the
women claimed they were only trying to remove  . . . the hanging chad.

 Votescam states, "Because the League of Women Voters has about it a
perfume of volunteerism and do-goodism, the fact that it is actually
a political club with a political agenda and a hungry treasury is
shrouded by the false myth that it is a reliable Election Day
watchdog."

 It's no surprise to me that the League of Women Voters has recently
come out strongly in favor of the diabolical ballot-less Touch Screen
machines.

 And even less shocking was the role Antonin Scalia played so
willingly in the selection of George W. Bush to office.

 The Rise of Resistance/ Knowledge is Power

 "Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong." ---
Thomas Jefferson

 Thanks to the 2000 fiasco, election reform is now growing as a
public battle cry . . . but who is leading the army?

 This is a question that every American has the responsibility to ask.

 Various individuals and groups are seeking to guide the reform
process, including politicians, government officials, voting machine
companies, computer experts, activists, and members of the elections
establishment. It is very safe to assume they do not all mean well.
Many have agendas of their own, some obvious, others hidden.

 Many are corrupt, others are ignorant.

 And some, who have the very best interests of America at heart, are
in the difficult position of having to make serious and potentially
damaging compromises in their quest for safe elections, in order to
push the issue in Washington.

 Before I explore this issue in more depth, I'd like to offer a
brief list of important lessons learned from twenty-five years of
fighting vote fraud in the trenches.

1) If there is any conceivable way to tamper with or rig an election
- someone will attempt it. This includes average citizens as well as
officials charged with protecting the process.
2) Every voting system is open to tampering, but paper ballots
counted in public are the easiest system to protect and monitor.
(It's estimated that only 2% of Americans still vote on a
hand-counted paper ballot).
3) Secret vote counting is illegal. Remember : counting them faster
is not a justification for counting them secretly.
4) When machines began to take over our vote counting systems,
election rigging became an exciting new national industry.
5) Lever machines were the first to appear, and they were riggable in
a number of ways. One could rig the lever machine itself, or, much
more easily, the electronic scanning machines that counted the
ballots. (See the Votescam video for footage of ballot rigging under
the supervision of both parties and the Dade County Election
Supervisor).
6) Computerized voting machines are the easiest to rig. Their
software is not open to public scrutiny, or the scrutiny of Election
Supervisors (rendering their title meaningless). There are nearly
infinite ways to program the machines to count votes fraudulently.
Since they are accessible by modem, they can be controlled from a
remote, centralized location.
7) Voting machine companies operate with no federal oversight,
certification process, standards or restrictions. Controlling members
of some of the most powerful voting machine corporations are
convicted criminals, some are politicians with obvious conflicts of
interests, others are not even American citizens. Just two companies
-- Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems -
now control about 80% of the vote count in the U.S.
8) Vote fraud on a statewide and national scale is not possible
without the complicity of (among others) corrupt Election
Supervisors, Secretaries of State, Judges, voting machine
corporations, and top officials of the major media outlets.
9) Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been complicit in
vote rigging for decades, to their mutual benefit. Vote rigging is
NOT a partisan issue (though recent evidence suggests Republicans
might be gaining the upper hand in the race to control our elections).
10) The corporate major media networks play a vital role in
perpetrating and covering up vote fraud.  Media methods of vote
rigging are explored in the Votescam book, including the role of
Voter News Service (VNS). (VNS was a consortium of all the major
media outlets. It recently closed up shop and scurried off into the
shadows, but for decades, under two different corporate names, it
controlled the compilation and dissemination of national vote totals,
with the power to alter the reported results. The networks have
actually not competed for vote totals, as they claim to have done,
since 1965. They got all their numbers from VNS , which operated
behind an iron curtain of secrecy. Any questions regarding their
operation were met with the ubiquitous response: "This is not a
proper area of inquiry." Most people erroneously thought they were
simply a polling organization, though no evidence of their supposedly
massive polling operation could be found by investigators). See my
interview with Bill Headline, former head of VNS, at
http://www.votescam.com/articles.html
11) Election Day media polls are untrustworthy at best, and very
likely fabricated to influence voter decisions and to support phony
vote results.

 Now that I've provided the minimal context for understanding the
current threats we face, we can begin to talk about strategies to win
back the control of our government.

 Not all strategies currently on the table are acceptable. Do not
take anyone's word on the reform that is needed. Do not cede your
power to government officials and so-called experts any longer.
Educate yourself. It's up to us, the American people, to decide what
strategies to support, and our goal must not fall short of what will
truly restore democracy to this sinking nation.

 The Nuts and Bolts of Computerized Voting

 The gravest error of judgment these days comes from those vote
reformers who honestly believe that the answer to the butterfly
ballot and hanging chad problems in the 2000 election is to embrace
the ballot-less computerized voting machine.

 Let's make this clear. These machines are nothing but Trojan horses
built by and for election thieves. With the ballot-less computer,
there is no way to recount, no way to prove any discrepancy,
inaccuracy or fraud. Just the fact that companies like ES&S, Diebold,
and Sequoia would even make a ballot-less machine should be cause for
a Congressional investigation. (There are also many other reasons to
investigate them. For a detailed examination of these sinister
corporations, check out http://www.blackboxvoting.com.)

 That said, the next error of judgment comes from those who believe
that all we need to make computerized voting machines safe is a paper
receipt.

 Many intelligent, well-intentioned and hard working vote reformers
are supporting HR 2239, proposed by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), requiring
all computerized voting machines to produce a receipt for each
individual voter. While I support the effort that has gone into
creating this bill, and I recognize the monumental struggle it will
face in Congress, I am unable to support it at this time, for many
reasons. The first of which is that, while calling much needed
attention to the dangers of ballot-less machines, this legislation
does not require actually hand-counting the receipts altogether in
each election.

 Why is this a serious problem?

 First of all, individual receipts are meaningless. They're worth
nothing if not counted altogether. A person's vote might be verified
by the slip of paper, but that person has no idea whether the
computer accurately tallied her vote along with all the other votes.
The final count still takes place inside the infamous computerized
"black box," beyond the reach of public scrutiny. An individual
receipt in no way guarantees the safety of the final vote count. It
is at best a meaningless gesture that  I am deeply afraid will
provide an extremely false sense of security for voters.

 As for recounting disputed elections, the obvious question is,
which ones? Every election is in dispute when counted by a secretly
programmed, modem-equipped computer!

 Most of the supporters of this bill agree that the receipts should
be counted across the board in each election, which would be the
equivalent of a good old-fashioned paper ballot count. But so far
there is little incentive to demand that the provision be added
because it won't get any support in Congress. What does this mean?
Are we interested in actually making our elections safe, accurate and
verifiable, or are we willing to play political ball to the point
where we lose sight of our goal completely?

 I am told that perhaps, over time, the legislation will be
strengthened. But history has repeatedly shown that as a bill makes
its way through Washington channels, its effectiveness is more often
than not watered down. Whatever teeth it might have to begin with get
filed into nubs that have no strength to tear into corruption.

 HR 2239 proposes surprise "random" recounts, where a small
percentage of jurisdictions are chosen for verification in each
election. Unfortunately, this is completely inadequate. Individual
machines can be manipulated, and election thieves can buy off the
people in charge of the random recount. Anyone who thinks that is far
fetched or impossible is very new to this issue.

 And what if discrepancies are found? Then everyone will call foul -
rightly so -- a glut of confused and disputed recounts will ensue,
and the entire elections machine will become hopelessly tangled in
its own mechanized parts. Meanwhile every election criminal in the
country will descend like vultures on the chaos.

 Folks, let's look at this honestly. We are already deep into a
horrible and expensive mess that could all be avoided by skipping the
computerized middleman and simply counting paper ballots.

 Paper Ballots - A Radical Idea

 The last, and to my mind, most grave error of judgment comes from
those who think that returning to a hand-counted paper ballot system
is somehow impossible, that we can't go back to a simple process that
works once we've stupidly and recklessly abandoned it.

 I don't know about you, but that strikes me as an extremely
dangerous perspective.

 An MIT/Cal Tech study done in 2001 shows that manually counted
paper ballots are the most accurate system out of the 5 systems used
in the last 4 presidential elections. They are totally verifiable,
and first-world nations across the globe still use them, including
Canada which counted their last presidential election in four hours.
And yet I am told repeatedly by vote reformers that there is no hope
of America ever returning to paper ballots because too much money has
been spent on the machines, and because the public is being sold on
their benefits. My argument is that the public must be immediately
educated on their dangers -- that should be the top priority of every
serious vote reformer in the country.

 My argument is that we should stop playing ball with these corrupt
voting machine corporations and the sold-out government officials who
support them.

 My argument is that we should remember we're Americans -- we don't
ask for permission to secure our own freedom. We should take these
Trojan horses and burn them in the public square before our whole
damn country crumbles before our eyes!

 But all this debate is misleading.  The bottom line is that a
computerized vote count is a secret vote count - and that's illegal.
Technology cannot supercede  the constitutional and mandatory
provisions of election law, which require open and verifiable
elections. There is no way to do a public vote count with computers.

 Listen, here's my idea. After the public Touch-Screen bonfire (we
really need more community minded events, don't you think?), we
should march to our Secretary of State's office and demand the
restoration of a hand-counted paper ballot system.

 Picture it. Millions of citizens marching on the gates of power,
demanding their keys back. It would be a quick, effective,
non-violent, American Revolution. And I think it's long overdue.

 The fact is, with a well-designed ballot and see-through boxes (to
prevent stuffing) the paper system can be simple, user-friendly, and
fosters community-based democratic participation. High school kids,
even children, used to count the ballots in America. We must have a
strong, diverse presence of citizen watchdog groups to oversee the
count, along with poll workers. The only election officials who are
truly independent, who represent the interests of all parties in an
election, are the poll watchers. The count must be done by hand, in
public, video-taped, aired live on television, and the results posted
on the precinct wall  -- just like they used to be. Ballots should be
counted on the same day as the voting takes place, making it much
more difficult to alter ballots.

 But that is not enough to ensure the safety of the election.

 Intense, multi-faceted scrutiny and public awareness must surround
every step of the process, not just the activities at the precinct.
Otherwise ballot boxes tend to disappear on the way to the county
courthouse, or arrive with their locks broken. Election "officials"
will be waiting with new locks, to replace the broken ones (ballot
box seals are also made by multiple suppliers, making duplicate
numbered seals easy to obtain).The reported vote totals tend to
change mysteriously when a secret corporate media consortium is in
charge of reporting them. If anyone disputes the numbers, the same
centralized media can assure the charges are never investigated or
reported by the press. Election officials and Secretaries of State
can manipulate or withhold the final election results to prevent
citizens from proving fraud, and rotten Judges can throw out vote
fraud lawsuits.

 I promise you, all of this can and will happen - it has been
happening for decades -- if the public as a whole is asleep and only
a few good men and women are on the watch.

 Hand-counted paper ballots and eternal vigilance are the only hope
left for us. The corporate fascists are taking over, and we will
never depose them non-violently as long as they control our elections.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Victoria Collier directs a non-profit organization focused on
building sustainable living systems that work on the personal,
community and global levels.  A long-time writer and political
activist, she  continues to educate the public on the subject of vote
fraud in place of her father and uncle. She is the editor of
http://www.votescam.com.  Victoria is available for interviews and
can be reached at 1-866-280-9090 and at editor@votescam.com

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