Why your vote may not matter

http://rense.com/general31/vote.htm
Why Your Vote Won't Matter

By John Kaminski
sky-@comcast.net
11-3-2

So, you're going to cast your vote to prove that you live in a democracy,
are you? Guess again, Chuck.

Your vote does not matter. It might not even be counted, assuming you're
allowed to vote to begin with. In fact, if you're black, and the first four
letters of your last name match the first four letters on that famously
fabricated list of Florida felons, you definitely won't be voting at all,
because the state of Florida hasn't bothered to fix its mistakes from the
last election " the same problems that allowed George W. Bush to slither
into the White House like the rapine reptilian he is are still in force.

Plus, the thoughtful Republicans in Florida, led by the president's porcine
brother Jeb Bush, have added some new obstacles to counting the votes
accurately, the best of which is the new touchscreen voting system, which
eliminates the paper trail that would expose ballot manipulation and also
would be used for legitimate recounts in the case of very close elections.
No more recounts " isn't that efficient?

Angry columnist Jackson Thoreau recently penned a comprehensive roundup of
Republican shenanigans going on around the country to reduce the Democratic
vote. Read the whole story at
http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed110102.shtml or let me give you this
brief synopsis.

You have to hand it to the Republicans for evil inventiveness. In New
Mexico, the GOP tried to bribe the Green Party to run candidates in three
Congressional races to siphon votes away from popular Democrats. Of course,
the principled Greens refused. In Michigan, Republicans recruited nine
"stealth" candidates to run as Democrats, thereby discouraging legitimate
opposition. In early voting in Dallas, Texas, voting machines were
recording
Democratic votes as Republican; the GOP, when caught, blamed it on
"miscalibration." In Arkansas, many African American voters were asked to
produce their voter ID cards in a blatant effort at intimidation. Officials
in South Dakota want new restrictions on Native American voters.

Did you know that Republicans used private planes from Enron Corp. and
Halliburton Co., the firm headed by Dick Cheney that also practiced phony
accounting fraud, to crisscross the state and block the counting of Florida
votes? This time around in the Florida primary, misleading fliers were
circulated again, saying that some people should vote on a day after Nov.
5.
Similar fliers were circulated in Florida before the 2000 election, which
some say confused some voters there. I bet they'd like to hire Arthur
Andersen to audit Florida's elections system.

But these are trivial gestures - distracting parlor games, really - and not
the real issue that proves your own vote will not matter.

President Bush supposedly signed new Election Reform Legislation into law
earlier this month. Kay J. Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters
of the United States, stated: "Because of the hard work of many ? elected
officials, advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations such as ours,
America,s voters can look forward to real changes at their polling places
over the next few years." Right, the next few years. But not this year.
Nothing, especially in Florida, has really changed at all.

Where we begin to get a little closer to the truth is not in the debate
about who can vote, although that certainly is important, but in the
mechanics of the voting. Call it the hanging chad tangent, if you like.

Like the voting machines. Who provides them, and who operates them?

Most recently, a former Florida secretary of state profited by being a
lobbyist for both the state's counties and the company that sold some of
them touch-screen voting machines used in last month's botched primary
election. Sandra Mortham, who served as the state's top elections official
from 1995 to 1999, is a lobbyist for both Election Systems & Software and
the Florida Association of Counties, which exclusively endorsed the
company's touchscreen machines in return for a commission... Mortham
received a commission from ES&S for every county that bought its
touch-screen machines. The exact terms have not been disclosed... Mortham
is
of course a Republican who before a scandal brought her down was going to
be
Jeb Bush's running mate in Florida.


And of course, there is the current problem in Nebraska. Look at the
documents, see the loop: ES&S, according to the Nebraska Elections
Division,
is the ONLY vote-counting company certified to sell machines in Nebraska.
ES&S counts 80 percent of the votes; the remaining 20 percent are hand
counts.

ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy runs the McCarthy
Group; Michael McCarthy is the Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator
Chuck Hagel; The FEC designates Michael McCarthy as a Primary Campaign
Committee for Candidate Chuck Hagel; and Chuck Hagel's financials list the
McCarthy Group as an Asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million.

Hagel came to Omaha from Washington, where he worked with the first George
Bush Administration. In news articles by the Omaha World-Herald, Hagel said
he was coming to Omaha to become president and partner in the McCarthy
Group
and Chairman of American Information Systems.

In his congressional bio he is said to have come to Omaha "to prepare for
running for office." The first thing he did was run American Information
Systems, a vote-counting company. Hagel was the first Republican in 24
years
to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. He continues to disclose an
investment of $1-5 million in the McCarthy Group, but he does not identify
the underlying assets (ES&S). His disclosure documents omit any mention of
American Information Systems at all. John Gottschalk has been reported as a
director for both the World-Herald Company Inc. (concentrating on the
non-newspaper subsidiaries) and ES&S. He was also involved with Senator
Hagel in the World USO, has relationships with James Baker; he is listed as
a USO pal of George W. Bush. Hmm, there's that certain odor again.

(The unabridged information on this can be accessed at
http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html#Nebraska)


This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to voting machines, by
the
way, as you could read in the aforemented reference. Perhaps the greatest
vote-fixing story of the computer age occurred in the1988 Republican
primary
in New Hampshire, where it is likely that a notoriously riggable collection
of "Shouptronic" computers "preordained" voting results to give George Bush
his "Hail Mary" victory in New Hampshire. Nobody save a small group of
computer engineers, like John Sununu, the state's Republican governor,
would
be the wiser.

"People who mistrust the voting process cannot, in the traditional American
way, accept the defeat of their candidates gracefully and work loyally with
the winners. Instead, more and more American voters are feeling "had,"
"scammed," "hoodwinked" by the voting system. Trust has almost departed.
There is the nagging, unproven, yet pervasive feeling that the "experts,"
the "spin doctors," the "covert operators" and the "private interests" have
put their technicians and consultants in absolute control of the national
vote count, and that in any selected situation these computer wizards can
and will program the vote as their masters wish." So wrote James M. Collier
in his 1992 classic, "Votescam: The Stealing of America."

This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in
American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state
confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter
opinion, Collier wrote. Gallup's glaring error and the miscalls of other
polling organizations once again raised questions about the accuracy of
polls.What nobody seriously wrote about was that the polls were usually
right and that the computers were eminently "fixable." Read the whole sorry
tale at http://Votescam.com/chap1.html. When you do you'll realize that not
just the second Bush was an illegitimately elected president.

What really determines elections is who counts the votes, and who counts
the
votes is somebody you probably didn't know, and if you did know them, you
surely wouldn't trust them to count the votes. No government agency counts
the votes. And the people who count the votes, who tell you who your next
president is, have no government oversight, no audit, no official you have
elected watching over them.

The people who really count the votes are the media, more specifically a
politically influenced cabal of minions bought and paid for by corporate
tycoons who own the nation's major media outlets. These are the same people
who don't think peace demonstrations are worthy of coverage, and who in the
year 2000 got together and reviewed the data from Florida and then really
wouldn't tell us what they found out. They'd only say ... Bush won, just
like the Supreme Court. The highest court of the United States wouldn't let
Florida recount its ballots, and the highest media of the United States
wouldn't tell us what they found when they did. In case you were wondering,
there is no honest official vote total from the last election, only the one
"certified" by Katherine Harris.

Evan Ravitz, founder of the website vote.org, has itemized the major
problems with America's manipulable election system.
(http://www.vote.org/fraud.htm)

"When I directed Boulder, Colorado's Voting by Phone ballot initiative
campaign in 1993 I learned many unnerving things about existing voting
procedures. The problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning,"
Ravitz
wrote. Here's his list:

1. The Voter News Service (formerly News Election Service) " which supplies
ALL election-eve numbers on national and Congressional races " is a private
business of the TV networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and
the
Associated Press. If you ask them how they count votes and predict outcomes
they say that's proprietary information! They have no web site or other
publ
ic profile. And they won't tell you a thing about how they do what they do.

2. Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also
proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to inspect
these programs (the "source code") to verify their accuracy. Election
officials can test the programs (using "test decks") but any clever
programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies the
election.

3. In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor system.
Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on file in most
places unless you are "challenged" by election judges or poll watchers, a
rare event. When this system started hundreds of years ago, the election
judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in their precincts. In modern
America, this is rarely true.

4. Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the
USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it out in
the rightful voter's name. This is discussed in the document "Florida Voter
Fraud Issues" from the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement. In student
and
other high-turnover areas, this problem is rife.

5. In states with "early" voting, there is no system to prevent people from
voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their precinct.
This is going on right now as we speak. (See the Dallas anecdote above.)

So, here's the deal: the people who count the votes are the same people who
both predict (via the use of polls) the winners and also report on the
outcomes of these elections. Do you think they have any interest in
promoting their credibility by seeing their predictions verified? After
all,
these are private businesses.

Also, the actual members of the Voter News Service are super-rich media
barons, with intimate ties to the power structure of America, which chooses
all of the major candidates for president in every election. Do you think
they might be in agreement who will win before the election ever
transpires?

As Collier wrote of the 1988 fiasco in New Hampshire, "there was no
rechecking of the computerized voting machines, no inquiry into the path of
the vote from the voting machines to the central tallying place, no public
scrutiny of the mechanisms of the mighty peculiar vote that saved George
Bush's career and leapfrogged the relatively obscure Sununu into the White
House."

The media giants who reported on " and recounted " Florida's votes in the
2000 election failed to report one simple fact: that by law, ballots
rejected by counting machines have to be hand-counted. This did not occur,
and this was not widely reported.

If either had occurred, you know who would not be in the White House at
this
moment trying to make war on the entire world. If either had occurred, our
Constitutional Bill of Rights would still be in force, which now, as a
result of this convenient media oversight, it is not.

The same wealthy patricians who undercount the number of people who attend
antiwar demonstrations, who pretend there are no political opinions in the
United States except Republican and Democratic, who deride "liberals" and
blithely report that Paul Wellstone's political assassination was just a
mysterious accident " and that 9/11 was an attack by disenchanted Muslim
terrorists ... these are the same people who are predicting and reporting
on
your elections, as well as the very ones who actually count the votes and
give you the totals.

Which is why your vote in Tuesday's election will most definitely not
really
matter.

John Kaminski is a writer living on the coast of Florida who will not be
voting for Katherine Harris (who should be indicted for 22,000 counts of
civil rights violations) in Tuesday's election.
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