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seldom mentioned: BUSHITE corporations--two related corporations with very close ties to the Bush junta--gained controlled of our election system during the 2002-2004 period, as a consequence of the so-called "Help America Vote Act," the handiwork of the two biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney.* These corporations insisted on the use of "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY vote tabulation programming code in the new electronic voting systems--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it--and have fought tooth and nail against any kind of auditing/recount capability, even a meager "paper trail." Congress failed to require transparency and verifiability, and provided a $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle which benefited these Bushite corporations, and was used to bribe, corrupt and bully elections officials from one end of the country to the other, into purchasing these insecure, unreliable and extremely hackable, Bushite-controlled voting machines!
The Bushite corporations who counted virtually all our votes under a veil of secrecy in 2004 are:
Diebold: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer" like Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004."
ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the Chalcedon Foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things). Diebold and ES&S are run by two brothers, Tod and Bob Urosevich. Together these two corporations 'counted' 80% of the nation's votes in 2004.
Sequoia: The third big player, which employs former Republican Calif Secretary of State, Bill Jones, and his chief aide, Alfie Charles, to peddle its machines--the same people who first purchased this election theft technology for California--an outrageous example of corrupt "revolving door" employment.
This is ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW about the 2004 election! Tom Delay and Bob Ney* DELIBERATELY set up *NON-TRANSPARENT* conditions. Transparent elections are not difficult. People vote, and the votes are counted in public view. Clearly, the Bush junta DID NOT WANT a transparent election in 2004. They wanted to corrupt it. They wanted there to be no evidence, no recountability, no transparency. They wanted to privatize it. They wanted to gain rightwing secret power over it. (The systems are most easily hackable from inside these corporations.) They wanted to create a high maintenance cost system, as an on-going cash cow for their buds at Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia. Now the states are saddled with these costly, insecure, unreliable, hackable machines--whose inner programming the public is not allowed to see, and which require constant maintenance and upgrades, at additional cost.
This situation is OUTRAGEOUS. It should have brought down the government! It is tyranny! This is the face of tyranny: SECRET VOTE COUNTING. Ask citizens of Stalinist Russia. Ask anybody.
And the facts of Republican election officials' suppression of Democratic votes in Ohio and other states--and their egregious violations of the Voting Rights Act--are INFORMED by this INTENT to hold a NON-TRANSPARENT ELECTION.
You don't create non-transparency in vote counting with benign intent.
With this secret vote 'counting' capability in place, why did they bother with blatant, visible vote suppression in Ohio? For several reasons: 1) Ohio was not completely Diebolded--opposition to Diebold had partially succeeded--so non-electronic votes had to be suppressed. 2) Obviously, the Bushite-controlled voting machines and central tabulators had to be pre-programmed to certain percentages and could not be that easily changed on election day itself, so, when the Kerry landslide began developing, they had to intensify the vote suppression with overt tactics, like shorting black precincts on voting machines (and the pre-election suppression--such as the RNC paying operatives to shred Dem voter registrations in New Mexico--were likely due to old pols distrusting the promises of the new techies); 3) sheer perversity--racism, and hatred for the poor and for Democrats, humiliation and demoralization of progressive voters.
While all direct evidence of who won in 2004 was deliberately denied to the public, there is a mountain of inferential evidence and studies that point overwhelmingly to a Kerry win, including studies of the exit poll discrepancy (Kerry won the exit polls; the exit polls then were FALSIFIED--in impossible ways--on election night, by the corporate news monopoly consortium pollster, to FORCE those numbers to FIT the unverifiable, non-transparent results of Diebold's and ES&S's secret formulae; unlike exit polls in other countries, which are used to verify elections and checking for fraud, here they were used to CONFIRM the results of a NON-TRANSPARENT vote count); studies of the clear advantage to Bush in electronic voting systems (vs. forms of paper ballots); studies of the big turnout (20 million new voters) and the 60/40 Democratic success in new voter registrations in 2004 (do the math! were all those people flocking to the Dem party to vote for Bush?), as well as detailed studies of Ohio and New Mexico that clearly point to those electoral votes going to the wrong candidate.
People get into arguments about the details and forget the CONTEXT of DELIBERATE, BLATANT NON-TRANSPARENCY. Further, if you solve Ohio--that is, if you enforce EXISTING LAW, and thus prevent the egregious vote suppression--you have not solved the problem of non-transparency and stolen elections. And, as a matter of fact, the outrageous violations of law that Ohio Republican officials got away with is a SYMPTOM of the non-transparency and illegitimacy, and consequent arrogance of the Bush junta. With transparent elections--vote counting in public view, not by private Bushite corporates behind a veil of secrecy--Ohio COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. BECAUSE the Bushites are beholden to Diebold and ES&S and non-transparent elections, they can GET AWAY with crap like they pulled in Ohio. No legitimate government would have permitted that. Ten hour voting lines in poor black communities! I mean, really!
To repeat: The lawless Republican behavior in Ohio must be seen in the CONTEXT of the "Help America Vote Act" and the intention of Tom Delay and Bob Ney* to PREVENT transparency, to corrupt our election system and to transform it into yet another Bushite pigsty, with the additional benefit of corrupting state/county election officials with lavish lobbying and the heady power of secrecy.
I won't address here why I think our Democratic Party leadership was silent throughout this coup (except to say that I think it was a lethal combination of corruption and fear; it was the Anthrax Congress that passed this truly wretched bill; and we didn't know about Bushite spying and blackmail capabilities at that time). Some people are attached to an idea of the Democratic Party as it was in the Old Republic--a vigilant monitor of open government and the public good. It's just not so any more. We can no more count on the Dem Party to protect our basic rights than we can on the war profiteering corporate news monopolies. All of our institutions have failed us. We have essentially lost our right to vote. And it's going to take a long hard effort at the state/local level to get it back.
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*(Delay and Ney were abetted by Bilderberg 'Democrat' Christopher Dodd, in the content and passage of the bill. All but two U.S. Senators voted FOR this terrible bill. The two exceptions were (surprise, surprise!) Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. 63 House members voted against, mostly Dems, but also James Sensenbrenner, another surprise.)
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