Election Fraud 2000

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 20:34:36 GMT, Gunner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 19:02:58 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> (Desertphile) wrote:

> >It's entirely possible that Mr. Ball is not aware of Bush2's friends
> >engaging in voting machine tampering in Florida (where Bush2's brother
> >is governor). That might explain his odd claims.

> You have cites? 



A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier

"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 naive, 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 TV 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
p.m., 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 canceled 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 Antoni
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 sneeked 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 Antoni 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 US

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 supersede 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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