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Edited on Thu Jan-10-08 12:06 PM by Peace Patriot
I'm amazed at how often I have to explain what an election is.
An election in which the government does some voodoo behind the curtain, with vote tabulators run on 'trade secret' code, and comes out and announces who 'won,' is not an election. It is tyranny. Or a Marx Brothers movie. Take your pick.
Elections are like no other process in our democracy. They must be open, visible, transparent, verifiable and verified UP FRONT. Hiding the vote counting from the public is INHERENTLY fraudulent. This is so basic, so obvious, such a no-brainer, it's difficult to explain. It's like having to prove that most people have two legs. Do you have to photograph everybody on earth to establish something like this that everybody knows, that is common sense? Secret vote counting will always result in the powers-that-be reinforcing their own power and control. THEREFORE vote counting is conducted IN PUBLIC VIEW.
...until corporations entered the picture, and started re-writing our laws to permit THEM to count the votes using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, that the public has no right to review. Now we have an utterly flip-flopped situation in which PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS are interfering with the most basic requirement of democracy: that elections be counted in public. The biggest corporate scam ever.
Let me put this another way. There should be no uncertainty in any election. In elections, the burden of proof is on the GOVERNMENT. Elections are guilty until proven innocent. The burden is not on the citizen to prove fraud. The burden is on the government to prove transparency. And if there is no transparency, the election is INHERENTLY fraudulent.
This is far, far different than any other kind of fraud, in which, first of all, the person accused of fraud is entitled to be presumed innocent. Elections are NOT presumed innocent. They are presumed guilty, until proven otherwise by transparent procedures. Elections MUST be totally open and aboveboard, up front. A person in a fraud case is entitled to privacy unless the government can establish reasonable suspicion of a crime, to invade their documents, phone calls, hard drives, bank accounts, etc. In elections, the OPPOSITE is the case. Election officials have NO right of privacy. They have NO presumption of innocence. All documents and activities--and, most especially the tabulating of the ballots--MUST be entirely visible to the public.
The burden of proof that an election result is valid is on the GOVERNMENT, not on the citizens. And if the government hides the vote counting process--pulls it behind a veil of corporate secrecy--so that the validity of an election cannot be established, up front, the election is FRAUDULENT.
This is the case with virtually every election in the United States starting in 2004--after the cancerous spread of 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period, by act (and $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle) of Congress.
Thus, citizens--who do not even bear the burden of proof--are forced to gather INFERENTIAL evidence of the specific use of this inherently fraudulent vote counting system, to challenge, a) specific results, and b) the fraudulent SYSTEM.
This is upside down, backwards and inside out. It is Alice in Wonderland. Citizens should not have to do this.
Can people get this now? It is Democracy 101. It is FUNDAMENTAL. The burden of proof is on the government to establish that its counting of the votes is accurate.
But we have had an extremely alarming series of events, including court rulings, that protect the corporate 'TRADE SECRET' code, and not us, the voters, in our FUNDAMENTAL right to transparent vote counting. The incredible FL-13 case shows us how far gone our democracy is. ES&S 'disappeared' 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic areas, in this '06 election 'won' by the Republican (of course) by only some 350 votes. When the lawyers for the Democrat (Christine Jennings) took the matter to court, and asked to see ES&S's 'trade secret' code, to try to determine what happened to those 18,000 votes, ES&S refused , and argued that their "right" to profit from our elections (and steal our elections) trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted.
And the Jeb judge agreed!
But that isn't even the worst of it. Our so-called Democratic Congress--which has the power to reverse this injustice--has DONE NOTHING ABOUT IT. NOTHING!
NOTHING!
The Democrats love (or fear?) "trade secret," proprietary vote counting by rightwing Bushite corporations! (And ES&S is the worst of the election theft monopolies, as to extremist rightwing ties.)
Nothing! They have done NOTHING to restore our most fundamental right, and the most fundamental basis of our democracy: transparent vote counting.
A lot of people don't realize how WRONG this is--because our Corporate Rulers have tried to slide this brand new "right" for themselves into our legal system, under the radar: their "right" to count all our votes IN SECRET.
They got personhood rights this way--sneakily. They got the right to live forever--and to gobble up property and wealth over generations of time, with no end to it. These are business groups of moneyed interests who were short-lived consortiums, in historic times, tolerated by governments for their common good purposes, licensed by governments, and frequently disbanded by governments. Now they have virtually BECOME our government. And now they are asserting the "right" to profit from our elections, at the cost of election transparency, and to count all our votes--once a public, democratic process--with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code.
So, where should the burden of proof be? Ye who scoff at, and snicker at, and and ridicule, and try to marginalize those of us who want TRANSPARENT VOTE COUNTING: Who should have to prove what, when it comes to elections?
Why is it so difficult to get a recount, when inferential evidence--the only evidence available to us--points to a wrong outcome? And why is it impossible to GET a recount in one third of the country that doesn't even have a paper trail for vote counting?
Who bears the burden? And why has our political establishment thrown the burden on US--on ordinary citizens, with few resources, funds and time--with a NON-TRANSPARENT vote counting system?
WHY?
We are not likely going to fix this until we answer that question. Why did they do this? Why did they CHANGE our election system so that we CAN'T PROVE fraud, so that we only have INFERENTIAL evidence, and so that, when we go to court--if we can ever get it to court, a rare and difficult undertaking--a PRIVATE CORPORATION can claim PROPERTY RIGHTS over our ELECTION SYSTEM?!
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A quick rundown on the system:
Touchscreen voting machines (about a third of the country) have no paper ballot. There is no evidence.
Optiscan voting machines have a paper ballot, but 99% of the ballots are never counted. (Totally inadequate "check and balance" in a "TRADE SECRET" system.)
Absentee Ballots, other paper ballots--most are scanned into the riggable electronics, not hand-counted.
The electronics have proven to be--time and again, in numerous tests--extremely insecure and insider riggable. The only improvement that opticans provide is that, if you can get a recount, there is a ballot to recount.
It is extremely difficult--often impossible--for ordinary citizens to get a recount. It is expensive, and blockaded in many ways, and often only the candidate can get a recount, and candidates fear the voting machine corporations and almost never challenge them. Also, it is never a full, or even a big recount. It will be, say, a 3% recount of selected precincts (opening up an whole additional can of worms). The principle of COUNTING EVERY VOTE has been entirely lost.
The 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY vote counting code permeates the system--it's in the touchscreens, the optiscans and the central tabulators. With a 1% audit--and often a 0% audit--the vote counting is virtually unmonitored--unverified, unverifiable, non-transparent.
The three main electronic voting corporations--Diebold (now Premier), ES&S and Sequoia--all have very close ties to the Bush regime, far rightwing causes and/or the Republican Party.
BOTH political parties were collusive in installing this egregiously undemocratic vote counting system nationwide.
Note: New Hampshire has a Diebold optiscan system in the urban areas, and hand-counting in the rural areas (very rare in the country). Therefore it is possible to compare a pristine, hand-counted vote with a machine vote. The hand-counted rural areas went for Obama. The urban (Diebold) areas went for (pro-war, pro-corporate) Clinton. Pre-election polls predicted an Obama win of the state by as much as 8%. Clinton 'won' the state by 3%. It is a duplicate of the 2004 election, in many ways, including the exit pollster, Edison-Mitofsky, "weighting" the exit polls, post-election, to force them to MATCH the official results. These same bad actors--Diebold & brethren, and Edison-Mitofksy--together stole the 2004 election for Bush. All evidence points to at least a 5% landslide for Kerry; the real, pre-doctored exit polls gave him a 3% win (but this doesn't count all the suppressed black votes, in Ohio for instance). Edison-Mitofsky CHANGED the exit poll results (Kerry win) to MATCH the results of Diebold/ES&S's secret formulae (Bush win). Thus, a probable landslide for Kerry in 2004, and a probable landslide for Obama in 2006, are buried beneath clouds of obfuscation--corporate "trade secret" code in the voting system, and corporate "trade secret" exit polls, with most of the ballots (approx. 98%) never counted by anybody. Obama is the type of politician who seeks to please the "powers-that-be" with vague "politics of hope" rhetoric. He will not challenge the New Hampshire result. Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia hold his fate in their hands, in the remaining primaries. Whoever gets 'made' by them as the Democratic candidate (probably Hillary), will then face a Bushite in the general election, which will also be tabulated by these Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls.
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There really has been only one issue since November 2004: Transparent vote counting. Without it, we don't really have a democracy any more. You wonder why Bush and Cheney are still in office, and not in jail? This is why. You wonder how a Democratic Congress--with 70% of the American people opposed to the Iraq War and wanting it ended--could, instead, ESCALATE the war, and lard Bush/Cheney with billions more of our non-existent tax dollars to keep killing Iraqis until they sign over their oil rights? This is why. You wonder why a great surge of youthful support for Obama came to nothing in New Hampshire, despite polls--even Clinton's own internal polls--saying he would win big? This is why.
Get to work, friends, at your local/state level, to change this circumstance. Demand vote counting that everyone can see and understand. You should NOT have to produce any proof that this fraudulent system came up with a wrong result. It should be obvious--and plain for all to see--who won. There should be NO uncertainty.
Your election officials are guilty until proven innocent. Remember that.
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