Posted on 26-10-2003
A Brief History of
Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier, t r u t h o u t | Perspective, 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.
Thats 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 Ws 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,
were 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
expertsand 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 theres 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 solutionis
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.
Its 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 Secretarys 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 naïve, 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 Americawas published
in 1992 and immediately banned by the major book chains, which
listed the book as out of printand actively worked to prevent
its sale. Votescam chronicles the Collier brothers groundbreaking
investigation into Americas 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 cant 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 projectionsfor
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 didnt get another vote for the
rest of the night.
This piqued their interest.
When they examined the officialelection results from the Secretary
of States 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 officialvote results with a print-out
of the vote projectionsbroadcast by the TV networks on the final
election night, they found that channel 4 had projectedwith
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 projectedthe final vote total for a race at
96,499 votes. When the Colliers checked the officialnumber .
. . 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 machines 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: Youll 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 dont
want to get caught up in this thing.
But theres more.
According to the print-out of the TV networks 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. Its 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 90s, 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 Colliers 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. Ill 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 countingsession. 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.
Its 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, Id 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.
(Its 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 Ive 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 anyones word on the reform that is needed. Do not
cede your power to government officials and so-called experts
any longer. Educate yourself. Its 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.
Lets 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. Theyre
worth nothing if not counted altogether. A persons 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 wont 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 randomrecounts, 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, lets 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 cant go back to
a simple process that works once weve stupidly and recklessly
abandoned it.
I dont 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 were Americans -- we
dont 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 thats 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, heres my idea. After the public Touch-Screen bonfire
(we really need more community minded events, dont you think?),
we should march to our Secretary of States 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 its 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 officialswill 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.
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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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