My book on the myriad problems and potential for fraud with our election system was recently published by
Biting Duck Press. It is titled “Democracy Undone – Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Impending Demise of American Democracy. It can be found at
http://bitingduckpress.com/democracy_undone/ . Here is a brief description of each of the book’s chapters:
Chapter 1 – Consequences of a failing democracyWhen elections of our public officials are for sale to the highest bidder… when our public officials are so addicted to the “campaign contributions” of their wealthiest constituents that they develop a symbiotic relationship with them… when our communications media are owned and controlled by an oligarchy of wealthy elites… when our citizenry lack the ability to differentiate propaganda from reality… when we allow machines provided by private corporations to count our votes using secret electronic software… then we should expect that the consequences will not be pretty or comfortable for the vast majority of our citizens. This chapter briefly discusses some of the major consequences of all that, including:
Election to public office of people who have no desire to represent our interests
Routine abrogation of international law
Gross, record breaking income inequality
Rampant militarism
The highest rate of imprisonment of its citizens, by far, of any nation in the world
The impending destruction of the human life-sustaining capabilities of our planet
Chapter 2 – How the 2000 Presidential election was stolenThe American people were widely aware that on Election Day 2000 the TV networks made two calls on the winner of the Presidential election in Florida that were reversed shortly afterwards. Within an hour of poll closing, Florida was called for Al Gore. A little more than two hours later, the networks reversed that call, calling the race in Florida “too close to call”. Four hours after that, at 2:16 a.m. Wednesday morning, they began calling Florida, and with that the U.S. Presidential election, for George W. Bush. About an hour later the networks put Florida back in the “too close to call” category, where it remained for the next 36 days, amidst Democratic Party efforts to have the votes recounted, Republican Party efforts to stop the vote counting, bitter publicly aired arguments and court battles.
Why would the national TV networks make two calls in the same state, within seven hours, which had to be reversed shortly afterwards? Our national news media attributed those two calls to “bad data”, but they never explained them in any adequate detail. An analysis of those two reversed calls sheds much light on the many problems with the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. That analysis provides no evidence that the early call for Gore was based on “bad data” at all. So why did it have to later be reversed? The Wednesday morning call for Bush was based mainly on a computer “glitch” that reduced Gore’s vote count by more than 16 thousand in a single precinct that contained only about 600 voters.
This chapter explores the reasons for the two “bad calls”, as well as the many illicit and shady maneuvers that provided the Bush/Cheney margin of victory in Florida and thereby gave us “President George W. Bush”.
Chapter 3 – Was the 2004 Presidential election stolen too?It was well known in the days prior to the 2004 Presidential election that a Bush victory was highly unlikely without Bush carrying both Ohio and Florida. As Election Day unfolded, spirits in the Kerry camp were running high, as it became evident that Ohio’s 20 electoral votes would determine the victor, and Kerry had a comfortable lead in the Ohio exit poll. Even CNN’s right wing hack, Robert Novak, acknowledged that it would be an uphill climb for Bush.
But as the results came in from Ohio, optimism in the Kerry camp began to fade, and by late evening their remaining hope was narrowed down to strongly Democratic Cuyahoga County, and especially Cleveland, where reports of large pre-election increases in new voter registration and exceptionally high voter turnout had circulated. But this remaining hope soon faded, as it became clear that the (official) voter turnout from Cleveland was in fact miserably low, and by noon the next day John Kerry conceded the election, which he officially lost by about 119 thousand votes.
In this chapter I do not discuss all of the evidence for a stolen 2004 election, as I reserve most of that for later chapters that deal with election fraud by type of fraud. In this chapter I discuss: 1) the record breaking discrepancy between the many exit polls that were performed as voters left the polls and the official vote count; 2) the widespread silence regarding that discrepancy by our national news media, and; 3) the corrupted vote recounts that were performed when citizens concerned about the integrity of the election challenged the results.
Chapter 4 – Can you trust the corporations that make the computers that count your votes?Both the running of our elections and the registering of voters have to a large extent been turned over to private for-profit corporations in recent years. These corporations have displayed great resistance to any laws or policies that would make their voting systems more transparent or less susceptible to fraud.
Many of these corporations have been shown to have political ties, especially to the Republican Party. It is widely acknowledged that the electronic machines that they produce, own, and use to count our votes, can be easily programmed to switch votes from one candidate to another. The final results produced by most of these machines cannot be verified by any means. Much evidence provides good reason to believe that these machines have been used to steal elections, especially the 2004 presidential election. Chapter 4 describes much of this evidence and explains why these machines are unfit for use in our elections.
Chapter 5 – Fixing elections by making 2 + 2 = 3 In addition to the electronic voting machines that count our votes at the thousands of individual precincts throughout the United States, other electronic machines compile the individual precinct vote counts to produce total county-wide vote totals. As with the individual voting machines, these “central county tabulators” can be programmed for fraud. Chapter 5 describes evidence of election fraud mediated by these central county tabulators and discusses how this type of election fraud can be prevented.
Chapter 6 – Illegal purging of legitimate votersOf the many irregularities found in the 2000 Presidential election, it was the illegal purging of legitimate voters that was the biggest factor in the awarding of Florida and therefore the Presidency to George W. Bush. The irregularities identified in the 2004 Presidential election dwarfed those found in 2000 in scope and magnitude, and consequently Bush was awarded a second term as president. Once again, illegitimate purging of legitimate voters led the list of causes for Bush’s victory. This practice was prevalent all over the country, including again in Florida, but this time it was Ohio that led the way and made the biggest difference. And once again, the person responsible for conducting a fair election in the state that made the difference, this time Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, was the highly partisan Chairperson of the Bush/Cheney campaign in the state. This chapter describes the abundant evidence of illegal purging of legitimate voters in Florida 2000, Ohio 2004 and elsewhere.
Chapter 7 – More dirty tricks – Voter suppression and intimidationThis chapter discusses other means of voter suppression, including:
Insufficient allocation of voting machines to poor and minority precincts
Spoiled ballots – on which the voter intends to vote but is unable to do so
Moving polling places without notifying voters
Voter intimidation
Frivolous lawsuits against voter registration organizations
Chapter 8 – The “voter fraud” myth and the barrage of new restrictive voting lawsRestrictive voting laws decrease voter turnout by making it more difficult for people to vote. They disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, the poor, and Democrats. To rationalize these anti-democratic laws, Republicans have been pushing for several years the myth of “voter fraud” – the idea that voters who impersonate other people and otherwise vote illegally represent a monumental threat to the integrity of our elections.
While the first restrictive state voter ID laws were passed in 2003, by September 2011, 30 U.S. states required either photo ID or some other form of ID in order to vote. American voters who are homeless, do not own cars, or otherwise lack access to photo IDs are usually ordinary people who have fallen on hard times and gotten caught up in a system that is making life more and more difficult for ordinary people. Preventing them from voting helps the cause of the American oligarchy at the expense of almost everyone else. Consequently, in 2012 alone, voter ID legislation with the purpose of disenfranchising millions of Americans was introduced in 34 states.
Chapter 8 debunks the “voter fraud” myth, discusses the anti-democratic effects of the restrictive voting laws that use the “voter fraud” myth as their rationale, and describes the current status of voter ID laws.
Chapter 9 – Shocking testimony on vote switching in the 2004 presidential electionThere are several unsolved (not to mention uninvestigated) mysteries surrounding George Bush’s 2004 Ohio “victory”, many which suggest the possibility or likelihood of electronic vote switching. A computer programmer, Clint Curtis, provided sworn testimony to Congress that he wrote a computer program, at the request of a Republican operative, which was capable of rigging the 2004 election, and which he believes was in fact used to rig the 2004 election. The man charged with investigating Curtis’ allegations appeared to be on the verge of verifying his allegations and tracking them “all the way to the top” shortly before he died under highly suspicious circumstances. The investigation into his alleged suicide was quickly squelched by Governor Jeb Bush’s administration in Florida.
Four years later, following numerous investigations that cast further suspicion on the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, ‘Karl Rove’s IT guru’ was killed in a plane crash shortly before he was scheduled to testify in a court case involving allegations of vote manipulation in that election, and shortly after receiving threats regarding his impending testimony. The close association of this man with Karl Rove is probably significant.
Chapter 9 discusses those two deaths in detail, in the context in which they occurred.
Chapter 10 – Legalized bribery of government officialsThere is no greater corrupting influence on a democratic (or any other) government than systematic bribery of the government officials who are supposed to serve the interests of the nation’s people. In the United States today the system that is used to finance election campaigns amounts to systematic bribery of our government officials. This system perpetuates a double whammy on the American people. Money from wealthy “campaign contributors” – individuals and corporations – has tremendous influence on the outcomes of our elections. Then the recipients of that money, once installed in office, use the powers of their office to pay back their contributors by passing and supporting legislation that favors them, at the expense of everyone else. That enables the wealthy contributors to accumulate even more wealth and power, and the cycle repeats itself over and over again.
The end result of legalized bribery in our country is that a great many of our politicians do everything they can to make their wealthiest constituents happy with them, at the expense of everyone else. They do that with the knowledge that the voters they lose in doing so will be more than compensated for by their disinformation campaigns that will be paid for by their wealthy donors. This is a recipe for turning democracy into corporatocracy, which is a major component of fascism.
This chapter describes the malignant effects of legalized bribery in the United States, and some of its history, along with the most important U.S. Supreme Court decisions that enabled this system, by striking down campaign finance reform laws passed by the U.S. Congress, and by using the rationalization that corporations are “persons” and money is a form of “speech”. Thus our Supreme Court has conferred our First Amendment protection of free speech upon corporations, thereby enabling them to spend millions of dollars in behalf of the political candidates and causes that support their interests.
Chapter 11 – Corporate control of communications mediaBecause the good majority of information that most Americans receive today is through the telecommunications industry, and because access to the megaphones that the telecommunications industry uses to communicate to the American people is very expensive and under corporate control, the wealthy now have the ability to use those megaphones to a much greater extent than do ordinary American citizens. Consequently, wealthy persons, individually or through the corporations that they control, use their wealth to obtain air time on the previously “public airways” to get their message out – in the process precluding those with less money from doing the same.
The implications for national politics have been quite unfortunate, as our elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, feel the need to move further and further to the right, lest they risk being ignored, mocked, or attacked by our corporate news media.
This situation is intolerable. A free and independent press, which provides unbiased accurate information to the people, is crucial to a healthy functioning democracy. When most of the press is under the control of corporate interests, which strive to tilt elections in their favor, democracy becomes nothing but a fig leaf. The result is a playing field tilted heavily towards the right, in which the American people suffer because corporate interests are served at the expense of the vast majority of people.
Chapter 11 explores the history of corporate monopolization of our communications media, the resulting attacks on our First Amendment rights, and other consequences destructive of a democratic society.
Chapter 12 – Some actions we can take nowThis chapter provides a framework for solutions to the myriad problems with the election system in the United States today. It ends with a quote from Milton Mayer, who studied the thinking of ordinary lower level Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power. Mayer explained in his book, “They Thought They Were Free – The Germans 1933-45”, the gradual process by which Germans gave up their freedom to Hitler:
What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter…
You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time…
You speak privately to your colleagues… but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’ … And you can’t prove it…
In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next… You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago.
Final Note from the Publisher: Use This Book!We were keen to get this book published prior to the upcoming presidential election for what readers should perceive as pretty obvious reasons. Even those of us not privy to all the facts suspected that two out the last three presidential elections were stolen. Now this book removes whatever doubts we may have had.
The silence on this subject from both sides of the political spectrum (after some initial rather feeble whining) has been nothing short of deafening. From progressive and far left all the way to conservative and far religious right the mantra has resounded: “all right, whatever may have happened it is in the past, it’s time to forget about it, it’s time to move on.” But moving on without making an effort to understand from past mistakes sets the stage for creating a nation of fools ruled by a coterie of knaves. For if there is one thing we can count on, it is that members of the ruling elite continue to learn from their past. Indeed, stealing the 2004 election was a slicker process than the terribly clumsy and obvious 2000 maneuvering.
Our recent US election history is a tale painful to recount and an agony for those of us who were actively involved to relive. But it is imperative that we do so, because, as the great writer says: “past is prologue.” Here are some ways to use the invaluable information contained in this book…
If you read the book or part of it and agree that the information contained in it has the potential to educate American voters about the problems with our election system and motivate them to be more vigilant about protecting it, please consider writing a short review of the book and posting it at Amazon.
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