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Vote wont matter OPINION:
Why your vote won't matter
by John Kaminski
So, you're going to cast your vote to prove that you live in a
democracy, are you? Guess again. Your vote does not matter. It might
not even be counted, assuming you're allowed to vote to begin with. In
fact, if you're black, and the first four letters of your last name
match the first four letters on that famously fabricated list of
Florida felons, you definitely won't be voting at all, because the
state of Florida hasn't bothered to fix its mistakes from the last
election—the same problems that allowed George W. Bush to slither into
the White House are still in force. Plus, the thoughtful Republicans
in Florida, led by the president's porcine brother Jeb Bush, have
added some new obstacles to counting the votes accurately, the best of
which is the new touchscreen voting system, which eliminates the paper
trail that would expose ballot manipulation and also would be used for
legitimate recounts in the case of very close elections. No more
recounts—isn't that efficient? Angry columnist Jackson Thoreau
recently penned a comprehensive roundup of Republican shenanigans
going on around the country to reduce the Democratic vote. Read the
whole story or let me give you this brief synopsis. You have to hand
it to the Republicans for evil inventiveness. In New Mexico, the GOP
tried to bribe the Green Party to run candidates in three
Congressional races to siphon votes away from popular Democrats. Of
course, the principled Greens refused. In Michigan, Republicans
recruited nine "stealth" candidates to run as Democrats, thereby
discouraging legitimate opposition. In early voting in Dallas, Texas,
voting machines were recording Democratic votes as Republican; the
GOP, when caught, blamed it on "miscalibration." In Arkansas, many
African American voters were asked to produce their voter ID cards in
a blatant effort at intimidation. Officials in South Dakota want new
restrictions on Native American voters. Did you know that Republicans
used private planes from Enron Corp. and Halliburton Co., the firm
headed by Dick Cheney that also practiced phony accounting fraud, to
crisscross the state and block the counting of Florida votes? This
time around in the Florida primary, misleading fliers were circulated
again, saying that some people should vote on a day after Nov. 5.
Similar fliers were circulated in Florida before the 2000 election,
which some say confused some voters there. I bet they'd like to hire
Arthur Andersen to audit Florida's elections system. But these are
trivial gestures—distracting parlor games, really—and not the real
issue that proves your own vote will not matter. President Bush
supposedly signed new Election Reform Legislation into law earlier
States, stated: "Because of the hard work of many elected officials,
advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations such as ours, Americas
voters can look forward to real changes at their polling places over
the next few years." Right, the next few years. But not this year.
Nothing, especially in Florida, has really changed at all. Where we
begin to get a little closer to the truth is not in the debate about
who can vote, although that certainly is important, but in the
mechanics of the voting. Call it the hanging chad tangent, if you
like. Like the voting machines. Who provides them, and who operates
them? [See Who makes the vote-counting machines?] Most recently, a
former Florida secretary of state profited by being a lobbyist for
both the state's counties and the company that sold some of those
touch-screen voting machines used in last month's botched primary
election. Sandra Mortham, who served as the state's top elections
official from 1995 to 1999, is a lobbyist for both Election Systems &
Software (ES&S) and the Florida Association of Counties, which
exclusively endorsed the company's touchscreen machines in return for
a commission... Mortham received a commission from ES&S for every
county that bought its touch-screen machines. The exact terms have not
been disclosed. Mortham is, of course, a Republican; and before a
scandal brought her down, she was going to be Jeb Bush's running mate
in Florida. And of course, there is the current problem in Nebraska.
Look at the documents, see the loop: ES&S, according to the Nebraska
Elections Division, is the ONLY vote-counting company certified to
sell machines in Nebraska. ES&S counts 80 percent of the votes; the
remaining 20 percent are hand counts. ES&S is owned by the McCarthy
Group; Michael McCarthy runs the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy is
the Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator Chuck Hagel; The FEC
designates Michael McCarthy as a Primary Campaign Committee for
Candidate Chuck Hagel; and Chuck Hagel's financials list the McCarthy
Group as an "asset," with his investment valued at $1-$5 million.
Hagel came to Omaha from Washington, where he worked with the first
George Bush Administration. In news articles by the Omaha
World-Herald, Hagel said he was coming to Omaha to become president
and partner in the McCarthy Group and Chairman of American Information
Systems. In his congressional bio he is said to have come to Omaha "to
prepare for running for office." The first thing he did was run
American Information Systems, a vote-counting company. Hagel was the
first Republican in 24 years to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. He
continues to disclose an investment of $1-$5 million in the McCarthy
Group, but he does not identify the underlying assets (ES&S). His
disclosure documents omit any mention of American Information Systems
at all. John Gottschalk has been reported as a director for both the
World-Herald Company Inc. (concentrating on the non-newspaper
subsidiaries) and ES&S. He was also involved with Senator Hagel in the
World USO, and has relationships with James Baker; he is listed as a
USO pal of George W. Bush. Hmm—there's that certain odor again. (The
unabridged information on this can be accessed on Talion.com's site. )
James M. Collier wrote, in his 1992 classic, Votescam: The Stealing of
America, "People who mistrust the voting process cannot, in the
traditional American way, accept the defeat of their candidates
gracefully and work loyally with the winners. Instead, more and more
American voters are feeling ‘had,’ ‘scammed,’ ‘hoodwinked’ by the
voting system. Trust has almost departed. There is the nagging,
unproven, yet pervasive feeling that the ‘experts,’ the ‘spin
doctors,’ the ‘covert operators’ and the ‘private interests’ have put
their technicians and consultants in absolute control of the national
vote count, and that in any selected situation these computer wizards
can and will program the vote as their masters wish." Check out the
Vote Scam web site. When you do, you'll realize that not just the
second Bush was an illegitimately elected president. What really
determines elections is who counts the votes, and who counts the votes
is somebody you probably didn't know. If you did know them, you surely
wouldn't trust them to count the votes. No government agency counts
the votes. And the people who count the votes, who tell you who your
next president is, have no government oversight, no audit, no official
you have elected watching over them. The people who really count the
votes are the media, more specifically a politically influenced cabal
of minions bought and paid for by corporate tycoons who own the
nation's major media outlets. These are the same people who don't
think peace demonstrations are worthy of coverage, and who in the year
2000 got together and reviewed the data from Florida and then really
wouldn't tell us what they found out. The highest court of the United
States wouldn't let Florida recount its ballots, and the highest media
of the United States wouldn't tell us what they found when they did.
In case you were wondering, there is no honest official vote total
from the last election, only the one "certified" by Katherine Harris.
Evan Ravitz, founder of the vote.org website, has itemized the major
problems with America's manipulable election system. "When I directed
Boulder, Colorado's Voting by Phone ballot initiative campaign in 1993
I learned many unnerving things about existing voting procedures. The
problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning," Ravitz wrote.
Here's his list: The Voter News Service (formerly News Election
Service)—which supplies ALL election-eve numbers on national and
Congressional races—is a private business of the TV networks, The New
York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. If you ask
them how they count votes and predict outcomes, they say that's
"proprietary information"! They have no website or other public
profile. And they won't tell you a thing about how they do what they
do.
Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also
proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to
inspect these programs (the "source code") to verify their accuracy.
Election officials can test the programs (using "test decks") but any
clever programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies
the election.
In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor
system. Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on
file in most places unless you are "challenged" by election judges or
poll watchers, a rare event. When this system started hundreds of
years ago, the election judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in
their precincts. In modern America, this is rarely true.
Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the
USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it
out in the rightful voter's name. This is discussed in the document
"Florida Voter Fraud Issues" from the Florida Department Of Law
Enforcement. In student and other high-turnover areas, this problem is
rife.
In states with "early" voting, there is no system to prevent people
from voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their
precinct. So, here's the deal: the people who count the votes are the
same people who both predict (via the use of polls) the winners and
also report on the outcomes of these elections. Do you think they have
any interest in promoting their credibility by seeing their
predictions verified? After all, these are private businesses. Also,
the actual members of the Voter News Service are super-rich media
barons, with intimate ties to the power structure of America, which
chooses all of the major candidates for president in every election.
Do you think they might be in agreement who will win before the
election ever transpires? The media giants who reported on—and
recounted—Florida's votes in the 2000 election failed to report one
simple fact: that by law, ballots rejected by counting machines have
to be hand-counted. This did not occur, and this was not widely
reported. If either had occurred, you know who would not be in the
White House at this moment. If either had occurred, our Constitutional
Bill of Rights would still be in force—which now, as a result of this
convenient media oversight, it is not. The same wealthy patricians who
undercount the number of people who attend antiwar demonstrations, who
pretend there are no political opinions in the United States except
Republican and Democratic, who deride "liberals" and blithely report
that Paul Wellstone's death was just a mysterious accident—and that
9/11 was an attack by disenchanted Muslim terrorists...these are the
same people who are predicting and reporting on your elections, as
well as the very ones who actually count the votes and give you the
totals. Which is why your vote in the November 5 election most
definitely does not really matter.
John Kaminski is a writer living on the coast of Florida who will not
be voting for Katherine Harris ("who should be indicted for 22,000
counts of civil rights violations"). He may be reached at
skylax@comcast.net.
Updated for the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel
by Allegro Web Communications on November 4, 2002.
Copyright © 2002 The Baltimore Chronicle and the SENTINEL. All rights reserved.
http://www.charm.net/~marc/chronicle/opinion_oct02.shtml
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