The Globalization of Electronic Election Theft

[Demeter]

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1005

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

From Ohio and California to Scotland and France, the disputes surrounding electronic voting machines have gone truly global... the issue has spread worldwide. Widespread cries of theft and fraud erupted in Ukraine, just before the 2004 U.S. election. A forced re-vote ousted the "official" winner.

In Mexico, leftists contend the recent presidential election there was stolen just as Bush did it in the U.S., with some of the same personnel pulling it off.

Now similar cries are coming from Scotland and France. May 3 elections in Scotland using new electronic counting systems resulted in as many as 100,000 votes being classed as "spoilt papers." (About 90,000 such ballots from Ohio 2004 remain uncounted to this day).

Complex methods of tabulating and weighting the Scottish votes yielded "chaos." Several vote counts were suspended. In some races, the tally of rejected ballots was greater than some candidates' winning margin. "This is a temporary interruption to one small aspect of the overall process," says a spokeswoman for DRS, the company responsible for the vote counting technology.

The language in France has not been so polite. Nicolas Sarkozy, a blunt right-wing Reagan-Bush-style extremist, has just won a watershed presidential election over the socialist Segolene Royal. Sarkozy is a hard-edged authoritarian whose intense anti-immigrant rhetoric matches his support for the American war in Iraq and his avowed intent to slash France's social service system, including a public health program widely considered among the best in the world.

Like the balloting in Ukraine, the U.S., Scotland, and Mexico, Sarkozy's victory was marred by angry, widespread complaints about dubious vote counts whose discrepancies always seem to favor the rightist candidate. Throughout France, the cry has arisen that the conservatives have done to Segolene Royal what Bush/Rove did to John Kerry.

In the not-so-distant past, other elections were engineered by George H.W. Bush, head of the Central Intelligence Agency and father of the current White House resident. During the Reagan-Bush presidencies, in the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other key third world nations, expected leftist triumphs somehow morphed into rightist coups. "CIA destabilizations are nothing new," said former CIA station chief and Medal of Merit winner John Stockwell in 1987. "Guatemala in 1954, Brazil, Ghana, Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay -- the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracy."

The recent trend to privatizing vote counts, with corporations claiming "proprietary rights" to keep their hardware and software covert, has added a new dimension to an old tradition. The recent "e-victories" in the U.S. and France have significantly tipped to the right the global balance among the major powers. So while Ohio and California conduct their studies of electronic voting, the whole world will be watching.


Bob Fitrakis's forthcoming book, The Fitrakis Files: Cops, Coverups And Corruption, is at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 is at www.solartopia.org.

[lvx35]

1. What? He is FOR the Iraq war? How could a candidate run FOR the Iraq war in France

and get elected when the approval rating HERE is like 25%