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set up the "Help America Vote Act" as a $4 billion boondoggle to entice and corrupt local/state election officials to purchase crap-ass voting machines, hackable by a chimpanzee, and actively prevented a paper trail requirement (bottled it up in committee, strong-armed Congressmen to keep if off the floor), with no rules about paper trails, audits or recounts, and a greatly underfunded machine certification commission, no rules about transparency ("trade secret" source code permitted in the voting machines and central tabulators), and no rules about lavish lobbying, partisan ownership of the private corporations that would now take over our elections, or "revolving door employment," so that billions of dollars were poured into the pockets of the major Bush donors who made these machines, and people like Repub Sec of State Bill Jones, after purchasing this crap-ass, hackable voting machinery for Calif, went to work for the company he had bought it from (Sequoia).
The Bush junta SET OUT TO corrupt our election system, thoroughly and permanently, and to gain control over vote tabulation with "trade secret," proprietary programming code, run by Bush's buds at Diebold and ES&S (the main perps). Diebold, whose CEO promised to "deliver" Ohio to Bush in 2004, and its spinoff company, ES&S, initially funded by far rightwingnut billionaire Howard Ahmanson, counted 80% of the vote in 2004. These two related companies--run by the Urosevich brothers--also have similar computer architecture in their voting machines.
It was/is a fraudulent election SYSTEM, quite deliberately set up by Bushites, in Congress and in the electronic systems business, with no controls, in order to be used for election fraud, and specifically to keep Bush in office in 2004.
If they had wanted transparent elections, we would have had transparent elections. It's not rocket science. They put every obstacle imaginable in the way of transparency.
How anyone can look at this election system, and how it was set up, and by whom, and say that there is anything less than a 100% chance that Bushites would steal the 2004 election, with Plan A being electronic fraud, I don't know. Some sort of Pollyanna naivete?
There is one main central tabulator in each state. They are manufactured by Diebold or ES&S, and they, too, have secret, proprietary innards. It would be no problem at all to pre-program these tabulators to switch 3 million to 7 million votes out of 120 million. One third of the country had no paper trail whatsoever. So those votes are NOT recountable AT ALL. In the others, there is a mixed picture of paper trails (can be discarded in favor of electronic results at the whim of election officials) and real paper ballots. More than 99% of these votes received no routine audit (vote compared to electronic result). At best--AT BEST--there is a 1% audit in some places. (And even with a 5% audit, many corrupt precinct totals could go undetected.)
One hacker, a couple of minutes, leaving no trace.
It's my guess that Kerry's win was bigger than expected, thus triggering Plan B, Ohio: Overt, visible vote suppression--by shorting black precincts of voting machines, unfairly challenging voters, etc.--that is quite illegal (Voting Rights Act) and risky, as to lawsuits and riling up the black community. This has led me to surmise that the central tabulators in the general national vote theft had to be preprogrammed to certain percentages, and could not be easily changed on election day itself. Otherwise--with control of the vote tabulation via secret programming--why do Ohio? With Diebold and ES&S shifting small percentages of votes all over the country, mostly via the central tabulators, to manufacture and pad Bush's national popular majority, and with targeted thefts in the closest battleground states, to secure the Electoral College vote, they were able to bring it down to Ohio, where they had to get out down and dirty and physically prevent large numbers of Democrats from voting. (--and there is evidence for this, in unusually low Dem vote turnouts, but high registration, and all the Conyers report evidence).
Exit poll analysis seems to suggest that the wave of vote theft, on the general national level, ran east to west (highest in the east), for any early securing of the popular majority. It also shows high red shifts in 11 battleground states.
The real exit polls (which Kerry won) only reflect the voters who made it to the polling booth. Greg Palast estimates that about 1 million black voters were purged from voter rolls, nationwide, before the election. So it's a good guess that, had all votes been permitted and counted, Kerry won by more than the 3% exit poll margin (more like a 5% margin).
There is a lot of other evidence that points to a Kerry win. I won't go into it here, except to say that an almost entirely non-transparent election system, controlled by Bushite corporations, and deliberately prevented from having audit/recount controls, is the FIRST PROOF OF ELECTION FRAUD, and all other evidence, including the exit polls, is FURTHER CONFIRMATION. It's not that the real exit polls showed a Kerry win in a neutral and normal situation. It's that the real exit polls showed a Kerry win in a highly abnormal election system, deliberately set up to be impenetrable and to conceal evidence. And the same is true for all the other evidence of a Kerry win: that the Dems blew the Repubs away in new voter registration, nearly 60/40, in 2004, that the great majority of new voters, independent voters and former Nader voters, voted for Kerry. Etc. Etc. It all needs to be seen in the CONTEXT of what Tom Delay's Congress and Bush's buds at Diebold and ES&S arranged for.
This election didn't happen on a theoretical plane, where numbers seem to stand alone, as the only thing of importance. It happened in a heavily corrupt political context, where one party methodically sought and obtained control over vote tabulation, using very heavy-handed means, such as denying Democrats all normal power in Congress to bring amendments (such a a paper trail requirement) to the floor. It happened in a context of political bribery and other crimes, and enforced government secrecy, and massive domestic spying, such as we have never seen before in this country. And who knows how these things influenced the installment of this fraudulent election system--for instance, with blackmail of election officials, or generalized fear of the Bush Cartel (Democrats getting anthraxed, for instance, and the perpetrators not pursued)?
The election also took place in a highly corrupt corporate news environment--some of the details of which we are only getting now--for instance, the NYT having suppressed news of the Bush spying program until after the election. But the capper for me is the news monopolies' FALSIFICATION of the exit poll data to force the data to "fit" with Diebold's and ES&S non-transparent results. The exit polls were the best tool we had, in this situation--a situation of non-transparency and political corruption--and we were deprived of that verification check. The scumbag press black-holed information on the election system itself, and who was running it, and how, and then conformed their exit polls to the non-transparent results--and then black-holed or marginalized all discussion and protest afterward, in a rush to get Bush crowned without dissent.
To ignore the context in which this election occurred--and how the election system was set up--is a very grave error, in my opinion. It will inevitably lead to wrong conclusions, and wrong-headed political strategies and remedies.
People who tend to think Bush won will also tend to forget or ignore the fact that 58% of the American people opposed Bush's war from the beginning, back in Feb. '03, before the invasion--even before all the lies were exposed--across the board in all polls. They didn't trust Bush even then. Or they will forget or ignore the fact that 63% of the American people oppose torture "under any circumstances"--May '04, five months before the election. Such people will think it more plausible that maybe Bush won--whereas in the context and these and other such polling statistics, and in the context of a Bushite controlled non-transparent election system, and in the context of Republican bribery scandals and other crimes (rendition of prisoners to eastern Europe, for instance, and the outing of Valerie Plame and her entire counterproliferation network, and massive illegal spying), and in the context of the real exit polls, etc., it not only becomes less and less plausible that Bush won, it becomes clearer and clearer why they set the election system up the way they did. Because they still had a lot of paper to shred and a lot of crimes to cover up before they leave office, if they ever do. They could not afford to hold a transparent election.
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