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I recently sent a series of letters to the elections commissioner here in Wichita, KS, the editor of a paper that advertises itself as the only Union paper in town, the Democratic Party office, and the Secy of State of KS. In all of them I included a letter I'd sent to the election commissioner as well as the electionarchive.org flyer. The flyer can be obtained by going to the uscountvotes.org site or election archive site and downloading it, then making it into a single front and back flyer. Here's my letter to the election commissioner in case anybody wants to do something similar in your own little postage stamp of a county or precinct:
Election Commissioner Sedgwick County
510 N. Main #101
Wichita KS 67203
Dear ------,
I talked with you a couple years ago about the voting machines being used in Sedgwick County, the Micro-Vote machine. Recently, I ran across an organization that is working to get
transparent “audited” elections around the country and have enclosed a flyer from them. There are 12 people in their organization at present, six of them are PhDs in statistics, four PhDs in
social science fields, one with an MA. They continue to study the wide discrepancy between the alleged election “results” for the 04 election and the exit polls.
Are you aware of this discrepancy? I recently wrote a letter to one of the editors at the Eagle about this subject. He had asked me earlier if I thought there was a conspiracy to fix elections in
the US. In the letter, I asked him a similar question. It’s a well-known fact, I told him, that the exit polls, both the Edison-Mitofsky poll (commissioned by a consortium of news agencies, etc.) and the state exit polls indicated that Kerry won the election by about 3%, despite the fact that the electronic voting machines gave Bush the election by a 2 ½ % margin. Yet this fact has hardly been reported in the American news media. As far as I know it has never even been
mentioned in the Eagle. Is this because there’s a “conspiracy” among all the main stream media not to mention this untidy fact?
I think the same kind of “conspiracy” allows the vote to be rigged that keeps the media from reporting such facts (and most elections officials to ignore even the possibility of fraud). I doubt
if you can name anybody at the Eagle who is personally locking down this bit of news. Yet the paper does not report it. Why? Probably partly fear that the “fact” may be wrong (even though Mitofsky himself admits that the two results could not have happened by chance); partly just unawareness of the facts; that is, most just haven’t heard anything about the possibility and assume that since we have a democracy it couldn’t have happened; partly, the assumption, which Mitofsky himself makes, that it would take too big a “conspiracy” to have carried off such a coup. He suggested that his own exit poll must have been wrong, that Republicans were more
“reluctant” to respond to pollsters than Democrats. Actually, of course, since we’re talking about machines that are used all over the country and are programmed and set up by a very small group of insiders, probably twenty-five people could rig any national or state-wide election in the country where the machines are used. I suspect that there are probably no more than 50 people who know all the facts about the 04 rigging and the only way any of them will blow the whistle is if enough pressure is put on them, that is, if they face prison terms for not being forthcoming. I doubt this is likely to happen any time soon.
Here’s another untidy “fact,” which is essential knowledge for all those who work in elections around the country. Because 80-85% of our votes are counted on electronic voting machines or on the central tabulators (which are even easier to rig or hack or patch or “fix” than the voting machines) and because the machines either can’t be audited or are never audited, in effect, we have an election system in which the votes are counted in secret by extreme partisans
of one side (the right at the moment) and there is no way possible for fraud to be discovered. The source code of the machines is off limits even to the elections officials. Courts in FL and
elsewhere have ruled that this is “proprietary” material. Exit polls are the only check that is possible at the moment.
What would you do if you knew you could rig an election and there was no possible way of ever being discovered?
As you indicated to me when we talked, the Micro-Vote machine is used in Sedgwick County. The machine, as you pointed out, prints the vote on a paper scroll on the inside of the machine which can be used (and has been used in the past I believe) when recounts have been
called for. However, the voter cannot verify that this is his vote and see this paper ballot deposited in a box for later audits or recounts. So there’s no assurance that what is recorded in
cyberspace or on the paper scroll is what the voter intended his vote to be. He must just trust the machine.
I am convinced that Diebold and ES&S are corrupt and are stealing elections. I think the evidence, taken as a whole, is overwhelming that this is so. I have to admit, however, that I
don’t know that much about Micro-Vote. I have a sense that they’re on the up and up and aren’t intentionally stealing elections. However, machines make mistakes. Take Boone County Indiana, 2003. They used a Micro-Vote machine in that election just like the one used in Sedgwick County. In that election, in a county with 19,000 eligible voters, the machine counted 144,000 votes. Google that election and read some of the newspaper reports of the time.
Obviously, that mistake was discovered, but what about the cases where the machine mistake was only a few percentage points, just enough to put one candidate in over another? How many of those cases have occurred and nobody knows to this day that they happened?
I hope you’ll take a look at the enclosed flyer and do some thinking and checking about the validity of elections that use machines programmed by outsiders, which do not provide a paper
ballot print out, voter-verified, and require audits for every election.
It seems pretty obvious to me that unless the vote counting procedure is completely transparent to the public and fair for all sides, you can’t have a democracy. This I think is the place we’re in at the moment in the US and in Sedgwick County. I personally think it’s time for all people of good will to work together to restore confidence in the voting system here and around the country. This issue is not going to go away, as much as we might wish it to. Is it not possible for Sedgwick to move toward either a paper ballot for all elections, or at the very least, a voter verified paper ballot and required audits for all elections?
Give me a call or write me a letter or an email if you’re interested in talking about the issue. And investigate the subject on the internet or at the site indicated on the flyer.
My best wishes for your continued work with elections and in the political arena.
Sincerely,
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