BuzzFlash Interviews
BuzzFlash.com
02.13.06
Mark Crispin Miller, professor of culture and communication at New York University, is an expert in propaganda and mass persuasion. Having scrutinized the election of 2004, he concludes that team Bush wants to permanently disenfranchise the majority. In his "J'accuse" book on the 2004 election, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election - Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them), Miller documents how the Republicans likely stole a second presidential election, just in a more complicated way than they did in 2000.
To those who dismiss such claims as "over the top," BuzzFlash responds, if the Republicans stole the presidency in 2000 by hot-wiring the Supreme Court of the United States, why wouldn't they do it again? They would -- and they probably did. If we could transplant Mark Crispin Miller's passion and stamina into the backbones of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, we wouldn't have a silent coup taking place now in the United States. In this, part two of a two-part interview, Miller looks at the voting machines, and at our collective refusal to see and acknowledge what has happened to our democracy. (Part one is here.)
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BuzzFlash: Let's talk about a major problem that the press refuses to discuss: the privatization of the voting process. That's really what the spread of computerized voting machines is all about. Diebold, ES'S and Sequoia - the three largest manufacturers of such machines - are private vendors. They keep their programming codes secret as “proprietary information,” and worse, all three are extremely close to the Republican party. There is no way to determine whether these machines are accurate. Using them is tantamount to having secret vote counts.
Diebold in particular has been in the news. Some months before election day, 2004, Wally O'Dell, Diebold's CEO, sent a Bush/Cheney fundraising letter out to other rich Ohio Republicans, promising to do everything he could to “deliver Ohio's electoral vote to the president.” In December, he suddenly resigned. What's going on?
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20351