My letter to Bernie Sanders: Ignore the voting machines to your peril.

[Stevepol]

Maybe I shouldn't have written to Bernie in this tone. It could be he will need money to succeed, and I certainly do wish him success. But my money is for those who are facing the voting machine issue head on. I didn't send the letter to the campaign donation site since it would not have gotten read. There's a chance, though probably infinitesimal, that this letter will be read. It will almost certainly not change his mind since much more eloquent spokesmen for the issue have no doubt plied him with arguments and he hasn't responded.

Bernie Sanders
2233 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington DC 20515-4501

Dear Bernie:

I admire you a lot and appreciate your efforts to work in behalf of real working people, average people rather than corporations. However, your plea that I not “let the same thing happen in Vermont that occurred in South Dakota and Georgia when disgusting personal attack ads defeated Tom Daschle and Max Cleland” strikes me as somewhat humorous. Are you joking? Cleland won his election easily, probably by a near landslide. Diebold gave the election to Chambliss. I don’t know for sure about Daschle. I suspect there was a lot of hanky-panky there with regard to the Indian tribes as well as a strong tilt in the machines. Your request for money makes it seem as if money will decide the election. These days nothing could be farther from the truth. If Warren Buffet gave you a billion dollars to run your campaign, it would still make no difference if the machines there in VT are able to count the votes without audit or recount as such machines are doing throughout the country. Let me just repeat an obvious fact that you will have to admit if you let yourself think about it. If the votes are counted in total secrecy by partisans of one side or the other without any audits being used to check the validity of the vote, THIS IS NOT A DEMOCRACY. Let me repeat that in slightly different words. Perhaps you missed it the first time. The electronic voting machines are programmed and maintained by private, highly partisan, for-profit corporations, using secret, proprietary software, which even the elections officials are not allowed to see (and would not understand even if they could see it), without mechanisms in place, except in a handful of places around the country, to check the validity of the machine count using audits and hand recounts. What this means, Bernie, as you should realize, is that WE DON’T HAVE A DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA ANYMORE. I suspect that VT is perhaps an exception, one of the lonely outposts of democracy in America. If that’s true, you should have no problem winning your election.
I have read that you don’t want to approach this subject for fear of scaring off voters. A bigger non sequitur I think I shall never read. What difference does it make how many people vote? The machines are almost certainly programmed based on percentages, one vote in 60 say, flipped from Independent to Repub say, just enough to give whatever percentage is deemed necessary to throw the election. If more tilt is needed, then agents provocateur, i.e. “technicians, ” are sent to hack or patch or otherwise add whatever additional tilt is needed to assure the win. A good example is the recent 05 referendum in OH where the vote was flipped from a 60-40% in favor (according to highly reliable polls done by the Columbus paper) to 60-40% opposed, a 40-point turnaround. Of course in this case the referenda that experienced this flip were aimed at more closely monitoring elections, so the machine vendors had a financial reason to make sure these particular initiatives didn’t pass.
Let me assure you, Bernie, if you have a fair vote in VT, you will win going away. This is the real mood of the country at the moment. You have shown integrity and honesty and a concern for the good of the American people. But if the machines are being used there, and it is possible to rig or throw the vote, you will lose, I don’t care how much of a “real” majority you may have at the ballot box.
The truth is that in 2006 as in 2008 and every subsequent election, unless something is done about the electronic voting machines, the will of the American people will not be honored, any more than it was honored in 2000 or 2004. Perhaps you think that somehow the voting machines will change their programming once they realize how passionate and sincere and justified you are. If so, I think your faith is misplaced. You would do well to recall what the space explorers did when Hal tried to take over the ship in 2001 Space Odyssey. In that movie, it became quite clear that machine was no longer taking its orders from the human passengers on the voyage, despite the moral superiority and even urgency of their claims. The only real option for the crew was to dismantle the machine. I think that’s what your objective should be. You should do everything in your power to obliterate Americans’ faith in these infernal machines which have stolen our democracy and which are presently burying that democracy deeper and deeper with every new rigged election or referendum.
For the past ten years, highly partisan private companies, using secret, proprietary software, have been allowed, and are still being allowed, to count our votes, in nearly every case without auditing or meaningful oversight, resulting in almost certain fraud (witness the 96 election of Hagel in NE; the 02 “amazing” upsets in GA, MN, and CO; the 04 national race; the 05 initiatives referendum in OH), and yet politicians of good will, Democrats and Independents like yourself, and others, have raised hardly a peep about it. Some Democrats have been complicit, taking money from these mafia-style companies, even voicing the company mantras (that elections without a paper trail for audits and recounts are cleaner and more cost effective than elections held entirely in cyberspace). The people are outraged about it, yet the “leaders” say nothing. Meanwhile, with each passing day, democracy becomes more and more a dream and a fantasy.
Don’t get me wrong. I wish you well. But I also don’t think you will pay the slightest attention to what I’ve written here since you are already ignoring almost every computer scientist in the country (notice I said “scientist” and not “expert”), Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalists, PhDs in many fields, especially in statistics (see www.ElectionArchive.com), and by now hundreds of thousands of voters throughout the country. I am presently contributing to several organizations which are working to restore American democracy. Perhaps you would like to support some of these “grassroots” efforts. One of my favorite organizations is VotersUnite.org, but there are many, many others. You would do well to join one of these organizations. They are doing more for our country at the moment, I believe, than any of the so-called progressives or even enlightened Independents like yourself..
If you want to win your election, I suggest that you begin to make this issue job #1. Your electorate will respond to this. I’m presently working with a Democratic candidate for Secretary of State here in KS, and he plans to meet the issue head on. Even among Republicans there’s a very strong minority that realizes the problems with the voting machines. I hope our campaign here in KS will succeed, but I have strong reservations. Johnson County (Kansas City and environs) uses Diebold without even a paper trail to use for an audit, and if Mr. Diebold decides we lose, we lose. Here in Wichita, we use ES&S (more subtle but also more successful in rigging elections I believe) and even though we have a paper trail, there’s no provision for audits, and the paper is absolutely meaningless without audits.
I wish you the very best in your campaign, Bernie, but I’m saving my money for the organizations that are working to restore democracy to our country. I hope that, if you win (and I suspect you will win and perhaps handily), you will once again take a look at this issue. Until people such as you take on this issue head-on, there’s really little hope for our country in the near future.

Sincerely,


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