The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

Having just watched the video, "Votergate," (Go to www.votergate.tv to view this yourself.) I now understand how our votes can disappear by the hundreds and why our elections are now easily rigged with no chance of audit. Not being up on the inner workings of computers, many of us probably are not aware of what can happen when using electronic voting machines. We are much too trusting. We are assuming much too much. If only one person who has access to voting machines decides to tamper with them for political reasons, the entire outcome of an election can be reversed. The rightful winner becomes the loser. It is really easy. And no one will be the wiser. The felony happens within a matter of seconds while the thief sits at a PC and changes a few numbers. That's all it takes.

The exit polls on Tuesday afternoon showed Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, among other states. But something didn't come out right because the number of votes from the paperless machines showed a very different outcome. Under normal circumstances, the exit polls and the machine tallies should be nearly equal. In fact, exit polls in paper-ballot states were largely accurate. But there were extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida.

As you read this, there is going on now what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filing in history. We may eventually find out who actually won Florida.

Thom Hartmann wrote, "It's time that the USA- like most of the rest of the world- returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees) under the watchful eye of the party faithful. " Hartmann says when he lived in Germany, the voting was done this way. People filled in hand-marked ballots, which were hand-counted by people who took off a week from work. The process was watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. This process is totally above board and easily audited. It takes about a week or more to count the vote, but the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls have never been more than a tenth of a percent off for 200 years.

If we had adopted this simple voting procedure, we could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to ES & S, Diebold, and other private companies.

If we must have machines, Hartmann implores, let's have them owned by local governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We the People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis.

Until this is sorted out, America will not have fair elections, the results of which can be accepted as accurate.

[Click on the blog title to read Thom Hartmann's article in full.]