03 January 2006

In 2006, Voting Fraud is the Keystone Issue

Ernest Partridge - The Crisis Papers

The significance of the election fraud issue can not be overstated. The fate of our republic turns on how this issue is dealt with and resolved in the coming year.

On the one hand, the Bush Administration, the Republican party and the Republican Congress, with the continuing connivance of the corporate media and the persistent indifference of the Democratic party,  may successfully resist public demands for electoral reform, and consequently the existing system of unverifiable voting and secret software will remain in place. If so, then the Republicans will surely retain control of the Congress, regardless of the will of the American people.

On the other hand, if, at last, it becomes irrefutably clear to a large portion of the general public that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen, along with key congressional races in 2002, and if indictments follow and a fair election ensues, then public outrage will result in the Democratic control of at least one, and more likely, both houses of Congress. Still worse will then be in store for those who stole our elections and our democracy, as the congressional Democrats gain the power of subpoena and the threats of perjury and contempt of Congress. The likely outcome will be the disintegration of the Republican conspiracy, and the relegation of that party to minority status for the next generation.

The ballot is the heart of democracy. If one party “owns” the ballot box, it owns the government, for that party is no longer answerable to the will of the people; it rules without the “consent of the governed.” Thus it is no wonder that the Bush regime and the GOP want to keep this issue off the public agenda. We can’t allow them to succeed. It’s as simple as that.

The Busheviks, their Congressional toadies, and their fat-cat sponsors are fully aware of the stakes. Not only do they want to remain in power and keep their ill-gotten booty, many of them want desperately to stay out of the federal slammer. Accordingly, there may virtually nothing that they might not resort to in order to avoid this outcome. Things could get very nasty.

So it all comes down to this: voting fraud is the keystone issue for this year. If the keystone remains intact and in place, the structure will endure, and the United States will continue along the road toward oligarchy and despotism. Remove the keystone, and the structure will collapse, opening the possibility for a restoration of the rule of law and of a government of, by, and for the people.

At this moment the outcome of the struggle for ballot integrity is uncertain and is, in no small part, in the hands of ordinary American citizens, for our political establishment and our corporate media have forsaken us and our republic, while the ostensible “opposition party” is AWOL. It is up to us in our everyday, face-to-face-dealings with our fellow citizens, and through our remaining mode of public communication, the internet, to force the issue into the mainstream media, on to the agenda of a reluctant Democratic Party, and into the criminal courts.

Despite the coordinated and so-far successful effort by the media and the GOP to keep the election fraud issue contained, the pressure under the lid of media and establishment silence is rising, as more and more evidence of stolen elections and of the vulnerability of computerized voting seeps into public awareness. This evidence includes: the report of the Congressional General Accountability Office, the spectacular “hacking” demonstrations in Florida, statistically impossible polling vs. voting discrepancies in the 2005 Ohio election, leaks from whistle blowers within the e-voting industry, and the actual and pending decertification of paperless touch-screen machines in a growing list of counties and states. Add to all this the continuing output of articles and now books by Mark Crispin Miller, by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, by John Conyers and his congressional colleagues, and soon still another book by the statistician, Steven Freeman.

As a consequence of growing public concern, stocks in the e-voting companies have sharply declined and stockholder suits and criminal charges are pending against company officials. Diebold CEO, Walden O’Dell, who foolishly released a letter in which he vowed to deliver Ohio to George Bush, has resigned. All this upheaval suggests that the criminal and civil courts may at last expose the racketeering in the private election industry, succeeding where Congress and the media have failed.

Clearly, this is an issue that refuses to be starved from lack of feeding by the mainstream media. The “keystone” is loose and it is disintegrating.

There is an overwhelming accumulation of statistical, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that paperless, secretly coded voting machines are facilitators of massive fraud that have succeeded in stealing numerous elections, most significantly the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Because I have discussed this evidence in several essays, and because The Crisis Papers has collected links to hundreds of articles about election fraud and electoral integrity, I will not repeat that evidence here.

There is, however, little direct evidence of fraud, that is to say, evidence obtained through examination of the machines and their software or of controlled experiments with these machines. There is little direct evidence simply because the manufacturers will not allow it, and no courts or government agencies have successfully demanded such scrutiny. This refusal by the e-voting companies brings to mind numerous troubling “how-come” questions which, as long as they remain unanswered, must be added to the weight of evidence of electoral fraud.. Among these questions


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