http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102503C.shtml

A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier

Saturday 25 October 2003

"*Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"- Thomas Jefferson*

In the 2000 election, George W. Bush stole the presidency by combining
various forms of vote fraud, not all of which could be concealed from the
American public.

The month-long battle in Dade County ended with open slaughter of the
democratic process, and the occupation of the country by a regime of what
may be accurately described as corporate fascists. That's the bad news.

The good news is, the 2000 election also marked a turning point in
American consciousness. Or, I might venture to say, an awakening. Before
W's coup, most Americans were, for lack of a better metaphor, asleep at
the wheel. This metaphor works just fine, because our electoral process
is the wheel that guides our nation, the mechanism that allows us to
control the engines of power, and to turn our country in a new direction
if, for instance, we're nearing the edge of a cliff. /Nothing/ is more
important to an American citizen than the right to cast a ballot.

But modern Americans have been abandoning the voting booth in droves.
Over the past fifty years, less than half of all eligible voters went to
the polls, sometimes less than 25%. However, far more astounding is that
those who voted rarely bothered to wonder if their vote was counted
accurately.

A vote cast but not counted is meaningless. The only way to know that
your vote is properly counted is to watch the 'entire counting process',
which is why election law requires an open, public vote count, and makes
secret ballot counting illegal. However, most voters have eagerly
abdicated the responsibility of overseeing their vote count to a handful
of extremely dubious "experts" and "officials." Human nature is largely
to blame. November election night in most states is cold -- and often
wet. Those who manage to make their way to the polls after work want only
to go home, turn on the TV, and let their local newscaster tell them who
won. And yet, our natural instinct to curl up on the couch cannot be
wholly to blame. Recent history has shown that the most avid political
junkies even candidates themselves -- have demonstrated a profound
disinterest in how the gears and levers work behind the scene on election
night, or who is controlling them. It should not surprise us that vote
fraud has flourished in this vacuum of electoral vigilance.

Criminals of every stripe have slithered through the unwatched gates and
into positions of power in America. It has not taken them long to corrupt
the entire electoral process itself, securing for themselves the gates of
power. As I write this article, America is on the verge of losing the
last shreds of its democracy, with the rise of ballot-less computerized
voting machines. *One Machine to Rule Them All*

Thanks in part to the recent Bush approved Help America Vote Act (HAVA),
squadrons of shiny new Touch Screen Trojan horses are being rolled into
precincts across America. Not, as we are told, to make voting easier or
more accurate, or to help disabled people vote privately, or to save
America from the dangers of hanging chad and butterfly ballots -- no.

The real reason America is being flooded with billions of dollars worth
of paperless computerized voting machines is so that no one will 'ever
again' be able to prove vote fraud.

These machines are not just unverifiable, they are secretly programmed
(their software is not open to scrutiny by election officials or computer
experts), equipped with modems, accessible by computer, telephone, and
satellite. They are the final product of decades of work by the election
rigging industry. When they are installed in every precinct in America,
our elections will finally become completely meaningless, nothing more
than charades behind which criminal thugs will wield the power of this
nation.

That is the plan for America. But there's a glitch. The blatant and
multi-faceted fraud of the 2000 election -- in which the ultimate poster
boy for corporate corruption stole the highest seat in the nation -- woke
the American people from their dangerous slumber. The issue of election
fraud is now smoldering in the minds of millions. Of course the Touch
Screens were immediately offered as the solution to all our voting
problems, but thanks to the wonderful work of many new computerized vote
fraud researchers, most notably Bev Harris (author of Black Box Voting),
Americans are quickly recognizing that the "solution" is worse than the
problem.

Despite the best propaganda efforts of corrupt voting machine
corporations like Diebold and ES&S, even those with the worst butterfly
ballot jitters are coming to understand that destroying the ballot
altogether, erasing any verifiable record of the vote count and making a
recount impossible, is /not/ the answer to our problems. And, as the
Touch Screen systems continue to openly malfunction, increasing numbers
of voters will begin doubting their safety and accuracy. It's becoming
clear to Americans that, just like the aftermath of the Enron scandal, no
real government reform is forthcoming in the area of election security.
The news is out that the same company that was used in Florida to purge
voter rolls of millions of African American votes is now being hired by
other states across the country /for the same job/. As you will soon see,
many of our Boards of Elections and Secretary's of State will continue to
blindly defend their collusion with shadowy corporations, and spending
billions of tax-payer dollars on unreliable machines that patently
subvert the democratic process. Why? Because they have sold out. They
have been bought by corporate interests. It happened a long time ago.

As political events at home and around the world continue to unfold in
one devastating disaster after another, our cry for honest elections will
only grow louder. The movement toward real election reform, and what
will, in the end, amount to a revolution by the American people, is only
just beginning.

We the People are responsible for taking back the control of our
democratic process. No one else will do it for us. We cannot afford to be
naive, or uneducated, at this time in history. In order to fully
understand the extent of the corruption we are dealing with, and to avoid
making dangerous mistakes based on ignorance, we must understand the
history, and the power structure, behind vote fraud in America.

*Votescam: The Stealing of America*

*"One of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable
mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count." ---
Votescam*

I grew up with two men who spent twenty-five years investigating vote
fraud in America: James and Kenneth Collier, my father and uncle. Their
book, "Votescam: The Stealing of America" was published in 1992 and
immediately banned by the major book chains, which listed the book as
"out of print" and actively worked to prevent its sale. Votescam
chronicles the Collier brother's groundbreaking investigation into
America's multi-billion dollar election rigging industry, and the
corporate government and media officials who control it. Before the 2000
election, Votescam was widely read (thanks to independent bookstores and
the Internet) by the minority of Americans still engaged in the political
process, mostly members of independent and third parties trying to break
the chokehold of the two party system. The corporate media will not give
their causes or their candidates adequate press coverage -- if any. This
censorship alone effectively controls the first stages of our political
races. If a candidate can't get T.V. coverage, he or she has little
chance of even making it out the gate. These citizens were not surprised
to learn that the media has been complicit in rigging the final stages of
our elections our vote counting and the reporting of results -- for
decades.

* Down the Rabbit Hole*

The Votescam investigation began in 1970, in surprise!-- Dade County,
Florida, where Ken ran for Congress (with Jim as his campaign manager)
against Claude Pepper, the "Father of Social Security." The Colliers were
researching a book they were writing for Dell Publishing titled: "Running
Through the System: Ballots Not Bullets," an idea born from their
involvement in the social upheaval of the sixties. Jim and Ken proposed
that if our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights
were indeed the rule of the land, real change could be made in America by
working within the system -- more effectively, and much more safely, than
waging bloody revolution in the streets.  Putting their ideals, love of
country, and political savvy to the test, the Colliers began their
grassroots Congressional campaign and discovered exactly /why/ the
bullet, not the ballot, was being used to change the power structure in
America.

Ken was rigged out of the election through a vote scam, which the
Colliers later discovered was used throughout the country for decades. It
went like this: The local newscaster would announce during the broadcast
of election returns that election "computer has broken down." Instead of
giving official returns from the County courthouse, the networks would be
running vote "projections" for the rest of the night.

Jim and Ken, who had garnered 30 percent of the vote and were excited
about running again, noticed that when the vote totals came back on the
screen after the announcement, they had mysteriously lost 15 percentage
points. They didn't get another vote for the rest of the night. This
piqued their interest.

When they examined the "official" election results from the Secretary of
State's office for the September primary, October run-off and November
final election in Dade County, the record listed a total of 141,000 votes
cast for the Governors race in each election. The exact same number of
total votes were cast for three elections with a different number of
candidates running each time./ The same identical figures were listed for
the Senate race 122,000 votes cast in the primary, run-off and final
election.  This, of course, is a statistical impossibility. When they
compared the "official" vote results with a print-out of the vote
"projections" broadcast by the TV networks on the final election night,
they found that channel 4 had "projected" with near perfect accuracy the
results of 40 races with 250 candidates only 4 minutes after the polls
closed.

Channel 7 came even closer; at 9:31 pm, they "projected" the final vote
total for a race at 96,499 votes. When the Colliers checked the
"official" number . . . it was also 96,499. "In hockey, they call that a
hat trick," the Colliers write. "In politics, we call it a fix."  The
networks then made the astonishing claim that the results from a /single
voting machine/ somewhere in Dade County were run through a computer
program in order to get these vote projections. Elton Davis was the
computer programmer responsible for the magic formula that could convert
one machine's vote results into near perfect projected vote totals for 40
races and 250 candidates. When Jim and Ken confronted Davis in his office
at the University of Miami, he responded: "You'll never prove it, now get
out."

Finally the networks claimed that members of the League of Women Voters
were out in the field on election night, calling in vote totals to
channels 4 and 7.

When the Colliers confronted the head of the League, Joyce Deiffenderfer,
she admitted that there were no LWV members out in the field that night.
She broke down crying, saying "I don't want to get caught up in this
thing."

But there's more.

According to the print-out of the TV network's election night
"projections," the networks were not receiving any actual voting results
at any time during their broadcast, but had been using their own
projections from the moment the polls closed. When they claimed that the
courthouse computer had broken down, and they would no longer be
reporting actual vote totals, they were lying. They had never been
reporting actual vote totals.

However, the final shoe dropped months later when an official press
release appeared from Dade data processing chief, Leonard White, which
stated emphatically: /The county computer at the courthouse was never
down, and it was never slow.

This was the beginning.

The Collier brothers had slammed their boat into the tip of a giant
iceberg. As they continued to investigate, they were horrified to
discover vote fraud collusion among key individuals in every branch and
on every level of the American political system. Those who were not
benefiting from the fraud were too afraid to fight it. Their search for
justice led to dead-ends. Their lives were threatened, they were vilified
as conspiracy theorists by the mainstream press, Dell publishing
cancelled their book contract . . . and yet they persevered.

The next quarter century was spent compiling a wealth of FBI documented
evidence proving that elections in the United States have come under the
tight control of a handful of powerful and corrupt people: Secretaries of
State, Election Supervisors, Judges, owners and editors of the major
media outlets, voting equipment corporations, and assorted key members of
the elections establishment, including the League of Woman Voters. These
groups have assured the dominance of the two party system, unfettered
corporate control over government, and media censorship of issues most
important to the American people, including the cover-up of vote fraud
evidence.

*"Now we understand why things have gone so terribly wrong in this
country. It's due to the corrupted vote. It is the stolen vote that
perpetuates corrupt city, state and federal governments. When those
corrupt power brokers in your town weed out that up-and-coming
politician, they are looking for a person who is willing to 'play ball.'
Politics is 'playing ball.' Suddenly you find property decisions going
against nature; land and water needed for the perpetuation of life on our
earth suddenly disappear. A handful of developers get richer while the
land, and the quality of life, get poorer." -- Votescam* Jim and Ken both
died young during the 90's, as heroes to many thousands who read their
book and heard them speak on the radio and at political meetings across
the country. They helped to guide individuals and groups working for
clean elections in their communities -- some of them fighting against the
first wave of computerized voting machines. The Collier's last hope was
that Votescam would be used as evidence in a serious Congressional
investigation into election fraud, if we should ever see the day. Many
people still in power have yet to be held accountable for their role in
aiding and abetting vote fraud. I'll give you two important examples.

When the famous Miami lawyer Ellis Rubin agreed to be Ombudsman for the
original Votescam evidence, he brought it to the Florida assistant State
Attorney at the time, Janet Reno. The evidence included the shaved wheels
of lever voting machines, forged canvass sheets (the sheets that poll
workers sign to verify the final vote count), and pre-printed vote tally
sheets that were used in conjunction with a lever machine vote rigging
device called the Printomatic.

Reno refused to prosecute, claiming falsely that the statue of
limitations had run out on the crime. Years later, Rubin would tell my
father that behind closed doors Reno had stated that she 'could not'
prosecute. Why? Because she would bring down many of the most powerful
people in the state.

Would the 2000 election fiasco in Florida have been avoided if Reno had
agreed to do her job thirty years earlier and root out the vote fraud
thieves?

Another notable Votescam criminal can now be found sitting on the bench
of the highest court in the nation. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,
while still a Federal Appeals Judge, single handedly destroyed what would
have been an historic lawsuit filed against Justice Department lawyer
Craig Donsanto, who had refused to prosecute the extensive vote fraud
evidence brought to him by the Colliers. The evidence included videotape
of the League of Women voters tampering with ballots in a close door vote
"counting" session. The women were illegally punching holes in already
cast ballots. When confronted by Jim and Ken, just minutes before the two
were bodily thrown from the building (which they had snuck into), the
women claimed they were only trying to remove . . . the hanging chad.

Votescam states, "Because the League of Women Voters has about it a
perfume of volunteerism and do-goodism, the fact that it is actually a
political club with a political agenda and a hungry treasury is shrouded
by the false myth that it is a reliable Election Day watchdog." It's no
surprise to me that the League of Women Voters has recently come out
strongly in favor of the diabolical ballot-less Touch Screen machines. 

And even less shocking was the role Antonin Scalia played so willingly in
the selection of George W. Bush to office. 

* The Rise of Resistance/ Knowledge is Power* *"Ignorance is preferable
to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than
he who believes what is wrong." --- Thomas Jefferson*

Thanks to the 2000 fiasco, election reform is now growing as a public
battle cry . . . but who is leading the army? This is a question that
every American has the responsibility to ask. Various individuals and
groups are seeking to guide the reform process, including politicians,
government officials, voting machine companies, computer experts,
activists, and members of the elections establishment. It is very safe to
assume they do not all mean well. Many have agendas of their own, some
obvious, others hidden. Many are corrupt, others are ignorant.  And some,
who have the very best interests of America at heart, are in the
difficult position of having to make serious and potentially damaging
compromises in their quest for safe elections, in order to push the issue
in Washington.

Before I explore this issue in more depth, I'd like to offer a brief list
of important lessons learned from twenty-five years of fighting vote
fraud in the trenches.

1) If there is any conceivable way to tamper with or rig an election
someone will attempt it. This includes average citizens as well as
officials charged with protecting the process.

2) Every voting system is open to tampering, but paper ballots counted in
public are the easiest system to protect and monitor. (It's estimated
that only 2% of Americans still vote on a hand-counted paper ballot).

3) Secret vote counting is illegal. Remember : counting them faster is
not a justification for counting them secretly.

4) When machines began to take over our vote counting systems, election
rigging became an exciting new national industry.

5) Lever machines were the first to appear, and they were riggable in a
number of ways. One could rig the lever machine itself, or, much more
easily, the electronic scanning machines that counted the ballots. (See
the Votescam video for footage of ballot rigging under the supervision of
both parties and the Dade County Election Supervisor).

6) Computerized voting machines are the easiest to rig. Their software is
not open to public scrutiny, or the scrutiny of Election Supervisors
(rendering their title meaningless). There are nearly infinite ways to
program the machines to count votes fraudulently. Since they are
accessible by modem, they can be controlled  from a remote, centralized
location.

7) Voting machine companies operate with no federal oversight,
certification process, standards or restrictions. Controlling members of
some of the most powerful voting machine corporations are convicted
criminals, some are politicians with obvious conflicts of interests,
others are not even American citizens. Just two companies -- Election
Systems and Software (ES&S) and Diebold Voting Systems now control about
80% of the vote count in the U.S.

Vote fraud on a statewide and national scale is not possible without
the complicity of (among others) corrupt Election Supervisors,
Secretaries of State, Judges, voting machine corporations, and top
officials of the major media outlets.

9) Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been complicit in vote
rigging for decades, to their mutual benefit. Vote rigging is NOT a
partisan issue (though recent evidence suggests Republicans might be
gaining the upper hand in the race to control our elections).

10) The corporate major media networks play a vital role in perpetrating
and covering up vote fraud. Media methods of vote rigging are explored in
the Votescam book, including the role of Voter News Service (VNS).

(VNS was a consortium of all the major media outlets. It recently closed
up shop and scurried off into the shadows, but for decades, under two
different corporate names, it controlled the compilation and
dissemination of national vote totals, with the power to alter the
reported results. The networks have actually not competed for vote
totals, as they claim to have done, since 1965. They got all their
numbers from VNS , which operated behind an iron curtain of secrecy. Any
questions regarding their operation were met with the ubiquitous
response: "This is not a proper area of inquiry." Most people erroneously
thought they were simply a polling organization, though no evidence of
their supposedly massive polling operation could be found by
investigators). See my interview with Bill Headline, former head of VNS,
at http://www.votescam.com/articles.html

11) Election Day media polls are untrustworthy at best, and very likely
fabricated to influence voter decisions and to support phony vote
results.

Now that I've provided the minimal context for understanding the current
threats we face, we can begin to talk about strategies to win back the
control of our government.

Not all strategies currently on the table are acceptable. Do not take
anyone's word on the reform that is needed. Do not cede your power to
government officials and so-called experts any longer. Educate yourself.
It's up to us, the American people, to decide what strategies to support,
and our goal must not fall short of what will truly restore democracy to
this sinking nation.

* The Nuts and Bolts of Computerized Voting* The gravest error of
judgment these days comes from those vote reformers who honestly believe
that the answer to the butterfly ballot and hanging chad problems in the
2000 election is to embrace the ballot-less computerized voting machine. 

Let's make this clear. These machines are 'nothing' but Trojan horses
built by and for election thieves. With the ballot-less computer, there
is no way to recount, no way to prove any discrepancy, inaccuracy or
fraud. Just the fact that companies like ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia would
even /make/ a ballot-less machine should be cause for a Congressional
investigation. (There are also many other reasons to investigate them.
For a detailed examination of these sinister corporations, check out
http://www.blackboxvoting.com.) That said, the next error of judgment
comes from those who believe that all we need to make computerized voting
machines safe is a paper receipt. 

Many intelligent, well-intentioned and hard working vote reformers are
supporting *HR 2239, proposed by Rep. Rush Holt* (D-NJ), requiring all
computerized voting machines to produce a receipt for each individual
voter. While I support the effort that has gone into creating this bill,
and I recognize the monumental struggle it will face in Congress, I am
unable to support it at this time, for many reasons. The first of which
is that, while calling much needed attention to the dangers of
ballot-less machines, this legislation does not require actually
hand-counting the receipts altogether in each election. Why is this a
serious problem?

First of all, individual receipts are meaningless. They're worth nothing
if not counted altogether. A person's vote might be verified by the slip
of paper, but that person has no idea whether the computer accurately
tallied her vote along with all the other votes. The final count still
takes place inside the infamous computerized "black box," beyond the
reach of public scrutiny. An individual receipt in  'no way' guarantees
the safety of the final vote count. It is at best a meaningless gesture
that I am deeply afraid will provide an extremely false sense of security
for voters.

As for recounting disputed elections, the obvious question is, which
ones? /Every election is in dispute when counted by a secretly
programmed, modem-equipped computer!

Most of the supporters of this bill agree that the receipts should be
counted across the board in each election, which would be the equivalent
of a good old-fashioned paper ballot count. But so far there is little
incentive to demand that the provision be added because it won't get any
support in Congress. What does this mean? Are we interested in actually
making our elections safe, accurate and verifiable, or are we willing to
play political ball to the point where we lose sight of our goal
completely?

I am told that perhaps, over time, the legislation will be strengthened.
But history has repeatedly shown that as a bill makes its way through
Washington channels, its effectiveness is more often than not watered
down. Whatever teeth it might have to begin with get filed into nubs that
have no strength to tear into corruption. HR 2239 proposes surprise
"random" recounts, where a small percentage of jurisdictions are chosen
for verification in each election. Unfortunately, this is completely
inadequate. Individual machines can be manipulated, and election thieves
can buy off the people in charge of the random recount. Anyone who thinks
that is far fetched or impossible is very new to this issue.

And what if discrepancies are found? Then everyone will call foul rightly
so -- a glut of confused and disputed recounts will ensue, and the entire
elections machine will become hopelessly tangled in its own mechanized
parts. Meanwhile every election criminal in the country will descend like
vultures on the chaos.

Folks, let's look at this honestly. We are already deep into a horrible
and expensive mess that could all be avoided by skipping the computerized
middleman and /simply counting paper ballots.

* Paper Ballots A Radical Idea*

The last, and to my mind, most grave error of judgment comes from those
who think that returning to a hand-counted paper ballot system is somehow
impossible, that we can't go back to a simple process that works once
we've stupidly and recklessly abandoned it. I don't know about you, but
that strikes me as an extremely dangerous perspective.  An MIT/Cal Tech
study done in 2001 shows that manually counted paper ballots are the most
accurate system out of the 5 systems used in the last 4 presidential
elections. They are totally verifiable, and first-world nations across
the globe still use them, including Canada which counted their last
presidential election in four hours. And yet I am told repeatedly by vote
reformers that there is no hope of America ever returning to paper
ballots because too much money has been spent on the machines, and
because the public is being sold on their benefits. My argument is that
the public must be immediately educated on their /dangers/ -- that should
be the top priority of every serious vote reformer in the country.

My argument is that we should /stop playing ball/ with these corrupt
voting machine corporations and the sold-out government officials who
support them.

My argument is that we should remember we're Americans -- we don't ask
for 'permission' to secure our own freedom. We should take these Trojan
horses and burn them in the public square before our whole damn country
crumbles before our eyes!

But all this debate is misleading.

The bottom line is that a computerized vote count is a secret vote count
and that's illegal. Technology cannot supercede the constitutional and
mandatory provisions of election law, which require open and verifiable
elections. There is no way to do a public vote count with computers.

Listen, here's my idea. After the public Touch-Screen bonfire (we really
need more community minded events, don't you think?), we should march to
our Secretary of State's office and demand the restoration of a
hand-counted paper ballot system.

(abridged)

Hand counted paper ballots /and eternal vigilance/ are the only hope left
for us. The corporate fascists are taking over, and we will never depose
them non-violently as long as they control our elections.

###

Victoria Collier , a long time writer and political activist, continues
to educate the public on the subject of vote fraud in place of her father
and uncle. She is the editor of http://www.votescam.com. She can be
reached at 1-866-280-909 and editor@votescam.com

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