Computer Vote-Fraud

in the United States: Ideas

to Fix “The Fix in ‘o6” including

THE NEED FOR AN

INDEPENDENT

COMMISSION

August 2, ’06 draft

In the “Rigging History” report I described the basic facts of the e-voting crisis facing the people of the United States. Once informed and alerted to the perils, the reader may naturally ask, “what can and should be done to bring back a system of free and fair elections?”

The answer is straightforward and simple:

First, create national legislation that bans the use of computer and electronic machines as a method of recording and counting a person’s vote at the voting booth, and which also bans the use of tabulating computers to tally the final vote count for counties and precinct districts. Require that the states return to the former method of vote counting done by humans, by hand counting, with al of the votes marked on paper ballots and the ballots saved for possible later inspection or recounts.

This is the time-honored, secure way of voting and vote counting done for hundreds of years in countries across the world, and is the safest way to ensure that the people’s will is faithfully measured and enacted democratically.

Such legislation would in effect be an ”anti-HAVA” act, reversing the mandatory use of computer voting machines made by Diebold, E.S. & S., Sequoia, SAIC etc. and replacing them all with paper balloting methods.

This anti-HAVA act would be passed by congress, signed by the President, and then made the law of the land. Ideally, this would happen as soon as possible and be done quickly, the way the 2001 PATRIOT act was speedily passed through congress. Practically speaking, however, the passing of a reverse-HAVA act with the current congress is like pie-in-the-sky.

The House and Senate both have Republican Party majorities, indeed many of those Republicans already owe their jobs to e-vote switching of the votes favoring their candidacies and installing them as congresspeople.

On top of this, Democrats have on the whole shown surprisingly little concern and impetus to solve the e-voting problems and bring back free and fair elections, despite the fact that their own party’s survival and, in fact, their own jobs in the case of elected legislators and their staffs, are at stake.

Examples of Democratic Party lassitude and even collaboration with the Republicans on computer vote fraud are to be found in the Maryland state senate, whose Democratic Party majority has voted to keep Diebold voting machines in place throughout the state and oppose bills by voting rights activists to remove the machines and move back to a paper trail system. The Maryland case is even more surprising given the fact that the state’s governor, a Republican, has called for the replacement of the Diebold machines with a paper-auditable system, and he has been opposed in this by the Democratic-majority state legislature.

Resistance to fraud-prevention in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, whose chief Howard Dean, and associates have refused to take a strong public stand on the issue. This despite Dean’s having been recorded on film for a documentary, sitting with e-vote investigator Bev Harris and personally expressing dismay at the ease with which thousands of votes can be numerically changed, fabricated or deleted with a few keystrokes of a notebook computer in the current central tabulating computer system of county ballot-counting centers.

Other political parties and organizations, such as the Green Party, “Move On” and “People for the American Way,” have expressed concern, but their words and actions have thus far been muted.

A more practical alternative to a national voting reform bill may be laws passed at the state level.

A grassroots anti-fraud/theft voter’s rights movement could have strong and immediate effects at the local levels of town councils, assemblies, and state legislatures. With Democratic majorities still in place in a number of state assemblies, and Democratic governors, the enforcement of anti-computer and pro-paper ballot counting laws is at least feasible, though the state laws may be challenged in court by Republican forces, as conflicting with the federal HAVA act mandates of 2002.

THE NEED FOR AN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION

The fundamental problem, though, rears its heads when dealing with the crisis: widespread Democratic Party apathy, and also the general apathy and co-optation of liberals and those on the left/Greens/minority rights/voting rights action communities. We may attribute this to bad leadership on the part of these American groups and movements, and/or to the lack of awareness in the general public which is not being informed by the media of the enormous and startling crisis to society, and indeed, to their daily lives if the U.S. government and the powerful feel no need to respond to their daily concerns and problems, since the people’s ability to elect lawmakers representing their interests, through fair voting, has been taken away.

In my experience, there is already a common knowledge among ordinary people that the new computer voting machines are suspect and probably have implemented election thefts, particularly “Diebold” machines, whose name now strikes a chord of household recognition. The front page of USA Today recently carried an article on e-voting that noted most Americans do not trust the electronic voting system being made mandatory in all states, and dislike it. However, newspaper, magazine and television reports such as this are too few and far between to inform the average reader of the news/current events of the specifics and large number of incidents where obvious vote fraud has already occurred with the machines.

What is also needed is the set-up of a commission to officially investigate, with the help of experts on the panel and in advisory roles, to prove that massive election fraud has in fact taken place and almost certainly will take place again unless e-voting is outlawed and paper vote counting reinstated. This commission would call forth witnesses and present to the media a concise, easy-to-understand report with an alert of the danger to people’s democratic rights, and an urgent appeal made both nationally and internationally.

Historical examples of human rights/civil rights commissions of great value to society include the Knapp Commission, formed to investigate corruption in the New York City Police Department in 1971, and the Mollen Commission of 1992 created for the same purpose. These two commissions, led by city government officials, exposed extensive and systematic bribery, racketeering, drug dealing, theft, brutality and a “code of silence” within the USA’s largest city police force, and made recommendations on how these abuses could be corrected.

The South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created in the post-Apartheid Era, successfully exposed many previously unsubstantiated suspicions, and some completely unknown, secret aspects of the white apartheid regime’s human rights abuses including torture, abduction-murders, and violation of the laws of war with regard to the use of biological and chemical weapons.

The Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, formed in 1966, included an international panel of renowned philosophers, scientists, writers and legal experts, and played a significant role in raising public awareness of the mass atrocities then taking place in the Vietnam War, although as a body independent of government, it had no power to enforce sanctions. There were two heads of state sitting in judgment on the Russell Tribunal: Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and the former president of Mexico, Lazaro Cardenas.

An independent commission to investigate and document systematic, nationwide computer vote fraud, and election theft, would be comprised of a panel of experts with power to call forth witness and seek out an, archive and present relevant documentary material such as videos, audio recordings, internal government and corporate files, filmed whistleblower and eyewitness testimony and so on.

Among the vote fraud commission’s aims would be to determine:

1) Did centrally organized, systematic vote fraud illicitly give a false electoral vote count, and thus the presidency, to George W. Bush in the 2004 election?

2) Did such centrally rigged vote fraud also give a false popular vote “victory” count to George W. Bush in the 2004 election?

3) Has computer vote fraud resulted in false victories for Republican congressional candidates in the 2002 and 2004 elections?

4) How is election theft made possible by the hardware and software devices in U.S. computer vote machines, and is there proof that vote fraud and election rigging has been done with these machines?

5) Has there been a widespread cover-up and intimidation of whistleblowers/witnesses with respect to the perpetration of e-vote rigging and creating false vote tallies?

NOTES:

One possible model for such a commission is the Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal created to investigate and document Vietnam and has as its goals the proposal of a government commission with full powers of subpoena.

The Civil Rights Act of 1965 empowers the President to appoint a Special Investigator with powers of subpoena.

In 2000, after the Jim Crows-skewed Florida election, Bill Clinton, an attorney, failed to appoint a Special Prosecutor.

Sanctions and punishment for criminal offenses.