Guest guest Posted February 7, 2003 Report Share Posted February 7, 2003 [Whether you feel comfortable on the right or the left, this thought provoking article raises questions that ought to concern us all. DaveO] Published on Friday, January 31, 2003 by CommonDreams.org " If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines " by Thom Hartmann** Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles. Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots. But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it. You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts. You'd be wrong... [The entire article is posted here: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm ] **Thom Hartmann is the author of " Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights. " www.unequalprotection.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this credit is attached. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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