How to Rig an Election in the United States

The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it is being broken today here in New Zealand.

This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing.

Imagine if you will that you are a political interest group that wishes to control forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further that you know you are likely to implement a highly unpopular political agenda, and you do not wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash.

One way to accomplish this outcome would be to adopt the Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Hun Sen (Cambodia) approach. You agree to hold elections, but simultaneously arrest, imprison and beat your opponents and their supporters. You stuff ballot boxes, disenfranchise voters who are unlikely to vote for you, distort electoral boundaries and provide insufficient polling stations in areas full of opposition supporters.

However as so many despots have discovered, eventually such techniques always fail ? often violently. Hence, if you are a truly ambitious political dynasty you have to be a bit more subtle about your methods.

Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing.

Imagine for example if you could:

secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software;


centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;


legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;


establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election ? at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level;


get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control ? removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans.

And imagine further that you install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in.

FULL STORY Bigger Than Watergate!:

http://truthout.org/docs_03/voting.shtml