America's Media Just Made Vote-Rigging Easier

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12213-americas-media-just-made-vote-rigging-easier

Friday, 19 October 2012 10:15 By Victoria Collier, Truthout

The news that America's mainstream media has cancelled exit polling in 19 states, means that insider election theft this November is now even harder to track, and therefore easier to get away with - something that scarcely seemed possible.

As I've written in the November issue of Harper's Magazine ("How to Rig an Election"), our voting system is already privatized, corporatized, computerized and arguably less secure than Vegas slot machines. It's also controlled by a shadowy cartel of right-wing affiliated companies that keep merging and changing their names, perhaps - and almost certainly in the case of Diebold - to avoid association with the record of white-collar criminal charges and convictions that trail them from state to state.

Precious few methods now remain for verifying results generated by these corporate "black box" touch-screen voting machines and optical scanners, which have been proven (ad nauseam) by experts to be vulnerable to insider rigging and outsider hacking. This evidence remains long unreported by the mainstream media, which ignore the kind of stories now broken weekly at the Brad Blog, like the latest White Hat hack of Diebold voting machines: In September, 2011, the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Labs gained controlling access to the electronic votes within the machines using $20 in parts and the equivalent of an 8th grade science education.

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To make the case that we've got to toss these corporate Trojan Horse voting machines into the scrap heap (as was just done by Ireland), the EI movement has heavily relied on public opinion polls, tracking polls and exit polls for election forensics: comparing polling data to the "trust us" numbers spit from the secret innards of the voting machines.

Election forensics has turned up some very serious discrepancies in elections spanning the past few decades, and even led to the coining of a new term: The Red Shift.

The Red Shift has been detected in both state and federal American elections, where computerized vote totals have consistently "shifted" - often by a 5 percent to 7 percent margin disparity (sometimes less, but sometimes much greater) - in comparison to hand-counts and polling data. This mysterious seismic lurch invariably pushes votes to the right, and when the dust settles, it has inordinately benefitted GOP candidates and ballot issues.

To conceal these unnerving discrepancies that strongly suggest computerized vote rigging, exit pollsters began "adjusting" their final reported numbers - literally forcing polls at the end of Election Day to better align with the voting machine results.

Surprisingly, this is not a criminal or even covert act, but common knowledge amongst pollsters (though certainly not the American public) and accepted practice.

Therefore - and here's the rub - only the early, "unadjusted" exit polls numbers can provide evidence of the "red shift." But this smoking-gun data has been increasingly guarded by the pollsters, and withheld from release to EI analysts.

Nevertheless, the "red shift' reports we do have are beginning to attract attention, thanks to the tenacity of EI activists spreading them on the Internet. Could this be why the media consortium that controls the exit polls is shutting them down in 19 states?

David Moore, former Vice President of the Gallup poll for 13 years, agreed in an interview with me that the killing of the exit polls in 19 states is a "disaster" for the Election Integrity movement, "because you don't have the kind of polling data to help you determine whether polls and vote statistics are in accordance with each other."

The non-exit poll states in 2012 will be Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

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In 2004, for example, "unadjusted" exit polls showed John Kerry winning the Presidency by what many considered an insurmountable margin, until Ohio's votes surged for George W. Bush late on election night. The unexpected windfall that handed Bush Ohio's electoral votes - and therefore the White House - was reported on the web site controlled by the Republican Ohio Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, a fundamentalist Christian, and - yes, it's true - Honorary Co-Chair of the Committee to Re-elect George W. Bush.

Blackwell's web site was programmed by two companies deep under the sheets with the GOP - GovTech and SMARTech - and operations were coordinated behind the scenes by campaign manager, Karl Rove.

Which brings us back, full circle, to the problem of this new blackout of exit polls.

"The problem," writes Jonathan Simon, "is that Karl Rove now has 19 states to mine votes to cover a Romney popular vote loss (undermining and casting suspicion upon his easily arranged Electoral College 'win'), without the remotest trace of the theft, not even the telltale 'red shift.' This was done in 2004 for Bush, and it showed up in the 'red shift' in states like Alaska and New York, as millions of votes were shifted in non-competitive states where there was little forensic vigilance. And if it turns out that they need even more votes for Romney, with the public now 100 percent blind to these 19 states, they'll have them by the millions."

The same threat hangs over competitive Senate races across the country, which will determine the balance of Congress, and the courts, for years to come.

Now more than ever, if we suspect our vote is stolen, we couldn't prove it if we tried.

Yes, You Should Still Vote: But That's Not All

Remember, low voter-turn out makes it easier to rig elections. Don't kill your own vote by not casting it. Cast a ballot, but do it with your eyes wide open to the reality of the changes that need to be made in our vote counting system, then get busy organizing to make those changes happen before the next election.

Join the Election Integrity movement. If there's not a group in your area, start one. Educate, organize and help us restore transparent, publicly observable hand-counted paper ballot elections in communities across America.

Democracy is quite literally in our hands.