A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
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 naﶥ, 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.
8) 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.
Picture it. Millions of citizens marching on the gates of
power, demanding their keys back. It would be a quick,
effective, non-violent, American Revolution. And I think it?s
long overdue.
The fact is, with a well-designed ballot and see-through boxes
(to prevent stuffing) the paper system can be simple, user-
friendly, and fosters community-based democratic participation.
High school kids, even children, used to count the ballots in
America. We must have a strong, diverse presence of citizen
watchdog groups to oversee the count, along with poll workers.
The only election officials who are truly independent, who
represent the interests of all parties in an election, are the
poll watchers. The count must be done by hand, in public, video-
taped, aired live on television, and the results posted on the
precinct wall -- just like they used to be. Ballots should be
counted on the same day as the voting takes place, making it
much more difficult to alter ballots.
But that is not enough to ensure the safety of the election.
Intense, multi-faceted scrutiny and public awareness must
surround every step of the process, not just the activities at
the precinct. Otherwise ballot boxes tend to disappear on the
way to the county courthouse, or arrive with their locks broken.
Election ?officials? will be waiting with new locks, to replace
the broken ones (ballot box seals are also made by multiple
suppliers, making duplicate numbered seals easy to obtain).The
reported vote totals tend to change mysteriously when a secret
corporate media consortium is in charge of reporting them. If
anyone disputes the numbers, the same centralized media can
assure the charges are never investigated or reported by the
press. Election officials and Secretaries of State can
manipulate or withhold the final election results to prevent
citizens from proving fraud, and rotten Judges can throw out
vote fraud lawsuits.
I promise you, all of this can and will happen ? it has been
happening for decades -- if the public as a whole is asleep and
only a few good men and women are on the watch.
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.
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Victoria Collier directs a non-profit organization focused on
building sustainable living systems that work on the personal,
community and global levels. A long time writer and political
activist, she 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. Victoria is available for
interviews and can be reached at 1-866-280-9090 and at
editor@votescam.com
