Special Election 2002 Edition

Greetings, once again, to all subscribers!

You all remember the Republican Party, don’t you? That irrepressible gang of fascist thugs who stole the last presidential election, installed in the White House the crude, ignorant, semi-literate grandson of a Nazi financier, and then proceeded to implement an overtly fascistic agenda that they called ‘compassionate conservatism’? And that millions of people all across this land swore to run out of town on a rail, if not string up from the nearest tree, the next time an election rolled around?

Well … the strangest thing happened. That very same Republican Party just swept the mid-term election. That, at least, is the highly improbable story currently being sold to the American people.

So what are we to make of this?

According to the mainstream press, the announced election results were nothing short of a “vote of confidence” in Team Bush, and a “mandate” to hasten the descent of America into an undisguised fascist, imperialist, authoritarian police-state.

According to the ‘alternative’ media, the reputed Republican victory was attributable to the failure of the ‘Democratic Party’ to show up for the big game — which is to say that they failed completely to offer anything resembling an alternative to the current Republican agenda.

There is certainly more truth in that analysis than in the corporate media’s entirely fraudulent claims of Bush having been handed a mandate. But is that really all there was to it? Has the anger and outrage engendered by the Bush team’s brazen theft of the 2000 presidential election already entirely dissipated?

I really don’t think so.

No, there has to be some other explanation for the failure of Democratic voters – who had been waiting two long years to register their contempt for the Republican Party – to throw some of the conspirators out of office. And there is another explanation, although it is one that no one really wants to talk about: fraud.

Yes, dear readers, I am afraid that the election that we just witnessed appears to have been an entirely fraudulent affair, which perhaps explains the low profile maintained by Bush and company in the aftermath of their “historic” win — they may very well have been laying low while wondering if they were actually going to get away with what had to appear to many voters to be widespread fraud.

How else to explain the otherwise inexplicable results of the election? Are we really to believe that millions of outraged Americans have suddenly fallen in love with the Bush administration, despite knowing full well that his is a fundamentally illegitimate administration, and despite the fact that the Bush team’s criminality has been on full display throughout the last two years — so much so that even the craven ‘liberal’ press hasn’t been able to fully cover for them?

Are we really supposed to believe that Bush is such a formidable national and world figure that his appearances on behalf of various candidates rallied voters to defy all pre-election predictions? And are we supposed to not notice the stunning hypocrisy of the purportedly ‘liberal’ press fawning over Bush for allegedly taking great risks by spending endless hours crisscrossing the nation – and in the midst of fighting an alleged ‘war on terrorism,’ no less – though that very same media regularly castigated Clinton for making far less campaign appearances, and doing far less fund raising?

There is no doubt that the ‘Democrats’ did everything in their power to suppress the vote — waging relentlessly negative campaigns that turned the stomachs of voters across the country, in addition to failing – completely and deliberately – to further expose the rampant corruption of the Republican Party, or to take a stand against any of the policies of the Bush regime that Democratic Party officials knew full well were repugnant to Democratic voters.

But even the painfully obvious efforts of the ‘Democrats’ to depress voter turnout don’t explain the alleged failure of those voters to do a little house cleaning.

So what happened?

One thing that happened is that the Republicans gained two Senate seats — two seats that would otherwise have been occupied by Senators Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan. Carnahan’s seat would not have even been up for grabs for another four years had he not met with a most unfortunate ‘accident’ just before the 2000 election. And Wellstone would most certainly have defeated his Bush-cloned opponent.

No timely plane crashes, no Republican majority in the Senate. See how that works?

And that is certainly not the only apparent example of Republican malfeasance — just the most heavy-handed example. There was also the time-honored tactic of bribing Green Party members to field candidates that would split the Democratic vote. (http://www.richardsonforgovernor.com/news/br_abqjournal_7112002.htm)

And then there was the ever-popular tactic of fielding legions of jack-booted goons to serve as “poll watchers” in order to intimidate minority voters in districts where the races were close. (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/nov2002/poll-n04.shtml) And then of course you had Jeb Bush employing very much the same tactics that were used in the last election to disenfranchise countless thousands of Florida voters. (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/PAL211A.html)

But there was a new wrinkle added in Florida, and in many other places as well — ‘touch-screen’ voting systems. Now the beauty of these systems is that they leave no paper trail. None whatsoever. No way to recount ballots, because ballots don’t actually exist.

And who, you may be wondering, manufactures and administers these voting machines? As reporter Lynn Landes noted, “Republicans dominate the voting machine business.” (http://www.EcoTalk.org/MidtermElections2002.htm) In fact, the companies that control the voting machine business are owned by an interwoven network of right-wing extremists with a long record of pumping money into Republican campaigns. (http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html)

The touch-screens worked great though, according to all avenues of the media, yielding “a final result less than two hours after the last polls in the Panhandle closed.” And what was that final result? The reelection of Jeb Bush, of course. If anyone bothered to read past the headlines of the “smooth” Florida election though, they found that, according to poll monitors, “touch screen machines in eight Miami-area precincts were counting ballots cast for Democrat Bill McBride as votes for his opponent, Jeb Bush.” (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-glitch6nov06021420.story)

And then there were the 104,000 ballots in heavily Democratic Broward County that officials kind of, uhmm, forgot to count. But other than that, everything went smoothly in Florida. (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-broward8nov08.story)

Of course, there is really no way to verify that the Florida votes, or the votes in many other states, were counted correctly.

In the old days – which is to say, until this particular election – Voters News Service (VNS) would take exit polls to predict the outcome of elections. This was based on the crazed theory that, if you wanted to get an accurate gauge of how people are casting their votes, asking them just after they do so might be a good strategy.

The VNS is a consortium put together by the major print and electronic news organizations to supply exit polling numbers to the networks and cable news outlets to allow for the early projection of results. It is also, notably, the entity identified in the book “Votescam” as being implicated in widespread election fixing. This book is highly regarded in ‘conspiracy’ circles.

Interestingly enough, “Votescam” was heavily promoted on various ‘conspiracy’ sites just after the theft of the 2000 presidential election, and was even posted in its entirety on the web, free for the taking. A lot of people obviously wanted this book to be read. But the funny thing is that the conductance of the 2000 election seemed to directly refute the contentions in the book.

If, as the book claims, an election can be easily stolen from behind the scenes, well out of public view, then why would the heavy-handed, and very public machinations have been necessary? The book, coming into sudden prominence when it did, seemed to say: “Don’t worry that the election has been stolen right before your eyes; they’re all fixed anyway.”

The “Votescam” crowd has been demanding the termination of exit polling, and the disbanding of VNS. Well guess what? You pretty much got your wish. Hope you like the results — which are, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, that elections now can be easily stolen from behind the scenes.

VNS opted at the eleventh hour, according to numerous press accounts, not to release the results of exit polling this time around. The future of the organization itself is in question. And why, you may be wondering, did VNS opt not to supply exit polling data? According to TomPaine.com, it was because of their “off-base extrapolations.” (http://tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6699)

They just really blew it this time, you see. As the TomPaine posting tells it, “The VNS numbers didn’t make sense in race after race.” It was the craziest thing, but the VNS data showed the Republican candidates taking a serious beating. “[F]or example, they had the Democrat winning in Colorado by 20 points (he wound up losing by six) and in North Carolina by six (he lost by 9).”

That, of course, is the kind of results that you would expect to find in the first election following the spectacle that was Election 2000. It is also the kind of results you would expect based on the tracking polls taken in the days and weeks leading up to election day, which showed Democratic candidates holding impressive leads over their Republican rivals. (http://www.bartcop.com/111102fraud.htm)

Lynn Landes contacted John Zogby of Zogby International, one of the country’s premier polling services, and asked him “if over the years he had noticed increased variation between pre-election predictions and election results. Zogby said that he didn’t notice any big problems until this year. Things were very different this time.” (http://www.EcoTalk.org/MidtermElections2002.htm)

The Houston Chronicle reported that, in local races in Scurry County, “election error reversed the outcomes in two commissioner races.” A “defective” computer chip “misread” the ballots and “incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans. Democrats actually won by wide margins.” (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1652544)

“The problem was discovered when poll workers became suspicious of the margins of the vote, Scurry County Clerk Joan Bunch said.” Was this an isolated case of computer malfunction, or a glimpse of widespread fraud perpetrated against the American people?

What we have here is a number of elements coming together: a political party that has proven itself to place no limits on its criminality when it comes to the manipulation of elections (http://www.talion.com/election-mistakes.html and http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed110102.shtml); the timely closure of the media’s exit polling service, whose polling results were wildly at odds with the announced results; an alleged dropping of the ball by pretty much all of the pollsters across the country who had been taking the pulse of voters in the weeks leading up to the election; and the introduction of paperless, touch-screen voting systems that lend themselves very nicely to unseen and undetectable manipulations.

Does this prove widespread fraud? No, it does not. But neither can it be proved that the election results are valid. That’s the beauty of paperless systems. No trail to follow. No recounts. No investigations.

As Michael Ruppert reported: “There was one other great message from this election. On Wednesday morning I watched a crawl on the bottom of the CNN news screen. It said, ‘Proprietary software may make inspection of electronic voting systems impossible.’ It was the final and absolute coronation of corporate rights over democracy.”
(http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110602_elections.html)

And what are we, the American people, going to do about it?

The vast majority of us will do one of two things: many, heavily brain damaged from prolonged exposure to Fox News, will actually welcome the acceleration of Plan Bush, as though harboring the ridiculously irrational belief that the Bush team has our best interests in mind; many more will proceed blithely along harboring the equally irrational belief that somehow, magically perhaps, things are going to get better — that the next election is going to be different.

Both of these groups, who together comprise the vast majority of America’s mass of humanity, are composed of what Western society calls ‘sane’ people.

So what are we going to do about it? Probably absolutely nothing. But not to worry — as long as we can still turn on the television and be greeted by smarmy newscasters, meaningless sporting events, celebrity scandals, and insipid and propagandistic ‘entertainment’ programming, then things can’t be all that bad.

Can they?