Granny D writes: [Posted in entirety with permisson]
Dear Friends,
Bev Harris, who has provided such wonderful leadership on electronic voting machine issues, is the bright light behind the documentary film "Hacking Democracy," which aired Nov. 2nd, 2006 on HBO, and will show again. The film is dedicated to Andy Stephenson, whose tireless work to expose the problem cost him his health and his life.
What you will learn from the film is that, if Diebold designed their ATM machines the way they design their voting machines, none of us would have a dime left in our bank accounts. Such remarkable facts are usually not the result of incompetence, but of design. When the top man at Diebold promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush, you are allowed to be a little paranoid.
For those of us who resist paranoia, we can take some comfort in the fact that exit polls give a good indication of how voters really voted. However, it should be noted that the Republican leadership in Florida and Ohio have attempted to outlaw exit polls, so the old neck hairs of paranoia do tend to stand up.
And the reports of some early voters seeing machines flip their votes from Democratic candidates to Republican candidates cannot be ignored. Nor can the testimony of computer programmer Clint Curtis, who claims to have been hired by a top Florida Republican to flip the vote. He has passed a lie detector test. (You can Google or Youtube his testimony.)
Thanks to good local organizing around the country, more than half the states now require voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper receipt that is used for recounts. That is helpful if the election is close enough to trigger a recount. Of course, if enough machines are corrupt, it may not be close enough.
We certainly need a return to all-paper ballots as soon as possible, counted in the precincts with anyone watching who cares to do so. We need to push for that quickly, or corporations with clear agendas and murky ethics will be running the American show entirely. This scandal and the grassroots efforts to patch up the problem, state by state, have been dramatically underreported, but it is quite real.
Now, as for Tuesday. The Republicans, including Mr. Bush, Mr. Rove and others, are predicting they will retain control of the U.S. House and Senate.
If it is not simply bluster, could this confidence be related to the fact that U.S. warships have been stationed just off the shore of Iran. Should a missile be launched from the direction of Iran toward the ships, the election mood in America might change overnight. Anyone, of course, could launch such a missile from any rowboat.
Before anyone becomes too alarmed at the suggestion that the Bush people might put American servicemen at risk in order to influence U.S. politics, please look at the list of nearly 3,000 American dead in Iraq, whose sacrifice was used to pursue tax cuts, special-interest no-bid contracts and, indeed, U.S. elections.
Is such a possible event the basis for the optimism of Bush and Rove? Probably not, but we must not be slow learners when it comes to this Administration. Anyway, we will know soon enough.
If a fraudulent event abroad or fraudulent events at home are used to upend an election, how will we react? It is always calming to think of such strange things in advance so that, should lightning strike, we will be emotionally and otherwise prepared. You don't expect a fire when you go to the theater, but it feels good to know where the exits are, anyway.
We have seen elections rerun in countries -- the Ukraine, for example -- where the fraud was clear and the people were unwilling to leave the streets. We don't know what would happen here. Surely, the news channels will say the pollsters got it wrong, the Republican turn-out-the-vote machine saved the day, and they will point to the fact that Bush and Rove and other top Republicans predicted victory all along. If there is a new foreign crisis, it will be all the easier to justify the reversal of voter mood.
The promoting of the Bush-Rove prediction and the quite undeserved hype around the Republican vote-turnout machine (they did no better in 2004 than the Democratic machinery) can be viewed today with suspicion -- that the groundwork is being laid for explaining an unexpected outcome.
They can certainly rely upon the inability of the Left to organize itself in such a circumstance.
Actually, I think they might be surprised. There are, after all, tremendous organizing tools and organizations now operating on the Left. Unless the Internet is unplugged, I think there might be an inclination to use these tools to organize and support the needs of large crowds on the streets, demanding an immediate new election on paper ballots. It is very hard to imagine, but not impossible to imagine.
Emergency action would be required by Congress to supply the demanded new election. You can imagine the kind of pressure that would be necessary to generate that action with veto-proof margins--wildly improbable, indeed. It might also require the assent of a worried Supreme Court. Again, difficult to imagine, but not impossible to imagine if half the country were in the streets for week after week.
Are the likely web-based organizations making any contingency plans for such a possibility? I have no idea. I'm sure they have each others' phone numbers and know how to dial a phone.
Here is the big question: Who will be in a position of sufficient respect and credibility to declare that the election was fair or rigged? It would be lovely if we could decide in advance who would be a fair voice for that determination.
I expect the opinion of the Carter Center, for example, might be persuasive to many, as they make such determinations in elections all over the world. Who else? I expect a panel of investigators and Constitutional experts put together by the Lawyers Guild might also be authoritative. I would hope that organizations with the capability to assemble such credible observers and judges are thinking about all this, considering the stakes.
Let us be prepared to win on Tuesday, or to lose fair and square. But let us have our eyes open and our kit bag packed by the door.
Sincerely,
Doris "Granny D" Haddock
NewEnglandReformSchool.org
http://newenglandreformschool.org
Cobb Meadow Road
Dublin, NH 03444
USA