Computerized Election Fraud in America: A Brief History

By Victoria Collier
Editor of www.VoteScam.com
October 25, 2003

America's Wake-Up Call

"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, weíre
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 ìsolutionî 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 falsely purge voter rolls of thousands of largely
poor, black and Democratic voters is being hired by other states across
the country for the same job (read "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy"
by Greg Palast).

As you will soon see, many of our Boards of Elections and Secretaries
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 naïve, 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 Americaís 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 canít 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 ìFather of Social
Security. The Colliers were researching a book they were writing
for Dell Publishing titled: ìRunning Through the System: Ballots
Not Bullets,î 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 ìprojectionsî 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, 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
ìprojections, 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 Collierís 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.
Iíll 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.

* 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.


* 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).


* Secret vote counting is illegal. Remember : counting them faster
is not a justification for counting them secretly.


* When machines began to take over our vote counting systems,
election rigging became an exciting new national industry.


* 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).


* 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.


* 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.


* 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.


* 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).


* 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: ìThis is not
a proper area of inquiry.î 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.php


* 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 anyoneís 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
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 personís 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 wonít 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 weíve 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 its last 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, donít you think?), we
should march to our Secretary of Stateís 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 itís 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 ìofficialsî
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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------


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 www.VoteScam.com

Victoria is available for interviews and can be reached at
1-866-280-9090 and at editor@votescam.com