• Citizen outrage only cure for vote stealing epidemic
By Pat Shannan
While events surrounding electronic vote fraud today may not be as publicized as four years ago, the problem has not gone away by any means. The one person who has done more to expose this crime is still hard at it. AFP recently spoke with Bev Harris to get her take on some of the recent developments in South Carolina, Maine and Nevada.
The questionable vote that gave George W. Bush the 2000 presidential election was what first drew the attention of Ms. Harris in Washington state, not realizing she was grabbing a tiger by the tail.
Her private investigation ensued over the next fewyears, and after uncovering evidence of miscounted votes, error-prone voting machines, disappearing votes, purged voter lists, lax security, discrepancies between polling data and election results and sudden, come-from-behind wins by Republican candidates, her first book on the subject was published in 2004. Black Box Voting—Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century is now available at no charge at blackboxvoting.org. It details the numerous election computer “breakdowns” that seem to follow almost every questionable situation.
Josef Stalin once quipped: “Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.” That rings true today, as electronic voting machines are no more trustworthy than strangers who hide behind curtains to manipulate vote counts.
These new electronic machines are not transparent and are inherently insecure, say inspectors and exposers of the latest hi-tech usage, showing that even a mobile phone with a special “application” can be used to manipulate the apparatus as to just which candidate should win.
And this should explain what is really going on behind the scenes at every state primary vote. In the early days of the primaries, Americans watched so-called favorites Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Gov. Rick Perry (Texas) and Herman Cain drop out of the race. Then former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney emerged as the front-runner by taking the Iowa caucus until somebody screamed, “miscount.” It turned out later that state GOP officials had given Romney credit for 22 votes from a precinct where he had actually gotten only 2.
Vigilant citizens made enough noise about the incorrect tally to get the vote corrected. The hoopla also forced the resignation of the Republican chairman there.
Romney was still the anointed one at the time, but now as former Penn. Sen. Rick Santorum is garnering more questionable state victories along the way, it is difficult to determine which one is the current choice of the Republican national hierarchy, even though the applause meters and numbers at gatherings seem to indicate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas is more popular than polls suggest.
So now the Republicans favor Romney one week and Santorum the next, with periodic hints that even Newt Gingrich may make a comeback.
Meanwhile, the little-mentioned Paul continues to draw more people than anyone at nearly every campaign stop. As a point of interest in the Maine fiasco, Washington County was the only county Paul carried in 2008. But its polls were never opened this year because of an alleged snowstorm that turned out to be non-existent. Two other pro-Paul counties also showed a zero vote. When these were not included in the final count, party leaders were able to declare Romney the winner, by a scant 194 votes.
In Charleston, S.C. in early January, the same night that Paul drew a cheering throng of 1,000 people to his political gathering, Gingrich had to cancel his meeting because he couldn’t attract enough of a crowd to fill a hotel meeting room. The following Saturday, Gingrich drew 42 percent of the vote in the state to slam dunk Romney while Paul wound up in a dismal fourth place. Is there something wrong with this picture?
Ms. Harris tells us that not only is South Carolina “100 percent” electronic black-box voting, but that the boxes were packed up and trucked to Tampa, Fla. for final tabulation, creating another “chain of custody” suspicion.
The recent Nevada caucuses smell “fishy,” according to Ms. Harris because, not unlike Maine, Romney was declared the winner with only 71 percent of precincts reporting. She also pointed out that “undercounting and overcounting” are rampant everywhere.
Los Angeles Times reporter Ashley Powers tells of being removed by security from the Nevada count because there was “no press allowed.”
Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati has been exposing the ongoing nationwide election fraud almost as long as Ms. Harris has. His website, www.votefraud.org, has archived many of the crimes of years past as well as what happened recently behind the scenes at various voting precincts around the nation.
The problem, as Condit notes, is out of control.
Who is Bev Harris?
Bev Harris is the director of Black Box Voting, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan elections watchdog group. According to the group’s website, Black Box Voting’s mission is “to restore the citizen’s ability to see and authenticate each step of our public elections. Black Box Voting investigates election problems, communicates the problems to the citizenry and teaches citizens how to manage their own government—which means teaching citizens how to identify elections problems and providing citizens with the tools to oversee elections. Each of the four crucial steps in a public election must be something the public can see and authenticate, without need for special expertise.”
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Pat Shannan is a contributing editor of American Free Press. He is also the author of several videos and books including One in a Million: An IRS Travesty, I Rode With Tupper and Everything They* Ever Told Me Was a Lie. All are available from FIRST AMENDMENT BOOKS. Call 1-888-699-6397 toll free to charge.
