Betcha didn't know corporate malefactors and local election officials may already be plotting to steal the election from John Forbes Kerry. Never mind, I suppose, that those notorious Republican and corporate lackeys at the New York Times concluded Bush really won the famous "stolen election" of 2000.

No, the future is bleak, and ceding nothing to Michael Moore, The Nation explains the finer workings of the latest GOP plot to steal your vote.

On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

....About 61 million of the votes in November, more than half the total, will be counted in the computers of one company, the privately held Election Systems and Software (ES&S) of Omaha, Nebraska. Altogether, nearly 100 million votes will be counted in computers provided and programmed by ES&S and three other private corporations: British-owned Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, California, whose touch-screen voting equipment was rejected as insecure against fraud by New York City in the 1990s; the Republican-identified company Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, whose machines malfunctioned this year in a California election; and Hart InterCivic of Austin, one of whose principal investors is Tom Hicks, who helped make George W. Bush a millionaire.

It gets worse: there are some Republicans on The Hill who aren't falling all over themselves to issue federal legislation mandating a paper-ballot confirmation of each computer-counted vote. God forbid leaving the matter to the states!

Maybe famed Lefty rag The Nation is on to something. After all, Democrats know a thing or two about stolen elections. The 1960 presidential race was the last one before 2000 where extensive fraud was seriously alleged. It turns out both parties were guilty, but the Dems were better at it.

As the WaPo put it:

In Chicago, where Kennedy won by more than 450,000 votes, local reporters uncovered so many stories of electoral shenanigans--including voting by the dead--that the Chicago Tribune concluded that "the election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Nixon] was deprived of victory."

....Americans will probably never know for certain if the Democrats stole the election of 1960. But Earl Mazo is pretty sure they did.

"There's no question in my mind that it was stolen," he says. "It was stolen like mad. It was stolen in Chicago and in Texas."

Back in 1960, Mazo, now 81, was the Washington-based national political correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. After the election, he kept getting calls from reporter friends in Chicago who told him wild stories of election fraud there.

"They were in effect chastising me," he recalls, "saying, 'You national reporters, you're missing the story, why don't you come out and look?' "

So Mazo went out and looked. He went to Chicago, obtained lists of voters in precincts that seemed suspicious and started checking their addresses.

"There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted," he recalls. "I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for Kennedy in that house."

At the urging of Chicago Democrats, Mazo went to Republican areas downstate and looked for fraud there. He found it.

"In downstate Illinois, there was definitely fraud," he says. "The Republicans were having a good time, too. But they didn't have the votes to counterbalance Chicago. There was no purity on either side, except that the Republicans didn't have Daley in their corner--or Lyndon Johnson."

Now, The Nation would have us believe the electronic voting companies and local election officials are in the GOP's pocket. A fairly insulting proposition to companies and public servants increasingly, and rightly, under scrutiny. What's most important here is reasoned public discourse, advocacy, and resulting measures to boost the reliability of electronic voting.

But Chomsky-esque conspiracy mongering on this and other topics only discourages public engagement and voting. That's an outcome nobody should want.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 4, 2004 09:07 AM

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