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Why does an essentially liberal country -- as evidenced by the large number of ballot initiatives nationwide that would normally be considered "liberal" passing with large majorities -- elect conservative people who are dead set against those initiatives? This clear question-and-answer format book provides arguably the most likely answer.
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- The right-wing plan to take over the country was in gear by 2002, with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), from which poured the era of electronic control of voting. Mitch McConnell sold it to the Dems as a way to increase turnout (I mean, what were they thinking?!! Since when have Republicans wanted to increase turnout?). Then HAVA was nailed into place by claiming it would help those with disabilities, though methods were already in place to handle their problems. From then on, any questioning of electronic voting or vote tabulation was attacked as anti-disability (sort of like any critique of Israeli government policy is attacked as anti-Semitic).
- The voting machine industry has always been in the hands of extreme right-wingers, and in spite of attempts to break up the big players, consolidation has narrowed it down to essentially two firms, one of which makes the paper-ballot tabulators that are being foisted off on any town of over 2000 in Maine.
- Voting machine and tabulator memory cards (housing both the programming and data storage) are considered proprietary and cannot be examined by anyone, and are often poorly guarded. Citizens have no right to get access to ballots that go through opt-scan tabulators into locked boxes, and the candidates who might have a right to examine them seldom do (who wants to be called a "sore loser?"). Both direct recording DRE voting machines and vote tabulators (used at both local and state levels) have been shown to be hackable, often with little effort and using off-the-shelf inexpensive equipment. The most trivial approach is setting the starting "zero" counters for the candidates to +X for one candidate and -X for another, instead of zeroes. This will produce a 2X extra margin for one candidate, while maintaining the correct "vote count." A memory card usually has 500K-700K lines of code, four inconspicuous ones of which can do this -- and a few more can make that only happen on Election Day, so that pre-E-day testing comes out right. And paper-trail receipts can be printed quite differently from what is recorded on the memory card in a DRE machine. In short --
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The vast majority of votes counted in this country, on both DRE voting machines and opt-scan ballot tabulating machines, are completely opaque and unverifiable.
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- Given the tremendous power and financial value in control of the government at various levels, and the endless surveys which show people in this country more and more willing to cheat, the question is not "Who would DO such a thing," but rather "Who would NOT do it."
- The Gallup polling organization was taken over by radical Christian George Gallup III. He instituted the "Likely Voter Cutoff Model," which uses screening questions that eliminate whole classes of likely Democratic voters. The result was a portrayal of the electorate as more right-wing than they actually are, so when the "red-shift" of electoral theft produced "voting counts" that were to the right of other pollsters (not good PR for pollsters), they fell into line.
- The same thing happened with exit polling, which is the gold-standard everywhere in the world -- except in the United States, where the results are now always "adjusted" to the right to match the "vote count" so their results can be used for (misleading) demographic analysis. Simon has documented this by grabbing the initial exit poll results and then watching them change. It should be noted this doesn't happen with most state legislative and U.S. House races, but only because exit polling is seldom done on those, leaving them as the low-hanging -- and extremely valuable, given the potential for gerrymandered redistricting -- fruit for election thieves.
- So now polling not only portrays the electorate as conservative, but also gives cover to the "red shift" vote theft. Simon sites a striking example of the blindness of the Dems: he asked the head of polling for the DNC about their results. The pollster said it was odd how their internal polling -- always the most accurate, of necessity -- was always off. They got to assuming that a 10% lead meant an even heat. And he refused to consider theft as an explanation, though he had no better one.
- The 2010 election was crucial in paving the way for gerrymandered redistricting, creating almost 100% Dem mostly-urban districts and a lot of widespread mixed districts that were either mostly Rep, or close to 50-50 -- close races being always the easiest to steal without detection. And as an off-year election, it was not so closely watched.
- Simon produces massive statistical evidence supporting the claim of red-shift theft. He cites wonderful examples of carelessness on the part of thieves, like a South Carolina Dem primary, where a nobody who made no campaign appearances and had an anonymous person put up the entry fee won with 59% of the vote over a very popular opponent. He lost in the general election, of course; when he later ran for the legislature, he got about 30 votes.
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It's also of local interest that the same sudden 7% margin that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker got in both his recall and reelection campaigns (where he was slated in both to lose) is the same margin that suddenly showed up for Paul LePage after being tied to the last minute with Mike Michaud.
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- ALL commentators, in both the mainstream (for an exception, see Harper's November 2012 article "How To Rig An Election") and alternative medias and the Democratic Party, focus on polls and overt Republican disenfranchisement efforts. Which is just fine with the people doing the efficient big-time theft, since, as with a magician, everyone's attention is elsewhere than where the action is.
- Now that Republicans control most of the statehouses and state legislatures and both houses of Congress, with a gerrymandered guarantee of control and changes in the Electoral College method, it is not likely that Dems will see control of any of these, or of the Presidency, at any time in the foreseeable future, absent any incredibly major wide-spread scandal or "October surprises" that occur after the practical deadline for putting fixes in place in all key places.
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