More Voter Scam - going back to George I
Speculation and facts from votescam.com
Among the wickedest recent examples of possible computerized vote fraud, of the sort that has disillusioned millions of Americans, is the 1988 New Hampshire primary that saved George Bush from getting knocked out of the race to the White House.
Was the New Hampshire Primary scenario a modern classic in computerized vote manipulation? Here is the gist of it.
The Bush campaign of 1988, as historians have since recollected it, was filled with CIA-type disinformation operations and deceptions of the sort that America used in Viet Nam, Chile and the Soviet Union. Since George Bush was one of the most admired CIA directors in the history of the organization, this was not so surprising.
Yet George Bush stood to lose the Republican Party nomination if he was beaten by Sen. Robert Dole in the snows of New Hampshire. He had suffered a terrible political wound when Dole won big by a show of hands in an unriggable Iowa caucus. Bush came to New Hampshire with all the earmarks of a loser whom the press had come to identify as a "wimp."
Political observers were downbeat in their observations of Bush's chances in the face of Dole's Iowa momentum. Virtually every television and newspaper poll had Bush losing by up to eight points just hours before the balloting.
Desperate times require desperate measures. Perhaps that's what it required for "steps to be taken," and phone calls to be made. Then came a widely reported promise made by Bush to his campaign manager, Gov. Sununu. It happens that Sununu's computer engineering skills approach "genius" on the tests. If Sununu could "deliver" New Hampshire, and Bush didn't care how and didn't want to know how — then Sununu would become his chief of staff in the White House.
When election day was over the following headline appeared in the Washington Post:
NEW HAMPSHIRE CONFOUNDED MOST POLLSTERS
Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements
By Lloyd Grove
Washington Post Staff Writer
For Vice President Bush and his supporters, Tuesday's 9-percentage-point victory over Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) in New Hampshire was a delightful surprise; for Andrew Kohut, it was a horror story.
Kohut is president of the Gallup poll, whose final New Hampshire survey was wrong by 17 points: it had put Dole ahead by 8; Bush won by 9. "I was dismayed," Kohut acknowledged yesterday.
This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter opinion.
Gallup's glaring error and the miscalls of other polling organizations once again raise questions about the accuracy of polls, their use by the media and the impact they have on voters' choices and the public perception of elections. In New Hampshire this year, news organizations' use of "tracking polls" to try to follow the movement of public opinion night after night came to dominate news accounts of the campaigning and the thinking of the campaigns themselves.
Tracking polls usually survey a relatively small number of voters every night: 150 to 400 in each party, in the case of The Post-ABC poll. The results are averaged over several days. See POLLS, A11, Col. 1
Had the terms of Bush's "promise" to Sununu been met?
Whatever magic Sununu was able to conjure up during those final hours preceding the overnight resurrection of the Bush campaign, it worked.
There are those who believe that such a wild reversal of form would have been subject to an immediate inquiry by the stewards if it had happened in the Kentucky Derby. Any horseplayer would have nodded sagely, put a finger up to his eye, pulled down the lower lid, and signaled: "Fix."
Yet in New Hampshire, there was some wonderment expressed in the press, and little more. There was no rechecking of the computerized voting machines, no inquiry into the path of the vote from the voting machines to the central tallying place, no public scrutiny of the mechanisms of the mighty peculiar vote that saved George Bush's career and leapfrogged the relatively obscure Sununu into the White House.
Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the "Shouptronic" Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city.
These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave — and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies — will forever be in doubt. Consider these points:
1. The "Shouptronic" was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia.
2. It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone's dear knowledge.
3. It completely lacked an "audit trail," an independent record that could be checked in case the machine "broke down" or its results were challenged.
[regardless of the rest of the speculation, this is bad news]
4. Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic "much more risky" than any other computerized tabulation system because "You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check."
A year later, in June of 1989, Robert J. Naegele, who had investigated all computerized voting systems for New York State, warned: "The DRE (which the Shouptronic was) is still at least a year and possibly two away from what I would consider a marketable product. The hardware problems are relatively minor, but the software problems are conceptual and really major".
A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering.
How could such an offense against the United States electoral process have been carried out under the gaze of professionals from the nation's TV networks, newspapers and wire services?
There are lawyers who will argue that the party primary election is essentially an intra-party matter over which "outsiders" have no legal rights. That, in fact, if a political party wants to rig its elections, it can do so without violation of federal, state or local laws.
As long as men and women in charge of the vote count are on the take, or can be persuaded that tampering is "good for the party," that one candidate should win no matter what the vote count is — then wholesale vote rigging throughout America can be accomplished quite easily. It is a sick and vicious way to operate within the two-party system, and there is reason to believe that it is epidemic on a national scale.
The concept is clear, simple and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer.
Of course, there are problems about getting control of more and more computers, and that problem has been brilliantly solved with the help, and in some cases the unwitting collaboration, of the major news-gathering organizations. |
