Voting: What is it Good for? Absolutely Nothing

Kurt Nimmo
Nov. 01, 2006

David Swanson provides us with a glimpse of the stolen election, a mere eight days away. Zooming in on an NPR transcript of a conversation between NPR’s Robert Siegel and a boorish Karl Rove, we learn from the interview that Republicans use a “different math” to count polls, as they use “different math” to count election results at odds with exit polls. In other words, Rove was indicating, once again, Republicans will steal the election and thus retain possession of the House and Senate.

“Democratic candidates, consider yourselves warned. Don’t concede a shady election the next day and then complain weeks later that you didn’t realize, you hadn’t been aware, or you didn’t want to put us through a traumatic experience. Our uncertainty as to whether you will fight for your votes is what is traumatizing us,” writes Swanson. “Citizens, consider yourselves warned…. prepare yourselves to make sure the votes are counted. Then join a blue revolution: candlelight vigils outside county election offices the evening of November 7th—Let them know we’re watching.”

I can see Rove and the Republicans rolling on the floor, their sides splitting. Candlelight vigils? Please. Instead, activists should gather at the polling places and demand the removal of all devices—computer, optical, even card punch—and insist paper ballots be used instead. People should refuse to vote until this changes.

Here in New Mexico, we have optical readers. Since an optical reader translates my paper ballot into digitized information, subject to hacking and manipulation, it is not acceptable. I demand a paper ballet counted and recounted by human eyes not connected to the Republican or Democratic party. Short of this, there is no reason to vote. The last time I voted, in 2004, my vote was stolen. Ballots were “spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials. Many were given provisional ballots that subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush ‘won’ an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush,” writes Michael Parenti.

Of course, I didn’t vote for Bush Lite, Kerry, who thumbed his nose at the large antiwar faction of his party, thus revealing once again there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, exemplified by the fact Kerry and Bush are distant cousins and Skull and Bones Yalies, products of the same, for lack of a better word, shadow government, consisting of “high finance, big oil, corporate elitism,” as Jonathan Vankin notes, the members of which “slide smoothly into cabinet-level jobs in Republican and Democratic administrations.”

I am told I should vote Democrat, simply to get rid of the Republicans. Or I should vote for whatever candidate is opposing the incumbent, simply to throw the bums out. Or because the Democrats will impeach Bush, a highly unlikely scenario. All of this, of course, is simply a well-oiled shell game, for as the historian Carroll Quigley wrote, there is no difference between the parties, they are essentially cut from the same cloth. According to the elite who run things behind the scenes, “the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can â€˜throw the rascals outâ€™ without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policyâ€¦ It should be possible, to replace one party with the other party which will pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policy.”

Indeed, responding to the charge the Democrats will “cut and run” in Iraq, chairman Howard Dean admitted Bush and the neocons “will still be in charge of foreign policy and the military … I don’t imagine we’re going to be able to force the president to reverse his course,” in other words, no matter who sits in Congress, the war will continue, the policy will remain the same, the Democratic majority “will pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policy.” In short, a vote for a Democrat to get rid of a Republican is a vote for continued murder in Iraq and Afghanistan, possibly Iran in the not too distant future.

Of course, going to the polling place will not matter, as the going there did not matter during the 2002 midterm election, when “blackbox” voting ruled the day. “It’s a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buy-outs and bogus fronts. It’s a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers—and presidential family members—lie down together in the slime. It’s a hacker’s dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly-programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically-partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny,” writes Jon Traudt. “The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players—Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia—with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), coming on strong. These companies—all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid—were given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide for the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems—many using ‘touch-screen’ technology that leaves no paper trail at all—are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, John Hopkins and other universities.”

If you trek to your voting place next week, you will be condoning thievery, endless war, continued corruption, and above all else, the destruction of the Constitution. “Being patriotic in America means being devoted to the Constitution, if not the natural rights philosophy that motivated much of it. Since neither of the major political parties has any interest whatsoever in enforcing the constitutional limitations on the state, they are all traitors to the Constitution,” writes Thomas J. DiLorenzo. “Anyone who supports them is also behaving in a traitorous manner. That is, anyone who votes for any of them. Voting only allows these traitors to the Constitution to proclaim that ‘the people have spoken’ and ‘I am your president,’ or congressman, senator, governor, or whatever. Their legitimacy rests solely on their ability to make this claim.”

Howard Dean declares war to be interminable and Nancy Pelosi affirms her desire that Bush will not be impeached.

Instead of a record turn-out next week, determined to throw the bums out (again, ad nauseam), it is my wish that so few people go to the polling places it sends a message. “The upside is that it might just be possible that some politicians in Washington would get the message and start behaving more like a George Washington or Thomas Jefferson than a Tony Soprano or Vito Corleone (with apologies to all the distinguished Italian-Americans out there),” writes DiLorenzo.