House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) during a news conference at the
Capitol in Washington, Feb. 5, 2013. Cantor will resign as majority
leader within weeks, according to leadership aides a day after he was
defeated in the 2014 primary election by David Brat. (Photo: Christopher
Gregory / The New York Times)
November's political races will feature an all-out battle for
control of the US Senate. Eric Cantor's "upset" Virginia primary defeat
raises two integrity issues barely covered in the media that are red
flags for those concerned about vote manipulations.
Political races this November will feature an all-out battle for
control of the US Senate. The "upset" Virginia primary defeat of Eric
Cantor raised two critical election integrity issues that few in the
mainstream media have covered, but which should set up serious red flags
for those concerned about manipulations of the 2014 and 2016 elections.
The first alarm is the hidden connection that Professor David Brat's victory had to the Koch Brothers dark money network:
hundreds of millions of dollars in "charitable contributions" to
inoculate American academic institutions and media with extremist
libertarian philosophy, promoting the Ayn Randian culture of greed while
boosting radical Tea Party candidates. The net effect has been to
undermine the civility of American politics, divide the Republican
Party, stalemate Congress and hobble government institutions.
Most pundits reflecting on the Virginia race have myopically ignored
the money-in-politics corruption, because outwardly, Cantor outspent
Brat by a huge margin. Instead they focused analysis on immigration
issues, intraparty Republican division, Cantor's complacency as a
candidate, or the possibility of Democrats in the open primary crossing
over to vote for his radical opponent.
David Brat was not just any economics professor. He was director of
Randolph-Macon's Moral Foundations of Capitalism program, a curriculum
underwritten by John Allison's BB&T Bank's charitable foundation. Allison is on the Board of Directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, which means Rand's thousand-page ode to antigovernment libertarian capitalism, Atlas Shrugged,
is usually included in the curriculum. Allison is also the CEO of the
Cato Institute, the Koch-funded, far-right think tank working closely
with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to set back the
social reform and safety net programs of the 20th century.
ALEC has promoted legislation
for voter suppression and antilabor laws, and its legislative members
have pushed extreme gerrymandering in states such as Wisconsin, North
Carolina and Michigan.
"The virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike."
Meanwhile Koch Industries and related front charities are engaged
heavily in financial "sponsorship" of right-wing radio talk jocks who
push climate change denial and play a heavy-handed role in supporting
Koch-backed political candidates. A number of these, particularly Laura
Ingraham and Mark Levin, vigorously boosted Brat's campaign while
denigrating Cantor. Combined, these factors prove that Brat is not just a
benign professor who luckily caught the Republican House Leader
offguard; he is a construct and pawn of Koch industries' deliberate and
methodical transformation of the Republican Party and American
democracy.
Computerized Election Rigging - the "Hidden" Voter Suppression
The Virginia primary not only displays the nefarious role of dark
money in promoting extremism, it also raises yet again the question of
vote rigging - specifically the proven vulnerability to error and insider manipulation of the computers that register and tabulate our votes.
Brat won by 7,000 votes. But at least 37,000 votes in Virginia district 7 were cast on ballotless Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, providing no ability to recount, audit, or verify that these votes were counted as cast. Seventeen states use the same DRE technology in at least some of their districts.
Nationwide, electronic voting machines
are programmed on proprietary software that cannot be publicly
examined, and sold to voting districts by private corporations known to
have lied to public officials, employed convicted felons, and maintain ties to right wing partisan and religious extremists.
As explained in the 2012 Harper's Magazine article, "How to Rig an Election":
"The virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike."
The Virginia primary brings to the foreground how likely it may be
that, if all else fails, this cabal of right-wing libertarian-anarchists
could hack the voting machinery, as has been suspected in a number of
recent elections. A prime example is the evident manipulation of the
voting technology in the 2010 Democratic primary race in South Carolina.
In that remarkable election, Alvin Greene
- an unemployed, often incoherent man facing obscenity charges - became
the Democratic candidate for the US Senate. As described by election
watchdog VoterGA,
Greene ran absolutely no campaign; no debates or fundraisers, and did
not even deploy a yard sign, yet he mysteriously - miraculously - beat
former National Guard Colonel, judge, and four-term state legislator Vic
Rawl, by a stunning 18 percent margin. This ensured the landslide
victory in November of Tea Party Republican and fundamentalist
Christian, Jim DeMint.
Voters reported that "defective" Touch Screen machines
"flipped" votes in the primary to Greene in a number of SC voting
jurisdictions. Half of South Carolina's counties reported large
disparities between absentee ballot counts and those tallied by the
suspect machines on election day. According to VoterGA, In
20 out of 24 SC counties, Rawl won the verifiable absentee vote tally
but lost to Greene on the total computerized counts - statistically a
highly improbable occurrence.
Greene declined to explain where he got the $10,400 needed to file as a candidate and denied that he was a GOP plant.
Immediately after the story of his controversial election broke again
into the mainstream media, Jim DeMint abruptly resigned his Senate seat
in December of 2012 and was hired to head up the Koch-backed rightist
Heritage Foundation. Filmmaker Jason Smith made DeMint's scandalous 2010
election subject of an in-depth documentary on computerized election
fraud, I Voted?
Why Has Nothing Been Done to Safeguard Our Elections?
For decades, democracy activists have sounded the alarm on the dangerous spread of e-voting systems through dozens of books and films,
and thousands of articles. The growing attention certainly has raised
the risk to would-be criminals, and may have entirely thwarted some
rigging attempts (in 2012, legal action and even counter-hacking
was credited with preventing the stealing of the presidential race in
Ohio). Unfortunately, during the quiet interim between elections, this
issue falls back into obscurity.
Much of the blame falls on the media, both mainstream and
alternative. When election "upsets" and anomalies occur - such as
Cantor's race in Virginia - media pundits and analysts engage in whatever contortions are necessary to
rationalize and explain the outcome. Rarely do they question the faulty
and vulnerable technology, even in shocking turnarounds that defy
polling gravity.
As noted by Election Integrity journalist, Brad Friedman: "Three days ago, The Washington Post reported that Cantor's internal polling showed him 34 points ahead of Brat. Tonight, it's a given among the pundit class, that those numbers were simply wrong, and tonight's completely unverified computer-reported results are correct, showing Cantor losing instead by more than 11 points."
As noted by Election Integrity journalist, Brad Friedman: "Three days ago, The Washington Post reported that Cantor's internal polling showed him 34 points ahead of Brat. Tonight, it's a given among the pundit class, that those numbers were simply wrong, and tonight's completely unverified computer-reported results are correct, showing Cantor losing instead by more than 11 points."
Progressive media has largely ignored the evidence that recent
election "upsets" have favored extreme right-wing candidates so
consistently that some Election Integrity activists have coined the
phenomenon, the "red shift."
Alvin Greene's glaring election fraud was certainly not the first
example. In 2002, the GOP regained control of the US Senate with the
crucial defeat of popular Georgian Democratic Senator, Max Cleland,
a Silver Star recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam. Early polls
had given him a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby
Chambliss, who was supported by the Christian right and the NRA. Two
days before the election, a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead
among likely voters, while the Atlanta Journal - Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point advantage.
Cleland lost by seven points; a "red shift" of 10 points.
However, just prior to the election, Diebold Voting Machine employees had applied a mysterious, uncertified software "patch" to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May. Diebold consultant and whistleblower, Chris Hood, later confessed: "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do. The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it."
However, just prior to the election, Diebold Voting Machine employees had applied a mysterious, uncertified software "patch" to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May. Diebold consultant and whistleblower, Chris Hood, later confessed: "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do. The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it."
Two years later, John Kerry lost his 2004 presidential bid in Ohio; a
key swing state crucial to George Bush's reelection. A blitz of
right-wing voter suppression and dirty tricks tactics were reported
by thousands of voters, including voting machine anomalies and
"flipped" votes. The Republican secretary of state, J. Kenneth
Blackwell, a fundamentalist Christian who also served as cochair of
Ohio's Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush (yes, you just read that),
oversaw the controversial election.
Four years later, Ohio attorney (and former Republican) Cliff
Arnebeck began gathering evidence to file a racketeering claim against
Karl Rove, which included the charge that Rove's computer operatives
had masterminded the theft of the 2004 election. Specifically, the
investigation focused on the unusual computer architecture of election
night, designed by top GOP tech-guru (and zealous anti-abortion
Christian) Michael Connell. It was discovered that this system funneled
electronic vote data to the servers of a right-wing, Rove-connected
company in Tennessee, which could have tampered with results before
displaying them on the Ohio Secretary of State's website. Connell was
fighting Arnebeck's subpoena to testify in open court against Rove, when
he was killed in the crash of his single-engine Piper Saratoga he was piloting alone.
Lou Harris, long regarded as the father of modern political polling,
stated: "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen."
John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling late on
Election Day. Yet the final vote tallies in 30 states deviated widely
from the polls, with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but
nine. Some of the greatest disparities were concentrated in Ohio; in one
precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should have received 67
percent of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only 38 percent.
The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as a result of
sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553.
Other victories that contradicted the polls, where electronic vote rigging has been suspected, include Chuck Hagel's US Senate 1996 win in Nebraska,
where it was discovered that Hagel had not disclosed his prior role as
chairman of ES&S, the voting machine company that counted his own
votes.
Computer manipulations triggered George W Bush's first win in 2000,
where programmed purging of voter rolls was topped off by a rogue
memory card in Volusia County, Florida. At midnight, the card
mysteriously registered 16,000 "negative" votes for Al Gore, allowing
Bush's cousin at Fox News to call the election for him at the order of
Governor Jeb Bush.
Where Do We Go From Here?
We can only speculate about the possibility of computerized rigging
in the Virginia Republican primary - or in any election - but it would
be insane not to embrace the truly overwhelming evidence that our system
of voting is flawed and ripe for fraud and abuse by anyone with access -
as proven by Argonne National Labs recent $26 hack.
We must immediately stop using DRE voting systems that do not even
afford the ability of a recount or audit. That is the very least we can
do to somewhat safeguard important upcoming elections - but it is not
enough. In European countries, election technology that offers no public
transparency has been outlawed. A fully transparent paper-based system, counted in public on election night, is internationally considered the Gold Standard of democratic elections.
As November approaches, American voters still lack the ability to
know with certainty who wins any given race, or the true results of
ballot initiatives and referenda affecting some of the most vital issues
of our day.
Election Integrity remains a dangerously overlooked vulnerability in
the overall populist and progressive strategy. Democracy activists must
take the steps necessary to implement real reform and safeguard future
elections.
By Alan Dershowitz