On behalf of the State Elections Canvassing Commission and in accordance with the laws of the State of Florida I hereby declare Governor George W Bush the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes for President of the United States. Katherine Harris
To this day there has not been a true state-wide recount as mandated by state law. Jack Tapper, author Down & Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency
Forum: Mister Curtis, are there programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?
Clinton Curtis: Yes.
Forum: How do you know that to be the case?
Clinton Curtis: Because in October of 2000 I wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney ... that did just that.
Forum: When you say ‘did just that’, it would rig an election?
Clinton Curtis: It would flip the vote 51/49 or whatever you wanted it to go to and whatever race you wanted to win.
Forum: And would that program that you designed be something that election officials ... could detect?
Clinton Curtis: They’d never see it.
Forum: So how would such a program – a secret program that fixes the election – how could it be detected?
Clinton Curtis: You would have to view it either as a source code or you would have to have a receipt and then count the hard paper against the actual votes ... other than that you wouldn’t see it.
Forum: Given the availability of such vote-rigging software, and the testimony that has been given under oath of substantial statistical anomalies – gross difference between exit polling data and the actual tabulated results – do you have an opinion whether or not the Ohio presidential election was rigged?
Clinton Curtis: Yes, I would say it was. Clinton Eugene Curtis, computer programmer, 2004
This was the grand idea of the ‘representative democracy’ which first stirred in England in the revolution of the 17th century, and was taken up with much more force at the time of the French Revolution. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man denounced all governments which were not chosen by the people. To the government of the day, which was chosen by a handful of brigands and courtiers, this was dangerous subversion, and Paine was sentenced to death for it. Similarly, when the Chartists in the late 1830s and 1840s demanded the vote as part of an organised working class movement of strikes and physical force, the rulers set their faces firmly against the proposal.
The idea of a representative democracy is essentially distasteful to a class of people who owe their wealth to the process of robbing the majority. Exploitation of the many by the few is the most hideously undemocratic process imaginable. How could the minority exploiters agree to a system where the majority can vote?
After the Chartists were beaten in open class warfare, the British ruling class, then the strongest and most cunning in the world, applied itself to this question. It was obviously impossible forever to resist the popular demand for the vote. Was it not possible, however, to concede the vote bit by bit, making sure that the concessions coincided with relative industrial peace, and above all making sure that as each new concession led to new governments, those governments could be constrained against any action which would threaten the wealth and power of the ruling class? So, for a hundred years (1867-1970) the vote was conceded piecemeal. Governments were elected of many different colours; but the real power, especially the economic power, stayed exactly where it was.
The result was that the representative system was deprived of the very essence of representation: the ability of the government to act in the interests of the people who voted for it. How was this done? By keeping tight in the clutches of the ruling class the areas in society where real decisions were made and acted upon. Industrialists who in a day could decide the real fate of thousands if not millions of workers were not affected by the elections. They remained in charge of their industries. So did the banks, which by a flick of the wrist could transfer billions of pounds and ‘bankrupt Britain’. The media moguls were free after the election as well as before it to blabber on incessantly about the Red Menace. Judges and civil servants gloried in the fact that they were not elected. Army officers and police chiefs were rarely threatened by a change of government, even when they were openly hostile to that government. All these people came from the same class. They had real power, and were prepared to use it to protect their class against any elected government. Thus the parliaments (which were quickly set up all over the world as soon as the success of the British experiment became obvious to other rulers) became, in Lenin’s phrase, ‘mere talking shops’. Paul Foot, Will Labour Make A Difference? November 1991
Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. Joseph Stalin
The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. Thomas Paine, First Principles of Government 1795
I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong. Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
2004 Ohio Precinct exit poll data shows virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount. National Election Data Archive
Non-voting is a fruitless temper tantrum. Bruce Wright
cf.
When I see this – ‘Your Vote Is Your Choice: Be Heard’ – Bollocks it is. David Icke, Brixton Academy 2010
The vote becomes a voice when we refuse to vote. We refuse to play the game any more. ibid.
One man one vote. John Cartwright, English political reformer
Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against. W C Fields
We can only vote for those candidates who are put before us by our hidden masters. Jordan Maxwell, interview Lucifer 2000
Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. Lyndon B Johnson
If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it. Ken Livingstone
Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting. Franklin D Roosevelt
You can’t vote the rascals out because you never voted them in in the first place: the corporate executive and the corporate lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive assisted increasingly by a university-based mandarin class – these people remain in power no matter whom you elect. Noam Chomsky, lecture Government in the Future, Poetry Center of New York 1970
There’s a lot of fuss on the Left about election irregularities, like, you know, the voting machines were tampered with, they didn’t count the votes right, and so on. That’s all accurate and of some importance, but of far more importance is the fact that elections just don’t take place, not in any meaningful sense of the term ‘election’. Noam Chomsky
Half the population does not bother to mark the ballots, and those who take the trouble often consciously vote against their own interests. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
It makes no difference who you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four per cent of the people. Gore Vidal
I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy: Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide. John F Kennedy
I confirm is it my intention to let my name to go forward for a second ballot. Margaret Thatcher
I had to be eighteen. All of us in the tea shop had to be eighteen, the legal age to vote. There was an election coming up, and the tea shop owner had already sold us. He had sold our fingerprints – the inky fingerprints which the illiterate person makes on the ballot paper to indicate his vote. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger p97
I am India’s most faithful voter, and I still have not seen the inside of a polling booth. ibid. p102
The only people truly bound by campaign promises are the voters who believe them. Christopher Hitchens