What Stalin said

I ran across an interesting video clip in Facebook this morning. It depicts a computer programmer named Clinton Eugene Curtis of Tallahassee, Florida, testifying under oath that computer programs indeed exist to secretly fix elections. And unless someone knows how to read source code, the irregularities are pretty much undetectable.

Mr. Curtis, who says he’s worked for NASA, Exxon-Mobil and the Department of Transportation, seems credible. He claims former Florida Speaker of the House and Congressman Tom Feeney was a client who wanted Curtis’ help in rigging an election; Feeney, gubernatorial wannabe Jeb Bush’s running mate in 1994, was later named one of the "20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress" by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. (Feeney led the effort to certify Florida’s Republican presidential electors even though it was still unclear whether Dubya or Al Gore had won the state's 25 electoral votes in 2000.)

Remember after the 2000 election when the demand for electronic voting machines became louder? Companies like Diebold claimed their voting machines could solve Florida’s butterfly ballot problem and there was much discussion about hanging chads and paper trails and direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems and the likelihood of electoral fraud. Unfortunately, problems and irregularities with electronic voting machines have since been recorded in Virginia, California, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas and, of course, Florida.

In Ohio in 2004, there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for Dubya after Ohio’s vote count was transferred late on Election Night to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (For more information, read “New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked.”) The transfer was enabled by Govtech, a private IT firm headed by the late Michael Connell, a technical guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Mr. Connell died in a suspicious small plane crash 45 days after giving a deposition in the case examining Ohio’s electoral irregularities.

It’s interesting how conspiracy theorists seized upon Clinton confidant Vincent Foster’s "suspicious" demise in a Virginia park in July of 1993 but no one says anything about Mr. Connell.

The GOP’s recent willingness to take the economy of the United States of America to the edge of a cliff and nudge it several times proves that Republicans will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. It’s not hard at all to believe they’ll rig elections, especially since it’s so easy to do and difficult to detect.

In the words of Josef Stalin, "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes."