by James J. Condit Jr.
(first published in 1992, Updated in July 2003)
Source http://www.votefraud.org/greatest_coverup_of_all.htm
Sidebar on page one in original
pamphlet:
You're running in your first election for City Council in a crowded
field of 26 candidates. Nine will be elected. The No. 1 local
anchorman comes on TV at about 9:15 PM and announces that you're going
to do very well for a first time candidate, then flashes on the screen
that you're running 12th; only three places from victory. Such a
finish would give hope to all who were daring to "fight city hall."
Earlier in the evening, a
liberal-leftist home-town university professor who was analyzing early
returns for another local TV station had projected that your
arch-rival, and his ally the sweetheart of the anti-God portion of the
establishment was headed towards defeat.
But HO-L-L-L-D EVERYTHING ! ! !
At approximately 9:45 PM, the same
anchorman announces that there has been a computer breakdown. 45
minutes later when the computers come back up, a massive switch has
occurred. You and 7 other feisty challengers have fallen to the very
bottom of the heap. The establishment sweetheart has jumped into a
winning position against all odds. Despite unprecedented public
dissatisfaction, the same old faces are elected once again. Many
conclude that "you just can't fight city hall." Things have worked out
just great for all those entrenched politicians who seemed to be the
object of such public dissatisfaction right up to election day. The
next morning, you scan the papers in vain for any mention of the
computer breakdown: no record for posterity.
The above scenario is my story, but
it was happening in dozens of places all across the nation. It was
1979 and a new day had quietly dawned in America - UNVERIFIABLE,
RIGGABLE computerized vote tabulation. (end of sidebar)
Ballots for
Bullets
When I was small I remember my Dad
saying how in other countries they would shoot each other to decide
the transfer of power. In our country it was done by the ballot at
election time.
Millions of American soldiers have
fought and bled and died to protect your right to free and fair
elections; to protect your right to an orderly, peaceful transfer of
power when the people so will.
How Your
Parents' Votes Were Counted
Once upon a time, Americans voted by
Paper Ballot. At the end of the day after the polls had closed,
neighborhood people, Democrats and Republicans, worked together to
count the votes in the precinct (polling place) BEFORE the votes left
that precinct. The count was then posted at the precinct polling place
for all to see. This is the only way to insure a verifiable election.
Variations of method are possible, but the elements of physical
ballots which are counted and posted at the precinct before the
ballots leave each precinct are essential to insure a fair and honest
count.
To rig an election with the above
safeguards built in, one would have to bribe many hundreds of
neighborhood people, including key Democrats and Republicans in each
precinct you hoped to rig. Finally, the group of people bribed at each
precinct would only have access to a tiny fraction of the vote.
The Greatest
Coverup Begins
About 1974 a sinister development was
in full swing all over the United States. In many areas, especially
high populations regions, the votes were no longer being counted in
the precincts by neighborhood people. The switch was on to computer
vote counting systems. Typical was Cincinnati, Ohio where votes were
bundled up immediately after the polls closed and sent to a mysterious
central computer room to be counted by secret computer codes. To add
insult to injury, the votes were counted away from the watchful eye of
the entire electorate and the press.
Despite the brutal cover up that has
been conducted for going on three decades by the news media and the
major parties to prevent you from hearing about this issue, some major
media news items have appeared. In a rare but superb news story on the
eve of the 1988 Presidential election, Dan Rather (CBS Evening News)
engaged in this exchange with computer expert Howard J. Strauss of
Princeton University:
Rather: "Realistically, could the fix
be put on in a national election?"
Strauss: "Get me a job with the
company that writes the software for this program. (ed: Strauss was
referring to the most common computer program in use) Then I'd have
access to one third of the votes. Is that enough to fix a general
election?"
"A House
Without Doors"
In an earlier clip during this CBS
interview, Howard J. Strauss dropped this bombshell: "When it comes to
computerized elections, there are no safeguards. It's not a door
without locks, it's a house without doors."
The most succinct introductory summary to this mind-blowing subject is
found in the ground breaking book
Votescam: The Stealing of America
by James & Kenneth Collier. The following is quoted with permission
granted by the late James Collier in 1991:
The chapter begins by quoting the
first words spoken by President-elect, George Bush in his Nov. 8, 1988
victory speech in Houston, Texas. Bush said: "We can now speak the
most majestic words a democracy can offer: "The people have spoken . .
. "
The Colliers comment in the following brilliantly written passage:
It was not "the People" of the United
States who did 'the speaking' on that election day, although most of
them believed it was, and still believe it. In fact, the People did
not speak at all. The voices most of us really heard that day were the
voices of computers strong, loud, authoritative, unquestioned in their
electronic finality . . .
The computers that spoke in November 1988
held in their inner workings small boxes that contained secret codes
that only the sellers of the computers could read. The programs, or
"source codes," were regarded as "trade secrets." The sellers of the
vote-counting software zealously guarded their programs from the
public, from election officials, from everyone on the dubious grounds
that competitors could steal their ideas if the source codes were open
to inspection . . .
You may ask: What "ideas" does it require
to count something as simple as ballots? Can the "ideas" be much more
complex than, let's say, a supermarket computerized cash register or
an automatic bank teller machine?
The computer voting machines do not have
to do anything complicated at all; they simply must be able to
register votes for the correct candidate or party or proposal,
tabulate them, count them up, and deliver arithmetically correct
additions . . .
People with no formal training, even
children, used to do it all the time. So why can't the public know
what those secret source codes instruct the computers to do?
It only makes common sense that every
gear, every mechanism, every nook and cranny of every part of the
voting process ought to be in the sunlight, wide open to public view.
How else can the public be reasonably assured that they are
participating in an unrigged election where their vote actually means
something? Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert,
shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American
vote count . . .
Computers in voting machines are
effectively immune from checking and rechecking. If they are fixed,
you cannot know it, and you cannot be sure at all of an honest tally.
If you understand the above quoted
paragraphs, you understand the problem.
Crash,
Cover-up, Lawsuit, Fix
Among the many struggles which have
taken place all over the USA in the last few decades over this issue,
I can speak about only one from first hand experience: Cincinnati,
Ohio (part of which is covered on page 242-247 in the Collier book,
Votescam) Fortunately, the Cincinnati case illustrates as well as any
other instance how the establishment media and both major parties
coalesce to thwart any attempt to get rid of their precious, riggable
computer vote counting systems.
"How Elections Are Stolen" in American
Opinion magazine (written in 1977 by Dr. Susan L.M. Huck, who later
served as an aid to Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald, who disappeared
during Korean flight 007) alerted me to the dangers of computerized
vote counting systems. A great American patriot, the late Jim
Stefanopoulus, (a man who proved to be uniquely providential in my
life on several occasions) handed me the Huck article shortly after it
was published. If Mr. Stefanopoulus had not handed me this article, I
don't think I would have recognized the significance of the computer
crash we witnessed on election night in 1979, i.e., that it was not an
isolated incident, but a part of a nationwide pattern of computer
crashes on election nights, invariably resulting in the "re-election"
of incumbents.
When we actually witnessed our very
own computer crash in 1979 (described near the beginning of this
article) during which everything worked out perfectly for the
"in-crowd" -- I knew something big and bad was up. When the Cincinnati
newspapers failed to mention the computer crash the next morning and
the accompanying candidate position shake up -- this was our first
taste of the media blackout that dozens of other concerned citizens
were experiencing all over the nation.
After due research and preparation, we
filed suit against our local Board of Elections in 1981, and after 4
years of public service litigation conducted by my father, James J.
Condit Sr., our side won a decisive victory. Judge Richard Niehaus
ruled: "There is no adequate and proper safeguard against the
computers being programmed to distort the election results." What the
Judge's ruling means, Mommies and Daddies and Boys and Girls, is that
thousands of your votes can be switched in the blink of an eye and no
one would ever be the wiser!
Judge Niehaus also issued a court
order allowing us and our chosen experts "to observe all phases of the
election process" on election night 1985 with a view that we bring
evidence back to his court so that the situation could be properly
remedied.
Shortly before this court ruling, my
mother-in-law, Kay Kleiner, a tireless crusader for our country since
the 1950s, had providentially alerted me to a series called "Votescam"
by the Collier brothers being carried in the Washington DC-based
weekly newspaper, The Spotlight. Thanks to this tip, I was able
to ask the Colliers to serve as two of our court-approved experts in
1985. As reported in their book, the Colliers had already video-filmed
women punching votes out of voters' ballots at the Board of Elections
on election night 1982 in Miami, Florida.
And to my surprise (but not to
theirs), the Colliers also caught women on camera plucking votes out
of punchcard ballots in Cincinnati, this time using household
tweezers.
Disappointingly, Judge Niehaus (in his
tennis shoes) was summoned down to the Board of Elections at about
7:30 PM on that 1985 election night by the heads of both the
Republican and Democratic Parties. The Judge, in a highly unusual
move, modified his court order on the spot insisting that observing
"all phases of the election process" did not include videotaping!
The audio portion of the confrontation
between Ken Collier on the one hand, and the Judge and both local
Party heads on the other, is captured on a video camera which was
pointed at the floor during the tense exchange. The Colliers were told
to quit videotaping under threat of arrest.
The next morning we appeared on the
Jan Mickelson Show on WCKY Talk Radio. Mickelson, who is one of the
top Talk Show Hosts in the country (now for many years on WHO in Des
Moines, Iowa), was skeptical when Ken Collier asserted that we had
video-film of women pulling votes out of ballots with common household
tweezers. He shot a quick glance my way as if he were having second
thoughts about having let us on the air at all. But then our
credibility shot sky-high when no one from the Board of Elections was
willing to come on the air against us.
Back to election night: While the
Colliers' videotaping efforts were causing such consternation to the
Election officials, our other court-approved expert, Mr. Robert Strunk,
was moving quietly through the system with my Father.
Mr. Strunk, a highly respected
computer analyst who once headed the Xavier University computer
department, issued a magnificent report to the Court detailing why the
computer vote counting system was NOT verifiable. Mr. Strunk said that
to believe the published results under this computer system was "an
act of faith."
Please observe that the conclusions of
Mr. Strauss and Mr. Strunk, as well as the conclusions of dozens of
other honest computer experts, agree completely on the unverifiability
of these computer vote counting systems. As far as we know, there is
not one computer expert in the nation who has gone on record in an
attempt to refute these scholarly individuals.
Despite his previous fine decisions,
Judge Niehaus, perhaps feeling the heat from the local power
structure, excused himself from taking any action to remedy the
riggable computer system by announcing that he was a "pacifist" judge
whatever that means. In order to try and effect a remedy, we appealed,
and two years later in 1987 our deplorable Court of Appeals dismissed
the six year-old case stating absurdly that the county judge did not
have any jurisdiction over the county computer vote counting system.
(!!!) (And believe it or not, Hamilton County, Ohio, which houses
Cincinnati, is STILL using the exact same easily rigged punch card
system today in 2003.)
Whistle-blowers Emerge
In the meantime, something momentous
happened. Two whistle-blowers had come forth from Cincinnati Bell. One
of them eventually testified in convincing detail during court
proceedings connected with our lawsuit that he had been involved in
causing a computer crash while helping to alter the local 1979
election by wiretapping into our computer vote counting system. (The
reader will recall that this was the very year we had been stunned by
the candidate shake-up which occurred seemingly during the computer
shutdown.). The key whistle-blower had already watched for several
years as a Congressman, the FBI, and all the press stonewalled his
evidence.
On election eve 1986, Cincinnatus
Political Action Committee, our local political vehicle, had issued a
press release asking the media how they could ignore Judge Niehaus's
finding and continue to report local elections as business as usual
when the same riggable computer system was still counting the votes.
Only Channel 12 responded and took a brief statement from your writer,
but the spot they aired right after Monday Night Football caught the
attention of the key whistle-blower, and he contacted us the next day,
election day '86.
After another year of being
stonewalled, we convinced the frustrated whistle-blowers that the only
way to break through the media censorship was to utilize a little
known law which forces TV and radio stations to accept a candidate's
political ads provided no obscenity is involved.
Days before our TV ad featuring the
whistle-blowers was to air, Judge Niehaus again played a key role when
he ruled favorably on my Father's request to allow the key
whistle-blower to enter his sworn testimony about wiretapping the
computer on election nights as well as causing that crash in 1979 into
our suit against the Board of Elections, which had not yet been thrown
out by the Court of Appeals. Together the TV ad and the sworn
testimony combined to spark the only two significant local major media
reports that have ever appeared. Anchor Nick Clooney and reporter Mary
Krutko of Channel 12 aired an excellent, in-depth local TV segment,
and twenty minutes later during the same newscast our TV ad featuring
the whistle-blowers ran.
The next morning (Oct. 30, 1987),
reporter Randy Ludlow wrote an outstanding article in the Cincinnati
Post. But these two reports alerted the Media Moguls that word was
getting out to the public -- and the media curtain of censorship was
slammed down over all local establishment media, i.e., the Cincinnati
Enquirer, the Cincinnati Post, Channel 5 (NBC), Channel 9 (CBS at that
time), Channel 12 (ABC at that time).
WLW Radio Talk Show Host Mike
McConnell gave wiretappers Gates and Drais, as well as myself, a
forum, and WLW night talk show host Bill Cunningham interviewed Gates
and Drais.
After several meetings with Gates,
Drais, and myself -- a now defunct neighborhood paper, The Mount
Washington Press, embarked on a series of articles about the
controversy, primarily spearheaded by reporter Gregory Flannery.
Flannery is now at the downtown "alternative press" paper City Beat,
where reporter Maria Rogers wrote an in depth article on the votefraud
issue in the November 2002 issue.
Eventually a cornucopia of
establishment press coverage did ensue but it focused on all the other
aspects of the wiretap story, while maintaining the brutal cover-up of
the computerized vote fraud issue. All the rest of the coverage was
devoted to relative trivia such as which millionaires and
organizations had been allegedly phone tapped, speculation as to why,
etc. etc. etc.
By time the smoke had cleared in the
wiretapping story, 5 policemen had resigned in disgrace and Cincinnati
Bell admitted one of its trucks had been used in wiretapping
activities. The Wall Street Journal had mentioned the story. Local
Cincinnati newspapers, TV, and radio stations combined to carry over
400 reports. Even the national CBS program 60 Minutes aired a
segment on the Cincinnati wiretapping story, but again suppressing the
computerized votefraud apsect of the story. In a 1989 court proceeding
between wiretapper Leonard Gates Cincinnati Bell, the chief computer
man at the local Board of Elections admitted under oath that if
someone had the relevant codes he would have a 100% chance to alter
the election results.
So, omitted from all major local and
national media press coverage up to November, 1988 -- with the two
already noted exceptions, was any intelligible reporting on the
computerized votefraud aspect of the story. (Several of the highly
explosive radio shows featuring the Colliers, the whistle-blowers, and
myself are preserved on audiotape. Our TV commercial featuring the
whistle-blowers and the local Channel 12 spot is preserved on
videotape as is an hour interview which I conducted with one of the
whistle-blowers early on just in case we had not been able to break
through the media curtain.)
New Yorker
Magazine, Dan Rather, and the U.S. Department of Commerce
Even though 99% of the investigative
reporting on votescam has been done by private citizens and
non-establishment investigators (for instance, while the "respectable"
New York Times has done only 3 stories on the subject, the "persona
non grata" Spotlight weekly was carrying over 300 stories), there have
been enough establishment sponsored stories to demonstrate that the
major news media has what some call "guilty knowledge."
On the eve of the Bush-Dukakis
election, Ronnie Dugger broke the almost total silence in the major
media on votescam when his article "The Dangers of Computerized
Voting" appeared as a cover story in the Nov. 7, 1988 issue of New
Yorker magazine (This dynamite article is available in most
libraries).
Dugger, who visited me for a week in
Cincinnati during the wiretapping uproar, exerted his journalistic
skills to present this issue in an undeniably credible manner. He
documented the activities of many and varied citizens, candidates, and
experts generally unknown to each other who have been working on the
votescam issue in virtually every region of the country from the early
70's to the present day.
Within days of the appearance of the
Dugger cover story in The New Yorker magazine, CBS Evening News
with Dan Rather carried the only report on the computerized votefraud
issue to date to appear on a major national TV network, featuring
computer expert Dr. Howard J. Strauss. We have also preserved this
excellent 5 minute report on videotape.
In August of 1988, the U.S. Bureau of
Commerce published a comprehensive study under the auspices of the
National Bureau of Standards by Roy G. Saltman, Special Publication
500-158 entitled "Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized
Vote-Tallying." (There is also rumored to be a second volume of the
Saltman study, but we have never seen it.)
This is probably the most
comprehensive compilation of all the lawsuits and other aspects which
surround the issue of computerized voting published thus far. This
government study supports Dugger's article, as well as supplies
mountains of evidence documenting the problems with computer
vote-counting systems.
The fact that Saltman failed to pick
up our Cincinnati case -- which featured both the most decisive
judicial ruling and the only whistle-blower to come forth to date on
the computerized votefraud issue -- demonstrates the difficulty faced
by even a well-funded government agency in compiling a comprehensive
list of all the local and sporadic efforts that have been conducted to
expose the dangers of computerized vote tabulating.
Even -- as this updated version is
written -- after the 2000 Presidential election fiasco -- the thus-far
successful suppression of the computerized votescam issue from
widespread public notice, debate and understanding -- is a chilling
demonstration of major media censorship in America.
Why Does the
Board Of Elections Exist?
The Boards of Election exist for one
reason: to guarantee that the results published on election night are
in fact what the people voted that day, i.e., the will of the people;
to insure in a way that can be verified that what the people voted in
the thousands of neighborhood polling places is what shows up as the
final results. It doesn't matter how many pieces of literature are
distributed, or how many TV campaign commercials run, or how much
shouting goes on, or how many debates are televised -- if the votes
are not counted accurately.
If the computer programs which "count"
our votes are poised to switch key votes in the blink of an eye, the
rest just doesn't matter. As computer whiz Howard J. Strauss said at
the end of that lonely 1988 CBS Evening News report: "Should we make
it voluntary that we have safe elections or should we demand safe
elections?"
The new computerized vote-counting
systems are constructed so that nothing can verified or proven. No one
except the faceless expert who writes the vote-tabulating program has
any idea of what is in it. And not even that programmer can be
positive that some other clever computer expert has not devised a way
to tamper with his program on election night.
It is not my job, or your job, to
prove that votefraud has occurred in any given election. It is the job
of the Board of Elections to prove to US, the public, that sufficient
safeguards are in place to prevent votefraud, as far as is humanly
possible.
The only way to insure this all
important "verifiability" is for neighborhood people to count paper
ballots in full public view BEFORE the votes leave the neighborhood
precinct, and then post the results immediately at that polling place
for all to see. Impossible? India (the world's largest democracy),
Great Britain, and Canada -- have used the paper ballot method all
along -- and still use it today.
I charge that we have thousands of
people holding public offices that were never elected to those offices
by the people, but were put in by computerized votefraud. I charge
that millions of taxpayers are paying taxes that were never passed by
the people, but were made to look like they passed by computerized
votefraud. You, dear reader, cannot prove my charges wrong -- and
neither can anyone else in the United States of America. That is an
absolutely intolerable state of affairs.
The Board of Election officials at the
local, state, and national levels, together with the "mainstream" news
media, are maintaining, both explicitly and implicitly, that the
election night results are verifiable and above reproach. That is.
THIS PRETENSE IS AN OBJECTIVE FRAUD.
It is a fraud which involves an
essential cornerstone of freedom in our country: our right to vote,
which, the Supreme Court has ruled, includes the right that our vote
be counted accurately. Without these rights regarding the vote, the
"consent of the governed" becomes a meaningless phrase.
Whether that fraud is limited to the
objective deception that computerized vote counts are safe and
verifiable -- or whether it extends to include the silent rigging of
thousands of U.S. elections by silent, computerized votefraud over the
last 30 years, 1973 to 2003, (as I believe to be the case) -- either
way -- this pamphlet is aptly titled, "The Greatest Cover-Up of All:
VoteFraud in America."
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