*Kurt Nimmo-- Rove: Voters don't matter, results do

Kurt Nimmo here decodes -- not that much needs to be decoded -- Rove's shameless announcement on NPR that votes don't matter, only the people that count the votes matter. Rove indicated that just because GOP fear campaign tactics are more threadbare than usual, that's hardly a reason that this election be any different from the last 3 or 4 they've stolen.

I've omitted Nimmo's rants on the lack of difference between the parties which is a lesser truth beneath the reality that we're currently ruled by a small clique of exceptional irrational radicals who are bent on permanent war and destroying their domestic and international opposition. I've also omitted Nimmo's plan to make a statement by not voting.

My present view as I vote in NYC on my old trusty lever machines (perhaps for the last time since they are destined to be replaced by hackable digital machines) with virtually no local voter suppression that I'm aware of is to join those exhorting the most massive possible turnout. The hope is that people will start to wake up to what's going on and find Ghandian ways to make a statement. (Nimmo ridicules candlelight vigils, but the point is to force the media to report our outrage since cowards or villains like Kerry refuse to lead us.)

For this cycle we're reduced to hoping that some of the CIA apparatchiks at the NYT and people like Rupert Murdoch and Hillary Clinton will begin to pay attention in the wake of more and more obvious stolen elections.

-- Ronald
http://desip.igc.org
***


Kurt Nimmo
Voting: What is it Good for? Absolutely Nothing
Monday October 30th 2006, 3:28 am
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=634

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.”

[snip]

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.”

[snip]