The Real Fraud in Elections

Trey Smith

Fact: There are two things that occur more often than the right-wing myth of “voter fraud”: UFO sightings, and election-rigging. Statistically, you’re 3,615 times more likely to report seeing an alien than you are of seeing voter fraud. And we watched the right wing nakedly steal three elections in recent memory.

The entire reason we invaded Iraq, lost thousands of American troops and massacred hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, was because machines in Volusia County, Florida tallied NEGATIVE 16,022 votes for Al Gore when his name was checked at the ballot box in 2000. Despite the clear controversy, Bush won Florida, where his brother was governor and a presidential election was ultimately decided with a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court.

During the 2004 election, where Ohio was considered one of the most crucial battleground states, an executive for Diebold, a private company that sells voting machines, penned a fundraising letter that promised to deliver votes to Bush in Ohio in 2004. Bush ended up winning that state, and winning re-election. Diebold continues to sell voting machines unabated.

David Prosser, an arch-conservative justice on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, won his 2011 election against Joanne Kloppenburg, ultimately because Waukesha County Clerk Cathy Nicklaus, who used to work for the GOP caucus that Prosser oversaw, "miscounted" 14,315 votes after Kloppenburg emerged with a slim lead. Nicklaus' "error" gave her former boss a 7,500-vote margin of victory, which almost exactly matched the amount of votes needed to avoid a state-funded vote recount. Nicklaus apparently forgot to click "save" on a Microsoft Access template. Convenient, no?
~ from Target Election Fraud, Not "Voter Fraud" by Carl Gibson ~

Gibson's point is that more fraud is committed by those COUNTING the votes than by those casting them. It's a good point -- one that needs to be made -- but I think Gibson has missed the worst fraud of all.

In my view, the biggest fraud is this notion that Democrats and Republicans represent two divergent views and each election is a mammoth struggle between two bitter adversaries. While there is no question that Democrats and Republicans disagree on some social issues, when it comes to economics, the environment and foreign policy (i.e., war making), they don't disagree half as much as they pretend to.

Take away a few differences on one or more social issues and you'll find that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney aren't that far apart on much of anything else. On the vast majority of issues that are important to the American masses, their disagreements are slight, at best.

Of course, if you listen to their ads, spokespeople and the candidates themselves, you'd never guess that they have far more in common than where they disagree. You'd never guess that they don't really represent different ends of a wide political spectrum. You'd never guess that each receives the majority of their funding from the same small elite class.

So, while the people casting votes almost never commit fraud and the people counting the votes do it sometimes, the grandest fraud of all involves the political parties and the candidates themselves! They aren't anywhere close to who they say they are!!