This is an article written by Thmas Husted. If you had any trouble at the polls, drop him a line. Vist blackboxvoting.cim for more disturbing info... Or just sit back, watch tv, and pretend everything will be ok. It's up to you.

Thomas Husted

Evidence of vote fraud

is coming in faster than anyone can keep track of. There are specific

cases

such as counties with more votes than voters, one county that produced

a

negative total number of votes, obvious and heavy-handed voter

suppression,

and ballots simply discarded without being counted.

The most obvious sign that something went badly wrong were the exit

polls on

election day itself. While accurate predictors of the majority of

congressional and gubernatorial races, the exit polling on election day

showed John Kerry as the clear winner, and the word "landslide" was

starting

to be used by news readers who grimaced and shifted in their seats as

they

read the numbers. But then a strange thing happened! Vote actuals

coming in

started to swing back to Bush, even in states where the exit polls

indicated

Kerry should win. As the night progressed, an obvious and disturbing

trend

appeared. In states where paper ballots were used and audit trails

existed

for the vote, the actual vote results matched the exit polls closely.

In

states where the new electronic voting machines were being used, there

was a

consistent bias towards President Bush.

There are some facts about the American system of elections many people

do

not realize. For one thing, there is no governmental or citizen body

that

computes the vote totals. For decades, the counting of the votes in

Presidential elections has been handled by a private company owned by

the TV

networks. While it may change its name from time to time to stay out of

the

public eye, it is in fact the same company, owned by the major TV

networks.

That's right; in the United States, the Presidential elections are

counted

and decided by the TV network news departments. And nobody checks up on

them. Nobody is allowed to. This brings us to an interesting case that

happened in Florida where Fox News fired two reporters for refusing to

re-write a story to protect the interests of advertisers. The reporters

sued

and lost when the courts ruled that TV network news departments are NOT

under any legal requirement to tell the truth about anything, and have

a

legal right to fire any reporter that refuses to lie when told to! Now,

stop

and think about that a moment. The counting of the votes in the recent

Presidential election is solely in the hands of a private company under

no

legal requirement to tell you the truth about the results.

Now then, with regard to the electronic voting machines. The majority

of

voting systems are manufactured by just two companies, ES&S and

Diebold. The

CEO of Diebold, Wally O'Dell, stated publicly his intention to deliver

Ohio's electoral votes to Bush! The owners of both ES&S and Diebold are

brothers, and the software used in both machines, which account for 80%

of

the votes cast in the last election, share common roots.

It has been known for months that the part of the Diebold voting system

that

collects and totals the votes in the precincts is not only not secure,

but

in fact extremely easy to tamper with. Indeed, while the voting

machines

themselves are custom-built, the vote accumulator runs on an ordinary

laptop

computer, many of which are sold with built-in wireless LAN capability.

This

would allow a vote-stealer equipped with another computer with a

similar

wireless LAN to alter votes without even having to be in the same room

with

the accumulator system. Despite warnings and complaints from computer

security experts and honest elections advocates, electronic voting

machines

were put into use in the battleground states, and worse, were designed

to

NOT allow any checks on the vote counts. These easily rigged machines

leave

no paper trail of the votes that can be used for a recount. They were

DESIGNED that way! States that agreed to add paper trails under

pressure

from activists exempted last Tuesday's election from the requirement.

The

paper trails will be added for the NEXT election (in theory).

So, here we are, with voting machines that are easy to tamper with,

that

leave no paper trail, sending their "results" directly to the TV

network

news, who are under no legal obligation to tell us the truth about

anything.

It should be remembered that the TV news shows that assure us President

BUsh

won last Tuesday's election are the very same ones who assured us that

Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at us.

Now, the Bush/Neocon supporters are already screaming, "You can't prove

it".

But we are not talking about a criminal case here. We are talking about

a

group of people claiming to be the legal government of this land. with

the

authority to take your money from you and spend it as they see fit, to

take

your children from you to send off to wars,indeed to send YOU off to

war to

be killed or crippled. The burden of proof is on those people claiming

to be

the legal government to prove that they in fact won the election. And

they

cannot do that. The very absence of a paper trail designed into the

voting

machines to prevent a recount prevents verification of the election.

The Declaration of Independence says that governments derive their just

powers from the consent of the governed. Bush and his cohorts, backed

up by

the TV news media, claim they have the consent of 51% of the people to

be

the government. I doubt that. While the same TV news media is now

trying to

explain why the exit polls, usually the surest indicator of vote fraud

in

past elections, just "had to be wrong" this time, the fact that the

worst

skewing of votes towards Bush took place inside the electronic voting

machines that purposely leave no audit trail delegitimizes the entire

election. And, if the election lacks legitimacy, then so too do those

people

who claim authority over us based on that election.

If the elections in this nation are not honest and fair, then We The

People

have lost all control over the government. The government can do what

it

wants to with our lives and our wealth, using the illusion of elections

to

trick us into thinking we are obligated to obey their commands and pay

their

bills. But in truth, we are not. If the government that claims

authority

over us cannot prove they are legally entitled to that authority, why

should

we listen to them? If the government cannot prove that the election by

which

they claim authority is honest and fair, why should we surrender our

money

or our children's lives to them?

If the elections are not honest and fair, then we are living under the

exact

same conditions that our ancestors did in 1776. We are under the rule

of a

man who is ruler only because he says he is. And we have taxation

without

representation, because the Congress is not elected by the people, but

chosen from among the "club" by rigged voting machines and the TV

networks.

Our ancestors decided they would not live under a tyrant who took their

money without regard for their interests.

What will modern Americans do now?