Political Passion Counts – But Your Vote for Bush Might Not!
Joan Swirsky
Friday, July 2, 2004
Remember the presidential election of November 2000? Just kidding. Democrats are still trying to avenge Gore’s loss by insisting it was rigged in spite of three recounts showing that George W. Bush won the Electoral College vote – the only vote that has counted for over 100 years – and despite a six-month study in 2001 by largely leftwing publications (including the New York Times) that concluded Bush won by any and all counts.

So goes the loss of power and the lust for socialism.

But the outcome of the presidential election in November 2004 may be even more controversial because of three crucial factors that Republicans, conservatives and moderates must pay attention to NOW!

The Electronic Voting Factor

While it is widely believed that all things in the high-tech, impersonal world of technology are beyond the manipulation of crooked zone leaders, under-the-table payoffs, stuffed ballot boxes, staged protest rallies and even sabotage, nothing could be further from the truth.

The template for what may happen in November was dramatized this year when American Idol – the popular Fox TV show that invited the American public to vote or text message their preferences to decide who won the hot competition – was accused by both journalists and the public of manipulating the outcome.

As it happened, the most talented singer, Fantasia Barrino, won. But several immensely talented wannabes were voted off while lesser hopefuls remained to the end to inflict on the public their uniquely atonal Karaoke renditions of songs that deserved better.

How did this happen? Why did people all over the country – many who spent hours on the phone dialing hundreds of times – complain to Fox, the Federal Communications Commission and their legislators that they were “robbed” of their vote?

It turned out that – gasp – “the system” was flawed and that people who had mastered power dialing and text messaging had the advantage. While voters who called phone services like Verizon and others had lots of trouble getting through, those who called one of the program’s sponsors, AT&T, cast their votes with suspicious ease and the over-two-million voters who pay for that service largely determined the outcome.

What does this have to do with the upcoming presidential election? A lot! No American can now trust that anyone in charge of electronic technology, including manufacturers of electronic voting machines who may have their own political agenda) will not skew the election – through fraud – toward the candidate they favor. Nor, for that matter, can anyone trust the machines themselves!

Equally alarming is that no voter can be sure that the programming for election equipment is not outsourced to foreign countries like Russia, China, France or Germany that have America’s worst interests at heart! Nor can voters preclude the possibility of hacker attack or sabotage, knowing as they do that defective hardware and software and malicious programs could easily subvert the election.

Seeking Solutions

In 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) earmarking $3.9 billion to buy new computerized voting machines and provide incentives for states to improve their methods of voting. But since then elections in CA, FL, MD, GA, the list goes on, have taken place using electronic equipment that failed.

It’s noteworthy that manufacturers of electronic voting machines estimate that the small percentage of Americans who actually vote – about 50 million out of nearly 300 million, or approximately 20 percent – will use the e-vote in November.

HAVA requires that ALL voting machines provide a permanent paper record to insure verification and transparency, and that voters must be given the “opportunity to change the ballot or correct any error before the permanent paper is produced." Sounds good, right?

Well, not exactly. While most states have made efforts to comply with HAVA, most reforms won’t kick in until 2005 or later!

Groups like the San Francisco-based Verified Voting Foundation and www.VerifiedVoting.org say that electronic voting equipment is vulnerable to programming errors, equipment malfunctions and malevolent tampering, with no way to detect malfeasance or deliberate rigging either before or after a vote.

They insist that the only solution is for the equipment to provide a voter-verifiable paper ballot trail. However, many of the machines being purchased don’t meet this standard and thus provide no way is to determine the correct outcome of the upcoming election.

A Preview of November

In January, an electronic vote for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives showed that 134 votes were unrecorded and the winner won by only 12 votes. Although state officials acknowledged that touch-screen voting machines in 11 counties had a software flaw, the lack of a paper trail made checking the vote impossible – just as it threatens to be in November.

And in April when longtime, liberal Republican Senator Arlen Spector was challenged by conservative Pat Toomey, Spector won by 18,000 votes out of a million cast. The election could have been rigged – and some suspect it was – if only two or three ballots from each precinct in the state’s 67 counties had been tampered with.

The “battleground” states of Florida and Pennsylvania are only two great states in this country. But what will happen if the electronic voting outcome in November is called into question in other battleground states like California, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Indiana, Washington, Virginia and the District of Columbia?

Too Little, Too Late

It may seem encouraging that a few congressional Republicans and Democrats have asked the General Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate and report on the security of electronic voting systems and to suggest steps that federal and state governments have taken or should take to insure they are reliable.

But the GAO’s report is due AFTER the 2004 election!

In December, Senator Robert Graham (D-FL) introduced a bill, "The Voter Confidence Act” (S. 1980) that was followed by in May by an identical bill (H.R. 2239) by Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), requiring a voter-verifiable paper ballot on every voting system.

But these bills have gone NOWHERE!

The Campaign for Verifiable Voting, a non-partisan group in Maryland, has urged all voters to request paper ballots to create a verifiable paper trail of their votes.

But many state judges have denied requests for paper ballots!

While most election organizations insist that the voting problem is non-partisan, numerous polls report that Republicans overwhelmingly support legislation that mandates verification of electronic voting with paper ballots but Democrats overwhelmingly hate the idea, “feeling” that checking those receipts would take too much time and cause too much “confusion.”

Which begs the question: Why would any American not want proof of his or her vote unless the absence of proof would be to his or her advantage?

The Soros Factor

Not 12 hours after President Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election, Jesse Jackson and a number of other leftwing rabble-rousers appeared before the media in Florida, surrounded by throngs of people holding protest placards and mouthing what amounted to the Democratic National Committee’s talking points: “I was robbed of my vote!” “I couldn’t understand the ballot!” “I feel disenfranchised!”

The staged – and obviously preplanned – protests were followed by weeks of desperate Democrats squinting their eyes to determine if a chad was “hanging” or “pregnant” – a spectacle never witnessed before in American history.

But to George Soros – Hungarian-born multibillionaire, American citizen and hedge-fund genius – it was business as usual.

In a riveting exposé of the 74-year-old that was published by NewsMax’s magazine in May, writer Richard Poe – who delved the very depths of Soros’ ruthlessness, greed and Machiavellian nature – revealed him as a man who hates God, hates “American supremacy” and America itself (where he has made zillions) and, above all, HATES President Bush, calling his ouster “the central focus of my life.”

But he is not simply a naysayer. To the tune of $5 billion, Poe reported, Soros’ “philanthropy” in America has supported the noble issues of “abortion, atheism, euthanasia, gun control, mass immigration and other radical experiments in social engineering.”

Soros’ by-now seasoned strategy in overthrowing those he hates from power in what he refers to as “velvet revolutions” – coup-d’états that shed no blood but succeed in both garnering himself phenomenal wealth and the “regime change” he desires.

In 1992, he decimated the English economy. In 1997, he crashed the Asian economy. In 1998, he brought about regime change in Slovakia, doing the same in 1999 in Croatia and the same in Yugoslavia in 2000. He has now set his sights on the Ukraine.

But more important, they are set on the United State where he wants to inflict his hateful and perverse vision of society on America by installing another puppet – in this case John Kerry – as his emissary.

His foray into Yugoslavia is instructive. “Soros’ protesters filled the streets of Belgrade to halt an election that was still in progress,” Poe reported. “The vote was close enough that Yugoslav law required a runoff election.”

Equally revealing was Soros’ regime change strategy of 2002 in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. To stop President Eduard Shevardnadze’s reelection, Soros used the TV station he owned in Russia to question the final tally, sending thousands of protestors he had paid to demonstrate in the streets, assailing the Parliament and accusing it of vote fraud, and finally succeeding in having Shevardnadze resign to avoid a civil war.

Eerily similar to Florida in 2000, isn’t it? And not unimaginable that another Florida-like fiasco could be repeated this November, especially because rich and rabid leftist Democrats from Great Neck, NY, to Beverly Hills, CA, and everywhere in between are already organizing groups of lawyers to fly to battleground states – before the returns are in – to protest the outcome of the vote.

This includes Kerry, who is encouraging 2,000 lawyers he has assembled to "challenge anyplace in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes."

What will happen if the upcoming election is thrown into Soros-created chaos, the final tally undetermined beyond January of 2005? With no president in office, who will have control over our nuclear codes? Will a preplanned military dictatorship move into place? Will civil unrest force us to get out of Iraq and lose the war on terrorism?

And will Soros’ dream of a socialist regime be installed as it was in Spain? We still don’t know if the recent overthrow of Spain’s popular president – who days before the election lead by high margins in the polls – was the result not of a terrorist train wreck but rather Soros’s manipulation or, for that matter, the manipulation of electronic voting equipment by computer-savvy terrorists like the ones trained in American flight schools on Boeing 757s and 767s?

Our highest officials now warn us that al Qaeda WILL – not might but will attack us in another devastating onslaught. While they theorize about the capacity of our enemies to explode natural gas lines, poison our food or explode a “dirty bomb” in a densely-populated area, none of them have mentioned the most devastating possibility of all – sabotaging the American election of 2004 and thus throwing our very way of life into pandemonium.

In the most doomsday scenario – which is, unfortunately, highly plausible – if no winner is declared because our election turns out to be massively flawed – and massively protested – our country could be paralyzed and thus more vulnerable to terrorism han ever before.

While Soros’s name is not commonly associated with the Florida debacle of 2000, it is clear that he may not have been far from the eye of the storm. Gore’s success was crucial to the megalomaniac, who, Poe documented, wielded tremendous power in the Clinton administration and influence with its highest-ranking officials in the State and Treasury departments.

Working closely with Gore during the Clinton years, Soros was a central figure in determining American policy toward the defunct Soviet Union, a role that ultimately led him to the center of the huge “Russiagate” scandal that involved billions of dollars in illegal transfers out of Russia through the Bank of New York.

According to Poe, Iowa Republican James A. Leach, who headed the House Banking Committee at the time, said that the scandal might be “one of the greatest social robberies in human history.” But like most Clinton scandals, it was surgically excised.

Soros’ power in the U.S. literally evaporated when Bush took office; hence his burning rage and insatiable hunger for American regime change, and his determination to use his riches to buy the election of his fellow socialist, John Kerry.

To that end, Soros has spent multimillions for Democratic ad campaigns, with promises to spend multimillions more to support the work of the 527 groups that have found a way to circumvent so-called campaign-finance reform.

And that is not to omit the vast sum – reportedly $10 million – he has given to the radical, far-left Internet group MoveOn.org, or the $5 million he’s spent on America Coming Together, for which he hired dozens of felons to go door-to-door to register voters in Florida, Missouri and Ohio.

It is significant, as Poe reported, that Soros has “not one patriot…or one practicing Christian” on his formidable payroll.

So in addition to the gaping glitches in electronic voting, there is the God-hating and America-hating George Soros who is out to defeat President Bush.

The Hate Factor

Since 2000, the Democrats have been on a sustained rampage that, to borrow from Pascal, “reason knows nothing of.”

First, they tried to make the president’s tax cuts the centerpiece of their resistance, claiming that Kerry’s socialist philosophy would redeem the recession – until, that is, Bush’s tax cuts kicked in and the economy found its way to a robust recovery.

Then they protested the war in Iraq, squawking endlessly about the bogus issues of WMDs and Abu Ghraib while studiously failing to mention the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the dismantling of Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and of course the toppling of Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime.

Then they tried the bash-Bush-with-books strategy, trotting out historically revisionist tracts by Clarke, Carville, Corn, Conason (and dozens of others by authors whose last names don’t begin with C). They also took the visual media route with any number of movies and TV shows either subtly or blatantly alluding to the “stolen” election or the “dumb” president, as well as Michael Moore’s recent “fakeumentary” which exhibited, above all, its creator’s Marxist-Leninist bent.

And of course, they counted on – and received – the full measure of one-sided liberal media spin, complete with a spectacular lack of objectivity.

But taxes, propaganda, vindictive books, Hollywood fiction and media distortion are but squashable ants when it comes to the great issue of our day: The war against terrorism and who is best suited to protect our country against its inevitable onslaughts.

As spelled out in my recent article, (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/5/27/101900.shtml), and in one by Paul Sperry (http://members.aol.com/viperash50/kerry911/911.html), on September 11, 2001, more than 80 of Kerry’s constituents met their untimely deaths aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

This horrifying fact is made all the more horrifying when one realizes that Kerry – more than anyone in our nation – could have prevented those deaths and the great tragedy that befell out nation on that fateful day.

Kerry’s lack of action gives Americans a chilling preview of how seriously he will protect our country if the electorate is misguided enough to vote him in or if they ignore his consistent record in voting against every military and intelligence budget for his entire tenure in the Senate.

Is the Democrats’ hatred enough to put the safety of our country in the hands of a man who ignored the most serious warnings about the most catastrophic attack on our country in history? Who to this day embraces the corrupt U.N.? Who still believes that the French are our “friends”? And let’s not forget, who, in 1969, slandered his Vietnam War compatriots and in so doing gave aid and comfort to our Communist North Vietnamese enemies?

What can be done about this toxic mixture of electronic voting unreliability, Soros’ blood money and the animating hatred of the Democrats?

When it comes to Soros, just about the only thing concerned Americans can do is to pass along the information Poe accumulated about Soros (and that is repeated here) to their entire e-mail and snail-mail lists, as well as to simpatico radio and TV hosts, the better to expose this American-hating scourge and his malicious motives to as many people as possible.

When it comes to the poisonous, irrational hatred that leftists harbor toward our president – an unfortunate character flaw they share with Soros – there is simply no antidote.

But when it comes to the most important power that Americans share – the power of the vote – ordinary citizens can and should:

Call your two Senators (1-800-839-5276) to demand that they IMMEDIATELY pass The Voter Confidence Act (S.1980), requiring a voter-verifiable paper ballot on every voting system.

Call your Congressperson (1-202-225-3121) to demand the same of H.R. 2239.

Call or e-mail your senators and representatives and demand that they support – and enact – proposed legislation by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL): the Federal Election Integrity Act of 2004 (HR 4530) that requires voters to provide current and official photo identification – a U.S. birth certificate, naturalization card or U.S. passport – when voting in federal elections, and requires states to verify that potential voters are U.S. citizens, the better to avoid election manipulation by upwards of 15 million illegal voters.

Contact Rep. Hyde to express your support for the Federal Election Integrity Act at 1-202- 225-4561 or fax to 1-202- 225-1166.

Call your state’s senator, assemblyperson and Attorney General to demand that they mobilize efforts to have each voting precinct in your state monitored.

Call your local and state Boards of Elections (or go to their websites) to demand that they put paper ballots at each polling place and have on-site monitoring by trained poll watchers.

Call and e-mail every talk radio host or hostess in the nation, as well as your local newspaper, to alert them to the necessity of including paper ballots when voting electronically. Ask them to publicize the telephone numbers of the Senate and House and encourage their listeners/viewers/readers to light up their switchboards with DEMANDS to pass The Voter Confidence Act and the Federal Election Integrity Act of 2004 BEFORE NOVEMBER 2!

Alert your church or synagogue, your mayor, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and all other relevant organizations to the importance of calling the House and Senate about this urgent issue.

Keep handy the phone numbers of your local newspaper and TV station and alert them if your election board refuses to issue you a paper ballot to verify your vote.

In short, flood the powers-that-be with your demand for a verifiable vote. All of this should take only an hour or two of your time – a worthy expenditure considering the dire consequences of not taking action!