TEHRAN - For those misguided individuals who think there exists a democratic process in the United States to elect the president, think again.  Aside from the reality that the popular vote for the U.S. leader is at best an election to determine the votes of the ethereal elite who will actually vote for the president in December, there is the issue of just who counts the votes, how they are counted and who owns the voting machines.

Back in 2004, Florida held a primary election for a vacant seat in the state house of representatives.Strangely enough, out of 10,000 Broward county residents who showed up at the polls, 134 signed in but did not vote, at least according to Election Systems and Software’s electronic voting machines.  And while 134 represents less than 1.5 percent of the vote count, the runner-up in the election lost by only 12 votes.  A spokesman for the manufacturer insisted that they “absolutely do not believe” their voting machines failed to register votes.

This minor state race fully demonstrated the vulnerabilities of DREs, direct recording electronic voting systems: no paper trail, and hence, no possibility to conduct a recount. The electronic voting machines, peddled to gullible election officials by corporate elites on the pretext of preventing a repeat of the 2000 election debacle, have instead set the stage for untraceable election fraud.  And with “supervisor” access, these machines are even easy to hack by amateurs wanting to modify the vote count.

How insecure are these DREs?  Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten of Princeton University write:

“Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.”

Nevertheless, 29 states still use DREs and five States—Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina—use the easily-compromised machines without a paper trail.

According to the U.S. election assistance commission, only four companies produce “certified” voting systems, and 80 percent of all votes cast electronically are tallied on machines made by two manufacturers: Election Systems and Software, Inc. (ES&S) and Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.  

Diebold first changed its name to Premier Election Solutions, Inc. in 2007 and then sold its interests to ES&S in September of 2009.  Following monopoly charges, ES&S was forced to sell Premier to Dominion Voting Systems in 2010, allegedly to increase competition in the voting machine market.  However in the same year, Dominion acquired Sequoia Voting Systems and ES&S still controls some 60 percent of the U.S. voting machine market.

Furthermore, the heads of the limited number of companies producing voting systems all seem to have cozy ties to the deep state. For example, Diebold board chairman Walden O’Dell declared he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes” to George W. Bush in the 2004 election.  For his help, O’Dell secured lucrative contracts for his company under HAVA, the “Helping America Vote Act” passed by Bush II’s regime.

YAW/YAW