By Christopher Bollyn
The elections
in the occupied nations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine,
have been used to bestow an aura of legitimacy upon their quisling-like
leaders chosen by the occupying powers. The mainstream media
praises the triumph of "democracy" as sham elections, literally
held "under the gun," have been imposed on captive nations by
their foreign invaders.
In Afghanistan, we are told, the people freely elected Hamid
Karzai, the former paid consultant for the U.S. energy company
Unocal and quisling ruler installed by the occupying power.
The besieged Palestinians, we are told, elected Mahmoud Abbas,
a man who has very little support among the people, but is popular
with U.S., British, and Israeli leaders, to be their president.
Meanwhile, the truly popular political leader of the Palestinian
people, Marwan Barghouti, languishes in an Israeli prison.
On January 30, 2005, polls closed in the Iraqi election and
while the counting of the votes will take some time, we are
told, it is expected that occupied Iraq's previously appointed
prime minister Iyad Allawi will finish on top of the pile. Allawi
has worked closely with British intelligence since the 1980s
and with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since at least
1991, when he co-founded the Iraqi National Accord (INA) party.
"Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,'' U.S. President George W. Bush
must be thinking as early results point to an Allawi victory.
A "trifecta," a racing term often used by Bush, means when a
bettor wins by selecting the first three finishers of a race
in the correct order of finish. Is Bush really just "lucky"
or is there a more logical explanation for the surprising success
of his chosen candidates in successive elections in three occupied
nations? And what can the elections in these occupied countries
tell us about the condition of our democratic franchise? George
W. Bush became president in 2001 without winning the popular
vote and was then returned to the White House in 2004 in an
election in which 99 percent of the votes cast were counted
and tallied beyond the ken and out of sight of any voter. While
this raises the obvious question about the integrity of U.S.
elections, it is a question never asked by the controlled media
in the United States.
Whether reporting on elections in Iraq or the U.S.A., the mainstream
media invariably focuses on pre-election campaigns and procedures
and human interest stories about voters. The mass media completely
ignores the hard questions about what happens when the polls
close and the counting begins behind closed doors. This is,
after all, the critical point where the integrity of elections
is either sustained or broken beyond repair. As the British
playwright Tom Stoppard wrote, "It's not the voting that's democracy,
it's the counting."
No Local Count
I observed the last hour of voting in the Iraqi election, after
three days of polling among exile Iraqis and their children,
at the Assyrian National Council of Illinois Community Centre
in Skokie, near Chicago. Among the crowd of dark-haired
Assyrians were a few fair-haired Americans, employees of the
International Organization for Migration (IOM), a "branch"
of the United Nations, who were running the election.
While I discussed the voting with members of the local Assyrian
community, Kathleen Houlihan, media officer for the IOM suddenly
appeared before me ready to answer my questions. "When does
the vote count begin and will the voters be able to watch?"
was my first question.
Although the polling ended at 5 p.m., I was told there would
be no counting of the votes before the next day. All 6,000 ballots
would be taken to "a secure location," where they would be counted
by authorized personnel, I was told. When asked why the paper
ballots would not be openly counted when the polls closed, the
IOM personnel seemed to be at a loss for an answer. "They're
paper," the IOM employee said. "They're all folded and everything,"
as if that presented a problem. The question of ballot tampering
or vote fraud did not seem to concern the IOM personnel.
I watched the citizens of Avignon, France, count the votes of
nearly 800 presidential ballots two times in front of the some
60 voters in less than one hour. The French are able to openly
hand-count the paper ballots in every polling station across
the nation and announce the winner, with good accuracy, by the
time polls close in Paris two hours later, at 8 p.m. The Iraqi
results, we are told, may take a week or more to count, according
to UN officials involved with the election.
United Nations' Under-Secretary-General Sir Kieran Prendergast
and Carina Perelli, head of the UN Electoral Assistance Division
held an hour-long press conference on January 26, to brief correspondents
on "the complex technical aspects of the electoral process."
Prendergast indulged in a bizarre discussion of his favourite
New York restaurant and wine-drinking schedule while he presided
over a press conference concerning the most important election
in a nation that has been besieged and sanctioned to the point
of starvation for 12 of the past 15 years by his government
and the international organization that he serves. Perelli and
Prendergast have endeavoured to provide a veneer of legitimacy
to a sham election process in Iraq that has been entirely organized
and arranged by the occupying military power.
Perelli said that Iraqi ballots and votes would be counted locally
at each polling station but said nothing about the posting of
the results. Asked about the counting of the votes, UN spokesman
Farhan Haq said, "The results will not be posted locally." Haq
was unable to explain the reason for this odd decision.
The reason, however, is quite obvious. If the hand-counted results
of each polling place were to be posted, reported, and published
there would be no need to wait weeks for the results. The readers
of the next day's papers would be able to clearly see for themselves
who won the election, and figure out how and where it was won.
These two things, the open and public counting of the votes
and the posting and reporting of every polling station's results,
are the sine qua non essentials required to ensure the integrity
of any election claiming to be democratic. Both, however, are
lacking in Iraqi and U.S. elections.
Rick Fulle, a technology expert with the Illinois State Board
of Elections told me the importance of the local precinct, or
polling station, count. "The only official tally on election
night is the precinct tally," he said. In the United States,
hand-counted paper-ballots are only used in less than 1 percent
of the voting jurisdictions. Electronic voting machines, linked
together in a system, have effectively usurped the role of the
citizen election judge and removed the vote-counting process
to a back room, out of sight of any voter or election official.
On Dec. 6, 2005, in the outskirts of Washington, D.C., a computer
programmer named Clint Curtis signed an affidavit alleging that
Representative Tom Feeney (R. Fla.), a friend and former running
mate of Gov. Jeb Bush, had asked him to write an undetectable
computer code that would "control the vote in South Florida."
At the time, in the early fall of 2000, Feeney was a member
of the Florida legislature and Curtis was lead programmer for
Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), an Oviedo, Florida company.
According to Curtis, the vote rigging computer program, which
Feeney asked for "in his own words," needed to be touch-screen
capable; should be able to be activated without any additional
equipment; and should remain hidden "even if the source code
was inspected."
Flipping the Vote
Curtis produced a program that would flip the votes to produce
a "51-49" tally for any candidate in any race. This manipulation
of the tally could be done from any voting machine in the network
simply by touching "invisible buttons" on the screen. The program,
Curtis said, could also be used on other voting systems, such
as optical scan and punch card systems, by accessing or "hacking"
into the central tabulating computer that tallies the votes.
As Curtis explained to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) during a
Democratic House Judiciary hearing in Columbus, Ohio on Dec.
13, 2005:
Nadler: You could work back from the tabulator to the individual
machines, so that the tabulator could tell the machines to switch
their results? Curtis: Yes. It talks both ways. You could flip
it to whatever you need. Nadler: And they actually do talk to
each other - the machines and the tabulator? Curtis: As long
as it's hooked up. As long as they are networked together, they
can talk to each other.
Nadler: So, in other words, there is absolutely no assurance
whatsoever on anything with regards to these machines. Curtis:
Absolutely none, unless you look at the source code and make
sure it's safe before it goes in.
The mainstream media in the U.S. has avoided covering the allegations
contained in the Curtis affidavit and testimony.
Most of the electronic voting machines used in the U.S. are
actually programmed and operated by employees of the company
who sold the machines to the county or state. The precinct tally,
openly counted and authenticated by the signatures of the election
judges, no longer exists in U.S. elections. The vote counting
and authentication process has become centralized, non-transparent,
and artificial.
In Chicago, for example, the entire process of "counting" and
tabulating the votes is done by programmers working for a private
company in a back room at the county clerk's office. During
the 2004 general election I observed the vote count, as it is
called, projected from three computer terminals onto the wall
at the clerk's office.
As I watched the numbers flicker on the wall, the Associated
Press had direct access to the mainframe computer via the
laptop computer of an employee who sat in the corner of the
room. This unexplained AP connection to the mainframe computer
in Chicago was of a different nature than the connection available
to the rest of the media on the computers in the press room.
Asked where the actual count was being done, I was told in "the
ES&S room," where the company's programmers supposedly ran the
computer that tallied the votes. ES&S, or Election Systems
& Software, is a private and secretive company based in
Omaha, Nebraska. During the last U.S. election, 60 million Americans
voted on their voting machines. According to the company's own
figures, 42 percent of all registered voters in the United States
voted on ES&S equipment on Election Day.
ES&S and the Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems are
supposedly competing firms headed by two brothers, Bob and Todd
Urosevich. Both companies are closely tied to the Republican
Party.
It is probable that employees of U.S. or British-owned voting
machine companies are involved in managing the data and conducting
the national tally of the Iraqi election results. The UN has
not responded to written questions about the involvement of
private companies in the election.
But it is to be expected that an Iraqi national assembly favourable
to the U.S. and British occupying powers is seated after the
elections. L. Paul Bremer, the former U.S. proconsul and administrator
of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, signed
the laws that govern Iraqi elections. He also appointed 8 of
the 9 people who serve on the "Independent Electoral Commission
of Iraq." The ninth is appointed by the UN.
Bremer gave Iraq the "Law of Administration" for the "Transitional
Period," which will only end when "the permanent constitution
is issued and the new Iraqi government is formed in accordance
with it." Post war Germany is ruled by a similar law, the Grundgesetz,
imposed by the Allies and still in effect today, nearly 60 years
later. The Grundgesetz was only meant to be a temporary legal
framework, but has yet to be replaced by a permanent constitution.
The "Law of Administration" forms the basis for all Iraqi laws
during the transition period. During his last month in Baghdad,
Bremer issued CPA Order 92, which established the Independent
Electoral Commission of Iraq, Order 96 on the Electoral Law,
and Order 97 on Political Parties and Entities Law. The three
orders form Iraqi electoral law. Each order signed by Bremer,
begins by "reaffirming the right of the Iraqi people to freely
determine their own political future" and concludes: "I hereby
promulgate the following."
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