by Scott Creighton

In 2000 Volusia County, Fl. played an important role in the neoliberalization of America. While there are many on the so-called “left” who would have you believe that George W. Bush took office because of Ralph Nader, the fact is, the fix was in, the dice were loaded, and the financial and corporate elites who run this country were going to get the 3rd World America they had been planning on for decades. The tool of choice then, just as it is now, is the direct response electronic (DRE) voting machine and it’s sister in crime, the optical scan voting machine. Both are ultimately tabulated via computer and a proprietary software system that is kept secret by law.

“DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 – Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county’s Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore’s count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000–all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters.” – Washington Post Sunday , November 12, 2000 ; Page A22

In the above report ( click for full version), written days after the election, hotshot Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank goes on to attribute the strange 16,022 negative vote tally from Volusia’s precinct 216 to an apparently innocent cause. “…. faulty ‘memory cards’ in the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed,” he wrote. A. Thompson

In 2005, after Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org had already run several successful tests demonstrating how electronic voting machines could be hacked, she got a man by the name of Harri Hursti to assist her and her team in demonstrating that all they needed to hack an election was the memory card used to store the actual votes. The memory card is supposed to be a blank slate but Hursti found a sub-routine on them and determined that they were the most likely way to hack an election at the time. He proved his point. A test was set up and filmed for the final segment of Harris’ Hacking Democracy (a film any politically aware American should watch). The test was simple: take an actual electronic voting machine, set it up for a simple “election”, put in a certain number of votes pre-determined and video recorded as they were cast, and see if the memory card hack that Hursti created works. It did. All Hursti touched was the memory card, he never had access to the machine itself and this is was the outcome…

The Hursti Hack

In 2002 the Bush Administration helped push through the Orwellian named Help America Vote Act which promised to “fix” the problem of the punch-card system of voting (hanging chads.. remember that joke?) by having the federal government mandate all states use the electronic voting machines. It was a payoff to the electronic voting machines companies for helping to steal the 2000 elections and it was a guarantee of future control. Interestingly, if you read the text of the HAVA or if you go to the official government website or even Wikipedia there is one thing you won’t find in any of them… the names of the people who wrote it or submitted it for votes. Obviously no one wanted to go down in history as the congressman who killed democracy in America.

In Dec. of 2008, Mike Connell died in a plane crash along with his family. In July of 2008, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell case sent a letter to Michael Mukasey requested protection for his key witness in an investigation of electronic vote hacking in the 2004 presidential election. Mike Connell was that witness.

We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to “take the fall” for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations. Ohio News

Mike Connell was ”a long-time GOP operative, had provided web services for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s 2004 reelection campaign, and had also had provided IT services to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Republican National Committee and many Republican candidates, in addition to creating Ohio’s official, real-time state election website“. SourceWatch

In 2004 and in 2006, Mike Connell’s company, SmartTec, served as a kind of “hub” for election night vote tabulations. In effect they compiled all the votes and sent them to be officially recorded; it was a “man in the middle” scam. Raw Story picked up on this as well during the missing White House emails scandal. Ohio was one of the last, if not THE LAST state to report in on election night 2004. Discrepancies in the numbers were reported from all over the state of Ohio and voting problems were being reported that night, yet John Kerry, after having promised to ensure the vote was honest after the debacle of 2000, conceded the election in record time – thus preventing any official investigation. Of course Kerry married into one of the elite families in America and it certainly wouldn’t do for him to upset the apple cart so to speak.

The lesson the neoliberals learned in 2000, 2004, and 2006 was that if they are going to be able to use their magical electronic voting machine tool to steal democracy from the people, what they had to do was use it in such a way as to control who won the primaries and thus they could control who won the elections. Case in point, 2008. In early 2008 John McCain was running dead last in the primaries but then all of a sudden, with almost no money and right after a scandal involving one of his chair people, McCain staged a dramatic turn-around and secured the nomination in near record time. The fix was in; the neoliberal party needed a democrat in the White House to validate all the corruption that had occurred during the Bush/Cheney years and so they took the least viable republican candidate and flipped the electronic voting machine tallies so that he became the offering to run against Obama. McCain then ran around with Joe Liebermann whispering in his ear while Liebermann was hated by the republicans, and McCain picked an idiot of a vice-presidential candidate.

All of these things the McCain camp had done people wondered about at the time. They said it was stupid and it was bad choices and bad campaign decisions all around. But it wasn’t. It was by design. And the whole thing was set up during the primaries with the electronic voting machines. Of course, in the general election they didn’t need to hack the presidential race numbers because they had already controlled the outcome by controlling the narrative of the script. The neoliberal choice won, Barack Obama, and he immediately started on a course that had many “progressives” baffled. Well, it makes perfect sense if you understand how he got to where he is.

Fast forward to South Carolina 2010…

South Carolina, thanks to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their Help America Vote Act, is 100% electronic voting machines. Even the absentee ballots are run on the optical scan system.

All 46 South Carolina counties use direct recording electronic voting machines.The voter makes his/her selections by pressing a button beside a party, candidate or issue displayed on the direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machine. After all selections have been made, the voter presses a VOTE button to cast his/her ballot. Vote South Carolina

Serious problems are arising in early investigations into the numbers from the Alvin Greene vs. Vic Rawls race. Remember, Vic Rawls is a democrat, but he is a populist democrat meaning he is opposed to NAFTA, neoliberal economic policies, bailouts, and attacking the social safety net that is all the rage right now in the DLC / Clinton “New Dems” neoliberal congress and White House. However, Jim DeMint is a big-time supporter of the neoliberalization of America and has been serving big business for many years as a loyal neoliberal servant in the Senate.

In order to ensure that the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the Neoliberal Party get the candidate they want and avoid messy debates with Vic Rawls that could breach topics the elites don’t want discussed in public, Vic Rawls was weeded out of the picture by hacking the electronic voting machines during the primary and a paid loser, Alvin Greene, stepped up to the plate to “win” the nomination and then go on to make a complete fool of himself prior to the general election, ensuring Jim DeMint keeps his seat in the senate.

One potential red flag: A significant difference between the results of absentee and election day ballots….“The election day ballots all favor Mr. Greene. We don’t know what it means,” Ludwig said in an interview. “We did significantly better on absentees than Election Day, which is according to the mathematicians, quite significant. The other reason is, it didn’t happen in any other races on the ballot.”

In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count.

“In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,” Ludwig said.

Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach. Politico

The hack was set and the game was rigged. A real populist candidate was nudged out of the political arena in favor of a pro-corporate neoliberal sell-out like Jim DeMint.

The problem is going to be that the Chamber of Commerce is going to eventually step-up and get some local area businessman to come forward and claim he paid Alvin Greene’s filing fee and the investigation will ultimately boil down to people looking in the wrong direction.

They will continue to promote the false “left/right” narrative while people like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow hypothesis that the republicans set this all in motion to keep DeMint in power.

It’s a lie.

The Neoliberal Party as represented now by the Rahm Emanuels and the Hillary Clintons in the White House as well as the majority power structure in congress like Pelosi and Reed, have conspired to keep pro-business corrupt cronies littered in our political structure. Just look at what the White House did to help one of their own Blanche Lincoln.

This is how they work. You will also notice that the left blogosphere will avoid this issue as much as possible. Many of the leaders of the so-called “liberal blogs” are nothing more than servants to the neoliberal power structure in that they furiously advocate certain “safe” topics while actively discouraging more taboo ones. Daily Kos is a fine example of this and Think Progress is actually a focus group website designed and run by a former and current advisor to the neoliberal Clintons from their corporate friendly think-tank The Center for American Progress (Podesta).

This topic won’t be handled much in the liberal blogs except maybe to implicate the evil republicans as some kind of “get out the vote” motivational propaganda. But the fact is, the vote doesn’t matter as long as we allow the elites in this country and their servants in politics and the PR firms to control the narrative and use the electronic voting machines against us.

Alvin Greene is just the latest example and his behavior since coming into the spotlight just makes it more obvious. We had better start talking about this issue and we had better get angry about it.

All we have in this country to hold our representatives accountable is the vote yet more and more those same representatives, though paying lipservice to our collective wishes, are voting on key issues in ways completely contradictory to the wishes of the vast majority of American. Look at the FISA Bill and the TARP Bill and the GM Bailout Bill and the Stimulus Package and the Insurance Bailout / mandatory Coverage Bill…. all of these things, even after very expensive PR campaigns (which you paid for by the way) were opposed by the majority of the population… yet they passed anyway. Why is that?

The answer is simple; your vote doesn’t count anymore. The only thing that counts is service to the corporate industries and the banks that rule over us all. They don’t need to serve you, they just have to LOOK like they care about your wishes… they have to campaign and go through the motions, but in the end it’s their service to the Neoliberal Party that matters.

This is becoming a farce ladies and gentlemen with us in the role of the Stupid slave – servus stultus.