Stealing Elections

Every major election has its irregularities; it's not surprising when you consider that there may be hundreds of millions of people voting in a short period of time in thousands of voting stations spread across a continent, and everyone is awaiting the result and wants it to be delivered, like, NOW, that there are going to be mistakes made on occasion.

But when there are a huge number of inconsistencies, to the degree that there is concern that the final result as reported differs from the true result, then it's time to ask some hard questions, and if there's evidence of wrongdoing it should be investigated.

That's almost what happened here in the Good Ol' USA four years ago. I say almost, because the first part definitely happened - there were irregularities, concerns, accusations and in many cases hard evidence that the final counts in some areas didn't reflect the actual votes cast by the electorates.

The hard questions were asked - there's a Wikipedia Article dedicated to the subject - and even today people make reference to the whole sorry episode. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that something was very wrong with the 2004 election.

But what didn't happen was the part about the investigation. That surprised me, because you would have thought that the American people, of all people, would have wanted an assurance that the voting process they use to select their leaders was as fair and correct as was possible. So here was this shitpile of evidence of something being up; an official, independent investigation would have gone a long way to settling the matter one way or the other - either all of the mistakes were innocent, the inevitable errors that you're going to get in a vote this size in a country this size; or a significant number of those 'mistakes' - enough to sway the result - weren't actually mistakes, and there is a group of people out there who perpetrated the biggest vote fraud in recent years. And if that second case is true, then because there was no investigation they got away with it.

I don't want to see this happen again with this upcoming 2008 election. I don't want to hear about exit polls showing significant differences from official results; I don't want to hear about electronic voting machines that can be hacked in under a minute and made to deliberately flip votes; I don't want to hear about votes being destroyed because they were on the wrong kind of paper or a certain checkbox wasn't checked; I don't want to hear about vote counters employed by one party or the other (how is that legal in the first place?) destroying votes for the opposition; I don't want to hear about voters being deliberately misled about where and when they should vote and thereby missing their chance to vote; I don't want to hear about voters being intimidated or harassed, or forced by a shortage of voting stations in some areas to have to wait in line for hours.

And if any of this does happen I do want to hear about an official, independent investigation by people who will have the power to imprison those guilty of any wrongdoing, up to and including the President-elect, if he/she knew what was going on; and who have the power declare the election null and void, and demand a new one, only done right this time.