As this system is the only form and principle of government by which liberty can be preserved, and the only one that can embrace all the varieties of a great extent of country, it necessarily follows, that to have the representation real, the election must be real; and that where the election is a fiction, the representation is a fiction also. Like will always produce like.

- Thomas Paine to the Citizens of the United States,
January 29, 1803

Everyone knows that when we have a bad government we must put up with it; the question is how to find a good one.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract


19th Century American ballot-boxes were simple and clear
-- when our elections were transparent and real.

THE ELECTION MUST BE REAL

"Where the election is a fiction, the representation is a fiction also," Thomas Paine wrote to his fellow Americans of the early 19th Century.  Paine's words of warning are just as relevant for Americans in the 21st Century:  "to have the representation real, the election must be real."

Do Americans in the 21st Century have a meaningful democratic franchise?  Do Americans have real representation in their government?  Can it even be said in 2008 that elections in the United States are truly transparent and authentic?

Given the fact that the great majority of ballots cast in this election will have been processed by electronic voting systems controlled by secretive and private companies, Americans need to honestly address these questions about whether their elections are authentic and real -- or "a fiction," as Paine would say.

In the flurry of coverage by the controlled media about the presidential campaigns and election people are likely to lose sight of what really constitutes an authentic and transparent democratic election.

When, for example, elections in any other country are covered by television news there is invariably footage of the two fundamental aspects of a democratic election:  there are scenes of people registering and casting their ballots followed by scenes of the ballot box being unsealed and the contents dumped onto a table in front of citizen election judges ready to count the votes. 

The sine qua non of any democratic election is the open counting of the vote. 
Here Irish election officials prepare to count ballots from the Lisbon Treaty referendum
in Dublin on June 13, 2008.

In the United States, however, the media focuses only on the voting part of elections.  The most important vote-counting process is left quite vague and out-of-focus.  This is because the Zionist-controlled media is complicit in the stealing of elections in America.

In the coverage of U.S. elections in 2008, we have already seen scenes of people lining up to vote weeks before Election Day, but we are unlikely to see television footage of citizens in the local polling stations or precincts counting their votes as polls close on Election Day.  This is because, with the exception of a few rural counties in states like Idaho, Montana, Vermont, and New Hampshire, American citizens do not participate in the counting of their votes and have absolutely no oversight of the vote counting process.  Whether they voted with an electronic voting machine or marked a paper ballot, nearly every ballot cast in this election will have been processed, or "counted," by a computerized system run by a privately owned company.

I recommend the map of voting machine use in the U.S.A. at:  http://dvice.com/voting/index.php

As the people who created this color-coded map note:  "Most of the country (56%) will cast ballots into optical scanners, which are more vulnerable to hacking than antiquated voting gear like punch-card readers. Only electronic models are more vulnerable than optical scan, coloring some states red."  As their color-coded grading system shows, paper ballots counted by hand are considered green, i.e. the safest way to vote.  You will notice, however, that not a single U.S. state is green, although New York is considered the least "hackable" state.

Electronic voting machines are what make U.S. elections fraudulent, as I have said since 2000 when I first discovered how our elections were being stolen by the private companies who control the machines that "count" our votes.  (See:  "The Death of Democracy")

Christopher Bollyn (back to camera) confronted the CFO of ES&S in Omaha with questions
about the private company whose voting machines count the votes of millions of Americans.
(Photo - Helje Kaskel)

Having observed elections in Chicago and in a half dozen nations across Europe, I would say that American elections are the least transparent and most undemocratic of any I have ever seen.  It is not America's tightly controlled political system in which only two political parties are allowed to participate or the dominance of the controlled media that leads me to hold this opinion.  Elections in the United States are undemocratic because American voters are not allowed to openly count their votes in each polling station or precinct, which is the sine qua non of any democratic election. For a democratic election to be authentic, it is absolutely essential that the citizenry participate in and monitor the counting of their votes in each polling station.  It's that simple.

This is the way is used to be done in the United States and how it is still done in properly functioning democratic societies, like Switzerland, for example, where elections are held 4 times a year.  Real democratic republics require the active participation of the citizenry.

Elections in which citizens exercise their democratic franchise are supposed to be simple and transparent.  In the United States, however, elections have been made very complicated.  In Chicago, for example, the criminal regime of Cook County normally packs the presidential ballot with more than one hundred local choices to be voted on.  Then they say that they need machines to process the data.  This is an improper election with an extremely cluttered ballot.

Obama voting on November 4, shows one side of the long and complicated ballot to his daughter.
The Cook County ballot is always cluttered with more than 100 choices
which even a well informed voter has difficulty completing. 
I watched on live television as Obama worked through the ballot.  It took a very long time. 
The news went on to the next story after 15 minutes. They did not understand why it took so long.
The ballot below is what a presidential ballot should look like.



This is an actual presidential ballot from the French presidential election between Le Pen and Chirac.
Each voter took a ballot like this for each candidate and put his prefered candidate in a blue envelope.
The election judges then counted the envelopes, put them into groups of 100, and proceeded to count the votes - twice.
The entire vote count I observed in the city hall of Avignon of the nearly 800 ballots took less than 1 hour.
This is how simple a presidential ballot should be.

The Zionist controlled-media has replaced high school civics classes and taken over the role of explaining government and elections to the public.  In this way, the average American has been completely deceived and lost any understanding and appreciation of how democratic elections are supposed to be held.

In a proper democratic election there is no need for any voting machine.  A so-called voting machine is simply a device that is used to separate the citizen from the vote counting process, that is to say it is a device employed to facilitate the stealing of elections.  For this reason I am opposed to all voting machines. 

Elections should be very simple and frequent.  In a presidential election, for example, voters should only be voting for the president and their representatives in the U.S. Congress.  That's it.  Nothing else.  Elections for dog-catchers and county judges should be done during local elections - not during a presidential election.  In every election the ballot should be kept simple with a minimum number of choices.  

People should vote in their home precinct, which is how I have always voted in Cook County.  In this way the total number of votes is only a few hundred, which is an amount that can easily be counted by hand within an hour after the polls close.  In France, I observed the presidential vote in the city hall of Avignon.  There were about 800 paper ballots which were counted – twice – in less than one hour.  There were more than 50 people observing the vote count, which is normal in France.

"The precinct tally is the only official count on election night," a representative of the Illinois board of elections told me in Chicago.  This is because the public counting of the ballots and the votes in the local polling station is what authenticates the election.  If you don't have a public count in the local polling place, you don't have an authentic election. 

Only after the precinct votes have been openly counted and the tally verified, as they do in France, can the precinct results be passed along to the next level.  In this way, each individual unit that makes up the official tally has been confirmed and verified by the citizenry.  That's how an authentic democratic election is held.

The public counting of the votes in every polling station is the beauty of a proper democratic election.  A paper receipt of a ballot that has not been counted openly is absolutely meaningless.  What good is a paper receipt of a ballot that has been processed on an optical scanning device?  There is no way that the voter can be sure that his vote was correctly counted using any form of electronic voting or ballot counting machine.

Why is it that the people in every other nation are allowed to count their votes – but not Americans?  This is because the crimocracy that controls the United States needs to control the political system -- completely.  This requires control of the political parties, the election process, and the mass media.  It is through this control that the crimocracy has effectively disenfranchised the American electorate – and plundered our nation.

WHAT CAN BE DONE

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.  To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.  The proposal therefore to disfranchise any class of men is as criminal as the proposal to take away property.

- Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795)

The idea that the entire electorate of the United States could be cheated out of their democratic franchise through electronic vote fraud was something Paine could not even imagine in 1795.  It has happened, however, and we will not recover our democratic franchise - or our republic - without taking action. 

What can be done?  The remedy is as simple as a properly run democratic election.  The U.S. Constitution gives the individual states the power to conduct their own elections.  In every state, we need to demand the return of the democratic franchise to the American people by banning all voting machines and returning to hand-counted paper ballots.  This needs to be done in every county, in every state of the union.  It's that simple.

Finis

Sources and Recommended Reading:

Bollyn, Christopher, "On Fictional Elections & Taking Our Republic Back," January 3, 2008
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/read/116266

Bollyn, Christopher, "Voting Machines and the Bamboozling of America," November 15, 2002
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/read/25876

Bollyn, Christopher, "Who is Really Running U.S. Elections?" March 31, 2006 (and previous 5 articles in a series of 6) on Rumor Mill News with secret documents from Sequoia Voting Systems
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=87127

"Widespread Touch Screen Vote Flipping,"includes video of Clinton E. Curtis testimony to having written software in Florida to steal elections, DailyKos.com
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/26/112912/81/554/642200

Tatchell, Peter, "The Vote Grab: Voting machines are unreliable and inaccurate," October 29, 2008, The Independent (U.K.), Open House
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/openhouse/2008/10/the-vote-grab-1.html

"Voting Machines in the U.S.A.," Dvice.com,
http://dvice.com/voting/index.php