How to Overthrow a Country

Election Fraud Abroad:

With the intention of ousting an undesirable regime, the U.S. government dedicates itself to strengthening and uniting opposition to the government. This includes funding opposition political parties, and creating non-governmental organizations dedicated to toppling the regime in power. On top of this, the U.S. might contract political consultants and polling agencies to help their favored candidate win at the ballot box. But in the event they cannot win the election, fake polls cast doubt on the official electoral results, and the opposition claims fraud. Massive protests and media attention put pressure on the regime to step down, or to give in to opposition demands. [2]

As implausible as it might sound, it was exactly this strategy that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. After the war in Kosovo and NATO bombing had failed to produce regime change, the United States worked to strengthen Milosevic’s internal opponents by uniting them behind one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, and pumping about $40 million into his election campaign. [3] U.S.-funded NGO’s and electoral consultants helped create a propaganda campaign surrounding the elections, and worked behind the scenes to help organize mass resistance to the Milosevic regime. [4] U.S.-trained “election helpers” were deployed around the country on election day to monitor results. The U.S. even provided young activists with thousands of cans of spray paint and campaign stickers to cover the country with anti-Milosevic slogans. [5]

According to official results of the first round elections neither candidate had won a majority of the vote, and so it would require a second round run-off. But U.S. consultants published their own “exit polls” giving Kostunica a huge victory and Milosevic refused to recognize them. [6] The opposition claimed fraud and U.S.-backed groups staged acts of non-violent resistance to put pressure on the government. Armed groups stormed the Federal Assembly and the state television headquarters. [7] Massive protests and rebellion forced Milosevic to step down. There would be no second round election, and Washington’s candidate Vojislav Kostunica took power. The strategy had worked.

2000 US Election Fraud

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

2004 US Election Fraud

Speaking of statistics, perhaps the juiciest analytical morsel comes from Steven F. Freeman, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, who thoroughly examined discrepancies between reported results and exit poll data, with particular emphasis on the crucial states of Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Specifically, Ohio's reported results gave Bush a 6.7% premium over exit polls in 2004, Florida gave him an extra 5%, and Pennsylvania boosted him by 6.5%.

Freeman calculates the combined statistical probability of these three discrepancies occurring in 2004, is one in 250 million. In 10 of the 11 so-called "battleground" states, he observes, "the tallied margin differs from the predicted margin, and in every one, the shift favors Bush."

But what are exit polls, and how accurate are they? Basically, they ask people leaving a polling area how they voted. And, as for precision, even Republican consultant Dick Morris gives them high marks. "Exit polls are almost never wrong," he wrote in a November 2004 article. "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places, that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries."

Note, too, that exit poll discrepancies in Ukraine's run-off leadership election of Nov. 21, 2004, similar in magnitude to Bush's three sixes in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, were enough within days to bring hundreds of thousands of protestors into the streets of Kiev.

The exit poll data for Freeman's own analysis of the 2004 election came from the National Election Pool, a consortium of major television networks and the Associated Press, and are collected by two respected polling firms, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International. Freeman notes that in Germany, where it takes a week or more to tally an election, the German people nevertheless know the results the night the polls close "because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off."

It is cheaper, faster, and more profitable to change public perception and doctor the results than to give people what they want...if you were an amoral business or politician why wouldn't you invest in voter fraud?

Posted at May 21, 2007 12:02 AM