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The exit polls that showed a sweeping victory for Sen. Kerry on Nov. 2 were right. Unfortunately, the 2004 presidential election was cleanly stolen by Bush & Co. How, you say? With the help of Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC, four interlocked secretive right-wing electronic voting machine manufacturers. We have entrusted the most important election task, that of actually counting and tabulating the vote totals to extremist organizations with secret proprietary vote-counting computer software with no auditable paper trail for hand recounts. How very convenient, how very clean, how very slick and with all the evidence of election rigging is buried deep on their computer hard drives. 

Sen. Kerry won a landslide victory by between two million and five million votes. The pre-election public opinion polls pointed to a large and growing Kerry election day majority and the election day exit polls also indicated a Kerry victory. Unfortunately, theocratic extremely right-wing computer election machine manufacturing corporations were in charge of “counting” the votes of millions and millions of Americans. Some how, a few million Kerry votes didn’t get counted and a few million bogus Bush votes showed up in the final election tallies and voila, a Bush “victory.” 

Democracy in 21st century America has been kidnapped and destroyed by extreme right-wing control of the new secret computerized electronic vote counting systems. Verifiable hand-counted paper ballots are the only way to restore legitimate elections in America.  

Just search the Internet for any terms such as “black box voting,” “Max Cleland,” “Diebold,” “Sequoia,” “SE&S,” “Greg Palast,” “election fraud” or “election theft” and you will find a wealth of information to help arm you in the coming fight to restore legitimate free elections and democracy in our country. 

In 2002, the Republican Party staged their test run of controlling the new Diebold computerized paper-trail-free electronic voting systems that were installed in every precinct in the State of Georgia. It worked like a charm. Two popular Democratic incumbents, the Gov. Roy Barnes and Sen. Max Cleland, were both “defeated” by Republican challengers. The Democrats were both ahead by several points in both the pre-election voter opinion polls and in the election day exit polls, yet the Diebold voting machines declared the two Republican challengers as winners. The local media claimed to be “amazed” by this election “upset.” 

They should have been horrified and outraged. These elections were stolen electronically. There was no paper trail, no recount was possible and for good measure, Diebold Corporation “accidentally erased” the disputed 2002 election returns data from their computer hard disk drives a few days after the election. How convenient, how clean, how slick and how crooked is Republican election theft in the 21st century. 

The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were both stolen by Bush & Co. The 2008 and 2012 presidential elections will suffer the same fate unless we institute a complete and total return to traditional, verifiable hand-counted paper election ballots.  

The Republican Party will never lose another presidential election as long as we allow their corporate buddies to “count” our votes in secret.  

James K. Sayre is an Oakland resident. 

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