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Voting Machines and the Growth of Tyranny

January 13, 2013


Yet experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
- Thomas Jefferson, “Preamble to a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” 1778 

In the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 2012 citizens from all fifty states filed petitions to secede from the United States of America. This is a clear sign that many Americans think the federal government has become a tyranny. The word tyranny comes from the Greek word tyrant, which the ancient Greeks bestowed on good and bad rulers alike if their authority was not legitimate.  A tyrant is a person who has seized or assumed power wrongfully, as George W. Bush did in 2000. In this sense the words tyrant andusurper are exact synonyms.

The state petitions of secession, signed by more than 675,000 people in the days after the election, are indicative of the growing awareness among Americans that their government is not legitimate. What that means to all Americans and how we can rectify the problem and restore the integrity to our American republic is the purpose of this essay.

Once every two years Americans go to the polls to determine who will represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives, and for president once every four years. If the representation is to be real, the election must also be real, as Thomas Paine wrote in 1803. The fundamental problem with the U.S. government today is that it simply does not represent the American people because our elections are not real.

The presidential election of November 6, 2012, was as flawed as all U.S. elections have been since the citizenry was removed from the vote-counting process.   There were more than 70,000 complaints received on Election Day 2012. These complaints concerned vote fraud and problems with the electronic voting systems. There were, however, no formal complaints coming from the Romney camp, which is very odd. 

Since the election, Romney’s son Tagg has come out saying that his father did not even want to be president, which suggests that Romney was only running because he was being paid to fill the space for the Republican candidate. This is the same tactic that was used to elect the unknown Obama to the U.S. Senate in 2004. After the Republican candidate withdrew due to a sex scandal, there was no candidate opposing Obama until Alan Keyes of Maryland was drafted by the GOP of Illinois, 86 days before the election. The fact that Keyes did not even live in Illinois did not bother anyone because Keyes was only running to fill the space and make it looklike a race. It now looks like Romney was doing the same thing to enable Obama to win re-election.

ROMNEY - THE STRAW CANDIDATE

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life,” Tagg Romney told the Boston Globe. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside.” 

There was someone, however, who could have taken Romney’s place and who would have beaten Obama in the polls: Rep. Ron Paul. While Dr. Paul was very popular with the people across the nation, his anti-war positions and strict obedience to the U.S. Constitution are utterly anathema to the crimocracy that rules Washington, so they had to find a way to derail the Ron Paul Express to the White House. (Crimocracy is my word for the criminalochlocracy or “mob rule” that dominates our government.)


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

The most fundamental problem with elections in the United States is that the tallying of the votes is done in secret by the private companies who run the electronic voting systems used across the country. These voting systems were designed to remove the citizen from the vote counting and authentication process and have made a complete sham of our elections and our democratic franchise.

Elections in the United States have become a grand deception in which the ruling powers and controlled media deceive the people into thinking that they actually choose the people who represent them. It is, however, not the American people who choose their leaders but the people who run the voting systems that count the votes and produce the tallies. In this way the U.S. government has become tyrannical because it is not legitimate and does not represent the American people.      

THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED


In free governments, the rulers are the servants 
and the people their superiors and sovereigns.

- Benjamin Franklin

The most revolutionary aspect of our American system of government is that it is based on the concept of popular sovereignty, which means that the legitimacy of our government and law is based on the consent of the governed.   The American Revolution replaced the sovereignty of King George III with a collective sovereign – the popular sovereignty of the American people.

Americans give their consent when they exercise their democratic franchise by voting for their representatives every two years. As long as our votes are being counted in secret, however, by the privately owned companies that run our elections, our democratic franchise is meaningless. 

If we are not counting our votes in our local polling stations we are not enfranchised in our government.   It’s that simple - and that serious. We are not actually participating in our government, which means that our social contract no longer exists.

The American concept of popular sovereignty was articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, who wrote in The Social Contract (1762) about the tendency of governments to degenerate into tyrannies: 


The dissolution of the state can occur in one of two ways. First, when the ruling body no longer administers the state in accordance with the laws, and usurps sovereign authority. The change that then takes place deserves notice: it is that the state, not the government, contracts in size; I mean that the greater state is dissolved, and that within it another is created, consisting only of the members of the government, which in relation to the rest of the people is no more than its master and tyrant. So that, as soon as the government usurps sovereignty, the social pact is broken; and every ordinary citizen, restored by right to his natural liberty, is forced, but not obliged, to obey.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

This is evidently what has happened in the United States. Like ancient Athens, Americans are now living in a period in which they are ruled by tyrants. In the final analysis there is only one way to restore legitimate government in the United States: to return to democratic and transparent elections in which the citizens openly count the votes in every polling station across the nation.

The Constitution, after all, gives the legislatures of the individual states the power to decide how elections should be held in each state. Rather than secede from the union, the citizens in each state should turn their energies to demanding that their state pass legislation that bans voting machines entirely and restores the integrity to their elections by using paper ballots counted by the citizens in every polling place in the state.

It won’t be easy and there will be strong resistance to these efforts but this is what has to be done. There are many nations that could serve as models to help Americans restore democratic elections to their different states. The Swiss, for example, provide an excellent model and vote several times a year because they have a system of direct democracy in which the citizens are required to vote on legislation. This is probably due to the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said that the sovereign citizen could not be represented by anyone else. The Swiss, in fact, have a constitution that is based on the U.S. Constitution. The biggest difference between the Swiss and the American systems today is that the Swiss have not compromised their popular sovereignty and allowed private companies to count their votes. In Switzerland the votes are still cast using paper ballots that are counted by hand.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
- Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Sources:

Bollyn, Christopher, "The Reality of Electronic Vote Fraud in America," January 26, 2012
http://www.bollyn.com/13598/

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Christopher Betts (trans.), Oxford University Press, 1994