The USA Democracy Facade :
Who counts your vote?

by
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

Los Angeles, Alta California - January 9, 2004 - (ACN) A tenet of America, and one that has been utilized as a pretext to advance global ambitions, has been "making the world safe for democracy", yet this very tenet is no longer true in the very nation that gave it birth. This has been true for at least the past thirty years, is getting increasingly worse and it reached a crisis during the last presidential election, especially in the State of Florida. Today, with the massive installation of electronic voting machines through the Bush approved "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA), it is virtually guaranteed that those who provide, program, and manage these machines will now be empowered, to more elegantly, determine the outcome of elections for years to come.

Have you ever wondered why the most unscrupulous political candidates continue winning elections time after time? Have you ever wondered why these candidates have to raise millions of dollars in order to win and to whom they payout this money? Why and how is the two party dictatorship perpetuated assuring that electoral winners are pretty much copies of the same mold?

Our publisher, Hector Carreon, wondered about the above questions when ballots were still counted through IBM punch cards and while he served on the Los Angeles County Voting Rights Advisory Committee. As a member of the advisory committee under the chairmanship of then Registrar-Recorder Leonard Panish, Mr. Carreon became aware of the great potential for the massive rigging of electoral results in Los Angeles County. Hector Carreon had access, up to a point, into the vast voting operations in charge of collecting and counting the millions of punch cards turned in by the voters of LA County at hundreds of precincts. The operation involved the collection of the ballots by specially selected squads of Los Angeles County Sheriff's and their transport by squad vehicles and helicopters to the Downey, California plant of then Rockwell International, a defense weapons and principal contractor for the Space Shuttle.

The process was, for all intents and purposes, acceptably transparent to the precinct officials and voters at that level. All precautions where taken to safeguard against voter fraud by making sure to adequately identify the voter and match his name with the official Registrar-Recorder's voters list. The precinct officials also did a great job in guarding the "ballot boxes" by making sure nothing was put in there other than the legitimate ballots from legitimate voters.

The process began to get "blurred", however, for Mr. Carreon after closing of the precincts at 8:00 PM and when the ballot boxes were collected by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and taken by squad cars into the night for unknown destinations. The ballot boxes were supposedly taken to Sheriff's regional collection centers for eventual transportation to the Rockwell International Corporation facility by helicopter for counting by an IBM mainframe computer. Mr. Hector Carreon was never allowed to monitor the activities at the Sheriff's regional collection centers.

The next stop for the ballots boxes in the process was the defense contractor's facility in Downey, California. Here, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder lost all control over the electoral process and was turned over to private agents of Rockwell International Corporation. Mr. Hector Carreon had security clearance to monitored the process at Rockwell only up to the first phase where employees would unpack the ballots, stack them in packs and fed them into the IBM punched card readers. From here on every other phase, including the software utilized to count the ballots, was kept extremely secret and off limits to Mr Carreon and even to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Leonard Panish. More often than not, Rockwell International would produce vote counts for the various national, state and local offices that were very suspicious and did not make rational sense.

Today, we are being setup for the potential of even more sophisticated electoral tampering at the national level through electronic voting machines that provide no way to verify individual voting choices, make recounts impossible, and whose software is shielded from public scrutiny by so-called trade secrecy agreements.

There is an urgent need to establish a truly independent oversight mechanism to assure fraud proof elections is the conclusion of a number of expert academicians. A computer science professor at Stanford University, David Dill, said recently that "these machines do not allow the voters to check that their votes are accurately and permanently recorded. No one can prove that the machines are trustworthy." Also, Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard University, said. "It takes away the checks and balances of a democratic society."

The above hijacking of US democracy by powerful corporate interests should be of particular concern to Mexican-American voters who are struggling hard to better our social, economic and political status, through the democratic process, here in Aztlan. This was apparent in the last gubernatorial election in Alta California where our community narrowly lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger. If we are to win US Senate representation for the first time or if we are to negotiate a fair and just Mexican immigration agreement, we must first assure that so-called "democratic elections" are truly free from fraud and not pre-rigged against us.