(COMMON DREAMS)
By Carl Gibson
Fact: There are two things that occur more often than the right-wing myth of “voter fraud”: UFO sightings, and election-rigging. Statistically, you’re 3,615 times more likely to report seeing an alien than you are of seeing voter fraud. And we watched the right wing nakedly steal three elections in recent memory.
The entire reason we invaded Iraq, lost thousands of American troops and massacred hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, was because machines in Volusia County, Florida tallied NEGATIVE 16,022 votes for Al Gore when his name was checked at the ballot box in 2000. Despite the clear controversy, Bush won Florida, where his brother was governor and a presidential election was ultimately decided with a 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court.
During the 2004 election, where Ohio was considered one of the most crucial battleground states, an executive for Diebold, a private company that sells voting machines, penned a fundraising letter that promised to deliver votes to Bush in Ohio in 2004. Bush ended up winning that state, and winning re-election. Diebold continues to sell voting machines unabated.
David Prosser, an arch-conservative justice on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, won his 2011 election against Joanne Kloppenburg, ultimately because Waukesha County Clerk Cathy Nicklaus, who used to work for the GOP caucus that Prosser oversaw, “miscounted” 14,315 votes after Kloppenburg emerged with a slim lead. Nicklaus’ “error” gave her former boss a 7,500-vote margin of victory, which almost exactly matched the amount of votes needed to avoid a state-funded vote recount. Nicklaus apparently forgot to click “save” on a Microsoft Access template. Convenient, no?