When I describe the coming election as faith-based, I’m not talking about religion. What I’m referring to is the use of electronic voting machines that tally votes without any real oversight. Machines whose inner-workings allow them to do pretty much what their owners and programmers want them to.

Months before the 2004 presidential election, I asked my spirit guides who would win. The conversation went something like this:

     Me: “Who’s going to win the election?
     Spirit Guides: “John Kerry.”
     Me: “So, John Kerry’s going to be the next president?
     Spirit Guides: “No.”

What followed was a brief explanation from my guides that this election, like the one before it, was rigged. Kerry might win the race, but the other guy was going to get the prize. I still remember the sinking feeling I had when my guides used the word “rigged.” It implied a lot more than just the usual Republican efforts to suppress the African-American vote, and all the other kinds of shenanigans that marked the 2000 election. It meant the fix was in long before the votes were cast.

What happened in November of 2004 confirmed what my guides told me. Exit polls, which are scientifically designed, and have a reputation for being highly accurate, showed John Kerry set to take the White House. Then, at the last moment, Kerry’s easy margin of victory seemed to be turned on its head as George Bush took an unexpected lead.

The likelihood of the exit polls in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida being so off is estimated by statisticians to be one in 250 million.

To understand why Bush went from lagging far behind in the exit polls to being the victor, you only have to look at the way the votes were counted.

Joseph Stalin once said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s who counts the votes.” In the case of our elections, a huge number of votes are counted, in secret, by machines made by companies allied to the Republican Party.

Just prior to the 2004 election, Wally O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, the largest company making electronic voting machines said, “I’m committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.” Ohio became the Florida of 2004, and the rest, as they say, is history.

All over America, voters reported problems with touch-screen machines, the most common of which was vote flipping. Not surprisingly, when vote flipping happened it was, in virtually every case, 100% in favor of George Bush. If this were a “glitch” as the voting machine companies and media liked to put it, one would expect to see something more like a 50-50 split.

Other “glitches” meant that in one precinct, where 83% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush gained an astonishing 74% of the vote. And in another, Bush got 4,258 votes to Kerry’s 260. Which is pretty amazing given that only 638 voters turned up.

Sadly, these so-called glitches are just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of stories from both the last two elections showing that voting machine problems were far from uncommon.

How many other irregularities are so well hidden they’ll never come to light? Has the result of the next election already been decided in a smoke-filled room somewhere in Washington? The answer is that we don’t know, and we can’t know. What goes on inside these boxes (as well as the corporations who make them) is a secret. Software that could be programmed to steal the election may be sitting in every machine. We simply have no way of knowing.

There is no way to verify the vote. No hand count, no paper trail. Nothing. We have to put our trust in machines that can be opened with the key from a hotel mini bar and hacked within a matter of minutes.

So, what else do my spirit guides have to say? They believe that the current system is so flawed it can’t be fixed. With electronic voting machines it’s impossible to be certain that your vote counts. Though some people feel the solution is a verifiable paper trail, my guides reckon the only way forward is backward.

My guides would like to see paper ballots filled out be hand as they are in many other countries. By going back to basics, we could then gradually build a system based on fairness, accuracy and transparency. Most important, they believe that votes should be counted by citizens, not by the staff of partisan corporations.

And if you’re wondering why you hear so little about this appalling theft of our democratic process in the media, my guides ask, “Who benefits?” It’s clear that a Republican administration is good for media consolidation, and that’s why you’re not likely to hear any complaints from the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

This coming Tuesday, we can expect the usual stuff: long lines in predominantly minority precincts due to lack of machines, vote flipping, “glitches,” voters with insufficient identification being sent away, and millions of people casting their votes on faith, wondering, as one early voter put it just the other day, “Hurray—I voted! Or did I?” 

Yet it’s still important to make sure you vote, even though it can be dispiriting when you don’t know if your vote will count. My spirit guides describe the theft of our elections as “an outrage,” but stress that any effort you make to stand up against this kind of corruption is considered a spiritual act. 

Copyright © 2008. Ainslie MacLeod. All rights reserved.