In searching out the truth, be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it.
— Heraclitus
Q: What is a DRE?
A: A direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machine records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. DRE’s are also called “touchscreens” because the voters indicate their votes by touching images displayed on the screen.
And why should you care?
A:
1. It offers no paper record
2. It is immune to recounts
3. It is immune to meaningful audit.
Q: In 100 words or so, tell me what you believe is happening with American elections.
A: Computerized vote counting has opened the door wide, over the past 15 years, to large-scale fraud and election theft. Virtually all the vote counting equipment is produced and programmed by a few corporations with right-wing ties. There is strong and pervasive forensic evidence that votecounts are being shifted to the right, altering key election outcomes. Mystifyingly, political intransigence is being electorally rewarded rather than punished. As a result, even as the pendulum appears to swing, American politics has veered inexorably and inexplicably to the right. This amounts to a rolling coup that is transforming America while disenfranchising an unsuspecting public.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q. Haven’t there always been attempts to steal elections? Why is now any different?
A: Yes, political history is full of skullduggery. But, as IT expert Chuck Herrin memorably put it, “It takes a long time to change 10,000 votes by hand. It takes three seconds to change them in a computer.” What computerized elections have brought us, along with speed and convenience, is the opportunity to alter electoral outcomes strategically, surgically, massively, and covertly. And, because of selective access stemming from partisan control over the equipment itself, it is not equal-opportunity rigging—the evidence has shown that it virtually always goes in the same direction.
The “retail” fraud of the past, although unfortunate, was inefficient, rather overt, and tended to wind up a net wash overall, as it was a game played by both sides. The “wholesale” fraud of computerized rigging is a far more potent and incomparably more dangerous phenomenon.
Q: How do you know the computers on which we vote are so susceptible to fraud?
A: There is virtual unanimity among the experts who have studied electronic voting that insiders or hackers can change the results of elections without leaving a trace—at least not the kind of trace that any election administrator is likely to find. These studies have come from institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Princeton, the University of Michigan, The Brennan Center for Social Justice at NYU, the states of California and Ohio, and even the US Government Accountability Office. White-hat hackers such as Harri Hursti and Alex Halderman have demonstrated how quick and easy it is to swap memory cards in voting machines (inserting cards with malicious code) or break into the networked vote-counting computers increasingly in use.
The level of security of all this equipment is orders of magnitude below that found at major banks, corporations, and governmental institutions, and yet all of those high-security enterprises have been hacked and compromised repeatedly over the past several years, with increasing frequency. How much easier when the “hacker” is working from the inside or has been let in the door by someone who lives in the house.
Why, on what basis; why, by what logic; why, according to what understanding of human nature; why, from what view of history, politics, and the way high-stakes games are played by those high-rollers for whom, in Vince Lombardi’s words, winning is the only thing; why, why, why do we collectively and so blithely assume that hundreds of millions of votes counted in secret, on partisan produced and controlled equipment, will be counted honestly and that the public trust will be honored to the exclusion of any private agenda, however compelling?!
Why and how, in the face of this level of risk, can we just rest easy that all is going well and fairly in the depths of cyberspace where our choices have all become 1s and 0s dancing by the trillions in the dark? That dance is the embodiment of our sovereignty. It is from that dance that our future emerges and whoever programs the computers calls the dance. Setting aside for a moment all evidence of fraud, how can we possibly be OK with that?
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: If you wanted to alter the outcome of an election, give me an example of how you might do it?
A: It depends upon the type of computer, but there are many ways to manipulate votes. One very basic scheme, where optical scanning voting computers (“opscans”) are in use, would be to set the “zero counters” (the number assigned to the first vote for a candidate, which logically should be “1” but on a computer can be any number) on the memory card in each machine to, say, +100 for the candidate you want to win and -100 for the one marked for defeat. At the end of the day the positive and negative offsets are a wash, so the total of ballots recorded by the opscans matches the total of voters signing the log books, the election officials are satisfied that the election was “clean,” and you have shifted a net of 200 votes on each machine so rigged, PDQ.
This takes just a few lines of programming out of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code on the memory card. It would be detectable only by a very painstaking examination of the card and its code, but the cards are regarded as strictly corporate property, completely off-limits to public inspection; in fact, not even election administrators are allowed to look. The command to alter the zero counters can be written not to take effect until actual vote counting begins on Election Day so that the opscans pass any pre-testing that election administrators might perform, and it can also be written in self-deleting code so that literally no post-election trace remains.
None of this is difficult or beyond the skills of even a high school-level programmer. Nor, for that matter, are rigs that instead work by shifting every nth vote or simply capping one candidate’s vote total and assigning all subsequent votes to her opponent. And, since opscans are programmed to “read” the marks voters make on ballots “geographically,” it is easy enough to alter the code in the ballot definition files to flip votes by reading the area for Candidate A as a Candidate B vote, and vice versa, or to be more or less sensitive to inevitable stray marks on the ballot, so as to selectively void more ballots in precincts known to be strongholds of the candidate(s) targeted for defeat.
Where “touchscreen” (also known as Direct Recording Electronic or “DRE”) computers are in use, their programming can be altered to cause the screen button pushed for “A” to record instead a vote for “B.” DREs that print out a “receipt” for the voter to “verify” (the vaunted “paper trail”) are of little help, as it is a trivial step to program the DRE to print a vote for “A” on the receipt while recording a vote for “B” in its cumulative count. While such a rig would lead to a disparity between the paper trail and the machine count, uncovering that mismatch would require a hand count of the paper-trail and the reality is that both the voter-marked ballots deposited into opscans and the “receipts” generated by paper-trail DREs are off-limits to public inspection and virtually never see the light of day, no matter how suspect an election’s results.
Where the voting equipment is networkable (that is, as is often the case, equipped with a modem), votes can be added, deleted, and shifted at will, as needed, in real time on Election Night. Millions of votes are sent through IP networks off-site and often out-of-state for “processing.” This saves manipulators from having to guess in advance how many votes they will need to shift, and so permits real-time-calibrated, “tidier” rigs—contests stolen with a smaller numerical footprint.
Q: Is it really possible, in a major election, to “count every vote as cast?”
A: In theory, yes; in practice, no. There is going to be a bit of “noise” in any system that attempts to count and aggregate large numbers. So “count every vote as cast” is a quixotic and misleading standard. “Noise” is not The Problem and neither are so-called “voter” frauds or genuine “glitches.” Computerized election rigging is not about miscounting a vote here and there, nor even about a few people voting twice or in the wrong district. Such exploits as double voting and impersonational voting are open to both parties, are at once low-yield and tremendously labor-intensive, virtually never alter electoral outcomes, and in the end, over time and space, wind up a wash. You can’t take over and hold onto America by hand.
Nor will “glitches”—which, with the non-intentionality of a flipped penny, break 50-50, yielding no net advantage—turn that trick (indeed we would accept computerized counting if truly inadvertent “glitches” were the only problem). Only deliberate systemic misrecording of votes and/or deliberate mistabulation at the aggregate level can do it, and only computers and their programmers have that power.
It is beyond ironic that Republican-controlled state legislatures throughout the country, many of which came to power via the highly suspect 2010 election, have in the past few years enacted restrictive Voter-ID laws, several of which have already been ruled unconstitutionally discriminatory by the courts, to deal with a putative epidemic of “voter fraud” that turns out to be virtually nonexistent. Yet manifestly vulnerable secret vote counting by radically partisan corporations goes merrily on its unchallenged way, pervasive red-shift disparities notwithstanding. There is a real Alice-In-Wonderland feel to it all.
Q: How does America stack up against other long-established democracies when it comes to electoral integrity?
Not very well. Indeed, in a joint study conducted by Harvard and the University of Sydney, the US elections of 2012 and 2014 scored dead last among the group of 54 long-established democracies. Particularly revealing was each nation’s electoral integrity score plotted against per capita GDP. To a significant degree, electoral integrity follows national wealth; in essence, free and fair elections are a commodity that wealthier nations can generally better afford. In the graph of all the world’s democracies, the US appears as an egregious outlier far below the wealth/integrity curve: a great deal of wealth not being spent here on democracy, at least on its electoral component. This of course squares with the sadly dilapidated state of America’s voting equipment and with the budgetary impracticality of beefing up the invitingly low levels of administrative scrutiny.
A recent foreign example serves to place in context the low standard of fidelity to which the process of counting votes is held in America. The Constitutional Court of Austria held, on July 1, 2016, that the mere possibility of irregularities in the counting process (counting in some places was begun before the prescribed cast of observers was present) was enough to void that nation’s presidential election results and necessitate a new election. It was not necessary for the challenger to prove fraud or actual manipulation, merely a lapse of full transparency such that outcome-altering manipulation might have occurred unobservably. Quite obviously, if US elections were held to such a standard, our unobservable vote counting process would foster a continual string of electoral re-dos, until it was replaced with an observable process.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: Who are these corporations that count our votes? What makes you think they care who wins elections?
A: Democratic elections should by their very nature be a public trust. The fact that virtually the entire vote-counting process in America has been outsourced to a few private corporations that operate behind an impenetrable screen of proprietary legal and administrative protections is bad enough. The actual history of the shape-shifting electronic voting industry and the cast of characters that has controlled it is in no way reassuring. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel owned a good part of the outfit that counted the votes returning him to the US Senate in Nebraska. Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold and an active Bush supporter, in 2003 penned a letter to potential donors in which he stated that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” O’Dell was seen to be in a unique position to fulfill his commitment, as Diebold was the supplier and programmer of Ohio’s voting computers in E2004. Right-winger Bob Urosevich, founder of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), was also the first CEO of Diebold Election Systems (a subsidiary of O’Dell’s Diebold, Inc.); his brother, Todd, was Vice-President of ES&S.
As of 2012 the vote-counting corporations had been whittled down to two principals—ES&S and the descriptively named Dominion Voting—which between them controlled the computers that counted the vast majority of the votes in America. When you trace the pedigree of these vendors, every road seems to lead back to the right wing: wealthy Texas oilmen, fanatical Fundamentalists, major Republican donors, and prominent Republican politicians. In fact, Hart Intercivic, a junior partner to ES&S and Dominion, has a board majority controlled by an investment firm known as H.I.G. Capital, which in turn boasts Mitt Romney, his wife, son, and brother as major investors through the closely-held equity fund Solamere. Then there are the satellite corporations that do much of the actual programming, servicing, and deploying of the machines—outfits like Command Central, Triad, LHS, and the late Mike Connell’s own SmarTech—secretive to outright impenetrable.
All the self-promotion and self-congratulation on a sleek website like Dominion’s cannot quite obscure the fact that what these Lords of Elections are really saying is, “You may as well trust us. You have no other choice.” While the privatization of the vote-counting process gives rise to a situation in which electronic thumbs on the scale could in theory be sold to the highest bidder, the manifest partisanship of the outfits that program, distribute, and service the voting equipment is far more likely to translate in practice to politically selective access or, in the language of criminologists, opportunity and means. The consistently one-sided forensic evidence in the elections of the computerized era supports this assessment. It really is the man in the magician’s suit with the “Vote For So-And-So” button, if not on his lapel then on the inside of his sleeve, who takes our ballots and disappears behind the curtain.
Q: You state that virtually all the anomalies, disparities, and shifts are in one direction, favoring the right-wing candidates and positions. But what about 2006, 2008, and 2012? Those were Democratic victories! Why would forces on the right rig to lose?
A: They didn’t rig to lose, they rigged to win—or, more precisely, to maximize winnings and minimize losses within bounds of acceptable risk of detection. With a single very odd exception, to be discussed in the next chapter, every post-HAVA biennial election from 2002 through 2014 has exhibited a red shift both nationally and in the key states and districts. The red shifts in 2006 and 2008 were in fact massive but, in both 2006 and 2008, unexpected 11th-hour events (in 2006 the lurid sex scandals and cover-ups enveloping Republican Congressman Mark Foley and several other prominent right-wingers; and in 2008 the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which ushered in the Great Recession the day after John McCain had proclaimed the economy “strong”), dramatically altered the electoral dynamics.
In 2006, for instance, the Democratic margin in the nonpartisan Cook Generic Congressional Ballot (“On Election Day will you vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress in your district?”) jumped from 9% in the first week of October to 26% the week of the election, a Republican free-fall of epic proportions; a similar fate overcame McCain in the wake of the economy’s nosedive on Bush’s watch late in 2008. These leftward political sea changes likely swamped a rightward manipulation that turned out, in light of the unforeseen events, to be under-calibrated; and they came too late to permit rescue via recalibration and redeployment of tainted memory cards and malicious code.
The devil is in such details, but these red-shift red flags were ignored, trampled in the Obama victory parade. It is of course possible for Democrats and left-leaning candidates to win elections and there comes a point where, if the margin is large enough, reversing the outcome through computerized rigging, although technically feasible, would no longer pass the smell test. Nor is it necessary, after a certain point, for every vulnerable contest to be targeted for rigging: in bodies such as the US House and most state legislative chambers, a bare majority will suffice for practical partisan control and “padding” becomes a low-reward gambit. But it should be obvious that, in a finely balanced nation such as America, it is a long-term, indeed permanent, losing proposition to be required to poll supermajorities of 55% to 60% in order to eke out electoral victories. Even a relatively light thumb can effectively wreak havoc with the political scales.
It is now comprehended by strategists across the political spectrum that shifting demographic patterns have handed the Democrats a massive and growing electoral advantage nationwide. The radicalization of the Republican Party has only heightened that advantage. To win general elections and hold onto power—barring massive scandals and other egregious political fiascoes—Republicans are now obliged to turn to structural strategies to offset their demographic and political handicaps. Thus we have witnessed a spate of restrictive Voter-ID laws ostensibly passed to combat a nonexistent “epidemic” of “voter” fraud; ruthless gerrymandering of US House and statehouse districts, with emerging proposals to extend the gerrymander’s cynical powers to the presidential contest itself; the financial advantage gained through the US Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions and the torrents of corporate campaign cash to which they opened the floodgates; and of course the “Vote Wednesday” flyers and robocalls and related disinformation campaigns.
Such tactics have served their purpose if they can bring contests within smell-test distance (in tracking and exit polls), where a computerized mistabulation can be outcome-altering without being shocking, and thus suspicion-arousing, in its magnitude. Restoration of the democracy Americans have been led to believe is their birthright will require addressing and reforming in turn each of these thumbs on the scale. If we agree that the most insidious thumb is the most covert, we will begin with the rescue of the votecount itself out of the darkness of cyberspace and into the light of public observation.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: And the media? This is potentially the biggest story of their lives. Isn’t the “Fourth Estate” traditionally one of the most important guardians of democracy?
A: Many of us retain a warm spot for the American press still left over from the days of Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and even the networks seemed to be among the big heroes. It wasn’t that simple in reality, but the impression of both a heroic and a liberal press has been slow to fade, especially with the “liberal” label being flogged mercilessly by the right-wing media machine even as that machine took over talk radio and came to dominate network news and newspaper ownership.
Fast forward to 2014: the mainstream media (MSM) is almost entirely a subsidiary of mega-corporations, news budgets are slashed to the bone, opinions (often shouted) have displaced reporting and investigation, entertainment is the order of the day, and there are some insidious limits on the stuff that is, as the Times continues to put it, “fit to print.” That said, it is still astounding how impervious the MSM has been to this story. We have it, off the record, from several top journalists that their employers have flat-out prohibited them from writing or speaking on the matter of computerized election theft or reviewing any of the evidence that it is occurring.
The MSM has what seems to be a “rule” on this: it’s OK to make noise about the potential vulnerability of the machines in the run-up to elections (Lou Dobbs, for example, was all over this right up through Election Night in 2006; and we witnessed a virtual repeat in the days preceding E2012 and again this year); but following the election, when evidence pointing to actual manipulation is made available, all coverage is verboten. Omerta is the word that comes to mind, an unwritten code of silence. In 2004, when this story was “fresh,” Keith Olbermann had the temerity right after the election to start covering what had happened in Ohio, and actually began to dig into things a bit. He wrote to me that he was “very interested” in the statistical evidence that we had gathered. He devoted several powerful, widely-viewed, and very enthusiastically received segments to it and then . . . POOF! He was off on a two-week vacation of which there had been no prior mention. And when he came back . . . not another word, ever. The biggest story, by a factor of ten, of Olbermann’s professional career and he walks away mid-sentence?! It should be obvious that there are some powerful forces at work here set on making sure this story never gets legs.
And I might as well add that it’s not just the MSM. The progressive media—ranging from The Nation to Mother Jones to The Progressive Populist—have all taken a virtually complete pass. In their pages they continue to discuss—and bemoan—election dynamics and the “new politics” of the Tea Party era, without an iota of attention paid to even the possibility that these bizarre and troublesome results may have something to do with a digital thumb on the electronic counting scale, not so much as a hint that there may be something to question or investigate.
This is perhaps the most mystifying thing of all: watching the progressives of America commit political suicide, as their media buy into a rigged game and seem perpetually to be discussing their own culpability for the latest political setbacks or shocking routs, while their entire agenda goes DOA. As far as I can tell, apart from the Wall Of Denial itself, the fear in these quarters is marginalization, that even mentioning the possibility of actual electronic election rigging will forfeit their hard-earned place at the “serious journalism” table or, in the case of groups such as Common Cause or People For The American Way or the ACLU, the “serious advocacy” table. If that risk seems exaggerated, simply recall the fate of Dan Rather, a titanic media figure permanently exiled after stepping “out of bounds” regarding George W. Bush’s National Guard records. As with the whistle-blowers, even a single such demise sends a powerful and unambiguous message to the rest.
From his place of exile (Dan Rather Reports on the little-watched HDNet), Rather himself took on at least some of the story in a program that aired in October 2011. But journalism is classic groupthink and, until you have more than one brave soul willing to step concurrently into the breach, the story generally dies on the vine. No one followed Rather’s lead. Jon Stewart once questioned the technology in his inimitable way on The Daily Show, Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury, Scott Adams more recently in Dilbert, and I hope they (and/or some of their colleagues) will come back to it. Sporadic eyebrow-raising and throat-clearing is better than total silence, but it goes only so far and that is not close to far enough given the massive inertias involved.
Ironically, among many in the progressive media, the attitude seems to be, “If there were anything seriously wrong, the Democrats would be all over it.” This from the same people who regularly pillory the Democrats as political sellouts? So, in a classic and deadly illustration of Bystander’s Syndrome (action is distasteful or risky and we can each convince ourselves that someone else will “call 911”), everyone sort of sits around waiting for someone else to stick out his or her neck. And about the only press willing to do that are web-based sites such as BradBlog and OpEdNews. They merit very high praise indeed for their persistence. But in America if a story doesn’t make it to the Times or the networks, it’s still a tin-hat conspiracy theory, no matter how well presented and documented. Look at how long it took us to take seriously allegations of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Look at how long, even after the whistle-blower Harry Markopolos had stepped forward, Bernie Madoff continued to operate his Ponzi scheme.
With elections the stakes are immensely higher and the fear that everything will fall apart if the truth is rigorously pursued is rather paralyzing. To put it slightly differently, investigation would lead to knowledge and knowledge would mandate action, an inexorable process once begun. But no individual operating within the vast system of American politics can imagine what action he or she might take—both the personal blowback and the national earthquake would be too catastrophic. So the morally compelling but pragmatically daunting “action imperative” itself paradoxically operates to block the road of investigation at its very beginning.
To get back to the media, I wrote in 2004 that when the autopsy of American democracy is performed the cause of death will be given as media silence. What I’ve seen in the dozen years since only strengthens that prediction. To me, in fact, the American press and media are the most wretched villains of the piece. Those actually doing the rigging, whether it’s a Rovean figure playing God or some cadre of true believers, are in a sense “doing their job,” just like a lineman “holding” in football to protect the quarterback. The media’s job is to spot the foul, get at and promulgate the truth. And they are the ones who are not doing their job. Individually by the hundreds, and collectively as a force, they have served as enablers. They appear to be either in deep denial, anaesthetized, or content with a sham democracy, which would of course suit their ultimate corporate masters just fine.
I’m not sure how much intimidation is being meted out or even what quarter it’s coming from, but it is time someone with a following found the courage to risk his or her job, or even his or her life, in service to the truth. That courage is surely not unprecedented in our nation’s history and it is sorely needed now if what the courageous have fought and died for is to survive.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: What does it take to know that an election has been honest, that the votes have been counted reasonably accurately given the large numbers involved?
A: It takes an open, transparent, and observable process. There can’t be any point in the counting process where the magician disappears behind the curtain, even for a few seconds, because a few seconds is all it takes to change the outcome of an election inside a computer.
Apologists for the current computerized counting system will point to all the aspects of “openness:” how observers can be present at the polls, how the machines are “certified” and put through a sample ballot test at some point before the election, how when opscans are used all the actual ballots can be counted if there is any question, how with VVPAT (i.e., “paper-trail”) DREs the voter gets to see a receipt!
What they will conveniently leave out of that reassuring presentation are the crucial concealed passages along the pipeline, and the fact that a system is only as transparent as its most concealed point. A computer can without difficulty be programmed to pass any pre-election test with flying colors and still shift votes at the time of the actual election. You can deploy an army of observers at the polling places and central tabulation locations and none of them will be able to see the actual count (or miscount) inside the computers. Where opscans are used, the reality is that the actual ballots are virtually never examined: mere citizens have no right to do so and candidates, where they might have such a right (and noting that it is generally made prohibitively expensive at precisely the stage at which candidates have emptied their campaign chests), are under enormous pressure not to exercise it, lest they be labeled “sore losers” and so torpedo their future political careers. Certain states, following Florida’s lead, have gone even further and outright banned hand counting to verify the machine counts. Finally, touchscreen computers with so-called “paper trails” can easily be programmed to print a vote for “A” on the “receipt” while recording a vote for “B” in the official count, and these receipts for digitally cast votes are even less likely than actual voter-marked ballots to ever see the light of day.
An open and observable process would entail visible counting that could be witnessed by representatives of all candidates and the public at every stage. There would be, as there once was, a “tabulation tree,” with the precinct counts observed directly and publicly posted, and the subsequent aggregations at the town, county, and state levels capable of being reconciled (the process is simple addition) from the lowest level to the highest. No observation or vigilance will ever insure a “perfect” count, but the minor inaccuracies, the “noise,” in the system will break evenly, only extremely rarely affecting electoral outcomes, and those so close that full recounts would be undertaken as a matter of course. Under an observable counting process there would be no opportunity to, in effect, perpetrate a rolling coup and steal a nation.
Q: What can be done? Is there any real prospect of observable and honest elections in the United States?
A: Democracy, contrary to the facile assumptions of those born into it and apt to take both its blessings and its workings for granted, is no sure thing. While political evolution in the modern era has seemed to be inexorably bringing democracy of one sort or another to more and more of the world, the countercurrents—both historical (Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Pinochet, et al) and contemporary (Russia, China, Egypt, etc.)—are very strong and have certainly not ceded the field.
Power, always seeking consolidation and control, has a way of finding the chinks, slipping in the explosives and blowing democracies and genuinely representative governance up. Or, more subtly and patiently, slow-dripping its acid onto the scaffolding that holds democracy upright. We’ve seen in America the metastasis of the security state, the infiltration of big money into politics, and the consolidation of the mainstream media under control of a handful of corporations. All of these developments make America look less democratic. The process may not be explosive, like a coup, but it is visibly erosive.
Election theft is different in that it allows its perpetrators to keep “democracy” perfectly intact and looking like a democracy even after it’s been effectively gutted. It is also something that very few Americans of our time ever thought they’d have to worry about, and something that they’d still very much rather not worry about (as it goes against every premise of positive national identity and esteem), especially if they have a seat at or anywhere near the power table. So we are in a very dark and dangerous place and facing an historical tragedy in the making.
It is not unrealistic to imagine systemic election rigging giving rise to a politics so one-sided or so out of sync with the public will that eventually the inkling that something is very wrong with the whole picture becomes irrepressible.
It is also possible to imagine something ultimately more damning: a carefully titrated rigging strategy that would preserve, perhaps indefinitely, the illusions of a freely swinging pendulum and of public sovereignty.
And finally it is not wholly inconceivable that a hidden game of rigging, thwarting, and counter-rigging—a kind of domestic electoral equivalent of the spy-thriller antics of the Cold War—will come to characterize our best-in-class, made-in-the-USA model of democracy.
It is not yet entirely clear which it will be, though it is becoming clearer. As we will now proceed to examine, the elections of 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, taken together, shed a good deal of light on how the electoral computer game is likely to be played as we move further into the New American Century.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
