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Privatising the vote.

Article Excerpt
The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery ...

Thomas Paine

Santa Clara County, of all jurisdictions in America, should have known better. They could have started by looking at Florida.

Jeb Bush stole the vote in Florida in 2000 by kicking thousands of legitimately registered black voters off the voting rolls because they had similar names to Texas felons--a feat well documented by Greg Palast and the mainstream British press. In a brilliant bit of misdirection, Bush portrayed the problem as one of incompetent elderly voters, dumb minority voters, and a problem with 'chads'--unreliable voting technology.

Bush's answer was to install touch-screen voting machines across Florida in time for the 2002 election. (In this, he was following a similar course to Georgia, Texas, and thirty other key states, in large part because of $3.9 billion in federal funds offered by the Help America Vote Act passed just after the 2000 election to encourage states to replace government-run paper-trail vote systems with no-paper-trail computerised systems from private corporate vendors.)

But, in the November 2002 election, when some Florida voters pressed the touch-screen 'button' for Bush's Democratic opponent, votes were instead recorded for Bush. 'Misaligned'...