The most obvious sign that something went badly wrong were the exit polls on election day itself. While accurate predictors of the majority of congressional and gubernatorial races, the exit polling on election day showed John Kerry as the clear winner, and the word "landslide" was starting to be used by news readers who grimaced and shifted in their seats as they read the numbers. But then a strange thing happened! Vote actuals coming in started to swing back to Bush, even in states where the exit polls indicated Kerry should win. As the night progressed, an obvious and disturbing trend appeared. In states where paper ballots were used and audit trails existed for the vote, the actual vote results matched the exit polls closely. In states where the new electronic voting machines were being used, there was a consistent bias towards President Bush.

There are some facts about the American system of elections many people do not realize. For one thing, there is no governmental or citizen body that computes the vote totals. For decades, the counting of the votes in Presidential elections has been handled by a private company owned by the TV networks. While it may change its name from time to time to stay out of the public eye, it is in fact the same company, owned by the major TV networks. That's right; in the United States, the Presidential elections are counted and decided by the TV network news departments. And nobody checks up on them. Nobody is allowed to. This brings us to an interesting case that happened in Florida where Fox News fired two reporters for refusing to re-write a story to protect the interests of advertisers. The reporters sued and lost when the courts ruled that TV network news departments are NOT under any legal requirement to tell the truth about anything, and have a legal right to fire any reporter that refuses to lie when told to! Now, stop and think about that a moment. The counting of the votes in the recent Presidential election is solely in the hands of a private company under no legal requirement to tell you the truth about the results.

Now then, with regard to the electronic voting machines. The majority of voting systems are manufactured by just two companies, ES&S and Diebold. The CEO of Diebold, Wally O'Dell, stated publicly his intention to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush! The owners of both ES&S and Diebold are brothers, and the software used in both machines, which account for 80% of the votes cast in the last election, share common roots.

It has been known for months that the part of the Diebold voting system that collects and totals the votes in the precincts is not only not secure, but in fact extremely easy to tamper with. Indeed, while the voting machines themselves are custom-built, the vote accumulator runs on an ordinary laptop computer, many of which are sold with built-in wireless LAN capability. This would allow a vote-stealer equipped with another computer with a similar wireless LAN to alter votes without even having to be in the same room with the accumulator system. Despite warnings and complaints from computer security experts and honest elections advocates, electronic voting machines were put into use in the battleground states, and worse, were designed to NOT allow any checks on the vote counts. These easily rigged machines leave no paper trail of the votes that can be used for a recount. They were DESIGNED that way! States that agreed to add paper trails under pressure from activists exempted last Tuesday's election from the requirement. The paper trails will be added for the NEXT election (in theory).

So, here we are, with voting machines that are easy to tamper with, that leave no paper trail, sending their "results" directly to the TV network news, who are under no legal obligation to tell us the truth about anything. It should be remembered that the TV news shows that assure us President BUsh won last Tuesday's election are the very same ones who assured us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction aimed at us.

Now, the Bush/Neocon supporters are already screaming, "You can't prove it". But we are not talking about a criminal case here. We are talking about a group of people claiming to be the legal government of this land. with the authority to take your money from you and spend it as they see fit, to take your children from you to send off to wars,indeed to send YOU off to war to be killed or crippled. The burden of proof is on those people claiming to be the legal government to prove that they in fact won the election. And they cannot do that. The very absence of a paper trail designed into the voting machines to prevent a recount prevents verification of the election.

The Declaration of Independence says that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Bush and his cohorts, backed up by the TV news media, claim they have the consent of 51% of the people to be the government. I doubt that. While the same TV news media is now trying to explain why the exit polls, usually the surest indicator of vote fraud in past elections, just "had to be wrong" this time, the fact that the worst skewing of votes towards Bush took place inside the electronic voting machines that purposely leave no audit trail delegitimizes the entire election. And, if the election lacks legitimacy, then so too do those people who claim authority over us based on that election.

If the elections in this nation are not honest and fair, then We The People have lost all control over the government. The government can do what it wants to with our lives and our wealth, using the illusion of elections to trick us into thinking we are obligated to obey their commands and pay their bills. But in truth, we are not. If the government that claims authority over us cannot prove they are legally entitled to that authority, why should we listen to them? If the government cannot prove that the election by which they claim authority is honest and fair, why should we surrender our money or our children's lives to them?

If the elections are not honest and fair, then we are living under the exact same conditions that our ancestors did in 1776. We are under the rule of a man who is ruler only because he says he is. And we have taxation without representation, because the Congress is not elected by the people, but chosen from among the "club" by rigged voting machines and the TV networks.

Our ancestors decided they would not live under a tyrant who took their money without regard for their interests.

What will modern Americans do now?