Today is the long-awaited day of the Iowa caucuses. Yesterday in this column, I observed that the GOP is transparently moving to steal the election from Ron Paul, Republican presidential front-runner, by moving the vote-count to an 'undisclosed location'.In comparison with primaries, caucuses may technically be somewhat harder to "rig." However, new and disturbing information has come to light indicating that there are other machinations in the works to steal the vote, just in case the nefarious plan to tabulate votes in secret should fail.
There are all too many ways to tamper with an election; for example, it is well documented that voting machines have been rigged to slant election results. In a caucus, however, the votes are cast openly in public, with the county results being tallied on the spot. Unfortunately, that still leaves a couple of possible mechanisms for mischief at the "next level up" where the aggregate votes from all the counties are transmitted and tallied.
There is substantial evidence that during the 1996 Iowa caucus, Pat Buchanan was defrauded of a win by just such means (See also the "Dubuque County, Iowa" section of "A House Without Doors" by James J. Condit Jr.) To all appearances the "powers that be" are gearing up to do so again to Ron Paul.
If the votes are recorded and tallied by the Iowa GOP in an "undisclosed location," the count might be changed between what is reported by telephone from the county and what is written down by the party leaders. Alternatively, the sum of all the recorded votes might be tampered with in a centralized computer tally. With the very large number of caucus locations (1774) such shenanigans might be fairly easily hidden from view.
Fortunately, there is a watchdog group, "WatchTheVote2012," that plans to closely monitor the caucus results by attempting to place an independent observer at each of the 1774 county caucus locations. Each independent observer will record, photographically or otherwise, the vote tally at each county caucus location and will post those results to the internet, as directed by these thoughtful instructions. If there are enough independent observers, it will become immediately obvious if the results of the voting as reported by the media are accurate or if they have been tampered with. However, the organization reports that there may even be "fifth columnists" within the Ron Paul Iowa organization itself who have been attempting to discourage Paul supporters from taking part in such verification measures.
It should be obvious that any "voting process" that hides or in any way obscures the counting of votes is intended manipulate the outcome of the election. While I no longer have a strong belief in the democratic electoral process (I now consider it far more effective to move on to the more positive direct action of "agorism,") nevertheless, I feel a righteous indignation over this transparent intention to tamper with caucus results.
Express your outrage; contact information for the Iowa GOP is available by simply googling 'contact information for Iowa GOP.' The future of our nation may depend on your diligence today.
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