Voting Errors Shatter Popular Election Myths

• For decades, America's media has been shaping the vote of the people rather than reporting it.

Weeks after the election, the next president of the nation had not been decided, yet the nation survived. At least four heavily promoted media myths have been shattered by this interesting event:

• There is no pressing need for an immediate vote count.
• An honest hand count of marked paper ballots at each polling place before the votes are removed -- or a combination of cross-checked paper and computer tallies -- rather than causing a too slow vote count, would have given the nation an accurate and verifiable accounting of the vote by the morning after the polls closed, as the recent Canadian election proved.
• Machine ballots and computer blips as presently programmed for elections, rather than guaranteeing an honest vote count, result in questionable verification of the vote no matter how the ballots are handled.
• Present voting methods can actually take more time -- much more time -- to de termine election outcomes than paper ballots or a system whereby paper ballots are computer tallied as a part of the individual voter's operation in the polling place.

The real purpose of ongoing media de mands for instant vote counts, culminating in their Voter News Service (VNS), has from its inception been an agenda-driven, unlawful tampering with the vote by the simple means of broadcasting desired outcomes as "predictions" and "trends" to millions of potential voters, influencing their intent before they have had an opportunity to vote.

Television media belatedly claim they created VNS as a cost cutting cooperation. This is the same media which has often bragged that it is the most profitable business in the history of the world as the most desirable -- and therefore the most expensive -- outlet for the advertising industry.

VNS was not created to save money, it is a smooth, agenda-promoted, vote tampering machine. Each network has fraudulently led the public to believe that it was in competition with the others to get the first election "trends" while all were colluding with their jointly owned VNS service to coordinate tallies.

This alone violates the usage laws of the people's airwaves which are leased to private corporate "networks" conditionally, with a system of fines and loss of lease as penalties for misuse.

Criminal media

Regardless of actual media motives, broadcasting outcomes before all votes are cast nationwide -- and even before anyone has counted a single vote -- is not just unethical, it amounts to vote tampering, a criminal felony.

The fact that the media has been -- until challenged this year -- uncanny in its predictions is the argument it has presented as proof of the accuracy of its system, but is actually confirmation of its vote tampering.

Truth of the matter is that VNS' pretended count is simply converted into the actual count and the ballots themselves are never really seriously counted. Nor is the conglomerate of local counts totaled as a comparison with the VNS totals.

This year's "recounts" are original counts, not second counts. How could an original count take no time at all and a second "hand count" take so long? Ob viously, the "second" count is the first hand count or first actual count. The an nounced first count was simply a reporting of VNS' posted figures accepted as gospel.

Now, because of the political tantrums of Democratic presidential hopeful Al Gore, the public is being educated to the multitude of doubts generated by the products of present machine voting. Not mentioned by any mainstream media is the ease for cheating created by the universal habit of taking ballots to a central place for counting, which effectively removes the public from its right to oversee the operation while opening up every opportunity for political hacks to succumb to temptation.

Another avenue for massive cheating is the foolhardy rule which allows absentee ballots to be received after election day rather than previous to it. This begs for a loser who can't handle his loss to tamper with those ballots.

Many nations conduct more honest elections than we who are so quick to kidnap duly elected presidents (Marcos) and bomb nations into rubble because we don't like the outcomes of their elections.

The ongoing temper tantrum of American politicos in this just past election is the laughing stock of the world. Demands from others that the UN oversee our elections carry an embarrassing element of truth since we insist on telling the rest of the world how to live, misusing the threat of our bully military to force compliance.

It is not a difficult matter to make voting reasonably tamper proof. Once the rules of eligibility are satisfied, it requires only an honest system of ballot checks, one of which is outlined in this SPOTLIGHT on page one.

America's politicians seem to have a revulsion to honest elections because they insist on writing election laws as loosely as possible. When they are not loose enough they now resort to courts of their appointment to overturn or tamper further with the decision of the people's vote.