The 1996 presidential election campaign is in full swing, and in this year when our responsibilities as citizens of this democracy are foremost in our minds, we here at 50 Greatest Conspiracies want to do our part to undermine your faith in the electoral process. To that end, we humbly present this piece, taken from 50 GCAT co-author Jonathan Vankin's 1991 tome, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, which by remarkable coincidence is being reissued this spring by Illuminet Press with a new introduction and special "update" chapter by Vankin, and an all-new cover design by 50 GCAT co-author John Whalen. Wow! Heck, we're sold! We think everyone should buy a whole lot of copies right away before they sell out! And don't forget to vote.
O good voter, unspeakable imbecile, poor dupe . . . Octave Mirbeau, Voter's Strike!
On election night, when the three major television networks announce the next president, the winner they announce is not chosen by the voters of the United States. He is the selection of the three networks themselves, through a company they own jointly with Associated Press and United Press International. That company is called the Voter News Service (VNS). Its address is 225 W. 34th St, New York City. Its phone number is (212) 947-7280. Voter News Service provides "unofficial" vote tallies to its five owners in all presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. VNS is the only source Americans have to find out how they, as a people, voted. County and city election super visors don't come out with the official totals until weeks later. Those results are rarely reported in the national media. The U.S. government does not tabulate a single vote. The government has granted VNS a legal monopoly, exempt from antitrust laws, to count the votes privately. Those are the facts. Even an average citizen should be a bit unsettled by the prospect of a single consortium providing all the data used by competing news organizations to discern winners and losers in national elections. Every significant election in the country could be fixed by a sophisticated web of computer experts, media executives, and political operatives.The unbelievable accuracy of VNS's predictions is perhaps explainable as a marvel of technology, the genius of statisticians, or at least a mind-boggling stroke of luck. But their method has been expanded into an Olympian system that allows the three major television networks to "monolithically control" any election worth controlling—that is, most of them. They announce the winners and what percentage the winners get. They are virtually never wrong. And once you've been named, you can rest assured you're the winner, even if vote totals have to be meddled with later.
The Voter News Service is the only mechanism in existence for counting national votes on election night, the only one in contact with every voting jurisdiction in the nation. The company is a conspiracy theorists' dream— or nightmare. As mentioned above, VNS operates exactly the way the most imaginative conspiracy theorists believe all media operate. The ABC, NBC, and CBS networks, together with the Associated Press (a nonprofit co-op of many daily newspapers) and their "competition", and United Press International own the company jointly. (Actually, UPI dropped out recently after they were bought by the Saudis.) Local television and radio stations take most of their election returns from network tabulations. VNS is a very real "cabal." Every media outlet in the United States acts in concert, at least on election nights. VNS has a full-time staff of fourteen. On election nights, that number swells to approximately ninety thousand employees, most of them posted at local precincts phoning in vote totals as they're announced. Others answer the phones and enter these totals into the VNS computer. The government has no such computer. Only the privately-held VNS tabulates the votes. When the company's executive director, Robert Flaherty, was asked whether VNS was run for profit, he wouldn't answer. His only response was "I don't think that's part of your story."
VNS was conceived as New Election Service in 1964, in part as a cost-saving measure by the three major television networks (it was originally called Network Election Service, then the News Election Service, and only recently the brand new acronym), but largely to solidify the public's confidence in network vote tallies and projections by insuring uniformity. In the California Republican primary that year, television networks projected Barry Goldwater the winner on election night, while newspapers reported Nelson Rockefeller victorious in their morning editions. The networks themselves could vary widely in their return reports. "Many television executives believe the public has been both confused and skeptical over seeing different sets of running totals on the networks' screens," the New York Times reported. The networks and print syndicates wanted the figures transmitted over their airwaves to be irrefutable. With all the networks— and later the print media—deriving their information from a central computer bank, with no alternative source, how could they be anything but? "The master tally boards . . . would probably come to be accepted as the final authority on the outcome of races," the Times declared.
The "news media pool" was first tried in the 1964 general election. Most of the 130,000 vote counters were volunteers from civic groups. Twenty thousand newspaper reporters acted as coordinators. VNS central (at the time, still NES) was located at New York's Edson Hotel. When polls closed, the newly formed system shaved almost ninety minutes off the time needed to count votes in the 1960 election. News Election Service had its goal circa 1964 to report final results within a half hour of final poll closing time. Now, of course, they go much faster than that. In the 1988 election, CBS was first out of the gate, making its projection at 9:17 Eastern time, with polls still open in eleven states. ABC followed just three minutes later. All of these light-speed results are, naturally, "unofficial." County clerks take a month or more to verify their counts and issue an official tally. Plenty of time for any necessary fudging and finagling. And there may be none needed. Discrepancies are a matter of course throughout the nation's thousands of voting precincts. The major networks rarely bother to report on such mundane matters. So who's going to know? The idea is to get the predetermined winner announced as speedily and authoritatively as possible. VNS provides the centralized apparatus to do just that. One rationale behind maintaining a vote-counting monopoly is to insure "accuracy," but in 1968, when Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey by a margin that could be measured in angstroms, the role of VNS became a good deal more shadowy. At one point in the tally, the VNS computer began spewing out totals that were at the time described as "erroneous." They included comedian/candidate Dick Gregory receiving one million votes when, the New York Times said, "His total was actually 18,000." The mistakes were described as something that "can happen to anyone." VNS turned off its "erroneous" computer and switched on a backup system, which ran much slower. After much waiting, the new machine put Nixon ahead by roughly forty thousand votes, with just six percent of the votes left to be counted. Suddenly, independent news reporters found over fifty-three thousand Humphrey votes cast by a Democratic splinter party in Alabama. When the votes were added to Humphrey's total, they put him in the lead. Undaunted, the Associated Press conducted its own state-by-state survey of "the best available sources of election data" (presumably, NES also makes use of the "best available sources") and found Nixon winning again. And that's how it turned out. What exactly was going on inside the "master computer" at NES? The company's director blamed software, even though the machine had run a twelve-hour test flaw lessly just the day before using the same programming. Could the software have been altered? Substituted? Or was the fiasco caused by a routine "bug," which just happened to appear at the most inconvenient possible time? With all the snafus and screwups, the real winner of the 1968 presidential election may never be known.
As of 1992, computers tabulated 54 percent of the votes cast in the United States. Sure, paper ballot elections were stolen all the time, and lever voting machines are invitations to chicanery. But there's something sinister about computers. Though most professionals in the field, as one would expect, insist that computers are far less vulnerable to manipulation than old ways of voting, the invisibility of their functions and the esoteric language they speak makes that assertion impossible to accept. Even executives of computer-election companies will admit that their systems are "vulnerable," although they're reticent to make public statements to that effect. One executive told me, right after asserting that there's never been a proven case of computer election fraud, "there's probably been some we don't know about." Even if "we" do find out, there's still little chance that the fraud will be prosecuted. A former chief assistant at torney general in California points out that without a conspirator willing to inform on his comrades or an upset so stunning as to immediately arouse suspicion, there's little hope of ferreting out a vote fraud operation. There are very few elections that qualify as major up sets anymore. Preelection polling tempers the climate of opinion effectively enough to take care of that. As for turncoat conspirators, if the conspiracy works there are no turncoats. A good conspiracy is an unprovable conspiracy. It remains a conspiracy "theory." To even talk about it is "paranoid." "If you did it right, no one would ever know," said the same state prosecutor, Steve White. "You just change a few votes in a few precincts in a few states and no one would ever know." Maybe it's already happened. George Bush may have received a Votescam benefit in an election that was rare in that it was a significant upset. According to some researchers, the favor came courtesy of New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, who had staked his political future on Bush before the then-vice president was a clear people's choice (if he ever was). Bush had lost the Iowa Republican Caucus, the first round of the 1988 presidential primaries, to Senate Ma jority Leader Bob Dole. As Bush entered the New Hampshire primary, pollsters placed him behind Dole in that state, too. These were "days when things were darker," Bush said in his acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination six months later. His campaign was fizzling. Despite his apparent deficit in public opinion, Bush won a decisive nine-point victory in the New Hampshire primary, reanimated his campaign, and more or less coasted to the nomination and presidency. The press at tributed this remarkable turnaround to the contrary nature of New Hampshire voters and Dole's allegedly "mean" public image. Either that or... Sununu was later rewarded with an appointment as Bush's chief of staff, often considered the second most powerful job in the country. He is trained as a computer engineer who had been a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank believed to be linked to the CIA. The New Hampshire rigged primary scenario turned on the "Shouptronic" voting machines used in Manchester, New Hampshire, from which early returns were taken. The Shouptronic's most advantageous feature is the speed with which it tabulates votes. Multiple machines can send results to a central computer instantly over telephone lines or even by satellite. Shouptronic is essentially an automatic teller machine for voters. All votes are recorded by button pressing. The Shouptronic leaves no physical record of votes. Like all computer vote counters, its programming is top secret. As solid a source as Robert J. Naegle, author of the federal government's national standards for computerized vote counting, is alarmed by the secrecy masking computer election software. "They act like it was something handed down on stone tablets," he says. "It should be in the public domain." [As an aside, the Shouptronic is named for its company's owner, Ransom Shoup II. In 1979, Mr. Shoup was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice relating to a Philadelphia election urder investigation by the FBI. That election was tabulated by old-fashioned lever machines, which also leave no "paper trail" of marked ballots. Shoup was hit with a ten thousand dollar fine and sentenced to three years in prison, suspended.
Another computer voting company, Votomatic, maker of Computer Election Services (now known as Business Records Corporation Election Services), emerged unscathed from a Justice Department antitrust investigation in 1981. The president of the company quipped, "We had to get Ronald Reagan elected to get this thing killed." The remark was supposed to be a joke. Forty percent of Amencan voters vote on CES systems. CES machines have been described as relying on "a heap of spaghetti code that is so messy and so complex that it might easily contain hidden mechanisms for being quietly reprogrammed 'on the fly.' " A computer consultant hired by the plaintiffs in a suit against CES described the way a CES computer runs its program as "a shell game." Votomatic has one especially troubling drawback. The trick with the Votomatic is something called "hanging chad." The perforated squares on Votomatic computer ballot cards are, for some reason, called "chad." When a voter fails to punch it out completely, it hangs on the card. To solve this problem and allow the computer to read the cards, election workers routinely remove hanging chad. The registrar of voters in Santa Clara County, Cali fornia, says that "five percent or less" of all Votomatic cards have hanging chad, and election workers don't pull it off unless it is hanging by one or two corners. The vision of local ladies from the League of Women Voters deciding how voters have voted, putting holes in perforated ballots with tweezers, is an image both hilarious and sobering.
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