Published time: 15 Feb, 2016 13:10

Jesus once remarked to a wealthy man that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to go to heaven.”

The Electoral College was created by the framers of the US Constitution to ensure that the votes of the plebes did not supersede the interests of the landed gentry. That’s not just my opinion. For example, according to FairVote, an organization with which I have worked in the 2000 Presidential election, a whopping 78 percent of the votes cast were rendered unimportant due to the arcane rules of the Electoral College. They estimate that in 2008, the figure still topped 70 percent.
In order to be declared the winner of the presidency, 270 Electoral College votes are required. But the process is not what could be called transparent. For example, veteran Pro Se litigator Asa Gordon has demonstrated how the Black vote in the US is rendered less relevant by the arcane apportionment rules of the Electoral College. And when the Electoral College is deadlocked, which has happened before, then the matter falls to the United States House of Representatives to decide who will be allowed to serve in the White House.

Hacking Democracy

Add to the above debacles, the US Congress and the election authorities in the 50 states have authorized and encouraged the use of hackable electronic voting machines that are used for vote casting and vote tabulation. Bev Harris and her company, Black Box Voting, has accumulated horror stories surrounding the non-transparency of US elections. I have worked closely with Harris because the danger of these machines is self-evident to everyone except the officials who continue to purchase them for millions of dollars, putting millions of voters’ most precious political asset at risk.
‘Hacking Democracy’ is only one of the many documentaries to expose the fallibility of the actual voting process in the US. Other documentaries focus on how private money has corrupted its election process.

In addition to the insecure hardware, I am sorry to write that the voter list is kept on an electronic device and if the voter’s name fails to appear on the list, the voter has little recourse.
In the US, votes and vote tabulation processes are done without any traceable back-up procedures. In other words, there is no paper trail - no receipt of a vote, as it were - whatsoever. In one of my Congressional elections in which the electronic voting machines “failed,” not only was I unable to obtain the election data despite a lawsuit having been filed, an expert witness for the state of Georgia testified that voters have to simply “trust” that the announced winner is the actual winner. Meanwhile, candidates have no access to the raw election data because that information is “owned” by Diebold—the company that produced the electronic voting machines and the software used by them (The documentary ‘American Blackout’ tells my own personal story with US elections). It is difficult to place trust in the US election system when we learn about the number of votes cast that go uncounted. In the 2000 Presidential election between Bush and Gore, between two million and five million Americans went to the polls and voted, yet their votes were thrown out, disqualified for any number of reasons. Half of those uncounted votes were cast by Black Americans.

Money, money, money

The situation is so dire that one wealthy individual could legally bankroll an entire Congressional campaign and a roundtable of them could do the same with the US Presidency. So-called campaign finance reform blew the existing loopholes wide open instead of closing them. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling stood the revered Freedom of Speech First Amendment to the US Constitution on its head by allowing a few wealthy donors to have more 'free speech' than 300 million other Americans.

The sad truth is that much of what takes place resembles a horse race, or some kind of political theater designed specifically for public consumption. Each step of the process, whether it’s the hunt for delegates in the political party primary or the hunt for Electoral College votes after nominations have taken place, the real action takes place in the darkest recesses of the system, out of view. One could go so far as to say that the real action of US “democracy” takes place in the shadows.
So, what we are witnessing for public consumption is the hunt for delegates among the presidential contenders in the Republican Party and between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Until February 1, everything was basically kabuki theatre, advertising in order to lure an ample audience to enhance the profits of the major television, radio broadcasters and newspaper publishers. Donald Trump made this point repeatedly just before he decided to not participate any longer in the pre-February Republican Party Primary debates. He challenged CNN to donate some of its profits from debate ad sales to veterans’ charities—which, of course, CNN refused to do.

On February 1, the first popular voting actually took place. The Iowa Caucuses kicked off the delegate hunt. The Democratic candidates are trying to garner 2,382 delegates to win the nomination; Republican candidates need 1,144. Across the state of Iowa, registered voters gathered to cast their vote for their preferred party primary candidate. Yet the rules for the caucuses are far from straightforward, as are the rules for counting of votes and assignment of delegates.
The next vote took place in the New Hampshire primary, which is different than a caucus. And there, too, the rules change by state for which primary voters are eligible to vote.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.​