Vote Rigging Quotes

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Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Krista asks,"What is it about society that disappoints you so much?" Elliot thinks, "Oh I don't know, is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit; the world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck Society." "Mr. Robot" season 1 episode 1, 'ohellofriend.mov
Sam Esmail
Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations.
Chris Hedges (Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt)
In a dictatorship, every election is faked and everybody seems to know it except for the dictator. In a democracy it is the politicians that are rigged.
Lamine Pearlheart (To Life from the Shadows)
They worried that widespread mail-in voting would lead to fraud. And they had good reason to worry. A 2005 bipartisan commission co-chaired by none other than Jimmy Carter found that absentee balloting was the largest source of potential fraud in American elections. Why should 2020 be any different? They worried that universal mail-in balloting would make ballots harder to track, as some states bombarded addresses with ballots for previous residents who had moved out but hadn’t been struck from the voter rolls. What would happen to all the excess ballots?
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
As mail-in ballots came in and were accepted even when they were not properly filled out, Republicans saw the consequences of the mad rush to change the nation’s voting laws. And they saw how the media dismissed all concerns about how the election was run without a lick of investigation
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
They worried third-party ballot harvesting would encourage voter fraud. Some states had called for unsupervised drop boxes to replace or supplement ordinary polling stations. What would stop those boxes from being tampered with, or, worse still, from being filled with fraudulent votes by bad actors?
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Oh, I don't know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bulls**t, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards.
Sam Esmail
Wait a minute,” Billy said. “What about elections?” “What elections?” I asked. “Its easy for them to rig votes with the electronic ballets. If third world countries used archaic methods of voting, we sent in representatives from the US to ‘oversee them.’ Everybody I knew in politics didn’t give elections a thought. They knew that people would believe in the corrupted, controlled polls, and that those appointed to office in accordance with the New World Order were secure.” “So people are misled by their leaders to believe they chose them?” “Not only that,” I answered, “but figureheads are placed while the real power works behind the scenes. For example, when Salinas was Vice President of Mexico, he ran the country while dela Madrid was only a Presidential figurehead. Vice President Bush ran this country while Reagan was acting President.
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
Clinton’s advisers Robby Mook and John Podesta had said when Trump called the Electoral College “a rigged thing” and “a fraud,” suggesting that maybe only the popular vote should matter.
Bret Easton Ellis (White)
However, Trump’s flaws must be weighed against the disturbing nature of the opposition arrayed against him—an army of corporate-funded left-wing activists who excused and encouraged violent riots across the country; technology oligarchs who made unprecedented efforts to normalize censorship; state and local officials who radically altered the way Americans vote in the middle of an election for partisan advantage; an ostensibly free press that credulously and willfully published fake news to damage the president; politicized federal law enforcement agencies that abused the federal government’s surveillance and investigative powers to smear Trump as a puppet of a foreign power; and an opposition party that coordinated all these smears and spent years trying to impeach and remove a duly elected president from office.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
But the “relief” plaintiffs sought in many of these cases were changes to election policy that the Democratic Party had wanted for years, such as the expansion of mail-in voting and the relaxation or removal of scrutiny of mail-in ballots.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
and Joe Biden got 68 million votes. Through chicanery, Trump ended up with 74 million, Biden with 80 million. The professor's numbers convey my rough sense of the magnitude of this election steal. This steal, the “Deep Rig”, should have been child’s play to reveal and reverse.
Patrick M. Byrne (The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him)
As Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”8 When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Democrats immediately recognized that it would give them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to radically alter America’s voting laws and procedures to benefit their party.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Raffensperger also requested and received a $5,591,800 grant from the privately funded Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.84 The group reported Georgia used the funds to push mail-in balloting and to counteract negative messaging about mail-in voting.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Polls are one of the most dishonest things,” President Trump said, reflecting on the matter later from his Mar-a-Lago home. “I have never seen dishonesty like this. They’re dishonest with polls. You know it’s suppression to keep people home. Do you know how many people didn’t vote because of that poll and Wisconsin? And probably other places too, that poll got so much publicity.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
They told me to watch for counting being shut down during the election. It had happened in three other nations where sketchy elections had taken place. If it happened in our election, they warned me, it would be a sign that The Deep Rig was occurring. I thought it was preposterous: who ever heard of counting getting stopped in the middle of an election, in the United States of America?
Patrick M. Byrne (The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him)
But in the case of the new conspiracism, what should follow from bare assertion, innuendo, and ominous questions? Voter registration drives? Criminal indictments? Noncompliance? Violent resistance? We don’t know, because there is no call to vote, litigate, resist, or arm. After the summary diagnosis of “Rigged” or “Something is happening here,” there is a yawning hole where organized political action should be.
Nancy L. Rosenblum (A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy)
Arizona state law permits mail-in votes to be counted up to two weeks prior to Election Day. Those votes, which leaned Democratic, were some of the first to be posted when the polls closed. The state has a reputation for counting accurately and running elections cleanly, but it’s inordinately slow. It took the counters in Arizona days to count their ballots, which meant that the Election Day results that were posted were largely based on absentee ballots.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
A Politico article in November 2020 claimed that Biden’s eventual win in Georgia was related to Democrats’ massive efforts to fight so-called “voter suppression tactics,” the left’s terminology for ensuring that election fraud is limited by removing ineligible voters from polling books, having voters submit identification, and limiting the participation of outside parties in the secret voting process.56 Democrats did invest in the project, spending tens of millions of dollars to challenge and change voter integrity laws.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Some have argued that capitalism promotes democracy, because of common norms of transparency, rule of law, and free competition—for markets, for ideas, for votes. In some idealized world, capitalism may enhance democracy, but in the history of the West, democracy has expanded by limiting the power of capitalists. When that project fails, dark forces are often unleashed. In the twentieth century, capitalism coexisted nicely with dictatorships, which conveniently create friendly business climates and repress independent worker organizations. Western capitalists have enriched and propped up third-world despots who crush local democracy. Hitler had a nice understanding with German corporations and bankers, who thrived until the unfortunate miscalculation of World War II. Communist China works hand in glove with its capitalist business partners to destroy free trade unions and to preserve the political monopoly of the Party. Vladimir Putin presides over a rigged brand of capitalism and governs in harmony with kleptocrats. When push comes to shove, the story that capitalism and democracy are natural complements is a myth. Corporations are happy to make a separate peace with dictators—and short of that, to narrow the domain of civic deliberation even in democracies. After Trump’s election, we saw corporations standing up for immigrants and saluting the happy rainbow of identity politics, but lining up to back Trump’s program of gutting taxes and regulation. Some individual executives belatedly broke with Trump over his racist comments, but not a single large company has resisted the broad right-wing assault on democracy that began long before Trump, and all have been happy with the dismantling of regulation. If democracy is revived, the movement will come from empowered citizens, not from corporations.
Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
Democrats had figured out how to get what they wanted from existing rules. The only thing that could have been better was if they could import their “intense digital outreach and a well-coordinated vote-by-mail operation” into the official government election offices in heavily Democratic areas.52 As will be explained in subsequent chapters, grants from liberal billionaires allowed them to do just that in five cities in Wisconsin, Democrat-heavy counties in Georgia, and overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia, among others. Democrats would essentially run their vote-by-mail operation through official government offices, and Republicans wouldn’t find out until months after the election had passed.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
In tone, the administration said that the NSS was all about championing America, but I wondered what America that was: the national/nativist state defined by blood, soil, and shared history? Or America the creedal nation, the Madisonian embodiment of Enlightenment ideals? I suspected that it was the former, since the champion, Donald Trump, had already alleged that American elections were “rigged,” three million people had voted illegally (all against him), the seat of government was a “swamp,” the free press was the “enemy of the people,” crime was at record rates, and the American judicial system was a “joke.” In all that, he sounded a lot like an Internet troll on a botnet controlled from Saint Petersburg. Or like Vladimir Putin. Whom he never could quite admit had worked to get him elected. But Putin had. And then some.
Michael V. Hayden (The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies)
If America were a house, they’d be the termites. It’s that bad,” said Georgia Republican and voter database expert Mark Davis about the lawfare engaged in fighting against voting integrity laws. Long before COVID-19, the Democratic Party of Georgia, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sued Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in November 2019 to get him to water down the state’s requirements for checking signatures on mail-in ballots.57 Governor Kemp, under pressure from Democratic groups alleging voter suppression, had already signed a law earlier in 2019 that relaxed signature requirements and made it more difficult to reject ballots for signature mismatch or other ballot problems. Elias, who was leading the lawsuits, wanted the requirements relaxed even more.58
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.” It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.
Gabriel Rockhill (Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy)
Russians refer to United Russia as the Party of Power. Other nations refer to it as “the Party of Crooks and Thieves.” In exchange for financial support, Putin’s party controlled power by giving out contracts, bribes, and kickbacks. Across the country members of the party were routinely accused of corruption, drug trafficking, racketeering, vote-rigging, and murder. Yet, once in office they would not only escape prosecution, in some cases they were awarded medals for their service. Being a member was almost a get-out-of-jail-free card, unless you crossed the party itself.
Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
In the case of Obamacare, leading members of the intellectual class produced the appropriately rigged studies to promote the racket. Then members of the Obama administration and liberal Democrats in Congress took up these studies as an irrefutable demonstration of the wonders of Obamacare. Finally anchorpeople and reporters lined up to amplify the falsehoods and complete the sale to the American people. Despite all this, the American people remained unconvinced. Even so, the con men generated enough support that Democratic legislators, on a straight-party vote, got Obamacare through.
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
The next day, Sunday, June 14, Ahmadinejad held a press conference in the office of the president, on Pasteur Street in south Tehran. In the large white room with its decorative varnished wood panels, I sat among the dozens of Iranian and foreign journalists, taking notes and concentrating on remaining professional, even as I felt the anger inside me growing. The newly reelected president spent the first part of the press conference boasting about his win. When reporters asked about allegations of vote rigging, he barely batted an eye: Mousavi supporters “are like a football team that has lost a game but keeps on insisting that it has won,” he said. He flashed a malicious smile and added, “You’ve lost. Why don’t you accept it?
Maziar Bahari (Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival)
The Republicans, however, refused to let power slip from their hands so easily. The carpetbag governments in Louisiana and South Carolina announced that Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93), the Republican candidate, had carried those states and was therefore elected President by a margin of one electoral vote. It was the most outrageous piece of election-rigging in American history (which is saying something) and for a moment it looked as if it might precipitate a renewal of civil war. The
Hugh Brogan (The Penguin History of the USA)
Those in control of America’s most powerful institutions-- business, media, academia, bureaucracies, and even the FBI-- are engaged in a permanent struggle against half the country: technology oligarchs who made unprecedented efforts to normalize censorship; state and local officials who radically altered the way Americans vote in the middle of an election for partisan advantage; an ostensibly free press that credulously and willfully published fake news to damage the president; politicized federal law enforcement agencies that abused the federal government’s surveillance and investigative powers to smear Trump as a puppet of a foreign power; and an opposition party that coordinated all these smears and spent years trying to impeach and remove a duly elected president from office.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
So how do people who think and behave this way respond when the public rejects their agenda? They attempt to use their power to overrule the democratic process. When Democrats threaten to win elections, they rig the voting process, as they did in Georgia. When Democrats win despite election rigging, they strip the offices Democrats win of power, as they did in Wisconsin. When Democratic policies prevail despite all of that, they use apparatchik-stuffed courts to strike down legislation on the flimsiest of grounds. As David Frum, the author of Trumpocracy, warned a year ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That’s happening as we speak. So
Paul Krugman (Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future)
Politico poll, 47 percent of Republicans believed that Trump won the popular vote, compared to 40 percent who believed Hillary Clinton won. In other words, about half of self-identified Republicans said they believe that American elections are massively rigged. Such beliefs may be consequential. A survey conducted in June 2017 asked, “If Donald Trump were to say that the 2020 presidential election should be postponed
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
Riots, investigations, impeachments, and a non-stop resistance spurred on by the Democratic Party harmed the country in grievous ways that eclipsed the objections dozens of congressional Democrats made to certifying the 2016 Electoral College vote.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
The mainstream right is disgusted by the disparate treatment given to the conspiracies and violence hatched by Democrats. It was prominent Democrats and the media who had sounded the alarm about voting system security right up until November 3, 2020.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
The media, polling, and Big Tech rigging alone would have been enough to cause Republicans to doubt any election loss, but what Democrats did to the manner in which people vote was further destabilizing to the country... Long-standing historical concerns about the integrity of elections led to the development of a single Election Day, a secret ballot, and governmental running of elections--all developments that went a long way toward building up trust in America's electoral process. In recent years, Democrats have lobbied to move away from each of those things, saying that efforts to stop them from doing so were 'voter suppression.' In the months leading up to 2020, Democrats were able to convince legislators, courts, and election officials to open elections up to ballot trafficking, voting without showing identification, voting without following state laws or guidelines, and counting ballots without oversight from independent observers. Meager checks on fraud, such as signature matching, were watered down to the point of meaninglessness...And then Democrats tried to make permanent all of the radical changes they had made by passing legislation to ban voter ID, legalize vote trafficking weaken absentee voter verifications, and make it more difficult to keep updated lists of voters.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
In elections, where there is delay, there is a magic.
Olawale Daniel
In elections, where there is delay, there is a magic being worked on behind the scenes.
Olawale Daniel
Furthermore, it is not the people or the citizens who decide on what to vote, on which political program, at what time, and so on. It is the oligarchs and the oligarchic system that decide on this and that submit their choice to the vote of the electorate (in certain very specific cases). One could legitimately wonder, for instance, why there are not more referendums, and in particular referendums of popular initiative, in “democracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis perfectly described this state of affairs when he wrote: “The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. They are told, ‘vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,’ for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It isn’t us.”127 It would thus be naive to believe that elections reflect public opinion or even the preferences of the electorate. For these oligarchic principles dominate our societies to such an extent that the nature of the choice is decided in advance. In the case of elections, it is the powerful media apparatus—financed in the United States by private interests, big business, and the bureaucratic machinery of party politics—that presents to the electorate the choices to be made, the viable candidates, the major themes to be debated, the range of possible positions, the questions to be raised and pondered, the statistical tendencies of “public opinion,” the viewpoint of experts, and the positions taken by the most prominent politicians. What we call political debate and public space (which is properly speaking a space of publicity) are formatted to such an extent that we are encouraged to make binary choices without ever asking ourselves genuine questions: we must be either for or against a particular political star, a specific publicity campaign, such or such “societal problem.” “One of the many reasons why it is laughable to speak of ‘democracy’ in Western societies today,” asserts Castoriadis, “is because the ‘public’ sphere is in fact private—be it in France, the United States, or England.”The market of ideas is saturated, and the political consumer is asked to passively choose a product that is already on the shelves. This is despite the fact that the contents of the products are often more or less identical, conjuring up in many ways the difference that exists between a brand-name product on the right, with the shiny packaging of the tried-and-true, and a generic product on the left, that aspires to be more amenable to the people. “Free elections do not necessarily express ‘the will of the people,’ ” Erich Fromm judiciously wrote. “If a highly advertised brand of toothpaste is used by the majority of the people because of some fantastic claims it makes in its propaganda, nobody with any sense would say that people have ‘made a decision’ in favor of the toothpaste. All that could be claimed is that the propaganda was sufficiently effective to coax millions of people into believing its claims.
Gabriel Rockhill (Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy)
There will be a vote in Open Council. Meaning, I have no doubt, that there will be an orgy of blackmail, bribery, corruption, and betrayal. A carnival of deal making, alliance breaking, intrigue, and murder. A merry dance of fixing, of rigging, of threats, and of promises. It will go on until the King dies. Then there will be a vote in Open Council.
Joe Abercrombie (Before They Are Hanged (The First Law, #2))
My years of hard work setting up the system to rig the elections came to be much easier when electronic voting came into being. All I had to do was get my hackers to hack the system and off we went. Once we’re finally rid of Christians and all those other religious freaks, we can finally do anything we want without someone complaining about it. That’s the final piece of the puzzle to put in and then we get to have all those wonderfully indoctrinated fools out there do what we want, when we want, and how we want. Of course, we’ll make sure the Election looks close enough to be convincing, but not so close that people wonder who really won. Now, go play at campaigning while I finish up my work.
Cliff Ball (Times of Turmoil)
Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it,” he told de Mohrenschildt, recalling his days in the Soviet Union. “Here, the politicians constantly lie to people and they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing.” Oswald worried about the FBI’s police-state surveillance tactics. And he believed that America was turning more “militaristic” as it increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of other countries.
David Talbot (The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government)
Corruption in American politics is hardly new, of course, but previously, for the most part, it was conducted mainly on the local level. It was also conducted by Democrats. There were exceptions, of course, especially during Reconstruction, and in the administration of President Grant, and in the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. But generally, when we think of political corruption, we think of the Democratic Party machines in America’s big cities, of the city “bosses” using the political system to rig votes, install cronies in office, extort favors from businesses, collect bribes for the assignment of city contracts, and generally rip off the local taxpayer and loot the treasury. Just as slavery and white supremacy were the tools of Democratic exploitation in the South, the boss system was the party’s tool of corruption and theft in cities throughout the country. The most famous Democratic bosses were Edward Crump, mayor of Memphis from 1910 to 1916; Tom Pendergast, who ran the Jackson County Democratic Club and controlled local politics in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1911 until his conviction for tax fraud in 1939; Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947; and Richard Daley, who was mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976.
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I do hope and believe the people will not vote him into the Presidency—but, then of course elections always could be rigged. . . . The
Rosemary Sullivan (Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva)
In the summer of 2014, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and other members of the Democratic brain trust introduced a measure to amend the First Amendment as follows: Authorizes Congress and the states to regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections. Grants Congress and the states the power to implement and enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation, and to distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections. Declares that nothing in this amendment shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press.8 So, let me get this straight: The amendment would allow politicians in Washington, D.C., and state capitals to regulate speech that directly relates to the business of government and their jobs—the type of speech that should be most protected! This con job was nothing but a power grab to control how citizens—including corporations and conservative interest groups—can express their political views, a grab to help keep corrupt incumbents in office. After all, it’s tough to be voted out of office when you help control what your opponents and constituents can say about you. And it’s awfully hard to express one’s individual right to a fair vote when the outcome of an election is effectively rigged. Note the special carveout for the media. Reid and company were trying to make it so corporations and conservative interest groups would be muzzled, but unions and the Democrats’ tame press would be free to spew any kind of biased crap they like. If they can’t win elections fair and square, Democrats are more than willing to silence huge portions of the citizenry to stay in power. Had the amendment somehow passed, it would have been the first time one of the Constitution’s core individual rights would have been infringed through the amendment process itself.9 The attempt itself is disgraceful.
Eric Bolling (Wake Up America: The Nine Virtues That Made Our Nation Great—and Why We Need Them More Than Ever)
One example of how closely the two work together was revealed during the British Parliamentary or local Northern Ireland elections.  During the years, I would become involved in helping the Sinn Fein cause, along with many other young men and women, many of whom were members of the IRA. From their headquarters in Connolly House, Belfast, Sinn Fein organisers would try, with the assistance of the IRA, to do everything in their power to rig the elections.  The plan would be to distribute false identification papers to IRA men and women and other republican sympathisers, and send them around to a number of polling stations so that they could cast votes in perhaps six to ten different places. The
Martin McGartland (Fifty Dead Men Walking: A true story of a secret agent who infiltrated the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA))
Again, if more than 11,779 ineligible votes were found, that meant that the election should be redone, according to the Trump campaign’s understanding of state law. Trump said in the call, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”57 The media portrayed this request as Trump asking Raffensperger to steal the election for him and fraudulently create new votes to put him over the top.58 The false interpretation of the sound bite even made it into the article of impeachment the second time Democrats impeached the president.59
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections)
Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it. Here, the politicians constantly lie to people ad they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing." Oswald worried about the FBI's police-state surveillance tactics. And he believed that America was turning more "militaristic" as it increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of countries. Someday, he predicted, there would be a coup d'etat.
David Talbot (The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government)
this scientist and colleagues from a well-known government laboratory have been making a hobby of the study of election fraud. The final estimate of this scientist is that Donald Trump probably got around 79 million votes
Patrick M. Byrne (The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him)
Many people saw Sanders’s run for the presidency in 2016 as a joke. But his crazy socialist ideas of free college, free health care for all, higher minimum wage, income redistribution, and tearing the heart out of capitalism almost gave him the Democrat Party’s nomination. It’s hard to run against “free everything.” Even if that is a pipe dream, it’s appealing to those who don’t get or choose not to realize that nothing is free. He won twenty-three primaries, 13.2 million votes, and 1,865 delegates. Though he ultimately lost to Hillary, in what was really a stolen and rigged primary, his success gave birth to a new generation of socialists who now threaten to take over the Democrat Party—and the country, if they ever find their way to power.
Donald Trump Jr. (Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us)
Voting in rigged elections under dictators is like watching a batter pull off a single on the last ball. You know who's going to take the strike!
Vishwajeet Gudadhe
In elections, where there is delay, there is magic.
Olawale Daniel
Why would anyone blame any election results on “Russia” my first thought was, hey, did they rig the voting machines somehow? No…. Are you having problems with Basic Maths? Apparently what ACTUALLY happened was they ran some ads on FB or something, and THAT swayed the vote. Oh, wow. So, what you’re ACTUALLY saying is you do not trust your eligible voters to draw conclusions from an abundance of information available in a free society. Is that it? Well you’re fucking stupid. Stop bitching, bitch.
Dmitry Dyatlov
When democracy is weak, lower-income people have no defense against the wealthy rigging the rules and taking too large a share of the pie. Sooner or later, people of modest means, who tend to be cynical about government to begin with, give up on the idea that democratic participation and affirmative government can improve their lives. For more than forty years, voter turnout has been on a steady decline. States governed by Republicans have sought to deliberately depress turnout, especially among people likely to vote for Democrats. Extreme gerrymandering has compounded the sense that voting is futile, since incumbents can usually count on getting reelected. But the best-off 20 percent still vote at historic levels, while the decline has been steepest among the poor. When the bottom half turns away from government, people oscillate between not voting at all and embracing the magical promises of
Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
Today most Puerto Ricans are unhappy with their current political status, and the most popular alternative is statehood, while a minority prefer more autonomy. The most recent poll, just three months before the hurricane, showed a 97 percent majority for statehood, although opponents said the vote was rigged and refused to take part in the poll. Five years earlier, statehood won 61 percent of the vote. 10 Yet Congress will not grant statehood to the island in the foreseeable future because, as with the District of Columbia, Republicans oppose what they see as the creation of two new Senate votes aligned firmly with the Democrats.
José Andrés (We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time)
They are Americans—Americans that would have voted against you and, in all likelihood, would have opposed you once you won. I’m not saying it’s good that they were killed. I’m just saying these attacks are going to seriously depress the voter turnout in these districts, and probably the rest of the country. Low voter turnout favors
James Rosone (Rigged (The Falling Empires, #1))
The final estimate of this scientist is that Donald Trump probably got around 79 million votes and Joe Biden got 68 million votes. Through chicanery, Trump ended up with 74 million, Biden with 80 million. The professor's numbers convey my rough sense of the magnitude of this election steal.
Patrick M. Byrne (The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him)
Ask your local political science professor to explain why it is the case that to steal the national election one does not need, “widespread fraud”. If the professor is honest, you will hear, "Because it does not take widespread fraud, it only takes deep fraud in six cities to flip the swing states they are in, to thereby flip the electoral college, and to thereby steal the national election. Those cities are Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.
Patrick M. Byrne (The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him)
Page 85 -- Generally, there are more than two groups, but sometimes they nonetheless choose up sides in what becomes a bipolar confrontation. Where bipolarity does not take over, the presence of third groups opens the possibility that the largest group, though able to muster a plurality of the vote for its party, will be excluded from power by the configuration of votes and seats obtained in toto by the other groups. If the excluded group is the largest, the degree of dissatisfaction may be greater than in the simple 60-40 situation. An even more extreme result can be produced by party fragmentation. If Group A, with 60 percent of the population, divides its support between two parties, it is open to Group B or to B and C, with 40 percent but only one party, to form a government that excludes the majority group. This it can do by winning a majority of seats by repeated pluralities in three-way contests Page 86 -- I shall show later that elections of this general type are a major - though not the only - reason for the decline of democracy in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Such elections have much to do with the outlawing of opposition, the rigging of future elections, and the incidence of military coups
Donald L. Horowitz (Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Updated Edition With a New Preface)
Presidential elections were coming around, and it was obvious to me who was going to be put into the office of President. My experience inside the beltway of Washington, DC gave me exposure to politicians both Democrat and Republican. There was no difference between them, and they shared the same agenda of mind manipulation of the masses in order to achieve their self interests. No one I knew in DC worried about elections, and campaigns were illusions for justifying their predetermined political positions. Political parties divided people as intended to keep them from looking behind the electoral curtain to the pre-rigged electronic voting machines built by the very ones they purported to elect. Divided, the people fall for the ploy that the other party is responsible for putting the same old dynasties in office. Limited perception with no inner communication among the people is akin to compartmentalized memory with no conscious though.
Cathy O'Brien (PTSD: Time To Heal)
Citizenship entails more than voting on election days. It requires ongoing engagement—knowing what needs to be done, getting the facts and understanding the arguments, and then making enough of a ruckus, and organizing and mobilizing others to join you, to do what needs to be done.
Robert B. Reich (The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It)
Republican candidate sought to reduce the turnout in favour of his rival by approving calls to African American precincts urging residents not to vote by saying that their favoured candidate – a Democrat – was on track to win without their help: ‘Everything’s fine. The only thing left is to watch it on TV tonight.’46
Nic Cheeseman (How to Rig an Election: Tricks Despots Play)
only Mubarak could stand for presidential election on a yes or no vote. Elections were more of a selection process since most of them were rigged and falsified. Mubarak claimed to have won five consecutive presidential elections with a questionable sweeping majority in all of them.
Amiso M. George (Case Studies in Crisis Communication: International Perspectives on Hits and Misses)
Even for a country where corruption is taken for granted as a part of daily life, the revelations have stunned citizens — for uncovering a wholly new criminal ring smack in the heart of the capital, and for the staggering array of charges involving politicians across the spectrum. The inquiry has blossomed into a national scandal and a reminder that virtually no corner of Italy is immune to criminal penetration. It has also raised fresh questions about Italy’s ability ever to reform itself and fulfill the demands for fiscal responsibility demanded by its eurozone partners. The widespread and unchecked corruption of public money revealed by the inquiry has helped bloat Italy’s national debt to one of the highest levels in Europe. Mr. Carminati and his associates are accused of infiltrating contracts for a wide assortment of tasks including garbage collection and park maintenance. The charges cover a gamut of activities — vote rigging, usury, extortion and embezzlement. Rome’s chief prosecutor, Giuseppe Pignatone, told Italy’s anti-Mafia commission Thursday that new operations were imminent.
Anonymous
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. A billionaire can pay neither taxes nor debts. Liberating the wealthy from taxes will not increase the national debt. Fighting corruption means selling the presidency for favors. A disease that kills hundreds of thousands will vanish. The winner gets fewer votes. The vote is always rigged, and you should vote for me anyway. Black people are taking the vote away from white people, although American history shows that the opposite has been the case.
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
In Russia, power doesn’t change because of elections. This was a phrase I used in an interview in 2011. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that in the buildup to elections the public’s attention is focused on politics, and we have to make use of that. Moreover, at such a time the authorities are always very vulnerable. We saw this in 2011, when United Russia won the parliamentary elections thanks to vote rigging, and this immediately led to mass protests.
Alexey Navalny (Patriot: A Memoir)