How Josef Stalin Sees 2012 U.S. Elections

Russian Dictator Joseph Stalin at the ballot box  “You know, comrades,” says Josef Stalin in 1923, “that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how." – Boris Bazhanov, "Memoirs of Stalin’s Former Secretary", published 1992.

Josef Stalin's chilling assessment in 1923 about the process of voting is way too true today even 90 years later, he since died on March 5, 1953.  The question goes on about who will vote and how while the other issue is about who will count the votes and how.  

This assessment of voting was made by a brute mass murderer. Josef Stalin was a Russian Communist, Totalitarian, Dictator who ruled with an iron fist of power over a society chained to a stuffed ballot that only elected the Communist party line officials. 

Under Communism, "collectivization" is the process of conversion of small private farms and livestock into giant collective farms. The Soviet Government could not control the independent farmers in the Ukraine region of Russia. In 1932, they were in a position living on their own farms far away from the Kremlin to disregard the Soviet system. So, a coverup was carefully organized by Stalin's Kremlin and the Ukraine's borders were sealed tight by the Red Army and the Soviet Secret Police. Moscow banned all travel by foreigners in Ukraine and especially all foreign correspondents.  The massive planned starvation killings, executions and exiles to Siberia began as their farms and livestock were taken by the Russian Communist State Government.

Stalin at the peak of the genocide, which was in March 1933 according to historians, Ukrainians were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day, 1,000 per hour or 17 every minute. Estimates of the total deaths vary from 5 to 10 million but 7 million deaths is the accepted figure. This was almost one-quarter of the population of Ukraine.  Stalin conducted a huge cover-up and keep from the world this genocide just when Hitler was coming into power during the 1930s himself. Ironically, in 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, Stalin joined the US and its allies to stave off the German march to Moscow to save his Communist regime.  History reports that Stalin did not admit the Urkrainan Holocost until the end of WW2 when he spoke to Winston Churchill about how he killed more Urkraines than Germans, sick stuff.

 The Vote - Who & How

Today I find the whole voter ID Card issue rather beside the point in our computerized age of "Cloud Computing" that can easily handle voter registration verification ID and voter choices tabulations simultaneously.  But until we are up and running in the cyber world, I still  have to show my photo ID when I return items to the store, when I go to the library to check out books, when I buy medicine at the local pharmacy, when I board an airplane, when I get a senior discount at the local theatre or restaurant, and often nowadays, when I buy things with my credit card and even when the police just simply ask for it.  My younger adult children have to show a Driver's License when they purchase wine or tobacco, go to a casino or go to clubs and for rated R movies too. Why shouldn’t we have to show a Photo ID card to avoid voter ballot fraud when we fulfill our civic duty to vote?

Many Liberals, however, applaud Eric Holder for trying toWho needs a Photo ID when you have a Voter Registration Card? invalidate lawsuits that allegedly suppress voters that ask voters to prove that they are eligible to vote.  Holder seems to think that voter fraud isn’t an issue, even though experience makes it clear that it is. Eight states now require state-issued identification at the polls, but Mr. Holder has put them on notice, worried that these states might violate the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Asking voters for driver’s licenses or state ID cards may apparently disenfranchise many homeless people even when their states offer to give them a tamper-proof state I.D. card for free when they have no car and driver's license. The Florida Senator Democrat, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, actually compares these Voter ID bills to modern-day Jim Crow Laws.  Debbie refers to the old racial, prejudicial voter and polling Jim Crow laws prevalent in the South until the laws were overturned by the 1960's voters' legislation.

I have one question for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Holder:  How do these people get through their daily life without a Photo ID card for buying basic goods and handling services like prescription medicine, banking transactions, doctor check-in or hospital admissions, employee ID for job hiring and programs for government assistance? Then, are these people the "informed voters", "jury peers", "fellow citizens" and "paying taxpayers" who are engaged and interested in civic community choices, policy matters, infrastructure building bonds and local or national elected officials? ...Yeah, right!  ...and more than likely could just vote for the named party-line officials whose workers drove them to the polls or gave them food or drink and just forget the rest of the junk on the ballot?

The Vote Count - Who & How

"For the first time, in the 2008 Mid-Term Elections, some form of electronic voting machine will tally ballots in all 50 states. This new digital democracy is the culmination of the federal 2002 Help America Vote Act — a nearly $4 billion upgrade of voting machines approved after the disastrous 2000 Florida presidential election, which infamously left the fate of our country literally hanging by a chad.

The new computers are designed to count votes faster and more accurately than the clunky old levered, punch card and butterfly ballot machines. And laudably, they will make it easier for tens of thousands of disabled voters to cast ballots. But the new electronic voting, or e-voting, machines also have raised as many questions as they have answered. And they all boil down to the very definition of a democracy: How can the public be sure that each vote counts?

The e-voting machines’ inherent lack of transparency and vulnerability to hackers, as demonstrated by Gonggrijp and other activists, led three European governments to warehouse tens of millions of dollars worth of computerized voting machines. As of last year, citizens in Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands are now back to using what former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern once referred to derisively as “stupid old pencils.”

The United States, of course, has taken a different tack. In spite of the flaws exposed by U.S.-based hackers and activists — groups such as Black Box Voting and Verified Voting — states here continued a spending spree on e-voting machines. And they did so unencumbered by federal oversight. As of now, there is no federal body monitoring problems with e-voting machines."

Larry Norden, a scholar of voting technology at New York University’s law school, finds it implausible that the same federal government that monitors consumer goods like baby powder and automobiles is asking us to blindly trust e-voting machines. “I think it’s outrageous,” he said. “To me, there’s no explanation for why we regulate toasters so much more thoroughly than we do a voting machine. This is our democracy. There are few things more important than voting and making sure that all votes are counted accurately.”[i]

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[i] The Vote Count - Who & How section attributes credit to:  "Das Vote" - Dan Rather October 26, 2010 - an excerpt from a programming snopsis that was extremely concise and well written.