The November 2012 issue of Harper’ Magazine includes an article title, “How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. Aims to Paint the Country Red.” Unfortunately, the article by Victoria Collier is not available online in its entirety. Here’s a tiny excerpt of an extraordinary article that will leave you with a pit in your stomach and the phrase “faith based vote counting” resonating in your mind:

Blockbuster allegations are perhaps unsurprising given the group of Beltway insiders who helped to pass [the Help America Vote Act]. One central player was former Republican representative Bob Ney of Ohio, sentenced in 2006 to thirty months in prison for crimes connected with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff—whose firm was paid at least $275,000 by Diebold. HAVA’s impact has been huge, accelerating a deterioration of our electoral system that most Americans have yet to recognize, let alone understand. We are literally losing our ballot—the key physical proof of our power as citizens.

Here’s another haunting excerpt:

The statistically anomalous shifting of votes to the conservative right has become so pervasive in post-HAVA America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the “red shift.”

This article should be required reading for all of those who want to simply assume that the will of the majority is being honored throughout the United States. Those who have investigated this issues over the past few elections have identified red flags everywhere they look when it comes to counting the vote.

The Harper’s article mentions a non-profit organization geared to making sure that every vote counts: Election Defense Fund. A peek at the EDF homepage provides this information:

According to the “father of exit polling,” the late Warren Mitofsky, exit polls are intended solely for academic analysis of voting patterns and opinions (e.g., what did 25 to 34 year-old white males regard as the most important issue?) and not as any sort of check on the validity of the votecounts. Unless, of course, you are anywhere else on Earth (other than America), where exit polls are routinely employed, often with the sanction of the government of the United States, as just such a check mechanism, and have frequently led to official calls for electoral investigations and indeed electoral re-dos.

In America, where votecounts in competitive and significant races consistently come out to the right of the exit polls (it is called the “red shift”), the media machine has waved off the exit polls, concluding, without so much as a quick peek under the hood of the vote-counting computers, that the exit polls must be “off” because they “oversample Democrats,” conclusive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. We’re the Beacon Of Democracy, dammit–we don’t need no stinkin’ exit polls! We’re “one nation under God” so our elections must be honest!