America’s sham electoral process

By Stephen Lendman

Longstanding electoral fraud alone exposes fantasy democracy in America. The process lacks legitimacy.

America’s winner-take-all system lacks credibility. It’s borderline lawless.

In most countries if candidates from one party win 30% of the votes, they get 30% of legislative seats. Not in America where 50.1% takes all.

The Electoral College constitutes another systemic flaw. It’s fundamentally undemocratic.

Bush v. Gore stands out. Winning the popular vote doesn’t matter.

Gore also won an Electoral College majority. Final determination came months too late to matter. It didn’t matter.

Duopoly power runs America. Big Money owns it. Independent opposition has no chance. Voters have no say.

Numerous times under Electoral College rules, winning presidential candidates won a minority of votes.

Winner take all rules exclude runoffs. Popular favorites lose more times than people realize.

When half the electorate opts out, presidents can be elected with as little as 25.1% of eligible voters.

Past elections were rife with fraud as far back as 1824. Four major candidates contested.

All represented the Democratic-Republican party. Today they’re called Dems.

Platforms of both major parties spurn democracy. It’s always been that way.

The 1824 “Corrupt Bargain” settled things. Vote tallies produced no winner.

Andrew Jackson led with 42%. John Quincy Adams was second with 32%. Two other candidates had 13% each.

In the Electoral College, Jackson was 32 short of a majority. Under the 12th Amendment, House members chose a winner from the top three candidates.

Lobbying and back-room dealmaking went on furiously.

Weeks later, Adams got the minimum Electoral College count needed to win.

House galleries were outraged for good reason. Dealmakers won, not voters. Jackson should have been declared president but wasn’t.

He got a second chance. He became America’s seventh president.

In 1828, he defeated Adams soundly. In 1832, he won another term. He bested National Republican Henry Clay decisively.

In office, he vetoed congressional legislation granting the privatized Second Bank of the United States a 20-year charter.

Jefferson opposed the first US Bank. Both were 19th century versions of today’s Federal Reserve.

Jackson called the Second Bank a “hydra-headed monster” for good reason.

Along with other major central banks, the Fed wages financial war on humanity.

Subsequent elections were as fraudulent as the one Jackson lost. It’s an American tradition.

Media don’t explain.

Historian Robert Caro called Lyndon Johnson 1948 senatorial primary win the most blatant example of electoral theft in US history.

Ballot fraud was rife. Johnson was behind by 20,000 votes. Final tallies showed him winning by 87.

From the 19th century to today, electoral legitimacy was sorely lacking.

Today, elections are stolen with electronic ease. Corporate programmed and controlled machines vote, not people.

They choose winners, not enfranchised citizens.

Undercounts and overcounts are common. Many legitimate voters are stripped from rolls.

Jim Crow lives. Blacks and Latinos are most affected. Muslims are considered fifth column threats. Media say nothing.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act was supposed to curb discriminatory practices.

It prohibits states from imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure (that may) deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.”

It also established federal enforcement procedures. Most often it doesn’t matter.

In addition, no national standard applies. States choose their own electoral procedures. Discriminatory exclusion continues.

So do other gross electoral irregularities. US federal, state and local elections fail the smell test.

They’re woefully short of free, fair, and open. Money power controls them. Jimmy Carter once called America’s process “one of the worst…because of the excessive influx of money.”

The entire system is corrupt and dysfunctional. It has no legitimacy whatever. Presidential races constitute the apogean extreme of illegitimacy.

On the stump, candidates deliver prepackaged, prescripted slogans, sound bites, and other rehearsed rhetoric to win votes.

Focus-tested commercials proliferate. Candidate virtues and opponents’ shortcomings are exaggerated for maximum effect.

Debates are worse. Issues are avoided. What matters most isn’t discussed. A duplicitous charade substitutes. Voters are left entirely uninformed.

Until 1988, the nonpartisan League of Women Voters ran the process. Thereafter, both major parties usurped control through their Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).

Corporate money funds it. They get what they pay for.

Independent candidates and opinions are excluded.

In 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was shut out and threatened with arrest for showing up for the first debate.

Having a valid auxiliary viewing room ticket didn’t matter.

So-called presidential debates constitute scripted theater.

They feature prepackaged questions and answers. Issues mattering most aren’t discussed responsibly if at all.

Self-censorship is policy. Rules of engagement exclude truth and real debate.

Americans get the best “democracy” money can buy — the real thing banned from the nation’s inception.

Trump 16 points behind Biden weeks before Election Day, new polls shows

With less than a month remaining in the 2020 US presidential election, 57% of likely US voters say they back Joe Biden and 41% Donald Trump.

Stephen Lendman, born in 1934 in Boston, started writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.

He wrote this article for Press TV website.

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