SedonaEye.com J. Rick Normand, Investigative and Financial Columnist

Sedona AZ – I grew up on the north side of Lincoln Drive at about 40th Street in Phoenix and, just on the south side of Lincoln Drive at the same longitude, was Senator Barry Goldwater’s house. My sister in the mid-1970s was, and still is to this day, a corporate ranch manager who then managed Senator Goldwater’s horses. I got to know him personally, not on a first name basis, but was invited into his home several times. He wrote a testimonial letter in my behalf, on U.S. Senate letterhead, asking then-Senator John Tower of Texas to employ me on his (Tower’s) Congressional staff. I always addressed Senator Goldwater as “Senator.”

One thing I learned from Senator Goldwater was that certain prominent Republicans have some allies in the Democrat Party who are, for the duration of a venerated career, closer to them than fellow Republicans while Democrats have the same relationships with certain Republicans. These opposed party alliances are comprised of friends who have the exact same political belief-systems, the same deep-state bureaucratic enablers, the same contacts, the same media supporters, the same donors, the same judicial support, and the same legislative goals while their only difference is…their party label! Upon learning this I began to realize that there exists in this country a Democrat-Republican paradigm wherein both parties argue over cosmetic issues while never touching upon those significant differences that could divide the country…as happened during the American Civil War.

In other words, no one from either party is allowed to step outside the universal ground rules.

And, voters are led to believe that they have a choice since they’re never apprised of the cloaked mutually-defined and respected interlocking dual-party ground rules. Usually, most presidential elections are played within these commonly accepted ground rules. But only the elections of 1860 and this one we’ve all just participated in did not have both opponents agreeable to the same hidden ground rules. 

Whether vote rigging is occurring or not, there is now a distinct possibility that the Federal Election Commission, as well as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, are not capable of fair election regulation since modern international and domestic hacktivist threat actors have the online capability, the personnel talent pool, the funding, and the cross-border banking/commercial and political connections to put into play robust vote rigging scenarios.

Only enough popular votes need be rigged in our six largest “battleground” states, coupled with a few of our largest cities, to make it easy for presidential elections to always be determined by the same few states and cities, leaving the votes of the remainder of the country’s states virtually nullified. In other words, your vote, if you’re an Arizonan, is not of the same weight and importance as a California vote just next door. 

Here’s the recipe for the handlers of the Democrat-Republican false adversarial paradigm to enable them to manipulate the presidential election popular vote:

(1) Publish a poll contrived to suggest the result you are going to bring about.

(2) Manipulate the voting machines to bring about precisely your desired outcome.

How do the politicians of both parties get away with it? It’s as easy as determining, on the basis of honest polling, who is going to win. Then, if it isn’t your candidate, simply have the votes for the other guy be given digitally to your guy and vice versa. You keep the total vote the same. Few federal or state regulators can recognize the slight-of-hand.

Since 1987, the Media Research Center (MRC) has been the nation’s premier media watchdog. They don’t endorse politicians or lobby for legislation. The Media Research Center (MRC) has recently announced its findings of a new post-election 2016 poll on what actual voters thought about the media’s influence on the 2016 presidential race. The MRC/YouGov poll was conducted on November 9 and 10.

Key findings:

• in 10 (69%) voters do not believe the news media are honest and truthful.
• in 10 (78%) voters believe the news coverage of the presidential campaign was biased, especially though polling projections.

About that NBC/WSJ Clinton +11 Point Poll lead that didn’t materialize on election night…

♦ Republican and those leaning Republican 36%

♦ Democrat and those leaning Democrat 43%

♦ Independents 12% 

Above you can see precisely why the 2016 presidential election polls were so miserably inaccurate and misleading. Nevertheless, the participating 2016 presidential election polls were intended to influence the voting decisions of the registered voters in the large battleground states and cities. In other words, the mainstream media polls were designed to illicitly affect the popular vote since many voters want to vote with their perception of the winning side. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what the problem was in this poll. By the way the obvious problem, with this most prestigious of polls, was prevalent throughout the entirety of the polling and media industries. By itself, this ideological snapshot is just plain silly. Nationally the party registration is actually  32% (D), 27% (R), and 40% (I).

If you live in one of the 44 smallest states, or outside the top 20 largest cities, or in rural America, or you don’t meet the preferred demographic profile, you’d just as well not waste your time voting in national presidential elections…that is if not for the Constitutionally prescribed Electoral College. 

Retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, just introduced “long-shot-odds” legislation on November 15 to scrap the Electoral College, in the latest protest from Democrats following last week’s election wherein Hillary Clinton appeared to win the popular vote despite losing the election to Donald Trump. Trump, as with all presidential election victors, won the election because he garnered the most Electoral College votes. “This is the only office in the land where you can get more votes and still lose the presidency. The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately,” said Boxer, who apparently thinks she is smarter than the entirety of our Founding Fathers, in a statement after trying to effect the change she wants through an unconstitutional method.

Three million invalid votes in the recent U.S. presidential election were cast by illegal aliens and/or non-citizens, according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization after completing an analysis of an 180-million-voter-registrations database. Contemporaneously, President Obama, in a shocking interview replayed on Fox News by host Neil Cavuto, actually seemed to suggest that illegals should vote – and that if they did, they wouldn’t be caught and deported.

Meanwhile, The Hill, the prestigious beltway publication, said “A recent study by Stanford University proved that Hillary Clinton’s campaign rigged the system to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.” Worse, what was done to Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin, especially, is stunning. The issue here is both voter fraud which is limited but does happen and election theft through the manipulation of the computerized voting machines, particularly the DIEBOLD/PES voting machines in wide usage in most states which are manufactured by Diebold Security Systems, Inc. This is not to mention the potential of possible use of London-based Smartmatic voting machines whose Chairman, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, sits on the Global Board of the Open Society Foundation, an international grant-making network founded by George Soros who is the billionaire left-wing activist that sponsors groups like MoveOn.org and Black Lives Matter, as well as several foreign leftist revolutionary organizations like the illegal coup government of the Ukraine. Wouldn’t you think this type of conflict-of-interest should face legal constraints? Well, it doesn’t!

Think about this quote from The Hill:

“You’ve heard the old adage ‘follow the money.’ I follow the vote, and wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to … make bad things happen.” – Steve Stigall, CIA cyber-security expert, in remarks to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission 

POLITICO profiled a highly published college professor in the field of voting fraud who has demonstrated how the electronic voting machines that are most widely used today can be hacked in five minutes or less! His name is Robert Fitrakis who has co-written a must-read book on the “strip and flip technique” used to rig these machines. This book, written in collaboration with Harvey Wasserman, is entitled “THE STRIP & FLIP SELECTION OF 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft.” Professor Fitrakis is a progressive liberal and Green Party activist, as well as a Political Science Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College, where he won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991. He was a Ford Foundation Fellow to the Michigan State Legislature in 1975 and studied at the University of Sarajevo on scholarship in 1978. Fitrakis earned a J.D. from the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law in 2002. To wit, he says the Diebold AccuVote-TS Touchscreen voting machine that he recently analyzed was found to be running malicious software on a single voting machine that could be installed in as little as one minute, spreading invisibly from machine to machine through a virus, while stealing votes with little risk of detection. 

While recent laws have limited essential hand-counting audits, in some cases actually making them illegal, 18 states operate voting machines that produce no paper ballot at all, making verification of the results impossible. This is where the “strip and flip” technique described by Professor Fitrakis comes in. We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls. The computerized voting machines can be hacked and rigged and, after the experience of Bernie Sanders, there is no reason to believe they won’t be again. In other words, as mentioned above, the U.S. Federal Election Commission doesn’t really know the true popular vote totals. So much for a reported “close popular vote!”

Notwithstanding, in light of all the aforementioned, how many of you remember the United States presidential election of 2000? The contest was between Republican candidate George W. Bush and  Democratic candidate Al Gore. The 2000 presidential election was the fourth of five elections in U.S. history and the first, in 112 years, in which the eventual winner failed to win the popular vote (after the elections of 1824, 1876, and 1888, but prior to the election of 2016). It was the closest presidential election in the nation’s history, with a .009% margin, 537 votes, separating the two candidates in the decisive “battleground” state of Florida.

Florida’s narrow margin triggered a mandatory recount. Litigation in select counties proliferated into additional recounts, and thus, this litigation ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court. The Court’s contentious 5–4 decision in Bush v. Gore, announced on December 12, 2000, ended the recounts, effectively awarding Florida’s votes to Bush and granting him the victory. Studies have reached conflicting conclusions about who would have won the recount had it been allowed to proceed. Remember the “hanging chads” of disputed paper ballots? Conflicting conclusions would have been the outcome alright, along with a Constitutional Crisis!

Are you beginning to see the risks involved with a simple popular majority election vote determinant?

Our Founding Fathers, in their document–crafting genius, suspected future vote-rigging would be the case if they should build a simple popular vote into our Republic’s constitutional presidential selection process and leave it at that. 

So why did our Founding Fathers adopt the Electoral College presidential election/selection voting concept in the first place? They knew what they were doing! The Electoral College was created for two reasons: The first purpose was to create a buffer between our population and the selection of a President. The Founding Fathers were afraid of direct election to the Presidency. They feared a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come to power (Federalist 68). Isn’t that what’s going on in this present day? The second was part of the structure of the government that gave extra power to the smaller states in order to prevent a tyranny of an oligarchy incorporated where the location of major job-producing industries attracts the most voters!

Furthermore, Hamilton and the other founders believed that the electors would be able to insure that only a qualified person becomes President. They believed that with the Electoral College no one would be able to manipulate the citizenry. It would act as check on an electorate that might otherwise be duped by the media which, today, is all-pervasive, all day, every day, in our homes.

Furthermore, the Electoral College is also part of certain compromises made at the convention to satisfy the small states. Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representatives in Congress, thus no state could have less then 3.

If not for this time-tested 240+ year system, just our six largest states would always determine who the President of the United States would be and the vital interests of the rest of us would never, ever, see the light of day. 

While there are clear problems with the Electoral College, as well as some major advantages to it, changing it is very unlikely. It would take a constitutional amendment ratified by 3/4 of the State’s Legislatures to change the system. Remember, the 50 states have constitutional dual-sovereignty with the federal government. It is hard to imagine the smaller states agreeing to an electoral procedure that would weaken them even further as against the largest states. Also, it would be difficult, but not impossible, to get other states to change their systems since the party that has the advantage in each state is unlikely to agree to a unilateral change. Senator Boxer of California is obviously quite naive as to Constitutional election law.

The Electoral College is not outdated, but rather, is better than ever at accomplishing its originally intended purpose. The next time you hear a televised talking-head or ill-advised fanatical supporter of any candidate argue for the abolition of the Electoral College, you’ll know how to defend it since simple popular vote majorities, which are almost impossible to confirm in this electronic age anyway, can lead to a tyranny of industrial and banking oligarchs domiciled in the six largest states who can manipulate most voter’s ideologies and belief-systems starting with those implied in our nation’s public education system.

This SedonaEye.com column was initially published November 21, 2016 and is reposted today at J. Rick Normand request: The 2016 article received 48 comments now deleted, with the exception of author (JRN) 2016 adjunct comments.