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Entry: Did Vladimir Putin Steal Anne Applebaum's Wallet? Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/did_vladimir_putin_steal_anne_applebaums_wallet#3117 Post contents: BRITISH ELECTORAL FRAUD. from -- http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2149/81/ QUOTE--" "magine this scenario: In the upcoming Venezuelan elections polls show the main opposition party with a clear lead; each one of the country’s large circulation newspapers is editorially hostile to the opposition, producing a barrage of propaganda which culminates in alarmist front page stories on election day; newspapers carry explicit instructions on voting for the ruling party; the president personally intervenes in various constituencies to dissuade citizens from voting against his party; the ballot design is confusing, and invariably favours the governing party and 7 percent of all votes cast are spoilt as a result; the governing party wins seats no one expected it to, and when in one instance the result is challenged, the recount brings victory for the opposition; the electronic counting machines, it transpires, are provided by a company with links to former leaders of the ruling party. International election monitors declare the electoral process a disgrace. Were this to transpire in Venezuela – or for that matter any country with policies at odds with Washington and her allies – the international media (read Anglo-American media) would be up in arms. There would be widespread condemnation of the process; rivers of ink would spill forth on the deficiencies of the country’s democratic tradition; expert-commentators would expatiate on the flaws in its citizens’ character. In the event, none of this came to pass because the country in question was not Venezuela, but Scotland and the protests of a feeble few soon dropped off the column inches and airwaves of Britain’s docile media. Even by ‘Third World’ standards, the elections were a farce. Preceded by months of tabloid propaganda verging on the defamatory, the establishment resorted to its time tested strategy of wholesale scaremongering. Support for the SNP was gradually eroded through months of hostile coverage exaggerating the costs of independence and the proposed replacement for the hated community charge. However, by election day support for SNP, though diminished, was still widespread enough to lead major tabloids to attempt one final act of sabotage: Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Record – three rags with circulations exceeding those of all the rest combined – synchronized their attacks on their front pages; one depicting the SNP symbol as a noose, another calling party leader Alex Salmond ‘the man who wants to destroy Great Britain’, and the third sporting a sinister image of Salmond. For International NGOs – several deriving funds from the most unsavoury of sources – ‘free speech’ figured as the single most important issue in their condemnations with the issue being stripped of its political context. Perhaps understandably, as some of the more vocal ones – Inter American Press Association (IAPA), Reporters Without Borders (RWB), Article 19 – either have a history of association with the CIA (IAPA), or are funded by the State Department and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office through NED and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (RWB, Article 19) – all entities invested in the earlier failed coup. If free speech were really the issue, their energies would be better spent fighting threats to it closer home, such as the muzzling of media on Iraq; the Hutton Inquiry; or the gagging of the press through the Official Secrets Act (as in the case of the Mirror, which was gagged after publishing contents of a memo revealing Bush confiding his wish to bomb Al Jazeera’s offices in Qatar to Tony Blair. Leo O'Connor and David Keogh, the whistleblowers, have been subsequently), so on and so forth. While it is nearly impossible to find a Scottish voter who publicly professes support for Labour, and while early forecasts had predicted a Labour rout, its curiously narrow defeat understandably surprised many. One could attribute this to New Labour’s successful use of scare tactics – and the ‘money and muscle poured into key seats to fend off the SNP’, as Michel White of the Guardian put it – but the deeply flawed electoral process suggests it may have taken more than scary headlines to diminish the scale of its defeat. Against expert advice the Labour-controlled Scottish executive chose to hold both local council and national elections on the same day. In the ensuing chaos, there were the technical problems of the electronic counting machines, organizational problems of the electoral ballots not delivered on time in sufficient quantities, and the design problems of a ballot with two different voting systems on a single sheet. While it is acknowledged that nearly 140,000 votes – almost 7 percent of the total cast – were spoilt, it has yet to be confirmed if there are any discernible trends (other than the fact that the vote rejection invariably disadvantaged smaller parties). As the Guardian reported, in Edinburgh Central, “Labour's deputy environment minister, Sarah Boyack, held her seat with a majority of 1,193 but there were 1,501 rejected papers. In Glasgow Baillieston, the rejected total of 1,850 was more than 10% of the votes accepted, and most constituencies saw at least 1,000 papers rejected - 10 times the norm.” On the rare occasion where a result was challenged, it once again transpired that the ‘irregularity’ favoured the ruling party, casting further doubts over the transparency of the process. If it weren’t for a timely intervention by an SNP candidate – David Thompson of Highlands and Islands – which led to a recount reversing the result handing the seat to a Labour candidate, Blairites would still be in power. The commission’s excuse for the blunder did little to alleviate concern. The computer file was ‘misread’ by ‘exhausted vote counters’, it claimed. Further questions are raised by the fact that Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, sits as a non-Executive Director on the board of DRS, the firm providing the electronic vote counting machines at the middle of this controversy." Sent at: 2008 10 12