Going into the 2000 race, it was well known that George Bush had many winning advantages over Al Gore – a brother governing a pivotal state, judges seated by his father, and a “purge” of 91,000 black Democrat votes, to name a few. Even then, however, the American majority opinion still settled to the left. But after the 2000-election debacle, the system that popularly made Bush lose is now under the knife by America’s only court-appointed president.

Election Day: 2004 looms in the not-too-distant future and Americans, once again, will go without closure on which candidate they actually voted for. Only this time, electoral chaos goes high-tech.

Electronic voting has been an initiative of the Bush Administration since day one. With the 2002 passing of the sweetly named “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA), electronic voting will sweep across the nation by the 2004 elections.

Ideally, with this new system, voters will now be able to use an “ATM-like” machine to cast their vote for the next president. The machine will automatically tally votes and the election will be determined in no time at all.

So, what’s the catch?

The catch is that because private companies have been contracted to manufacture these machines, the voter tally is technically in their hands as well.

In an even more pessimistic light, scientists from some of the top schools in the country already see this system as a complete joke. One Stanford computer science professor even described the e-voting system as “an unlocked bank vault,” and “a disaster waiting to happen.”

While some have already begun dismissing this as common technophobia, others have written it off as another anti-Bush initiative from the liberals. But the story behind these machines and their manufacturers are a cause for concern for those who take American democracy seriously. (Sadly, statistics show that’s only 58 percent of you.)

Three companies have a stake in the building of these machines -Diebold, Election Systems and Software (ES’S), and Sequoia – and all of them are in bed with the current administration.

The CEO of Diebold, Wally O’Dell, is one of Bush’s top fund-raisers. Diebold’s so-called “competitor,” ES’S employs Todd Urosevich as VP. Urosevich owes his career to an investor named Howard Ahmanson, who staked his fortune for Todd and his brother Bob in the vote-tally business.

Ahmanson currently holds vast shares in ES’S and is a prominent Christian Reconstructionist – a movement that openly supports a totalitarian theocracy of American society. (I recommend reading “The Handmaid’s Tale” for reference.)

The third company, Sequoia, had already been involved in a corruption scandal involving bribed officials in the state of Louisiana via Mob front-companies. Enough said.

The machines have already been put to the test in a handful of states for the 2002 elections and, needless to say, the results were “right” on target.

In Snyder, Texas, Republicans won the 2002 election in a landslide, according to the tally of voting machines there. Later, it was found that a chip in the main computer had been defective and after being replaced, showed that Democrats had won by wide margins. A hand recount also verified this.

In Florida, “misaligned” touchscreens on these machines had led to people voting for Jeb Bush, while intending to vote Democrat. The problem of misaligned screens has now been confirmed in 18 other machines in Dallas.

One Florida Democrat had challenged the machines’ tallies by taking the case to court in order to examine the machines. The judge knocked the suit down by claiming that the hardware and software of voting machines were “trade secrets” of the company. So, there is no real way of telling how these machines work, if they are working at all.

The machines also leave no paper trail, and the provisions of the HAVA say that the only legitimate recount will be a single paper record of the machine’s tallied votes. Makes perfect sense.

Another anomaly was the amount of lobbying that the HAVA got by the military industrial complex. What stakes did Lockheed-Martin have in lobbying for this poor excuse of a bill – a bill that offers no protection to Americans from historically fraudulent, religiously zealous, politically biased companies and interest groups?

Has America now stepped into the electronic age of Stalinizing an election where archaic methods like hanging chads and racial profiling are no longer needed? Perhaps Bush has improved something after all.