SOURCE: http://www.truth-out.org

RICK: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
POLICE CAPTAIN RENAULT: I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
CROUPIER (handing Renault a pile of money): Your winnings, sir.
CAPTAIN RENAULT: Oh, thank you, very much… Everybody out, at once!
(Scene from the movie Casablanca.)

If there is anything positive to say about the 2016 elections, it’s that they have finally forced an end to the official denial of computerized election rigging. In the past month, the fact that our voting technology is a hacker’s paradise has been validated by no less than all the major TV news networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, USA Today,The Hill, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Politico, and a dozen other outlets.

Of course, the corporate media and political parties are now professing “shock” at the very prospect that US elections can be manipulated, and yes, even stolen. 

Yet it has long been an open secret that game-changing races have been decided not by voters, but by insiders; from the presidential race of 1960, appropriated for John Kennedy by Democratic muscle in Chicago, to the two victories secured for George W. Bush by GOP fixers in Florida and hackers in Ohio. Among other suspect elections in recent years are key Congressional races hijacked by combinations of voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and the ugly little secret of American elections: rigged voting machines.

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, “Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016.”