The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don't count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to th… - Greg Palast

In the days following the presidential election (of 2000), there were so many stories of African Americans erased from voter rolls you might think they were targeted by some kind of racial computer program. They were. I have a copy of it: two silvery CD-ROM disks right out of the office computers of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Once decoded and flowed into a database, they make for interesting, if chilling, reading. They tell us how our president (George W. Bush) was elected – and it wasn’t by the voters.

Secretary of State Harris declared George W. Bush winner of Florida, and thereby president, by a plurality of 537 votes over Al Gore... Over 50,000 voters wrongly targeted by the purge, mostly Blacks. My BBC researchers reported that Gore lost at least 22,000 votes as a result of this smart little black-box operation. The first reports of this extraordinary discovery ran, as you’d expect, on page one of the country’s leading paper. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong country: Britain. In the USA, it ran on page zero – the story was simply not covered in American newspapers. The theft of the presidential race in Florida also grabbed big television coverage. But again, it was the wrong continent: on BBC Television, broadcasting from London worldwide – everywhere, that is, but the USA. Was this some off-the-wall story that the British press misreported? Hardly. The chief lawyer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission called it the first hard evidence of a systematic attempt to disenfranchise Florida’s Black voters. So why was this story investigated, reported and broadcast only in Europe, for God’s sake?

It isn't done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast.