By Greg Szymanski

 The name Saxby Chambliss means nothing to most Americans.

 And after reading the freshman Senator from Georgia's voting record, it should mean even less.

 How he made it to the Senate is even less impressive? In fact, he might have been the GOP's first "test monkey" to see if electronic voting fraud really worked?

 In November 2002, then U.S. Congressman Chambliss, decided to challenge the popular democrat and Vietnam war hero, incumbent Sen. Max Cleland. He had long been a thorn in the Republican side, the GOP looking for any possible way to silence Cleland's anti-administration voice.

 A three-prong strategy was then set into motion:

 First, run a republican loyalist like Chambliss who will vote the party line. Next, wage a highly negative campaign to discredit Cleland's patriotism even though he was a triple-amputee and highly decorated war hero.

 Lastly, if the first two don't work, then like any good "underhanded Texas poker player," stack the deck, pull an ace from under your sleeve and cheat!

 And it appears the GOP finally stacked the deck to get Chambliss elected.

 Like a totalitarian dictator once said "the power doesn't really lie in the people who cast the votes, but in the people who count them," the GOP somehow rallied in the 9^th inning to upset Cleland.

 In baseball terms, Chambliss came from 10 runs down to win it in the bottom of the 9^th.

 From the conservative viewpoint, they called it an impressive hitting attack.

 Others called it something much different. They called it cheating. They called it electronic voter fraud. They called it manipulating the democratic system with a flip of an electronic switch.

 But like any sly poker player accused of cheating, Chambliss just stared his opponents down with a typical poker face and boasted: "Show me the proof?"

 And Critics complain there never can be any proof, since the electronic voting system approved for use in Georgia, provided absolutely no paper trail to check the final results.

 The absurdity of such a thing actually taking place is beyond belief in a democratic system based on checks and balances. It's basically like allowing  high school kids to take a test without a proctor or saying no one's entitled to a receipt on a credit card purchase. It's simply absurd!

 But that's the way the Chambliss election went down: No paper trail or possible way to verify the official results.

 And the absurdity actually worked so well for Chambliss, why not do it again in the 2004 Presidential election.

 Look at the case of Chambliss first:

 Although lagging badly in the polls only days prior to the election and the exit polls indicating a decisive Cleland victory at hand, Chambliss somehow pulls out a miraculous 11^th hour victory.

 How could the polls be so wrong?

  How?

 The poll-takers simply didn't take into consideration who counted the votes. The polls simply made the mistake of putting the power in the hands of the voter instead of the vote counter. Then to make matters worse, they take the blame for the errors, since there is no way to prove otherwise.

 Although no proof exists, if this type of thing went down at a wild west Texas poker table the accused culprit - Chambliss - would have been shot dead proof or no proof, the cheating so obvious it baffles the mind.

 But, instead, everybody asks "how" and looks at the results dumbfounded like a bunch of city slickers sipping on a Tom Collins in a hard-drinking Texas bar.

 The "how" lies in the simple fact the Republican controlled election rules allow for a vote tabulation without a paper trail. It allows for no credible way to check the results. It allows for the possibility of easy cheating. It allows, like the totalitarian dictator proclaimed years ago, for the power to be in the hands of the vote counter not the voter himself.

 In this case, not only was there a lack of a paper trail, but Diebold Inc., the company who made the machines and installed the software, had been reported to be deeply loyal and firmly in the pocket of the Republican Party.

 Although no hard evidence exists, Chambliss obviously had the deck stacked in his favor, not only having one ace but four aces under his sleeve during the whole election.

  He had Republican partisans make the rules, make the machines, count the votes, provide for no verifiable results and then declare him the winner?

 And now almost two months after the Presidential election, we are seeing the same system used all over again with underhanded Republican companies providing the voting machines that counted an estimated one-third of the entire vote, as well as a majority of votes tabulated in the so-called crucial battleground states..

 In fact, a new Harris poll now indicates one in five Americans don't believe the election was legitimate, citing electronic voting without a paper trail as the main reason.

 Also, University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven Freeman in a recent article entitled "the Unexplained Exit Pole Discrepancy, claims the chance that exit poles were all wrong in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania comes to about 250 million to one.

 Even Dick Morris, a Republican consultant for Fox News, said:

 "Exit polls are almost never wrong…They cannot be wrong across the board as they were on election night and I suspect foul play."

 And it's interesting to note that the Associated Press has reported on numerous occasions that the exit poll irregularities are "clear examples of voter fraud in the Ukraine" but failed to allege the same took place in our own elections.

 The Associated Press has also failed to mention that American democracy has been cheapened, almost destroyed, by privatized Republican-owned voting companies that have been allowed to function without any meaningful federal or state regulations.

 It has also failed to mention that Republicans have blocked legislation requiring that electronic voting machines produce a back-up paper trail as well as trying to sponsor new legislation outlawing any type of exit polling due to obvious irregularities.

 And as journalist Colleen Redman pointed out in a recent voting fraud article, it's hard to imagine Presidential 2004 election results have not been manipulated by the Republican Party after listening to what Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist David Suskind said a top White House official told him:

 "Your part of the reality based community, one who believes that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.

 "That's not the way the world works anymore. We're an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And why you are studying that reality - judiciously as you will - we will act again, creating other realities, which you can study, too."

 With this in mind, the suggested course of study is as follows:

 Closely study the moves of the underhanded Texas poker player as he pulls out four aces from under his sleeve.

 And the next time you catch him at his "dirty tricks," call him a cheat before the votes are counted since this poker player never leaves hard evidence or any paper trail whatsoever.

Greg Szymanski