Companion stories today on Truthout and Alternet, different authors, the same question: was the Iranian election rigged? Then came the response of the Obama administration: we don’t buy Ahmadinejad’s claim of a “landslide” victory.

Well, that’s pretty fucking rich.

Personally, I have no opinion on the Iranian deal because I haven’t examined whatever evidence there is, but I do have an opinion about crooked elections in the United States. That’s a subject I know something about.

America’s electoral history is, of course, chock-full of great stories. There’s Landslide Lyndon Johnson’s 87-vote Senate seat election and Box 13, and there’s Richard J. Daley’s notorious ballot stuffing in Chicago which arguably swung Illinois in 1960 and thereby elected Jack Kennedy.

There’s the 2000 election, where Bush won a first term only because hundreds of thousands of blacks were disenfranchised, Florida was flat-out lifted, and a compromised Supreme Court ordered the recount stopped.

But in 2004, all previous thefts were reduced to insignificance in the most collossal invalidation of a free election in history. And nobody in government or the mainstream media seemed very interested.

I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth repeating. Many political people knew by midnight on election day that the 2004 vote was rigged. The reason they knew this is that political people know how exit polls are conducted and what they mean.

I remember that night very well. I’d already learned during the day of massive lines and extraordinary turnouts in Democratic strongholds throughout the nation. Coupled with the pre-election polling trends, this indicated a probable landslide for John Kerry. Early returns validated it. Then came the exit polls.

What pols know about exit polls is that they are better than 99% accurate. Always. A one percent difference between an exit poll and the actual reported vote would be considered an anomaly.

On election night, 2004, exit polls showed a Kerry landslide in both popular and electoral votes. It was over. George Bush, looking at the same numbers, was despondent. But then something odd happened.

In one state after another, notably in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Colorado, and three other “battleground states”, the announced votes were between 6 and 8 percent different from the exit poll results, and in each case the reported numbers showed the switch from Kerry to Bush. In six of these states, the switch was enough to give the electoral votes to the President, completely altering the national outcome.

Having once been deeply involved in politics, I was familiar with exit polls. I was familiar with the methodology. Watching the returns at a dinner party at a friend’s home in Mill Valley, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Later that night, on the internet, I accessed the exit polls as first reported on CNN and compared them with the returns. The pattern was unmistakable. In 43 states, the returns mirrored the exit poll percentages exactly. In 7, they were wildly divergent, all in Bush’s favor. The first statisticians who looked at this were stunned. A Pennsylvania professor wrote that the odds against this happening were, roughly, 100,000,000-to-1.

It turned out that many people noticed the same thing and were alarmed at the implications. But the mass media ignored both the evidence and the clamor. What little controversy there was seemed to center on the more traditional methods of vote theft, with voting machines unavailable in urban or college town precincts, voting lines that ran for more than a mile in some places in Ohio, hundreds of thousands of uncounted ‘provisional’ ballots (nearly all of these cast by non-whites) in Ohio, and wholesale disenfranchisement in states such as Florida, where private companies were hired by Republican Secretaries of State to “purge” voter rollsof likely Democratic voters.

There were the occasional stories of weird returns, such as counties in Virginia where voting machines began to count backwards, and Ohio, where more votes were said to have been cast for George Bush in one town than its total population. But when it came to the larger question, the mass media just danced around.

I wrote an op-ed piece for the local newspaper; the editor, an old friend, told me that they wouldn’t run it. It was crazy, he said. And he pointed to an article in the New York Times which cursorily noted the charges some were making and then dismissed them as the ravings of the lunatic fringe.

Okay, I can work with that. I’d been relegated to the fringe so often in 40-plus years of adult life that I was comfortable out there.

But then the scary shit began to surface. First came the “undervotes”. An undervote is what it’s called when a voter marks his or her ballot for some candidates but not others. For obvious reasons, the highest number of cast votes is at the top of the ballot, with undervotes showing up in small increments further down, e.g. a voter who selects a candidate for President and another for Governor may skip the choice for state treasurer.

Typically, undervotes are a very, very small percentage. But in 2004, in key precincts in Florida and Ohio, especially, the undervotes reported for President were as high as SEVENTY percent. This means that in those places, seventy percent of those who actually voted in other races, supposedly skipped the Bush-Kerry race.

Nationwide, the undervote numbers in several districts in “battleground states” ran to the hundreds of thousands. That is a conservative estimate. Some investigators believe the true number is in the millions.

Then there were the numerous reported instances of ‘vote-flipping’, where voters saw their electronic, touch-screen votes for Kerry register as votes for George Bush.

To ignore the widespread and incontrovertible evidence of electronic fraud, the mass media and the politicians committed a criminal conspiracy. There is no doubt that it occasioned fierce arguments behind closed doors. One such argument is reported to have taken place between Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards. Edwards was furious and demanded that Kerry go public, that they challenge the legitimacy of the election. Kerry demurred. It would cause a constitutional crisis, Kerry said, to which Edwards is said to have replied, “So what!?”

In my lifetime I’ve witnessed several conspiracies deprive the nation of its elected leaders. Each time, the official story, while ludicrous under sober examination, was accorded august authority, sanctified on the networks, written into “history” books and taught to the next generation. This is how empires control the public mind.

Few people have the time or inclination to get into it. Those who do are subject to dismissal as crackpots. No one wants to be thought a crackpot; much easier to ‘prove’ your sanity by going along with what you’ve been told.

Over the years, one claim I’ve heard is this one: if these things had been conspiracies, someone would’ve talked. What’s so utterly sad about this argument is that the person offering it is unaware of the fact, the plain, unvarnished fact that people have talked; you just don’t get to learn of it. And even when it reaches the popular press, it’s mostly dismissed. Perhaps you recall the deathbed confession of E. Howard Hunt. This was actually covered in Rolling Stone, but it was ignored everywhere else. Hunt was dying. He told his son about Dallas and what he knew of the assassination of John Kennedy.

Old news, apparently. Yawn.

Not so old news: people have now come forward to talk about how they were recruited to build a fool-proof computer program for electronically rigging the 2004 presidential election.

There is a documentary called “Uncounted” which you must see. In it, that election is examined in detail, everything from systematic disenfranchisement to the hundreds of thousands –– perhaps millions –– of uncounted and/or thrown away “provisional” ballots. And then comes the testimony of men who were hired to rig the touch-screen voting machines. In Florida, one was asked by Congressman Tom Feeney to create a ‘back door’ program which would alter votes and make itself untraceable.

Watching these people talk about it is gut-wrenching. These were Republicans, conservatives, people who supported George Bush and Dick Cheney and believed in them. But in a couple of cases these were also people who believed in America, people who were self-described conservatives. They are obviously in shock. They still can’t believe that it happened, yet it happened to them.

If you watch this film, you will know these men are not lying. But let’s assume that they might be. Doesn’t it seem logical that, on an issue which strikes at the very heart of a free society, we’d want to know? Wouldn’t it seem obvious that exploring their veracity, at the very least, was worth the trouble?

The history we are taught is a false history when it comes to matters of empire. Perhaps in a hundred years it will be thought not to matter. Everyone involved will be long dead. Even the JFK murder, where evidence was destroyed wholesale and plenty more was locked up for fifty years by government order, is considered to have taken place so long ago that it no longer bears on our own lives.

It’s easy to let the matter slide these days. After all, with the ongoing destruction of the middle class, the transformation of the United States into Banana Republic Empire, and the theft of everything else that isn’t nailed down –– and they’re prying the nails out of what is –– there are other matters to worry about. Plus, Obama won, right? So what difference does it make now? 2004 is history.

But, however convenient such an excuse might be, and however much false comfort we might derive from it, that’s a dangerous conclusion. Because in our world, in our country, right now, criminal conspiracies are being hatched, not only by some local thugs who ‘plan’ to stick up a bank but by corporate thugs who plan to stick up the nation.

They do it because they can get away with it. They get away with it because the rest of us choose ignorance and selective amnesia.

So forgive me for being amused at the U.S. government’s and news media’s outrage at what is happening in Iran. And forgive me for wondering why some people, in some nations, unlike in America, care enough about their rights, their freedoms, and their countries to demand an accounting.