Joseph Stalin Quotes
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.
Joseph Stalin, 1879-1953, Russian Premier, Quoted in Robert G. Torricelli, Quotations for Public Speakers : A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology, 2001
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Although this is generally attributed to Stalin, there is no writing of his that has the quotation. So some believe that this quotation is apocryphal.
Florida’s vote counting system was extremely primitive and highly subjective, and no one could really ever tell whether Al Gore or George W. Bush ever won the state whose electoral votes determined the election of 2000. The Supreme Court finally decided that Bush would be president, but no one wanted such a situation to ever happen again. Blackwell had better technology in Ohio in the next election but Ohio various techniques were used to keep some Blacks from voting.
The President and many others feared a combination of voter ignorance and illiteracy together with vote buying, and voter fraud. Laws were advocated to clean up elections and outlawing paying for votes. Also literacy tests for voters were instituted but while for many the intention was noble, many of the Southern states used the voter literacy issue as a way of having subjective literacy tests to keep Blacks from voting.
They were voting on ignoring the fraudulent vote count in Dallas County, Alabama. The counter argument was that it would disenfranchise those honest voters of the country whose votes would not then be counted.
Zt the time he made this statement, some Russians—probably with the blessing of the Russian government—had been hacking the e-mail computers of the Democratic National Committee and making embarrassing e-mails public through Wikileaks. Many Americans were concerned at the possibility that Russia, another nation, or a non-state group could hack into the voting machines and the computers that tally the votes. This statement was made to reassure them. There are 9000 different polling places where Americans can vote in a Presidential election. There is no single entity that anyone could hack to rig the vote counts. And there is no uniformity in the voting machines used, the tabulating and aggregating methods and machines, and the software that is used to tally the vote in cities, counties and states. And no voting machines are connected to the Internet.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1927 until 1953. He served as both General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Despite initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he ultimately consolidated power to become the Soviet Union's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalized these ideas as Marxism–Leninism while his own policies are known as Stalinism.
