The Uniparty Crimes That Target Independents

My War Against the Corrupt Debbie Wasserman Schultz Machine (Part II)

By Timothy A. Canova, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

“My fundraising emails were increasingly directed into supporters’ Spam folders, likely by Google algorithms; my campaign posts were hidden from view on social media by Facebook algorithms; and my campaign Facebook page was eventually deplatformed without explanation or opportunity to appeal. This is the world we now find ourselves in, where Kafka meets George Orwell.” — Tim Canova

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent decision to run for president as an independent seemed inevitable once it became clear the Democratic National Committee (DNC) would never stop rigging its primary schedule and nomination process against him. The DNC did much the same against Bernie Sanders in 2016 when their lawyers admitted, in a federal lawsuit filed by then-Sanders supporters Jared and Elizabeth Beck, that the DNC was free to violate its own charter, rig its own primaries, and choose its candidates in “smoke-filled back rooms.” Sanders capitulated and endorsed those who rigged the primaries against him in 2016 and again in 2020, helping to normalize election rigging and push the party further into the hands of the powerful, predatory interests that control the DNC.

In choosing to run as an independent, Kennedy is refusing to be complicit in the corruption swallowing what’s left of the Democratic Party. 

My own experience running as an independent in 2018 against the corporate-backed uniparty revealed many of the roadblocks that Kennedy is now facing in his presidential campaign. We experienced the full wrath of the establishment, foreshadowing the Trump campaign’s allegations in the 2020 presidential election, including the weaponization of the corporate media, the suspicious shuttling of thousands of ballots in the darkness of election night, mathematical anomalies in electronic vote tabulations engineered by opaque electronic voting machine firms, and the politicization of election officials and law enforcement agencies alike.

In 2018, when I found myself at this same fork in the road, I too chose to leave the Democratic Party to run as an independent. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, another former Democrat, I did not leave the Democratic Party, the party left me. The DNC had become a Wall Street corporate-funded party pushing a predatory globalization agenda and endless wars of regime change. Since then, the party has only gotten worse. Liberal and progressive Democrats used to stand for free speech, civil liberties, medical freedom, secure borders, peace, and diplomacy. The Democratic Party now pushes censorship and cancel culture. It has championed Big Pharma vaccine mandates and draconian lockdowns that mercilessly punished working families. It backs endless funding for the war in Ukraine, a bottomless pit of corruption, even risking escalation and possible nuclear confrontation with Russia. It has opened our borders, inviting unsustainable levels of illegal immigration, an invasion of unvetted multitudes that may undermine our national security, destabilizes society, and overwhelms social welfare systems in cities and states across the country.

Kennedy’s candidacy as a Democrat, while it lasted, had represented perhaps the last hope of restoring the Democratic Party to its past leadership as a defender of freedom, champion of working people, and opponent of predatory corporate power. He reminded us of what it meant to be a Kennedy Democrat, to take on the war industrial complex and seek peace through strength, not through endless foreign wars that ultimately bleeds and weakens us as a nation. In leaving the Democratic Party, Kennedy has no doubt concluded that there is a better chance of both getting elected and reversing our national decline by running as an independent. 

My Decision to Run as an Independent

In 2016, as I reported earlier in The Kennedy Beacon, I had run as a Democrat against Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her House seat when she was the chair of the DNC. There was good reason to doubt the validity of the official election results. Even though Broward County election officials admitted to their illegal destruction of all ballots cast, we could not find any elected officials, Democrat or Republican, to help us challenge that crooked election in Congress or through criminal prosecutions, or even in the court of public opinion. It had become clear to many of us that the DNC is run as a top-down criminal syndicate, willing to use any means necessary to crush any opposition within the party itself. That frustration led to my decision to exit the Democratic Party and run against Wasserman Schultz in a 2018 rematch instead as an independent. 

In 2018, the demographics of my congressional district looked very good for an independent candidate. About 40% of the voters were Democrats, nearly 35% were independent, and about 25% Republican. We had built a big base of support among grassroots Democrats throughout our district and hoped to draw enough independent and Republican voters to put us over the top in a three-way race. I continued to reject any corporate PAC money, and if elected, I would be the only House member not affiliated with either party and free to take independent positions on the issues without regard to partisan politics. Now the issue of election integrity would be front-and-center given the illegal ballot destruction that marred our previous election. But it was also clear that the political establishment in both major parties had gotten away with blatantly violating election laws with impunity, providing them with incentive to do so again. 

Early on, one political consultant reported back to me on a meeting he was in with Wasserman Schultz, a billionaire backer of hers and top state party leaders, where they spoke of their plans to “absolutely crush” my campaign. It was already a David versus Goliath battle, and I was uncertain what to expect from political opponents who would illegally destroy every ballot cast. What else were they capable of doing to destroy me and my campaign?

Big Tech Social Media Censorship

In only eight months in 2016, I had built a significant base of grassroots support on social media, with more than 150,000 Facebook followers and 50,000 Twitter, more than 209,000 online donors, and an email fundraising list of around 150,000 supporters. Now in 2018, I found myself being throttled and shadow banned on social media by the Big Tech giants that are allied with the Democrat establishment. My fundraising emails were increasingly directed into supporters’ Spam folders, likely by Google algorithms; my campaign posts were hidden from view on social media by Facebook algorithms; and my campaign Facebook page was eventually deplatformed without explanation or opportunity to appeal. This is the world we now find ourselves in, where Kafka meets George Orwell.

Big Media Bias and the Wrap-Up Smears

The Wasserman Schultz machine was mobilizing every resource to crush my campaign, especially among its Big Media allies. Tellingly, now that we had proved in court that Broward election officials had destroyed the ballots from our 2016 election, I found myself suddenly blacklisted on MSNBC, CNN, FOX, and all the rest of the cable and network TV and radio stations, where I had previously appeared frequently. This time, I had to get my message out through social media and interviews with anchors who had also been banished from mainstream media, including Larry King, Ed Schultz, and Tom Hartmann, who were by then on RT TV, Russia’s overseas TV network, a platform which would soon be used against me even though I had never taken a penny to appear on RT and never pushed any foreign agenda.

Incredibly, Wasserman Schultz’s allies on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a staff report claiming I was pushing Russia’s foreign economic interests based on my opposition to fracking in Florida with its shallow water table and my opposition to building the Sabal Trail pipeline through ecologically fragile areas. The staff report was then weaponized with a hit piece against me in the Miami Herald in September 2018, just six weeks before Election Day. As evidence that I was serving the Kremlin, they pointed out that my words had been retweeted by Russian bots, meaning paid bots with Russian IP addresses. In addition, the hit piece added that I had publicly doubted DNC claims that the Russians had hacked the DNC server when I suggested it was more likely a DNC insider leak. 

This technique is what Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, had infamously referred to in 2017 as “the wrap-up smear”: you demonize and smear somebody with falsehoods and then you merchandise it, then you write it, and it gets validation when it’s reported in the press. The only difference is the uniparty was now using the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to help merchandise the smears against me. Robert Kennedy Jr. can expect similar wrap-up smears attempting to tie him to the Kremlin for his opposition to the foolhardy war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, throughout my independent campaign, the Miami Herald, along with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, refused to report on any developments in the ballot destruction case, and instead published repeated hit pieces against me. The Herald and Sentinel, which dominate South Florida print media, were owned by McClatchy and Tribune Publishing, respectively, the second and third largest national newspaper chains in the country at the time, which highlights the concentration of corporate power routinely mobilized against any grassroots challenge to corporate funded incumbents. 

The concentration of corporate power has only intensified in recent years, with six giant conglomerates now controlling, through their subsidiaries, nearly 90% of all TV, cable, and radio broadcast, and print media. In addition, three investment management giants, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, using other people’s money, have now become the largest shareholders in about 90% of corporate America, including in the Big Media and Big Tech giants. As a result, any grassroots independent candidate like Kennedy who opposes today’s predatory corporate agendas can expect to be ignored at best and attacked and smeared across a wide spectrum of media platforms. 

Political Bias of Corrupt Election Officials

Down the homestretch of our 2018 campaign, Wasserman Schultz was spotted openly campaigning with Brenda Snipes, the same Broward County Elections Supervisor who had admitted under oath to illegally destroying all ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Wasserman Schultz. Suddenly photos were everywhere of the two of them campaigning together at early voting sites. Apparently, they felt no need to even hide the bias and cronyism of the county’s top election official since Snipes had already gotten away with felonies in our prior race.

Although Wasserman Schultz was raising a ton of corporate money, her campaign had published no polls. I had heard for weeks from a trusted media source that private DNC and Republican Party polls were showing that Wasserman Schultz had a “low ceiling” of support, in the low 30s, due to her toxic image and high negatives. Then, in the final days of the campaign, The Floridian Press, a conservative media outlet, reported that the Republicans were sitting on a poll showing Wasserman Schultz and Canova in a 34-34% dead heat, the Republican candidate in a distant 3^rd place at 13%, and with 19% undecided. That poll gave us a real lift at early voting sites and on Election Day. Many disgruntled Democrats suddenly realized that a vote for me would not result in electing the Republican candidate, while many Republican voters eager to get rid of Wasserman Schultz once and for all did not want to waste their vote on a weak Republican candidate. The momentum seemed to be shifting our way.

As the polls closed, our supporters were barred from observing the ballot counting at voting sites in several key precincts. One supporter took video outside the Volunteer Park election precinct in Plantation showing a line of cars, perhaps from other precincts, pulling up in the parking lot in the dark of night to transfer, what appeared to be the blue satchels used by election officials to contain cast ballots, into the back of a rented truck. With only one person in each of those cars and no sheriff’s deputies to provide receipts, this violated all chain-of-custody protocols and election rules, according to leading election experts in Florida. When we posted the video on Twitter, it got more than 2 million views right away.

Video source: Tim Canova on X

Statistical Evidence of Electronic Election Rigging

When the November 2018 official election results were finally posted, Wasserman Schultz was reported to have won big, with the Republican in second, and me a distant third at around 5%. What immediately cast doubt on the official results was that my vote totals were “capped” at the same 5% low level in every demographic group, including among blacks, whites, and Hispanics, among both men and women, among Democrats and non-Democrats, and across precincts regardless of size. 

Dr. David Bader, then the chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science & Engineering, and now a distinguished professor and director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, would later testify to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights that my election results were mathematically as unlikely as winning the lottery every single day for a year. Unfortunately, many Democrats and Republicans, who talk about trusting science, apparently have no interest in mathematical science when it comes to election integrity.

Once again, we considered the possibility of suing to inspect the paper ballots, but in light of the clandestine shuttling of ballots on election night in violation of chain of custody protocols and rules, we could not be certain that the ballots we would ultimately inspect would even be the ballots actually cast.

According to software experts far and wide, all it would take to cap a candidate at any given level is to manipulate a few lines of source code in the software, either by an insider or outside hacking. A major election integrity advocate, visiting from Arizona to observe my election, detected modems on the electronic vote tabulation machines used that day in Broward County – modems that could connect to the internet and thereby provide an easy entry for an outside hacker. On his cellphone camera, he recorded these modems apparently in use, contrary to prior assurances made by both state election officials and spokespersons for Election Systems & Software (ES&S) ––the huge vendor that made those electronic machines––that they absolutely do not contain such modems. ES&S, along with Dominion Voting and Hart InterCivic, are the three firms in the cartel that dominate our elections, and all three are owned by opaque private equity firms accountable to no one, except their billionaire investors who no doubt have their own vested interests in the outcome of our elections.

The 2018 Election Crash Lands in Broward County

Meanwhile, also in November 2018, the elections for Florida governor and the U.S. Senate both crash-landed in Broward County. With both races too close to call and the entire state waiting for final vote totals in Broward County, Snipes was still discovering thousands of uncounted ballots days after the election. For months leading up to the election, I had called on Governor Rick Scott to prosecute Snipes for the ballot destruction. Now he was locked in a photo finish with the incumbent Senator Bill Nelson for Nelson’s Senate seat while Snipes appeared either corrupt or completely incompetent. The race for Governor, between Ron DeSantis and Andrew Gillum, was also too close to call. Bernie Sanders suddenly appeared at a rally with Andrew Gillum to “Count Every Vote!” including the suspicious additional ballots that Snipes kept discovering in her office, in a car parked at the airport, and who knows where else. On MSNBC, Joy Reid claimed that Snipes was being attacked only because she was an elderly black woman in the Deep South.

It was at this time that conservative media remembered that Snipes had destroyed all the ballots in my previous race and FOX News had me on three mornings in a row. I said that any election official who illegally destroyed every ballot cast in 2016 could not now be trusted when claiming to discover thousands of uncounted ballots days after the election. Within days, Florida’s former governor Jeb Bush was calling for Snipes to step down. Under intense scrutiny, Snipes finally stopped finding new uncounted ballots, and the two tight elections were ultimately called for Scott and DeSantis after machine recounts presumably using the same software source code as in the original vote counts.

Ron DeSantis and his Uniparty Complicity in Covering Up Election Crimes

On his way out as governor, Rick Scott issued an executive order formally removing Snipes as the Broward Elections Supervisor. Her illegal destruction of the ballots in my 2016 race was first in a list of her incompetent and illegal conduct. As President Trump recently posted on Truth Social with a photo of Snipes, “If no one goes to jail for election fraud, what incentive is there not to cheat.” For those of us longing for election justice and reform in Florida, we now hoped for state investigations and prosecutions. But then DeSantis, in his first act as the new governor, reinstated Snipes to her position, just so she could promptly retire on a $135,000 a year annual pension. Perhaps he had reached some kind of dirty deal with the Democrats — the uniparty was sweeping each party’s corruption under the rug.

DeSantis would soon create a new Election Crimes Office and declare Florida the “gold standard” in election integrity. In front of the TV cameras, he and his new election prosecutors soon brought charges against several dozen former felons, who, though newly franchised by the state’s successful referendum to allow rehabilitated felons to vote after serving their sentences, had voted without first properly filling out their paperwork and they were now arrested. Meanwhile, his new election prosecutors allowed the statute of limitations against Snipes to expire without so much as an investigation.

When asked last year by journalist Lara Logan if we should ban the electronic voting machines and replace them with a system of public hand counting of paper ballots that would be transparent and verifiable, DeSantis said no, that would be returning to the Stone Age. Instead, DeSantis and the uniparty keep us in a Silicon Age where election software can be manipulated so easily that most Americans now have lost confidence in the integrity of election outcomes no matter who is declared the victor. 

The Prospects for Kennedy’s Independent Grassroots Campaign

This now is what Kennedy is up against as an independent presidential candidate – a uniparty establishment willing to lie, cheat, and steal elections; a corporate cartel media that weaponizes smears on behalf of the establishment; a Big Tech oligarchy that will shadow ban Kennedy with their algorithms; and electronic voting machines run by hedge fund billionaires that are inherently vulnerable to outside hacking and insider software manipulation. These are monumental challenges and yet Kennedy’s independent campaign may be one of our last hopes to restore representative democracy and the rule of law to our Republic.

In many ways, Kennedy’s independent campaign prospects will turn on the activism of his huge grassroots support. It will be up to his supporters to amplify their voices by posting on social media to evade the Big Media censorship. He will need an army of supporters to volunteer at every polling station across the country to prevent fraud and to record and report when it happens. And finally, there is still time for Kennedy supporters along with those who support other candidates, to demand that every state ban the inherently vulnerable and fraudulent electronic voting machines and replace them with a system of hand-counting paper ballots in public as the only way to ensure election transparency and restore public confidence in the integrity of our elections.

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Timothy A. Canova is a Professor of Law and Public Finance at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and can be reached at tim@timcanova.com