The Count

One million for you,
One million for them,
One hundred thousand for you,
One hundred thousand for them.*

In the blink of an eye,
In a moment’s breath,
It can happen here,
It can happen absolutely anywhere.
A miscount,
A recount,
A single glitch
Purposely placed there
In order to fix…
The election.

One million for you,
One million for them,
One hundred thousand for you,
One hundred thousand for them.

And in our hearts
With all of our trust
We say this could not happen
This must be a must
Of course, the count was accurate
Everyone was there
People could see but not always have to hear,**
As they tallied every ballot from precincts far and near.

Feed all the ballots through,
It’s neither be wrong nor mean,
Why all they are,
Is a very expensive ballot counting machine.

One million for you,
One million for them,
One hundred thousand for you,
Eek, eek, squeak squeak, 500,000 for them.
It must not be working,
It has to be bad.

It does not match the hand count,
This is why some precincts have said,
“We only use paper,
We don’t trust the machines
They don’t always count the voter’s votes
But instead use other means.”

In the hand counted precincts Coakley won by 51.12 percent,
While Brown got 47.77%*** in voter’s descent.
But that has to be wrong,
The people counting were green,
Diebold now Premier had counted a win with their no fail machine.

Miscount the elections
Then total them quickly
Bring out the announcement
A loss for Coakley.
Then she can concede
Before the public has a chance
To think about hand count
Verses machine counts at a single glance.

One million for us,
Blink blink…squeak, squeak… two million for them
One hundred thousand for us,
Ahhh oooops 700,000 for them.

In the blink of an eye,
In a moment’s breath,
It can happen here,
It can happen absolutely anywhere.

Our democracy can soon be a thing of the past
For when the machines miscount our votes,
The voice of the people will be considered……………dead last.


Written by Amy Marschak


This poem was written for the special election held January 19, 2010 to replace Senator Edward M. Kennedy's seat.   The official outcome was very concerning as seen by some of the facts below.  

*There was only a total of 2,249,026 people who voted in this Massachusetts election according to CBS News.
“One million for you, one million for them, one hundred thousand for you, one hundred thousand for them.” is poetic license.

**Some election officials such as in Denver has fought the public’s right to hear the ballots being counted.

***Preliminary media results from most hand counted locations. The later hand count results was Coakley 55.68%
to Brown’s 42.9%. From blackboxvoting.org.

ES&S voting machines showed 53.64% for Brown and 45.31% for Coakley and Diebold voting machines totaled 51.42% for Brown
and 47.611% for Coakley. From blackboxvoting.org.

Then in June 2010, the Democratic primary in South Carolina, Alvin Greene (who did absolutely no campaigning) lost absentee votes in every county and Vic Rawl (who did a ton of campaigning and had been a previous judge) won absentee vote in every county and yet with the non verifiable electronic voting machines Alvin Greene won by a huge margin on election day.

Copyright Amy Marschak