Introduction to Midwest Seeds, the book

An in-progress work: archaeology of the soon to be extinct electronic voting systems and anthropology of the people developing a better path

Erik Marty van Mechelen
4 min readOct 5, 2022

By Erik van Mechelen (originally posted on Erik’s Substack)

From the Introduction…

9.26.2022

Sleep did not come easy again last night. Before turning light off, read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” penned in 1945, which describes how thoughts corrupt language and then how that deceiving language influences thoughts. Thoughts affect words, written and spoken, and then actions.

Was awake again about 2 or 3am, not because wife’s nose is blocked by sinus issue causing noisy breathing, but rather because something wakes me up — my higher Self? — when there is work to do. In and out of sleep the next few hours in part replaying a podcast conversation with Neil Shah hours before, in part preparing words for the Stearns County commissioners coming up at 9am (will call in) and for Mark Bishofsky’s fundraiser Friday.

It is late September, 2022, Minnesota. In a few weeks men and women will go to the polls to cast votes, their paper ballots will be fed into tabulators. These machines are sold to us as a convenience. To make counting easier and efficient because human hand tallying is oh so difficult we are told repeatedly by county auditors, clerks, election staff, and state-sponsored propagandists. But what is marketed as a useful tool has actually enslaved us, temporarily (for a couple decades at least). By offering the illusion of choice, between candidates and parties, we go on voting until we are no more than the serfs most of our great grandparents were. Because the electronic equipment is designed to allow your vote to be altered if necessary. That proven fact alone allows an election to be subverted by a very small group, even at the nation-state level. Meanwhile locally, for example, the reason the school board was unresponsive to mothers’ demands is because its members were [s]elected, not elected.

Post hanging chad heist in Florida 2000 HAVA in 2002 rushed in electronic voting machines meaning already then it may not have been who casts or counts the vote but who codes it that really matters. Wading through the oceans of data from 2020, it looks like at least the presidential [s]election was managed and controlled nationally — huge turnout from Trump supporters meant “counting stopped” to allow an algorithmic reset, affecting all 50 states as seen in the Draza-Smith-coined Edison Zero, where cumulative votes in Edison Research were zeroed out, likely to re-align the PID controller with a Biden electoral college victory despite losing Florida and well on the way to losing most “battlegrounds,” although in reality it seems like Biden was short 30–40 million votes from his certified 81 million, backfilled by mules, election offices, and electronic maneuvers.

All this had to happen, it seems, so that you and I have time enough to process what went wrong and then to seize the opportunity to choose between the old system with old leadership without accountability which costs enormous innocent life, or its alternative. We have been collectively living a lie. Only by carefully digging into what we’ve been up to can we begin to see what our action and inaction has created.

This story will be part archaeology and part anthropology.

Archaeology in the study of artifacts, structures, and processes of our largely digitized electronic voting system (keep Patrick Colbeck’s The 2020 Coup on hand for technical definitions), soon be discontinued. Future chroniclers looking back at this time will be made to dig and brush the dust off the discarded old ways.

Anthropology in the study of what we the people are doing and how we do it, focused on remedying a voting apparatus designed for slavery which has put many (temporary) slavemasters in position to thwart attempts to peacefully remove the chains. Who are the people who stood up successfully to the tyrants? What led them to plant the seeds which grew in both dark and light to remind us there is a better path?

My friend Andrei, creator of Project Apario, a decentralized app meant to make sense of fragmented declassified government records in The World’s Truth Repository™, necessary to change our relationship with information, so that information frees us instead of controls us, made a useful distinction between slavery of the mind and slavery of the body. The embarrassing fact that slavery of the body went on as long as it did in this country is only qualified by the fact that no matter how much a slave owner owned a slave’s body, the slave’s mind and soul could still be free. When methods of controlling a man, woman, or child’s mind and soul are used, a critical line is crossed. The slavery of the mind is insidious because someone can believe themselves to be sovereign and free but in reality be mind-controlled or heavily conditioned or influenced depending on what frequency they are vibing. Slavery has not captured all of us in this sense, we may still choose its alternative — to be free.

Perhaps the problem can be summarized as good people trapped in a bad system. Once aware, do we keep the bad system or change it?

If we learn enough about ourselves, we might create the space and have the energy to combine our skills in a dedicated, patient, and persistent manner.

To use available tools to advance.

Midwest Seeds is a forthcoming follow-up to [S]elections in Minnesota which can also be found on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Soundcloud (chapter 1).

Download free and provide your email address on Leanpub here to receive updates on this in-progress book and never pay to read new versions.

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