One issue that seems to arise every election is a shortage of poll workers. Lack of poll workers seems to translate into lack of ballots being distributed and/or counted properly and, ultimately, voter disenfranchisement is the result.
After the 2002 Election, I was determined to be more involved in this year's election by participating as a Poll Worker. I encourage you to do the same.
Also, if you speak another language besides English, you could be a big help as an interpreter.
I did a search on "poll workers san francisco" and found my local Department of Elections. The page gave me a phone number to call for more information. The recording at the number said that first-timers should come by City Hall in person in August. So that's what I'll do.
Civil rights group fears effect of e-voting company's threats
By Rachel Konrad for the Associated Press.
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued in federal court Monday that North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold Inc. should be barred from sending cease-and-desist letters to activists, who are publishing links to leaked documents about alleged security blunders at one of the nation's biggest e-voting companies.Judge Jeremy Fogel is expected to issue a ruling as early as this week.
Free speech advocates at San Francisco-based EFF compare the case to the groundbreaking Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was leaked to The New York Times, sparking a 1971 Supreme Court battle pitting the government against the media.
"I'm not making a judgment about which is more important, Vietnam policy or the future of voting in a democracy," Cohn said after the hearing in federal court in San Jose. "But this is important to the public debate ... and you can't squelch it."
Computer programmers, ISPs and students at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received cease-and-desist letters. Many removed links to Diebold documents, but some - including San Francisco-based ISP Online Policy Group - refused, and sued Diebold.
They say the leaked documents raise serious security questions about Diebold, which controls 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide. They argue they have a right to publish the data under the "fair use" exception of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
OPG, which hosts at least 1,000 Web sites of nonprofit groups and individuals on 120 computer servers, also argues that the volunteer organization cannot be responsible for every link of every client.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7286033.htm
Civil rights group fears effect of e-voting company's threats
RACHEL KONRAD
Associated Press
SAN JOSE, Calif. - A civil rights group fears that legal threats from an electronic voting company are having a "chilling effect" among Internet service providers, students and voting rights advocates.
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued in federal court Monday that North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold Inc. should be barred from sending cease-and-desist letters to activists, who are publishing links to leaked documents about alleged security blunders at one of the nation's biggest e-voting companies.
Judge Jeremy Fogel is expected to issue a ruling as early as this week.
Free speech advocates at San Francisco-based EFF compare the case to the groundbreaking Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was leaked to The New York Times, sparking a 1971 Supreme Court battle pitting the government against the media.
"I'm not making a judgment about which is more important, Vietnam policy or the future of voting in a democracy," Cohn said after the hearing in federal court in San Jose. "But this is important to the public debate ... and you can't squelch it."
Computer programmers, ISPs and students at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received cease-and-desist letters. Many removed links to Diebold documents, but some - including San Francisco-based ISP Online Policy Group - refused, and sued Diebold.
They say the leaked documents raise serious security questions about Diebold, which controls 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide. They argue they have a right to publish the data under the "fair use" exception of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
OPG, which hosts at least 1,000 Web sites of nonprofit groups and individuals on 120 computer servers, also argues that the volunteer organization cannot be responsible for every link of every client.
Robert A. Mittelstaedt, who represents Diebold, said the company didn't intend to stymie free speech or place onerous burdens on ISPs. He emphasized that Diebold objected to the activists and student groups' "wholesale reproduction" of 13,000 pages of internal documents.
Mittelstaedt said the file - still available on dozens of Web sites, including several overseas - gives rivals an inside look at proprietary data. He suggested voting advocates were ideologically opposed to Diebold, which refuses to publish source code.
"The plaintiffs advocate an open-source code system for elections code," Mittelstaedt said. "These materials were intended to be secret and private and proprietary."
Diebold's battle began in March, when a hacker broke into the company's servers using an employee's ID number, and copied company announcements, software bulletins and internal e-mails dating back to January 1999.
The majority of the 1.8-gigabyte file contains banal employee e-mails, software manuals and old voter record files. But several items raise security concerns that Silicon Valley programmers and voting rights advocates have been trying to publicize for more than a year.
In one series of e-mails, a senior engineer dismisses concern from a lower-level programmer who questions why Diebold lacked certification for the operating system in touch-screen voting machines. The Federal Election Commission requires such software to be certified by independent researchers.
In another e-mail, an executive scolded programmers for leaving software files on an Internet site without password protection.
"This potentially gives the software away to whomever wants it," the manager wrote.
In August, the hacker e-mailed data to voting activists, who published information on their Web logs. Wired News published an online story. The documents have been widely circulated.
Ka-Ping Yee, 27, a computer science graduate student at Berkeley who attended the hearing, said the documents make him skeptical about the U.S. elections process.
"These documents get people talking about the legitimacy of voting in America," said Yee, whose personal sites link to the data. "If a company can silence speech about a topic of extremely great importance, it could have a huge effect on all of our futures."
ON THE NET
EFF:
Diebold:
Diebold Audit Released, BlackBoxVoting.Org Shut Down
"The State of Maryland requested an audit of the Diebold electronic voting system by SAIC, after a report released by Johns Hopkins University and Rice Researchers (disclaimer: I'm one of Dr Rubin's students) noted several security issues . A condensed, from 200 to 40 pages, and censored version of the report has been released online (PDF link). The report notes that 'SAIC has identified several high-risk vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could have significant impact upon the AccuVote-TS voting system operation.'" However, Diebold says Maryland are moving forward with installation with "new security features" included, and elsewhere, Badgerman points out "Diebold has shut down blackboxvoting.org , apparently with copyright claims made to their ISP. But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site..."
From Tristero: On Democracy Now Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting fame, disclosed (near the end of the transcript) that in the compromised 1.8Gigs off Diebold's FTP site they uncovered "an actual election file containing actual votes on election day from San Luis Obispo County, California". Problem is, the date stamp was 3:31pm - during voting hours! The Diebold system uses a wireless network card. Worse: "So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines.
(Thanks, Tristero.)
Voting machine controversy
By Julie Carr Smyth for the Plain Dealer Bureau.
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
Blackwell's announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.cleveland.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/106207171078040.xml
Voting machine controversy
08/28/03
Julie Carr Smyth
Plain Dealer Bureau
Columbus - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
Blackwell's announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.
In his invitation letter, O'Dell asked guests to consider donating or raising up to $10,000 each for the federal account that the state GOP will use to help Bush and other federal candidates - money that legislative Democratic leaders charged could come back to benefit Blackwell.
They urged Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting-machine companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties.
This is the second such request in as many months. State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, asked Blackwell in July to disqualify Diebold after security concerns arose over its equipment.
"Ordinary Ohioans may infer that Blackwell's office is looking past Diebold's security issues because its CEO is seeking $10,000 donations for Blackwell's party - donations that could be made with statewide elected officials right there in the same room," said Senate Democratic Leader Greg DiDonato.
Diebold spokeswoman Michelle Griggy said O'Dell - who was unavailable to comment personally - has held fund-raisers in his home for many causes, including the Columbus Zoo, Op era Columbus, Catholic Social Services and Ohio State University.
Ohio GOP spokesman Jason Mauk said the party approached O'Dell about hosting the event at his home, the historic Cotswold Manor, and not the other way around. Mauk said that under federal campaign finance rules, the party cannot use any money from its federal account for state- level candidates.
"To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair," Mauk said.
Griggy said in an e-mail statement that Diebold could not comment on the political contributions of individual company employees.
Blackwell said Diebold is not the only company with political connections - noting that lobbyists for voting-machine makers read like a who's who of Columbus' powerful and politically connected.
"Let me put it to you this way: If there was one person uniquely involved in the political process, that might be troubling," he said. "But there's no one that hasn't used every legitimate avenue and bit of leverage that they could legally use to get their product looked at. Believe me, if there is a political lever to be pulled, all of them have pulled it."
Blackwell said he stands by the process used for selecting voting machine vendors as fair, thorough and impartial.
As of yesterday, however, that determination lay with Ohio Court of Claims Judge Fred Shoemaker.
He heard closing arguments yesterday over whether Sequoia was unfairly eliminated by Blackwell midway through the final phase of negotiations.
Shoemaker extended a temporary restraining order in the case for 14 days, but said he hopes to issue his opinion sooner than that.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
jsmyth@plaind.com, 1-800-228-8272
...with a little help from Florida's 1998 Voter Reform Law.
Here's an awesome video/animation from Eric Blumrich w/music from Grand Theft Auto:
Time's ticking away guys, we've got to do something or they're just going to do it again in 2004.
This animation was based on findings in Greg Palast's report:
Theft Of The Presidency.
There's real video of it available too.
(Thanks, Jason)
It's very important to keep our eye on the prize guys: a new democratically-elected President in 2004.
That may mean the end of computer voting in some areas -- NOT its introduction into new jurisdictions.
Unless these machines are required to be open source, so that third parties could verify their numbers. I believe open source voting machines are the only way that computer voting can move forward towards producing any kind of reliable results. What do you guys think?
New Voting Systems Assailed -- Computer Experts Cite Fraud Potential
By Dan Keating for the Washington Post.
Critics of such systems say that they are vulnerable to tampering, to human error and to computer malfunctions -- and that they lack the most obvious protection, a separate, paper receipt that a voter can confirm after voting and that can be recounted if problems are suspected.Officials who have worked with touch-screen systems say these concerns are unfounded and, in certain cases, somewhat paranoid.
David Dill, the Stanford University professor of computer science who launched the petition drive, said, "What people have learned repeatedly, the hard way, is that the prudent practice -- if you want to escape with your data intact -- is what other people would perceive as paranoia."
Other computer scientists, including Rebecca Mercuri of Bryn Mawr College, say that problems are so likely that they are virtually guaranteed to occur -- and already have.
Mercuri, who has studied voting security for more than a decade, points to a November 2000 election in South Brunswick, N.J., in which touch-screen equipment manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems was used.
In a race in which voters could pick two candidates from a pair of Republicans and a pair of Democrats, one machine recorded a vote pattern that was out of sync with the pattern recorded elsewhere -- no votes whatsoever for one Republican and one Democrat. Sequoia said at the time that no votes were lost -- they were just never registered. Local officials said it didn't matter whether the fault was the voters' or the machine's, the expected votes were gone.
In October, election officials in Raleigh, N.C., discovered that early voters had to try several times to record their votes on iVotronic touch screens from Election Systems and Software. Told of the problems, officials compared the number of voters to the number of votes counted and realized that 294 votes had apparently been lost.
When Georgia debuted 22,000 Diebold touch screens last fall, some people touched one candidate's name on the screen and saw another candidate's name appear as their choice. Voters who were paying attention had a chance to correct the error before finalizing their vote, but those who weren't did not.
Chris Rigall, spokesman for the secretary of state's office, said that the machines were quickly replaced, but that there was no way of knowing how many votes were incorrectly counted.
In September in Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward counties had a different kind of vote loss with ES&S touch-screen equipment: At the end of the day, precincts that reported hundreds of voters also listed virtually no votes counted. In that case, technicians were able to retrieve the votes from the machines.
"If the only way you know that it's working incorrectly is when there's four votes instead of 1,200 votes, then how do you know that if it's 1,100 votes instead of 1,200 votes? You'll never know," said Mercuri.
Because humans are imperfect and computers are complicated, said Ben Bederson, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, mistakes will always be made. With no backup to test, the scientists say, mistakes will go undetected.
"I'm not concerned about elections that are a mess," Dill said. "I'm concerned about elections that appear to go smoothly, and no one knows that it was all messed up inside the machine."
...if customers want receipts, he said, his company will supply them. And Williams said receipts may have a place in the system. "The advantage of a hard piece of paper -- one that a voter would hold in his hand and say, 'That is who I voted for' -- that is psychological, and there certainly is value to that. We need public confidence in our elections," he said.
Similarly, the official overseeing Maryland's program would accept paper if it were available.
"I've been doing voting systems for 15 years," Torre said. "I don't care if they give voters a piece of paper or not. If they come out with a receipt, that's fine. Maybe with the momentum out of California, we'll have receipts before too long."
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39241-2003Mar27.html
New Voting Systems Assailed
Computer Experts Cite Fraud Potential
As election officials rush to spend billions to update the country's voting machines with electronic systems, computer scientists are mounting a challenge to the new devices, saying they are less reliable and less secure from fraud than the equipment they are replacing.
Prompted by the demands of state and federal election reforms, officials in Maryland, Georgia, Florida and Texas installed the high-tech voting systems last fall. Officials in those states, and other proponents of electronic voting, said the computer scientists' concerns are far-fetched.
"These systems, because of the level of testing they go through, are the most reliable systems available," said Michael Barnes, who oversaw Georgia's statewide upgrade. "People were happy with how they operated."
In Maryland, "the system performed flawlessly in the two statewide elections last year," said Joseph Torre, the official overseeing the purchase of the state's new systems. "The public has a lot of confidence in it, and they love it."
But the scientists' campaign, which began in California's Silicon Valley in January, has gathered signatures from more than 300 experts, and the pressure has induced the industry to begin changing course.
Electronic terminals eliminate hanging chads, pencil erasure marks and the chance that a voter might accidentally select too many candidates. Under the new systems, voters touch the screen or turn a dial to make their choices and see a confirmation of those choices before casting their votes, which are tallied right in the terminal. Recounts are just a matter of retrieving the data from the computer again. The only record of the vote is what is stored there.
Critics of such systems say that they are vulnerable to tampering, to human error and to computer malfunctions -- and that they lack the most obvious protection, a separate, paper receipt that a voter can confirm after voting and that can be recounted if problems are suspected.
Officials who have worked with touch-screen systems say these concerns are unfounded and, in certain cases, somewhat paranoid.
David Dill, the Stanford University professor of computer science who launched the petition drive, said, "What people have learned repeatedly, the hard way, is that the prudent practice -- if you want to escape with your data intact -- is what other people would perceive as paranoia."
Other computer scientists, including Rebecca Mercuri of Bryn Mawr College, say that problems are so likely that they are virtually guaranteed to occur -- and already have.
Lost and Found
Mercuri, who has studied voting security for more than a decade, points to a November 2000 election in South Brunswick, N.J., in which touch-screen equipment manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems was used.
In a race in which voters could pick two candidates from a pair of Republicans and a pair of Democrats, one machine recorded a vote pattern that was out of sync with the pattern recorded elsewhere -- no votes whatsoever for one Republican and one Democrat. Sequoia said at the time that no votes were lost -- they were just never registered. Local officials said it didn't matter whether the fault was the voters' or the machine's, the expected votes were gone.
In October, election officials in Raleigh, N.C., discovered that early voters had to try several times to record their votes on iVotronic touch screens from Election Systems and Software. Told of the problems, officials compared the number of voters to the number of votes counted and realized that 294 votes had apparently been lost.
When Georgia debuted 22,000 Diebold touch screens last fall, some people touched one candidate's name on the screen and saw another candidate's name appear as their choice. Voters who were paying attention had a chance to correct the error before finalizing their vote, but those who weren't did not.
Chris Rigall, spokesman for the secretary of state's office, said that the machines were quickly replaced, but that there was no way of knowing how many votes were incorrectly counted.
In September in Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward counties had a different kind of vote loss with ES&S touch-screen equipment: At the end of the day, precincts that reported hundreds of voters also listed virtually no votes counted. In that case, technicians were able to retrieve the votes from the machines.
"If the only way you know that it's working incorrectly is when there's four votes instead of 1,200 votes, then how do you know that if it's 1,100 votes instead of 1,200 votes? You'll never know," said Mercuri.
Because humans are imperfect and computers are complicated, said Ben Bederson, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, mistakes will always be made. With no backup to test, the scientists say, mistakes will go undetected.
"I'm not concerned about elections that are a mess," Dill said. "I'm concerned about elections that appear to go smoothly, and no one knows that it was all messed up inside the machine."
"We're not paranoid," said Mercuri. "They're avoiding computational realities. That's the computer science part of it. We can't avoid it any more than physical scientists can avoid gravity."
The Miami-Dade and Georgia terminals were reprogrammed right up until the eve of the fall elections. The last-minute patches don't go through sufficient review, Mercuri said, and any computer that can be reprogrammed simply by inserting an update cartridge cannot be considered secure or reliable.
Dill said hackers constantly defeat sophisticated protections for electronic transactions, bank records, credit reports and software. "Someone sufficiently unscrupulous, with an investment of $50,000, could put together a team of people who could very easily subvert all of the security mechanisms that we've heard about on these [voting] machines," he said.
People who have sold or administered electronic voting systems, however, say the scenarios of fraud or widespread, election-changing error were not of the real world.
'We'd Detect It'
Howard Cramer, vice president for sales at Sequoia, one of the nation's largest suppliers of electronic voting systems, noted that his company has been supplying the systems for a decade and a half. "Our existing approach is verifiably accurate, 100 percent," he said. "Some of the things they're saying are flat-out wrong. Some are conceivable, but outside the likelihood of possibility."
The designer of Georgia's security system, for example, said nobody could insert a secret program to steal an election when the machines are created, because no one even knows at that time who the candidates will be, and the only people with access to the machines at the last minute are local officials.
"They're talking about what they could do if they had access to the [computer program] code, if we had no procedures in place and no physical security in place," said Brit Williams, a computer scientist at Kennesaw State University. "I'm not arguing with that. But they're not going to get access to that code. Even if they did, we'd detect it."
He also said that Georgia's patch was checked before it was installed and did not affect the tallying of votes. And no one, he said, could reprogram Georgia's terminals by inserting a cartridge.
"On our machine, the port is in a locked compartment. The only person in the precinct who has a key to that locked compartment is the precinct manager. [Critics are] looking at it from a purely computer science point of view, saying the system is vulnerable, and it would be vulnerable if we let anyone walk up and stick a card into it, but that doesn't happen."
After Dill launched his campaign, officials in the Silicon Valley county of Santa Clara delayed a purchase of 5,000 touch-screen voting machines. Despite insisting that their systems are reliable and secure, the nation's leading vendors all immediately agreed to provide paper receipts, and the California secretary of state announced a task force to review the security concerns. A month ago, Santa Clara went ahead with its $20 million purchase, insisting that receipts be provided once the state approves the new equipment.
Georgia and Maryland officials said that providing paper receipts may create more problems than it solves -- that paper would have to be transported and monitored with security, and printers could jam. Cramer of Sequoia said paper is unnecessary, costly and may pose a problem for blind voters.
But if customers want receipts, he said, his company will supply them. And Williams said receipts may have a place in the system. "The advantage of a hard piece of paper -- one that a voter would hold in his hand and say, 'That is who I voted for' -- that is psychological, and there certainly is value to that. We need public confidence in our elections," he said.
Similarly, the official overseeing Maryland's program would accept paper if it were available.
"I've been doing voting systems for 15 years," Torre said. "I don't care if they give voters a piece of paper or not. If they come out with a receipt, that's fine. Maybe with the momentum out of California, we'll have receipts before too long."
Let's follow the trail:
-->Senator Hagel -->McCarthy Group -->ES & S Voting Machines
or perhaps
-->Senator Hagel's $$$ and influence
-->McCarthy Group
-->ES & S Voting Machines
(That were then used to elect Senator Hagle.)
There's a pretty clear cut conflict of interest here.
Does anyone care? What can we even do? (Dammit!)
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html#Nebraska
ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy runs the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy is the Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator Chuck Hagel; The FEC designates Michael McCarthy as a Primary Campaign Committee for Candidate Chuck Hagel; and Chuck Hagel's financials list the McCarthy Group as an Asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million.
Four documents are shown below, with links so you can authenticate them yourself:
P. 1-2 Corporate registration papers for ES&S, as submitted to Arizona Secretary of State in 2001:
Full Size
Page 1
[Click to Authenticate]
(Scroll to "Scanned Annual Reports," click "2001")
Full Size
Page 2
[Click to Authenticate]
(Scroll to "Scanned Annual Reports," click "2001")
McCarthy is designated Primary Campaign Committee for a Candidate
Full Size
[Click to Authenticate]
Full Size
[Click to Authenticate]
* 5. The Nebraska Problem: Republican Senator Hagel was Chairman and CEO of American Information Systems (now called ES&S); And, Hagel was CEO and a partner in McCarthy & Company.(6)
According to his financial filings, Hagel's investments with the McCarthy Group are still between $1 million and $5 million. Hagel's largest single investment appears to be in the McCarthy Group, who owns a large chunk of ES&S, the firm responsible for counting Hagel's own votes.
Hagel investment in McCarthy Group
Full size
[Click to Authenticate]
(Enter Hagel in search box, view section IIIB on financials)
Hagel came to Omaha from Washington D.C., where he worked with the first George Bush Administration. In news articles by the Omaha World-Herald, Hagel said he was coming to Omaha to become president and partner in the McCarthy Group and Chairman of American Information Systems.
In his congressional bio he is said to have come to Omaha "to prepare for running for office." The first thing he did was run American Information Systems, a vote-counting company. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. He continues to disclose an investment of $15 million in the McCarthy Group, but he does not identify the underlying assets (ES&S). His disclosure documents omit any mention of American Information Systems at all.
* 6. John Gottschalk has been reported as a director for both the World-Herald Company Inc. (concentrating on the non-newspaper subsidiaries) and ES&S. He was also involved with Senator Hagel in the World USO, has relationships with James Baker; he is listed as a USO pal of George W. Bush.
* 7. The World-Herald Company, Inc. has a newspaper and, among all their other operations, a nationwide communications network with databases containing personal information on almost everyone in the USA, large direct mailing firms, phone message broadcasting, fax blasting, mass e-mailing, publicity, advertising, Internet services, printing, as well as elections services and voter registration services(7). The World Companies have operations in Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Nebraska, California, Iowa and Arizona and almost all of the companies listed above have nothing to do with newspapers. The concern here relates to access to these operations, which are sometimes used for political marketing, in combination with ES&S, which does voter registration services. It would be a conflict of interest for a voter registration program to have access these database and marketing capabilities IF political vested interests were involved. Because we don't have full disclosure we don't know what percentage of stock the major World-Herald stockholders have, or which ones they are, and because we don't know if these companies are wholly owned subsidiaries or partnerships, it is hard to judge conflict of interest on this.
U.S. vote fraud and some solutions
By Evan Ravitz, founder, Vote.org.
When I directed Boulder, Colorado's Voting by Phone ballot initiative campaign in 1993 I learned many unnerving things about existing voting procedures. The problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning:1. The Voter News Service (formerly News Election Service) -which supplies ALL election-eve numbers on national and Congressional races- is a private business of the TV networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. If you ask them how they count votes and predict outcomes they say that's proprietary information! They have no web site or other public profile.
2. Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to inspect these programs (the "source code") to verify their accuracy. Election officials can test the programs (using "test decks") but any clever programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies the election.
3. In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor system. Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on file in most places unless you are "challenged" by election judges or poll watchers, a rare event. When this system started hundreds of years ago, the election judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in their precincts. In modern America, this is rarely true.
4. Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it out in the rightful voter's name. This is discussed in the document "Florida Voter Fraud Issues" from the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement. In student and other high-turnover areas, this problem is rife.
5. In states with "early" voting, there is no system to prevent people from voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their precinct.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.vote.org/fraud.htm
U.S. vote fraud and some solutions
by Evan Ravitz, founder, Vote.org
Published 11/25/2000 in the Boulder Daily Camera
When I directed Boulder, Colorado's Voting by Phone ballot initiative campaign in 1993 I learned many unnerving things about existing voting procedures. The problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning:
1. The Voter News Service (formerly News Election Service) -which supplies ALL election-eve numbers on national and Congressional races- is a private business of the TV networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. If you ask them how they count votes and predict outcomes they say that's proprietary information! They have no web site or other public profile.
2. Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to inspect these programs (the "source code") to verify their accuracy. Election officials can test the programs (using "test decks") but any clever programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies the election.
3. In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor system. Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on file in most places unless you are "challenged" by election judges or poll watchers, a rare event. When this system started hundreds of years ago, the election judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in their precincts. In modern America, this is rarely true.
4. Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it out in the rightful voter's name. This is discussed in the document "Florida Voter Fraud Issues" from the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement. In student and other high-turnover areas, this problem is rife.
5. In states with "early" voting, there is no system to prevent people from voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their precinct.
You can verify all these points by calling your County elections office. These and other problems leave our voting system wide open to various frauds. The 1992 book Votescam: The Stealing of America, gives ample evidence of widespread voting fraud for decades. See Votescam.com.
Voting by Phone, used successfully in the National Science Foundation's 1974-5 Televote project, is a good solution to these problems, using PIN numbers which have protected our bank accounts for decades. This would also make voting much easier for single parents and those who work several jobs, and much cheaper and less wasteful of paper, gasoline, etc. Please see our paper on Security and Privacy. Now, web voting can be integrated with phone voting to make it easy for everyone on both sides of the "digital divide." The Arizona Democratic Party had great success with web voting last March. Turnout increased 622%!
Even better is what else this technology can be used for. Please see our web site at Vote.org. Vote.org is now an affiliate of Philadelphia II, a national organization led by former US Senator Mike Gravel. Our site is used in a Houghton-Mifflin college textbook and a Duke University course -see the site bottom.
.....................................
Back to Vote.org
Republicans Conspire to Steal More Elections in 2002
By
Jackson Thoreau
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed110102.shtml
Dec. 12, 2000
Sept. 11, 2001
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Editorials Archive
Republicans Conspire to Steal
More Elections in 2002
by Jackson Thoreau November 1, 2002
So much political treachery by Republicans, so little time to cover and expose it all.
This column is my attempt to cover just SOME of the many instances in which Republicans are conspiring to steal more elections come Nov. 5, 2002. Here goes:
Republicans conspire with Libertarians against Democratic Sen. Cleland in Georgia
In a recent letter that sounds like it was written by a Republican, Libertarian Party National Political Director Ron Crickenberger charged that "liberals tried to steal the 2000 presidential election with their 'Sore Loserman' campaign in Florida. They stole control of the U.S. Senate when GOP turncoat Sen. Jeffords jumped ship, leaving Tom Daschle in charge. Now they're fighting to keep that control... and they're doing it 'by any means necessary.' Well, it's time to fight back... using our own political tricks."
Crickenberger, who did not say how "liberals" are fighting to keep control "by any means necessary," bragged about the Libertarian Party helping to defeat Democratic incumbent Sen. Wyche Fowler in 1992, when Republican Paul Coverdell won in a runoff, after the Libertarians endorsed him. Crickenberger then outlined an "under the radar" scam this year to steal the votes of African-Americans who would normally vote for Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia.
"We're going to get a sizeable percentage of black Democrats - the ones most likely to vote - to vote AGAINST the Democrat incumbent, and FOR the Libertarian candidate," Crickenberger wrote. "These are voters who are passionate about one issue that Democrats are on the wrong side of: education choice, like vouchers and tuition tax credits .This is an 'under the radar' campaign - a 'sneak attack,' if you will .Cleland is the Libertarian Party's most targeted Democrat in this year's elections. We plan to attack him using other means as well, to pull black Democrats away from his vote total."
So did Republicans put the Libertarians up to conduct such a negative, targeted campaign against a Democrat? Some sources I talked to said it sure sounded like it. This letter has been circulated by Republican sites like Newsmax, so at the very least, Republicans are helping Libertarians raise money for this campaign.
I'm ashamed to admit that I voted for the Libertarian presidential candidate in 1980, when I was a confused college student who liked that party's message of individual liberties. It was a wasted vote, one that would have been better spent on Democrat Jimmy Carter. There are some aspects I like about the Libertarian Party, but right now, it's hard to think of any.
Republicans try to bribe Greens in New Mexico
In New Mexico, state Republican Party Chairman John Dendahl admitted that he promised "at least $100,000" to the state Green Party in exchange for the Greens fielding candidates in two of New Mexico's three congressional districts. His aim was to siphon votes from the Democrats, he said. Dendahl claimed he was acting as a "messenger" on behalf of an unnamed donor from the Washington, D.C., area.
The Greens, to their credit, refused Dendahl's offer, which the Greens said was as much as $250,000, and did not field candidates for the congressional seats. The New Mexico attorney general said the bribe attempt demonstrated "an attempt to manipulate the election process," but the offer was not illegal under state law. Idle question: Since when is bribery legal? For more information, go to: http://www.richardsonforgovernor.com/news/br_abqjournal_7112002.htm.
I have received other reports of Republicans contributing to Green campaigns and even voting for Greens to bolster their chances at spoiling Democrats' hopes. I have not been able to verify most of them. Green Party leaders say that, unlike the Libertarians, they have not had a national strategy to intentionally spoil elections, and they are not conspiring with Republicans.
Additional note: As a progressive, liberal Democrat who sometimes votes for Greens when there is not a Democrat in the race, I don't see the value of ostracizing Greens just because they support their parties' candidates. Sure, I argue sometimes with Greens that they helped get Bush in office. But then, so did the Socialists, who also amassed more votes in Florida than Bush's margin of "victory" there. For years, Republicans have complained how Libertarians have siphoned votes from them, even blaming them for losing the U.S. Senate seats in 1996 in Georgia held by Cleland and in 2000 in Washington state held by Democrat Maria Cantwell. If that does happen, it is balanced out by Libertarians helping to elect Republicans, such as the late Sen. Coverdell from Georgia in 1992, and Greens helping to elect Republicans in states like New Mexico.
I am slowly coming around to see that Democrats have to find ways to form alliances with Greens that will benefit both parties. One way is to support a concept Greens and others like the Center for Voting and Democracy are pushing called Instant Runoff Voting. Basically, voters rank two choices for an office. If one candidate fails to get 50 percent of the vote, the voters' second choices come into play. Under this system, Gore would have easily taken the presidency he won in 2000 without the hanging chads and despite the Republican fraud. And third parties like the Greens would have a better idea of their support - many progressive Democrats like me would give them my second-choice vote - and not be accused of spoiling elections.
The concept has been tested in other countries - Australia uses it for parliamentary elections, as does the Republic of Ireland for presidential contests. San Francisco recently adopted IRV for major offices beginning in November 2003. The New Mexico state senate passed the measure in 2001, but it died in the house. For more information, visit http://www.fairvote.org/irv/index.html.
I also support proportional representation, a more complicated system where parties obtain the proportion of positions according to the proportion of votes they receive. This system is at least partially used in 39 out of 41 major democratic countries, withthe U.S. and Canada the only exceptions. For instance, if the Democrats gained 49 percent of the national vote, they would receive 49 percent of the congressional seats. If Greens get 3 percent of the vote, they actually would gain some representation in Congress. More info on this can be viewed at http://www.fairvote.org/pr/index.html. Of the two, I think IRV is more likely to be supported by the major parties than proportional representation.
That said, I still hope Green voters at least consider voting for Democrats, especially in Congressional races [Greens are fielding 42 candidates for the House and six for the Senate]. We need to kick these Republicans out of office before they control every single segment of our government.
Republicans recruit phony candidates to run as Democrats in Michigan
Republicans in Michigan recruited "stealth" candidates to run as phony Democrats for nine state Senate seats, all Democratic-controlled districts. Local newspapers - see, there are some good journalists out there - exposed the scam after an 18-year-old was recruited to run, violating a law in which state Senate candidates must be at least 21.
Michigan Republican State Senator Ken Sikkema acknowledged Republican involvement in the scheme, attributing it to "overzealous staffers."
Republicans manipulate voting machines in Texas
In Dallas, Texas, a bastion of Republican strength where both Bush and Cheney have lived for several years, machines used for early voting are marking votes made for Democratic Sen. Candidate Ron Kirk in the column of Republican John Cornyn. Dallas County Democrats have sued to suspend early voting. Election officials blame mistakes on the calibration of the machines in the key Senate battle.
I have lived in Dallas County for decades, and it has a long history of such electoral manipulation. I don't trust election officials here at all.
Republicans intimidate African-American voters in Arkansas
In Arkansas, Republican Sen. Tim Hutchinson and Democratic attorney general Mark Pryor are locked in another tight, key Senate race. Democrats have charged that two Hutchinson campaign workers tried to harass African-Americans at a county courthouse by asking for identification - in addition to their voters registration cards - before they could vote.
A Democratic Party official said it was a "calculated effort to intimidate African-American voters." Judging by what went on in 2000, especially in southern states like Arkansas, it sounds like Republicans are continuing their racist tactics.
Missouri Republican election official accused of confusing issue
In Missouri, Democrats have filed a lawsuit to block rules issued by Republican Secretary of State Matt Blunt concerning a law allowing a voter whose eligibility is questioned to cast a provisional ballot counted only if eligibility is later verified. The law was passed after Republicans complained of alleged voter fraud in strong Democratic precincts in St. Louis in 2000. Democrats say Blunt's new rules confuse the issue.
South Dakota Republicans try to keep Native Americans from voting
Republicans are trying to keep absentee votes made by Native Americans in South Dakota from being counted in the hard-fought Senate race between Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson and Republican Rep. John Thune. Republicans have asked for federal election monitors on American Indian reservations, which some say will intimidate new voters.
Republicans' use of private planes from Enron and Air Force One
Bush, Cheney, and other Republicans have spent thousands of taxpayers' money to campaign for Republican senators using Air Force One in recent months. Clinton and other Democrats did this, but not to the extent that Bush & Co. are doing so this year.
Besides outspending Democrats by about five-to-one in the 2000 battle for Florida, Republicans used private planes from Enron Corp. and Halliburton Co., the firm headed by Dick Cheney that also practiced phony accounting fraud, to crisscross the state and block the counting of Florida votes.
White House influence on Ventura administration in Minnesota
Chief White House dirty trickster Karl Rove himself reportedly called Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and the Secretary of State's office to get them to agree to throw out absentee votes for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, but retain those for Rep. Senate candidate Norm Coleman. A ruling issued by that office read like one of Rove's memos, not like previous rulings by the office. The Minnesota state Democratic Party has taken the issue to court.
Bush himself called up Coleman to tell him to run for the Senate instead of governor, as Coleman originally planned to do.
More dirty tricks in Florida
The Sept. 10 primary in Florida was marred by widespread confusion, mostly in Florida's two biggest Democratic-strong counties, Miami-Dade and Broward. Numerous glitches were reported concerning the touch-screen voting machines, causing long lines and delayed results. Rep. Gov. Jeb Bush tried to blame Democratic election officials in those counties for the problems, despite the fact that the Republican-controlled elections department ultimately calls the shots. In the Democratic primary, Bill McBride barely won over Janet Reno, the former U.S. attorney general who was strongly opposed by Bush.
Also in Florida, misleading fliers are being circulated again, saying that some people should vote on a day after Nov. 5. Similar fliers were circulated in Florida before the 2000 election, which some say confused some voters there.
Republicans try to turn the tables by accusing Democrats of dirty tricks
The Republican National Committee has issued a hotline [1-866-NOT-TRUE] and Web site [http://democratattacks.com] to report supposed Democratic attacks and dirty tricks. It's a case of the thieves trying to point the finger at others so no one will finger them.
Here are some examples of "outrageous" Democratic "dirty tricks" reported to the RNC:
* "Lois Capps is doing her usual thing, speaking about how Republicans are hurting the elderly." [The nerve! Imagine that, a Democrat telling the truth about Republicans! What a dirty attack!]
* "There are television ads running in the greater Boise area attacking the president's plan." [Call the National Guard! A TV ad attacking the president's policies, oh no!]
* "In Allentown, there was reported repeatedly on the news a bus trip to Canada for drugs, saying in the report that the people on the bus won't be voting for our Republican candidate because of his stance, then interviewed the head of the trip who endorsed O'Brien, the democratic congressional candidate. I didn't know (if) it was out of the game book, it wasn't presented that way, it was a local news story." [More Democrats controlling the news media, telling a newscaster what to say, no doubt!]
I reported an attack to the RNC myself, though it was one done by Republicans. I haven't seen it listed on the RNC site yet. Should I hold my breath?
I'm sure you have heard of more dirty tricks by Republicans this year. It's amazing that we let them get away with it.
Finally, thanks to all who sent emails, information, and links to other stories raising questions about Sen. Wellstone's suspicious plane crash. I will continue to pursue those, believing that "accident" was the ultimate dirty trick played on that great American.
Vote Democratic on Nov. 5.
Jackson Thoreau is co-author of We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House. The 110,000-word electronic book can be downloaded at http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor or at http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html.
Thoreau can be emailed at jacksonthor@justice.com.
This was actually posted before the last election.
Why Your Vote Won't Matter
By John Kaminski for Rense.com.
Your vote does not matter. It might not even be counted, assuming you're allowed to vote to begin with. In fact, if you're black, and the first four letters of your last name match the first four letters on that famously fabricated list of Florida felons, you definitely won't be voting at all, because the state of Florida hasn't bothered to fix its mistakes from the last election " the same problems that allowed George W. Bush to slither into the White House like the rapine reptilian he is are still in force...Did you know that Republicans used private planes from Enron Corp. and Halliburton Co., the firm headed by Dick Cheney that also practiced phony accounting fraud, to crisscross the state and block the counting of Florida votes? This time around in the Florida primary, misleading fliers were circulated again, saying that some people should vote on a day after Nov. 5. Similar fliers were circulated in Florida before the 2000 election, which some say confused some voters there. I bet they'd like to hire Arthur Andersen to audit Florida's elections system...
Like the voting machines. Who provides them, and who operates them?
Most recently, a former Florida secretary of state profited by being a lobbyist for both the state's counties and the company that sold some of them touch-screen voting machines used in last month's botched primary election. Sandra Mortham, who served as the state's top elections official from 1995 to 1999, is a lobbyist for both Election Systems & Software and the Florida Association of Counties, which exclusively endorsed the company's touchscreen machines in return for a commission... Mortham received a commission from ES&S for every county that bought its touch-screen machines. The exact terms have not been disclosed... Mortham is of course a Republican who before a scandal brought her down was going to be Jeb Bush's running mate in Florida.
And of course, there is the current problem in Nebraska. Look at the documents, see the loop: ES&S, according to the Nebraska Elections Division, is the ONLY vote-counting company certified to sell machines in Nebraska. ES&S counts 80 percent of the votes; the remaining 20 percent are hand counts.
ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy runs the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy is the Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator Chuck Hagel; The FEC designates Michael McCarthy as a Primary Campaign Committee for Candidate Chuck Hagel; and Chuck Hagel's financials list the McCarthy Group as an Asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million.
Hagel came to Omaha from Washington, where he worked with the first George Bush Administration. In news articles by the Omaha World-Herald, Hagel said he was coming to Omaha to become president and partner in the McCarthy Group and Chairman of American Information Systems.
In his congressional bio he is said to have come to Omaha "to prepare for running for office." The first thing he did was run American Information Systems, a vote-counting company. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. He continues to disclose an investment of $1-5 million in the McCarthy Group, but he does not identify the underlying assets (ES&S). His disclosure documents omit any mention of American Information Systems at all. John Gottschalk has been reported as a director for both the World-Herald Company Inc. (concentrating on the non-newspaper subsidiaries) and ES&S. He was also involved with Senator Hagel in the World USO, has relationships with James Baker; he is listed as a USO pal of George W. Bush. Hmm, there's that certain odor again.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.rense.com/general31/vote.htm
Rense.com
Why Your Vote Won't Matter
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
11-3-2
So, you're going to cast your vote to prove that you live in a democracy, are you? Guess again, Chuck.
Your vote does not matter. It might not even be counted, assuming you're allowed to vote to begin with. In fact, if you're black, and the first four letters of your last name match the first four letters on that famously fabricated list of Florida felons, you definitely won't be voting at all, because the state of Florida hasn't bothered to fix its mistakes from the last election " the same problems that allowed George W. Bush to slither into the White House like the rapine reptilian he is are still in force.
Plus, the thoughtful Republicans in Florida, led by the president's porcine brother Jeb Bush, have added some new obstacles to counting the votes accurately, the best of which is the new touchscreen voting system, which eliminates the paper trail that would expose ballot manipulation and also would be used for legitimate recounts in the case of very close elections. No more recounts " isn't that efficient?
Angry columnist Jackson Thoreau recently penned a comprehensive roundup of Republican shenanigans going on around the country to reduce the Democratic vote. Read the whole story at http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed110102.shtml or let me give you this brief synopsis.
You have to hand it to the Republicans for evil inventiveness. In New Mexico, the GOP tried to bribe the Green Party to run candidates in three Congressional races to siphon votes away from popular Democrats. Of course, the principled Greens refused. In Michigan, Republicans recruited nine "stealth" candidates to run as Democrats, thereby discouraging legitimate opposition. In early voting in Dallas, Texas, voting machines were recording Democratic votes as Republican; the GOP, when caught, blamed it on "miscalibration." In Arkansas, many African American voters were asked to produce their voter ID cards in a blatant effort at intimidation. Officials in South Dakota want new restrictions on Native American voters.
Did you know that Republicans used private planes from Enron Corp. and Halliburton Co., the firm headed by Dick Cheney that also practiced phony accounting fraud, to crisscross the state and block the counting of Florida votes? This time around in the Florida primary, misleading fliers were circulated again, saying that some people should vote on a day after Nov. 5. Similar fliers were circulated in Florida before the 2000 election, which some say confused some voters there. I bet they'd like to hire Arthur Andersen to audit Florida's elections system.
But these are trivial gestures - distracting parlor games, really - and not the real issue that proves your own vote will not matter.
President Bush supposedly signed new Election Reform Legislation into law earlier this month. Kay J. Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States, stated: "Because of the hard work of many ? elected officials, advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations such as ours, America,s voters can look forward to real changes at their polling places over the next few years." Right, the next few years. But not this year. Nothing, especially in Florida, has really changed at all.
Where we begin to get a little closer to the truth is not in the debate about who can vote, although that certainly is important, but in the mechanics of the voting. Call it the hanging chad tangent, if you like.
Like the voting machines. Who provides them, and who operates them?
Most recently, a former Florida secretary of state profited by being a lobbyist for both the state's counties and the company that sold some of them touch-screen voting machines used in last month's botched primary election. Sandra Mortham, who served as the state's top elections official from 1995 to 1999, is a lobbyist for both Election Systems & Software and the Florida Association of Counties, which exclusively endorsed the company's touchscreen machines in return for a commission... Mortham received a commission from ES&S for every county that bought its touch-screen machines. The exact terms have not been disclosed... Mortham is of course a Republican who before a scandal brought her down was going to be Jeb Bush's running mate in Florida.
And of course, there is the current problem in Nebraska. Look at the documents, see the loop: ES&S, according to the Nebraska Elections Division, is the ONLY vote-counting company certified to sell machines in Nebraska. ES&S counts 80 percent of the votes; the remaining 20 percent are hand counts.
ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy runs the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy is the Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator Chuck Hagel; The FEC designates Michael McCarthy as a Primary Campaign Committee for Candidate Chuck Hagel; and Chuck Hagel's financials list the McCarthy Group as an Asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million.
Hagel came to Omaha from Washington, where he worked with the first George Bush Administration. In news articles by the Omaha World-Herald, Hagel said he was coming to Omaha to become president and partner in the McCarthy Group and Chairman of American Information Systems.
In his congressional bio he is said to have come to Omaha "to prepare for running for office." The first thing he did was run American Information Systems, a vote-counting company. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. He continues to disclose an investment of $1-5 million in the McCarthy Group, but he does not identify the underlying assets (ES&S). His disclosure documents omit any mention of American Information Systems at all. John Gottschalk has been reported as a director for both the World-Herald Company Inc. (concentrating on the non-newspaper subsidiaries) and ES&S. He was also involved with Senator Hagel in the World USO, has relationships with James Baker; he is listed as a USO pal of George W. Bush. Hmm, there's that certain odor again.
(The unabridged information on this can be accessed at http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html#Nebraska)
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to voting machines, by the way, as you could read in the aforemented reference. Perhaps the greatest vote-fixing story of the computer age occurred in the1988 Republican primary in New Hampshire, where it is likely that a notoriously riggable collection of "Shouptronic" computers "preordained" voting results to give George Bush his "Hail Mary" victory in New Hampshire. Nobody save a small group of computer engineers, like John Sununu, the state's Republican governor, would be the wiser.
"People who mistrust the voting process cannot, in the traditional American way, accept the defeat of their candidates gracefully and work loyally with the winners. Instead, more and more American voters are feeling "had," "scammed," "hoodwinked" by the voting system. Trust has almost departed. There is the nagging, unproven, yet pervasive feeling that the "experts," the "spin doctors," the "covert operators" and the "private interests" have put their technicians and consultants in absolute control of the national vote count, and that in any selected situation these computer wizards can and will program the vote as their masters wish." So wrote James M. Collier in his 1992 classic, "Votescam: The Stealing of America."
This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter opinion, Collier wrote. Gallup's glaring error and the miscalls of other polling organizations once again raised questions about the accuracy of polls.What nobody seriously wrote about was that the polls were usually right and that the computers were eminently "fixable." Read the whole sorry tale at http://Votescam.com/chap1.html. When you do you'll realize that not just the second Bush was an illegitimately elected president.
What really determines elections is who counts the votes, and who counts the votes is somebody you probably didn't know, and if you did know them, you surely wouldn't trust them to count the votes. No government agency counts the votes. And the people who count the votes, who tell you who your next president is, have no government oversight, no audit, no official you have elected watching over them.
The people who really count the votes are the media, more specifically a politically influenced cabal of minions bought and paid for by corporate tycoons who own the nation's major media outlets. These are the same people who don't think peace demonstrations are worthy of coverage, and who in the year 2000 got together and reviewed the data from Florida and then really wouldn't tell us what they found out. They'd only say ... Bush won, just like the Supreme Court. The highest court of the United States wouldn't let Florida recount its ballots, and the highest media of the United States wouldn't tell us what they found when they did. In case you were wondering, there is no honest official vote total from the last election, only the one "certified" by Katherine Harris.
Evan Ravitz, founder of the website vote.org, has itemized the major problems with America's manipulable election system. (http://www.vote.org/fraud.htm)
"When I directed Boulder, Colorado's Voting by Phone ballot initiative campaign in 1993 I learned many unnerving things about existing voting procedures. The problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning," Ravitz wrote. Here's his list:
1. The Voter News Service (formerly News Election Service) " which supplies ALL election-eve numbers on national and Congressional races " is a private business of the TV networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. If you ask them how they count votes and predict outcomes they say that's proprietary information! They have no web site or other public profile. And they won't tell you a thing about how they do what they do.
2. Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to inspect these programs (the "source code") to verify their accuracy. Election officials can test the programs (using "test decks") but any clever programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies the election.
3. In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor system. Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on file in most places unless you are "challenged" by election judges or poll watchers, a rare event. When this system started hundreds of years ago, the election judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in their precincts. In modern America, this is rarely true.
4. Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it out in the rightful voter's name. This is discussed in the document "Florida Voter Fraud Issues" from the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement. In student and other high-turnover areas, this problem is rife.
5. In states with "early" voting, there is no system to prevent people from voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their precinct. This is going on right now as we speak. (See the Dallas anecdote above.)
So, here's the deal: the people who count the votes are the same people who both predict (via the use of polls) the winners and also report on the outcomes of these elections. Do you think they have any interest in promoting their credibility by seeing their predictions verified? After all, these are private businesses.
Also, the actual members of the Voter News Service are super-rich media barons, with intimate ties to the power structure of America, which chooses all of the major candidates for president in every election. Do you think they might be in agreement who will win before the election ever transpires?
As Collier wrote of the 1988 fiasco in New Hampshire, "there was no rechecking of the computerized voting machines, no inquiry into the path of the vote from the voting machines to the central tallying place, no public scrutiny of the mechanisms of the mighty peculiar vote that saved George Bush's career and leapfrogged the relatively obscure Sununu into the White House."
The media giants who reported on " and recounted " Florida's votes in the 2000 election failed to report one simple fact: that by law, ballots rejected by counting machines have to be hand-counted. This did not occur, and this was not widely reported.
If either had occurred, you know who would not be in the White House at this moment trying to make war on the entire world. If either had occurred, our Constitutional Bill of Rights would still be in force, which now, as a result of this convenient media oversight, it is not.
The same wealthy patricians who undercount the number of people who attend antiwar demonstrations, who pretend there are no political opinions in the United States except Republican and Democratic, who deride "liberals" and blithely report that Paul Wellstone's political assassination was just a mysterious accident " and that 9/11 was an attack by disenchanted Muslim terrorists ... these are the same people who are predicting and reporting on your elections, as well as the very ones who actually count the votes and give you the totals.
Which is why your vote in Tuesday's election will most definitely not really matter.
John Kaminski is a writer living on the coast of Florida who will not be voting for Katherine Harris (who should be indicted for 22,000 counts of civil rights violations) in Tuesday's election.
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The morning after the November 5, 2002 election, I wrote this post.
In many ways, I regret making that post before all of the facts were in -- even if I was correct in my assumptions. (It's just a bad practice in general for reasons I'm sure I don't need to explain here.)
However, now that the facts are in, it would appear that the situation is actually even worse than I feared.
We need to work together to not only get to the bottom of this stuff (purge lists, lack of exit polls or conflicting exit poll results, computer voting manipulation, conflict of interests/politicians owning stock in voting machine companies) -- but keep focusing on the big picture: a fair election in 2004.
That means it will be more important to make sure everybody knows who these people are -- and work with the good guy democrats and republicans to reform our system -- and fast -- and, in many ways, leave it at that.
If we're not careful, we'll get caught up in some "make the skapegoats pay" bullshit session while the real people responsible for what's is happening quietly steal another election.
Attention Geeks, Newbies, and Those of You Who May Not Have Ever Voted Before In An Election: Your country needs you. It's time for us all to get hands-on in a big way with our country's elections.
This post was actually inspired by Douglas Rushkoff's threatening to not write about politics anymore. On the countrary Doug. After this beautiful post, it is my hope that you will be writing about politics more than ever!
After Democracy
As is becoming increasingly clear, the system through which we are supposed to elect our government has been subverted. I'm not just talking about black people in Florida being taken off the voting rolls, or poor people in Maryland being handed flyers that tell them the wrong day to vote or that they'll have to pay traffic tickets before voting. True enough, machines at which black people were likely to register their votes were set differently than in white, Republican districts. (In white areas, ballots with errors were re-read; in black areas, they were destroyed.) But that's not the kind of subversion of democracy I'm concerned about right now.As is now being reported widely in the 'alternative' press, in the last midterm election, the computers responsible for exit polling - an unofficial but telling check on the official vote count - were suspended without adequate explanation. Shortly later, the exit polling company went out of business. Meanwhile, an increasing number of districts came under the control of a private vote-counting company owned and, sometimes, operated - surprise - by Republican Chuck Hagel. His polling machines may or may not be responsible for his and other recent Republican electoral victories that confounded pollsters and analysts in the United States and abroad. (Republicans won by landslides in largely black districts that had never voted Republican, before. And then there is the question of memos with the subject line "how we stole the election".) But they sure don't inspire confidence. (For more, see the links at SeetheForest)
The Democrats might best use their remaining time in elected positions to safeguard what is left of the electoral system, or begin supporting Republican candidates who might have the resolve and patriotism necessary to dismantle the corrupted aparatus and voluntarily submit themselves to fair elections.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.rushkoff.com/2003_02_01_archive.php#90295243
Monday, February 10, 2003
After Democracy
Okay, this will be my last "political" post for a while. (I can hear your applause.) In the near future, I'll be sticking closer to my own areas of expertise, and posting links to news and analysis by others that I think deserves attention. You'll still see some current events here, but mostly in the context of media, values, cultural mythology and reality hacking.
My farewell is also a sad farewell to democracy - at least in America. Why write about politics if I don't believe in it, anymore?
As is becoming increasingly clear, the system through which we are supposed to elect our government has been subverted. I'm not just talking about black people in Florida being taken off the voting rolls, or poor people in Maryland being handed flyers that tell them the wrong day to vote or that they'll have to pay traffic tickets before voting. True enough, machines at which black people were likely to register their votes were set differently than in white, Republican districts. (In white areas, ballots with errors were re-read; in black areas, they were destroyed.) But that's not the kind of subversion of democracy I'm concerned about right now.
As is now being reported widely in the 'alternative' press, in the last midterm election, the computers responsible for exit polling - an unofficial but telling check on the official vote count - were suspended without adequate explanation. Shortly later, the exit polling company went out of business. Meanwhile, an increasing number of districts came under the control of a private vote-counting company owned and, sometimes, operated - surprise - by Republican Chuck Hagel. His polling machines may or may not be responsible for his and other recent Republican electoral victories that confounded pollsters and analysts in the United States and abroad. (Republicans won by landslides in largely black districts that had never voted Republican, before. And then there is the question of memos with the subject line "how we stole the election".) But they sure don't inspire confidence. (For more, see the links at SeetheForest)
The Democrats might best use their remaining time in elected positions to safeguard what is left of the electoral system, or begin supporting Republican candidates who might have the resolve and patriotism necessary to dismantle the corrupted aparatus and voluntarily submit themselves to fair elections. ('TO BE SURE' DISCLOSURE: In this post, I'm not saying Republicans are bad people, or that the Republican party's positions are necessarily inferior to the Democrats' policies. Neither am I suggesting they are better, or that they are equal. I'm not even suggesting that certain Democrats, with access to the computers that register votes, would be more or less corrupted by this power.)
As I see it, the Gore victory was just too close a call for those who mean to preserve business as usual in Washington DC. (And those of you think Gore is just another candidate of the same pro-business sort, well, that just proves how truly conservative the tyrannical forces that mean to control government are.) And now, it may be a very long time indeed until we see democratic process revived.
Yes, I'll keep voting. But, like I said, I'm not going to talk about politics for a good long time. At least not until I have more faith that representative democracy is more than just another distraction.
6:00 PM | link | 5 comments
On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming "Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering" in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel's votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings today and uncovered more details.Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, now admits that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group. ES&S counts approximately 60 percent of all votes cast in the United States. According to the Omaha World-Herald which is also a beneficial owner of ES&S, Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems, now called ES&S, from November 1993 through June 2, 1994. He was Chairman from July 1992 until March 15 1995. He was required to disclose these positions on his FEC Personal Disclosure statements, but he did not.
Hagel still owns up to $5 million in the ES&S parent company, McCarthy Group. But Hagel's office, when interviewed by Channel 8 News in Lincoln, Nebraska for the evening news on October 22, 2002, said he had sold his shares before he was elected. His office issued a fact sheet claiming that he had made full disclosure.
Last week, Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy (currently an owner and a director of ES&S) admitted to Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Hagel is still an owner of ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group, and said that Hagel also had owned shares in AIS Investors Inc., a group of investors in ES&S itself. Yet Hagel did not disclose owning or selling shares in AIS Investors Inc. on his FEC documents, a required disclosure, nor did he disclose that ES&S is an underlying asset of McCarthy Group, in which he lists an investment of up to $5 million in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.whoseflorida.com/voting_machines.htm#U.S.%20CHUCK%20HAGEL%20NOW%20ADMITS%20OWNERSHIP
Voting Machines: Vote Tampering in the 21st Century
BREAKING NEWS:
U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Now Admits Ownership In Voting Machine Company-- Senate Ethics Committee Director Resigns 1/30/03
On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming "Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering" in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel's votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings today and uncovered more details. (more...)
Why do you allow machines with no paper trail? These machines can be rigged. They were in 2002 by Bush and his cronies.
E,S & S is owned by the far right McCarthy Group and is connected to far right Republican Senator Hagel.
Voting Machines - A High Tech Ambush
Scoop: US Election Vote Fixing Reports Hit The Mainstream
Voting machine companies: Ownership disclosure, "private" vote-counting codes,
A Repository for Voter Complaints
ELECTION FRAUD 2002
...kgl, 11/19/02
Who Makes the Voting Machines? 10/9/02
Ex-secretary of state profits from counties' touchscreen buys 10/8/02
News Clips updated 01/30/03
Pinellas Delays decision on voting machine 10/31/01
Election firm has ties to Pinellas
Reno's Election complaint 9/15/02
Touchscreens: Manipulating totals would be too easy 8/21/01
Ballot Printout 8/01
Carter-Ford Election Reform Plan 8/4/01
An Idea to bring back confidence to our Elections!
No more messy recounts 6/21/01
See also:
Electoral Reform 2001
Electoral Reform 2002
"Unprecedented" an award winning documentary on the 2000 election 9/29/0202
U.S. CHUCK HAGEL NOW ADMITS OWNERSHIP IN VOTING MACHINE COMPANY
SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE DIRECTOR RESIGNS
CONTACTS:
Bev Harris, "Black Box Voting," 425-228-7131 http://www.blackboxvoting.com
Dan Spillane, Senior Test Engineer for voting machines: 206-860-2858
Chuck Hagel: 202-224-4224 -- Senate Ethics Committee: 202-224-2981
Charlie Matulka, ran for office against Chuck Hagel: 402-228-1009
Rebecca Mercuri, expert on computerized voting machines 215/327-7105
The Hill Article: http://www.thehill.com
U.S. CHUCK HAGEL NOW ADMITS OWNERSHIP IN VOTING MACHINE COMPANY
SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE DIRECTOR RESIGNS
"Hagel's ethics filings pose disclosure issue" -- "The Hill" 1/29/2003
On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming "Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering" in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel's votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings today and uncovered more details.
Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, now admits that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group. ES&S counts approximately 60 percent of all votes cast in the United States. According to the Omaha World-Herald which is also a beneficial owner of ES&S, Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems, now called ES&S, from November 1993 through June 2, 1994. He was Chairman from July 1992 until March 15 1995. He was required to disclose these positions on his FEC Personal Disclosure statements, but he did not.
Hagel still owns up to $5 million in the ES&S parent company, McCarthy Group. But Hagel's office, when interviewed by Channel 8 News in Lincoln, Nebraska for the evening news on October 22, 2002, said he had sold his shares before he was elected. His office issued a fact sheet claiming that he had made full disclosure.
Last week, Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy (currently an owner and a director of ES&S) admitted to Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Hagel is still an owner of ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group, and said that Hagel also had owned shares in AIS Investors Inc., a group of investors in ES&S itself. Yet Hagel did not disclose owning or selling shares in AIS Investors Inc. on his FEC documents, a required disclosure, nor did he disclose that ES&S is an underlying asset of McCarthy Group, in which he lists an investment of up to $5 million in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001.
SENATE ETHICS COMMITTEE CHIEF COUNSEL / DIRECTOR RESIGNS
Harris spoke with Victor Baird of the Senate Ethics Committee office January 9, and asked him who is responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete. She asked whether anyone had followed up to see why Senator Hagel did not list his positions with the voting machine company, and she asked about his characterization of the McCarthy Group as an "excepted investment fund" and his failure to disclose that it owned ES&S. Baird was silent, and then said "If you want to look into this, you'll need to come in and get hold of the documents."
Unfortunately, according to Alexander Bolton, a reporter at The Hill, when he went to the Senate Public Documents Room to retrieve originals of Hagel's 1995 and 1996 documents he was told they were destroyed. "They said anything over five years old is destroyed by law, and they pulled out the law," says Bolton. However, when he spoke with Hagel's staff, they said had obtained the documents from Senate Ethics Committee files. Copies of the documents are available at www.OpenSecrets.org/pfds -- a repository for FEC disclosures.
In 1997, Baird asked Hagel to clarify the nature of his investment in McCarthy Group on his 1996 FEC statement. Hagel had written "none" next to "type of investment" for McCarthy Group. In response to Baird's letter, Hagel filed an amendment characterizing the McCarthy Group as an "Excepted Investment Fund," a designation for widely held, publicly available mutual funds. He never disclosed his indirect ownership of ES&S at all, but apparently no one questioned this omission, nor his curious characterization of the McCarthy Group, a privately held company that is not listed on any public brokerage.
Baird told Bolton that the McCarthy Group did not seem to qualify as an "excepted investment fund." He reportedly met with Hagel's staff on Friday, January 25 and Monday, January 27, 2002. Then, also on Monday, he stepped down. On Monday afternoon Baird's replacement, Robert Walker, provided a new, looser interpretation of "publicly available" (though experts disagree, saying that a privately held company like the McCarthy Group cannot be called "publicly available" in order to avoid disclosing underlying assets.)
Hagel's challenger in the Nebraska Senate race, Charlie Matulka, wrote to Baird in October 2002 to request an investigation into Hagel's ownership in and nondisclosure of ES&S. Baird replied, "Your complaint lacks merit and no further action is appropriate with respect to the matter, which is hereby dismissed," in a letter dated November 18, 2002.
SENATE CANDIDATE QUESTIONS HAGEL'S CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Charlie Matulka, the candidate who ran against Chuck Hagel in Nebraska's U.S. Senate race in November 2002, also wrote to the Nebraska Secretary of State and to state elections officials in October 2002. He pointed out that his opponent had ties to ES&S, and asked them to look into the conflict of interest, but received no answer.
Several Nebraska ES&S machines malfunctioned on Election Day, and Matulka filed a request for a hand count on December 10, 2002. It was denied, because Nebraska has a new law that prohibits election workers from looking at the paper ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska are ES&S.
CAN VOTING MACHINES BE TAMPERED WITH THROUGH ACCESS TO PROGRAMMERS?
The Washington Post characterized Hagel's election in 1996 as the biggest upset of the election season. At the time, voters did not know that he owned and had held key positions with the company that counted his votes. But is it improper for a candidate to have ties with voting machine companies?
Harris examines the issue of tampering security in the upcoming "Black Box Voting" book. One of her sources, Dan Spillane, a former Senior Test Engineer for a voting machine company, believes that the computerized voting machine industry is riddled with system integrity flaws.
"The problems are systemic," Spillane says, and he contends that the certification process itself cannot be trusted. Despite industry characterizations that the code is checked line by line, this does not appear to be the case. Spillane points to frequent, critical errors that occur in actual elections and identifies omissions in the testing procedures themselves. His own experience as a voting machine test engineer led him to address his concerns about integrity flaws with the owner of the voting machine company, who then suggested that he resign. He did not, but shortly before a General Accounting Office audit, Spillane was fired, and so was his supervisor, who had also expressed concerns about system integrity.
Election Technology Labs quit certifying voting machines in 1992. Its founder, Arnold B. Urken, says that the manufacturers, specifically ES&S (then AIS), refused to allow the detailed examination of code needed to ensure system integrity. Wyle Labs refused to test voting machine software after 1996; testing then went to Nichols Research, and then passed to PSINet, and then to Metamor, and most recently to Ciber.
But even if certification becomes adequate, nothing guarantees that machines used in actual elections use the same programming code that was certified. Machines with adjusted code can be loaded onto delivery trucks with inside involvement of only ONE person. To make matters worse, "program patches" and substitutions are made in vote-counting programs without examination of the new codes, and manufacturers often e-mail technicians uncertified program "updates" which they install on machines immediately before and on Election Day.
Both Sequoia touch screen machines and Diebold Accuvote machines appear to have "back door" mechanisms which may allow reprogramming after votes have been cast. Diebold's Accuvote machines were developed by a company founded by Bob Urosevich, a CEO of Diebold Election Systems and Global Election Systems, which Diebold acquired. Together with his brother Todd, he also founded ES&S, where Todd Urosevich still works. ES&S and Sequoia use identical software and hardware in their optical scan machines. All three companies' machines have miscounted recent elections, sometimes electing the wrong candidates in races that were not particularly close.
For more information, call 425-228-7131.
.....taliion, 1/30/03
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Who Makes the Voting Machines?
Appearance of Impropriety New Questions About the Integrity and Security of USA Elections
The story is not about allegations of fraud it's about an appearance of impropriety that is stunning in its magnitude.
Unfettered by any disclosure regulations about ownership or political affiliations, just a few companies create and control almost all the voting machines in the U.S. Do the people who own them have conflicts of interest? We don't know, they won't tell us. Do they employ anyone with a criminal record? We don't know, they say it's private. Can we have someone check the vote-counting code to make sure no one tampered with it? Nope, they say its proprietary.
Election Systems & Software, the firm whose machines were involved in the 2002 flubbed Florida primary election and the company that now makes the voting machines for most of America is a private company that does not like to tell the public who owns it. But at least one major shareholder is Michael R. McCarthy, who runs the McCarthy Group. The McCarthy Group has been a primary owner of Election Systems & Software, including its predecessor, American Information Systems for more than a decade. Michael R. McCarthy is the current campaign Treasurer for Republican senator Chuck Hagel. [See Hagel and McCarthy Documents] Prior to his election, Republican Senator Hagel was president of McCarthy & Company. In fact, he decided to run for office while his own company was making the vote-counting machines!
Who cares? Poll workers count the votes, not election machines, right?
Wrong. The machines count the votes, and if you have any doubt about how critical it is for owners to disclose their information (as they must if they run lottery companies) read this: article by Ronnie Dugger, who will show you how easy it is for a single insider to fudge the vote-counting on these machines, in ways that can never be detected.
Why isn't tampering detectable?
Well, for one thing because the voting machine-makers fought in court to make their computerized vote-counting code "proprietary." Only their own programmers, it seems, are allowed to look at the innards of the code. Independent computer consultants almost unanimously cite the voting machine's impenetrable code as a security flaw. Difficult to detect tampering, yet relatively simple to implant an undetectable Trojan Horse to change counting algorithms.
And many of the new machines don't have paper trails
In Florida when votes were lost, election workers had to retrieve the hard drive as a back- up, because there were no paper ballots. But, if there was mischief in the computerized counting code, there would be absolutely no way to prove it. In California, thousands of votes just disappeared due to a computer glitch. What's up with this? Even the tax guys insist on a paper trail. (Just try telling an IRS auditor that your computer ate it.)
The other owner: Databases, personal information, mass communications, voter registration and vote-counting machines
The World-Herald Company, who owns the largest part of Election Systems & Software, likes to offer up a warm, fuzzy, "family and employee-owned" newspaper company as the owner. The company is actually something quite different. The newspaper is a small part of the overall business the real business of The World Companies is controlling a vast nationwide communications network: elections services, including all forms of voting machines (punch card, optical scanning and touch-screen); databases containing personal information on almost everyone in the USA, huge direct mailing firms, phone message broadcasting, fax blasting, mass e-mailing, publicity, advertising, Internet services and printing, and affiliations with cellular communication systems. The World Companies have operations in Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Nebraska, California, Iowa and Arizona and most have nothing to do with newspapers.
Wouldn't it be prudent to obtain names, political activities and corporate affiliations of major shareholders, directors and executives of the privately held companies who make our vote-counting machines? And could it be a bit reckless for Democracy to hand voter registration assignments over to a firm with active ties to political campaigns, which also has access to databases containing the race and political preferences of almost everyone in the USA?
Seventy percent of Election Systems & Software is owned by a partnership of the World Companies and the McCarthy Group. But who owns the McCarthy Group (besides Republican operative Michael R. McCarthy)? World Investments, a wholly- owned subsidiary of the Omaha World-Herald Co. (the conglomerate, not the newspaper), is a primary investor in the McCarthy Group. Round and round we go.
But speaking of newspapers, thank goodness a thoroughly objective organization like the Omaha World-Herald is involved with Election Systems & Software. "The delays [in the fall 2002 Florida primary voting] were the result of start-up errors by poll workers, not malfunctions by the company's election equipment," the Omaha World-Herald reports.
Who are these people, anyway?
We could go on for a week on this, and probably will. We've collected over 58 pages of information and there's more to come. Let's get started:
Election Systems & Software was formed by a merger of American Information Systems (AIS), a huge election company featuring several Republican owners, and Business Records Corp., part of Cronus Industries, in turn partially owned by a member of the Hunt oil family of Texas.
World Companies, Inc.: This is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Omaha World- Herald. It is a holding company with substantial ownership in Election Systems & Software, and it also controls World Marketing Inc., which operates gigantic databases and mammoth direct marketing companies. Election Systems & Software is also involved in voter registration services, and no one has questioned whether there is a conflict of interest with voter registration activity and access to the nation's largest databases containing race, political affiliations and other demographics.
Let me amend that: Investigative reporter Greg Palast can fill you in on exactly how to embezzle an election using tainted voter registration procedures. Jump to the bottom of this article for a list of "Six Ways to Fix Pesky Votes" uncovered by Palast. And by all means read Chapter 1 of his new book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, very carefully.
Questionable associations and relationships abound in the conglomerate that owns Election Systems & Software. One person with shares in the World Companies Inc. is Harold W. Andersen, who is on the board of directors for The Williams Companies yes, that Williams Energy, recently exposed by CBS for creating a sham energy crisis in California. CBS cites tapes, now sealed by the government, that prove Williams Energy turned off the juice, faking an energy shortage.
M. Gene Aldridge, the president and CEO of Omaha World-Herald subsidiary World Marketing, Inc. (the one that runs all those databases he knows if you've been black or white, he knows if you are poor...) is part of a conservative think tank, the New Mexico Independence Research Institute, and when he's not busy running the jumbo- sized database and direct marketing company, he is writing letters to Congress advocating that we take the huge future tax cuts and give them to the rich RIGHT NOW.
Here's more information on how Election Systems & Software came about, and who owns it:
From a 1996 article in The Omaha World-Herald:
"An Omaha company would become the nation's No. 1 ballot counter in a planned $59.3 million combination with a Dallas-based competitor...
"BRC is headed by a former Omahan, P.E. "Bill" Esping, who was a founder of First Data Resources.
"Under the agreement, American Information Systems would acquire the election division of Business Records. Both companies sell election counting and voter registration equipment and services based on optical scanners and paper ballots marked with pencils.
"Of the purchase price, $35 million would be in cash, $17.5 million in a note and the rest in stock of American Information, giving BRC about 20 percent ownership of the Omaha company. Stock owned by American Information employees would account for an additional 10 percent [OUR NOTE: This would include William L. Welsh II] with the remaining 70 percent owned by a partnership of the Omaha World-Herald Co. and the McCarthy Group, an Omaha investment banking company. American Information's share of the U.S. election automation market would increase to more than 50 percent..."
Let's have happy thoughts:
Before the 2002 Election, let's get disclosure from the handful of companies who make the voting machines that count our votes. These companies have nothing to hide (right?) so they should do this voluntarily. Then, Senator Hagel will lead the charge (won't he?) and he'll protect us from a situation that is, frankly, dangerous to Democracy, by getting some regulations in place:
(1) Require that any company who makes voting machines publicly disclose identities and political activities. And while we're at it, maybe criminal background checks are a nice idea, because if Republicans can control the big corporations that make the voting machines, just think what would happen if some crooks got into it. But I repeat myself.
(2) Require that all voting machines produce tamper-proof audit trails and that means retaining a paper trail using transparent computer code so that independent experts can investigate allegations of election tampering whenever needed.
More info:
Before Repiglicans start the squealing ("How DARE you bring this up so close the the
election, you know we have no time to rebut this") well, you can verify the facts yourself, in most cases using their own documents, if you go to google and run the following search terms:
"Election Systems & Software"
"McCarthy Group"
"Michael R. McCarthy"
"Charles T. Hagel"
"World Marketing Inc."
"World Investments Inc."
You'll find enough traceable leads to keep you busy for a week, if you run searches on the names and other related companies. * * * * *
Six Ways to Fix Pesky Votes
1. Scrub the lists too clean: if Andersen commits a felony, Anderson loses his vote.
2. Hire a firm to check voter eligibility, pay them 27 cents a name instead of the going rate (2.7 cents a name). When they contract to verify accuracy for people they remove, write them a friendly note: "DON'T NEED."
3. "Reform" the flawed voting system by purchasing millions of dollars in new, automated voting machines. Order them from a private company in Omaha that refuses to divulge who its owners are, or reveal their political connections.
4. Don't do any big stuff (switching 5,000 Dem votes to Republican). Do little things. Lots of them. Diversify.
5. Choose methods that will be boring or hard to understand.
6. Make sure people have to use math or statistics to see what you did. (Raise your hands: Who loves math?)
And if you want specifics of what happened in Florida, where over 50,000 votes disappeared in election 2000, start running google searches on Greg Palast's articles, aired on BBC and printed in the Guardian, and belatedly, picked up by major media outlets in the USA like the Washington Post.
To be continued. Next: How Election Systems & Software and the second biggest voting machine maker, Sequoia Pacific Systems, are actually related.
About the Author
The author of this report, Bev Harris, is the owner of Talion.com, a publicity company.
Here's how it came to be that a publicist wrote an investigative piece on election machines: While checking out an author as a potential guest for Talion's "Featured Guest" page, Harris did a media search and, by accident, realized that no one had disclosed who the owners are for the USA's main voting machine companies. The potential for conflicts of interest, and abuse disturbed her. Under her pen name, BJ Dudley, Bev had previously written a special report called "How to Unbezzle a Fortune" in which she details how to unravel and recover embezzled funds. Using some of the same techniques she used to unravel accounting frauds, she began to investigate voting machine ownership. All of the information in this article is readily available on the Internet, if you know where to search and what names to enter. This is a huge story, with thousands of leads to follow, and much of the information is findable.
...posted by KTR, 10/9/02
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