How American Elections Became a Criminal Enterprise
October 21, 2015 in News by RBN
Hermes-Press | Michelle Mairesse
Every day we hear laments about the state of the state or the nation or the world. The twenty-first century seems to be a powder keg rolling downhill. We have already witnessed enough chicanery, bad faith, fecklessness, and desecration to make us wary of the future. Yet we hope.
But hope, be it wan or fervent, is not enough. Most Americans are by nature pragmatists. For us, remedies begin in action. What can I do to heal a sick planet? we ask. What can I do to feed the hungry? What can I do to stop wars? What can I do to bring wise leaders to the fore?
We have grown complacent about our elections. We like to think that someone is in charge of the orderly ritual of designing, allotting, and counting the ballots. There are officials whose job it is to keep the roll of voters and supervise the count. There are bound to be a few errors and a few lost votes, but on the whole, our elections are well-conducted and honest. In this essay, I hope to convince you that the entire electoral process is in grave danger, has been insidiously subverted, and will continue to erode unless we intervene. We can hope, but hope is not enough. This is a call to action!
No sooner had he taken the oath of office than Jeb Bush began ferreting out and replacing Democrats throughout Florida state government, his first purge of Democratic voters. According to Lance deHaven-Smith, in his book entitled The Battle for Florida,
Lance deHaven-Smith describes how education took another hit in 1999:
Harris hired Data Base Technologies (DBT, now a division of Choicepoint) and paid them $4.3 million to compile the most extensive scrub list possible. Race was a big factor in compiling matches for the list. Blacks make up less than 15% of Florida’s population and 90% of them vote Democratic, so targeted blacks made up more than 50% of the ex-felon list. Were the errors minor? No, they were outrageous. Here are two typical examples: Randall Higginbotham, age 41, was scrubbed from the voting roster because he was identified as Sean Higginbotham, age 30; and David Butler,Jr. of Florida was scrubbed from the voting roster because he was misidentified as convict David Butler of Ohio. Five months before the election, Harris circulated the hit list of 57,700 names to all the precincts with instructions to remove those voters from the rolls.
Greg Palast, an award-winning American reporter based in England, broke the story of the scrub list and documented its sleazy origins in The Observer, London, November 26, 2000. Updates, as well as each edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy have added irrefutable, hard evidence of fraud. (Palast’s most recent estimate of all qualified Florida voters barred from casting a ballot in Election 2000 stands at 90,000.) The story was big in Europe, but the American press ignored it completely. Massive civil rights violations that subverted an election just didn’t resonate with the mainstream press. On January 10, 2001, lawyers acting for the NAACP sued and won their case against ChoicePoint’s DBT, Secretary of State Katherine Harris (who coincidentally was enthusiastically co-chairing the Bush campaign), and Bush loyalist Clay Roberts, Director of the Division of Elections. In July 2002, to atone for its staggering error rate of 95%, DBT agreed to remove innocent voters from the now infamous list of purported ex-felons. (In 2002, the purge list hadn’t been corrected. In 2004, another suspicious list appeared.)
Beginning early on Election Day, Democratic poll watchers phoned complaints to LePore’s office about the difficulties voters were having with the ballot. Between noon and one, she responded to the precincts with a memo: “Please remind all voters coming in that they are to vote only for one (1) presidential candidate and that they are to punch the hole next to the arrow next to the number next to the candidate they wish to vote for.” LePore registered as an Independent after the election. Some votes were simply later trashed by ballot handlers. In Duval County, 27,000 ballots were discarded, over half of them from black precincts in Jacksonville. No official challenges were filed within the 72-hour time limit, so thousands of mostly Democratic votes were lost. Sixteen-thousand votes for Gore disappeared overnight from the ongoing Volusia County tally and were reinstated only when an election supervisor questioned the subtraction of already registered votes. No voting machine company representative or election official was able to explain what happened.
Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, says she uncovered an 87-page CBS news report that contained a shocker: the erroneous subtraction of Gore’s votes in Volusia caused the election to be called for Bush. Claiming that the Voter News Service numbers from one Democratic county were flawed, the Bush election team called a press conference at the governor’s mansion in Austin. The Bush spokesman declared that the race was too close to call in both Pennsylvania and Florida. Between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m., according to Ellis, Bush pulled ahead. Between 9:00 and 9:30, the other television networks agreed that the race was too close to call. But shortly after midnight, Bush’s numbers plunged rapidly by thousands of votes and Gore jumped into the lead. Despite Gore’s soaring numbers, at 2:16 a.m. Fox News announced that Texas Governor George W. Bush had won Florida, with its 271 electoral votes. Within minutes, the other television networks repeated Fox’s false information. When Gore heard the fake news of his defeat, he phoned his congratulations to Bush and headed for the Knoxville War Memorial to deliver his concession speech to the nation. Gore’s chief deputy in Florida advised him to hold off. After all, there were still 360,000 uncounted votes. It was much too early to concede formally. Out of 6 million votes cast in Florida, Bush’s lead was reported to be a mere 537 votes. The Florida Constitution had no provisions for a statewide recount, so Gore asked for a partial recount in four southern counties where glaring irregularities had shown up. The last thing the Bush team wanted was a fair recount. They complained to the press that Gore was a sore loser, and the press largely agreed. On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court overturned a circuit court decision and ordered a manual recount. Based on findings in the circuit court trial, Gore was awarded 393 votes, reducing Bush’s lead to 154 votes. That’s when the Bush camp went ballistic.
The Bush campaign team and lawyers diligently circulated misinformation–misinformation about Florida’s election laws, about the reliability of manual recounts (both Jeb and George W. claimed that only machines could count accurately), and about the likelihood of a constitutional crisis. As for Florida’s election laws, they were quite clear. After a series of fierce, close contests, the legislature had carefully laid out legal procedures for contesting elections and conducting recounts. The Florida Constitution specifies that the intent of the voter be paramount during ballot recounting. Because electronic machines had repeatedly failed to read, discern intent, and count ballots accurately, manual recounting is mandated.
Normally the legislature wouldn’t have been involved in the election controversy until after December 12, when they could have taken whatever actions were necessary until December 18. Hastily, the Republican leadership called the legislature into special session while the judiciary branch still addressed election issues, an extraordinary move. Speaker of the House Tom Feeney, Jeb’s bosom political buddy, took the podium and, with a little help from his friends on the Bush legal team, criticized the Florida Supreme Court decisions. He warned that if the dispute continued to December 12, Florida’s electoral slate would be excluded from the Electoral College vote. Since Florida had submitted its election results as they were certified, the electoral slate was never in danger. Nevertheless, on November 22, Speaker Feeney declaimed, “Yesterday, if the Court had merely enforced firm and clear statutory deadlines, the Florida Supreme Court could have given us a resolution. Indeed, I fear it has given us a potential constitutional crisis.” Right on cue, the sheep-like press corps took up the rallying cry, “Constitutional crisis!” If one reporter had telephoned an expert in Florida constitutional law, the “crisis” myth would have died a natural death. When it looked as though the election would be settled in the courts, Jeb Bush’s Florida legal staff warned the state’s major law firms not to represent Gore. As with the “pay to play” threats the radical Republicans had used to extract political donations, the risk to law firms aiding the Gore camp was financial–they could be denied access to state contracts and to the governor, dispenser of patronage plums to the party faithful. In the meantime, Bush family attorney Jim Baker worked the legal front. The Bush legal team, determined to delay or stop the recount, appealed to the U.S. District Court of Appeals, the Florida Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court. The first two courts denied the appeal. Then the U.S. Supreme Court gave them the nod. From that moment, the fix was in.
Somewhat belatedly, eight major news organizations paid the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) almost $900,000 to do a recount of the disputed ballots in Florida. NORC concluded that Gore won the most votes throughout the state, no matter what tabulating method was used. After sitting on the report for nine months, the mainstream media released the results with misleading headlines (“Supreme Court Did Not Decide Outcome”) and buried NORC’s astounding conclusion on the inside pages almost as an afterthought. Reviewing the actual results of the statewide examination of 175,010 disputed ballots, on November 12, 2001 Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com, cleared away the media fog:
The Federal Voting Assistance Program, under the umbrella of the DoD, paid Bermuda-based Accenture $22 million to conduct its Internet voting project. Strange to say, Accenture had recently acquired election.com from Osan Ltd., a Saudi investment group that owned 51% of the company. In February 2004, two weeks after a panel of scientists determined that the Accenture system was extremely vulnerable to tampering and lacked any way for voters to verify that their ballots were cast or counted, the DoD canceled the program. Accenture, surprised by the announcement, first denied that the program had been canceled, but later backed down. Spokeswoman Meg T. McLaughlin said the decision to continue testing SERVE would allow Accenture to study Internet voting further. When the voting machine companies took a drubbing after the 2000 election, the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a high-powered lobbying group, launched a task force that included Accenture, Northop-Grumman, and Lockheed-Martin. Their focus: replacing punch card and lever systems with brand new electronic voting machines. Here we have the Pentagon, offshore companies, and foreign proprietors mucking about in our elections. Quietly, stealthily, the full-scale takeover of our national election process occurred when the voting machine companies entered the mix with money-laundering and bribes operating at the highest levels of government (think Jack Abramoff). In their wake came the orchestrated obfuscation and confusion that has characterized every national election since 2000.
Although Representative Bob Ney (R) of Ohio and Representative Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland jointly sponsored (HAVA), its prime mover was Representative Ney who, as House Administration Committee chairman, held hearings on voting irregularities in Ohio. Only one voting rights group testified before his committee: the American Center for Voting Rights. The Brad Blog exposed them as a phony GOP front group founded by two Bush/Cheney operatives shortly before the hearings. The hearings often focused on voting rights for the disabled. Since Diebold contributed one million dollars to the National Federation for the Blind and at least $26,000 to the American Association of People with Disabilities, we should not be surprised that spokesmen for those organizations testified that their members badly needed electronic voting machines without a paper trail. Congressional members made several attempts to amend HAVA so that the voting machines would have a paper trail–voter verified paper ballots–but Ney stalled all of them. Just before the 2002 election, he and the other HAVA co-sponsors sent a letter to their colleagues arguing against amending HAVA to include paper records with touch-screen voting machines lest they disenfranchise the disabled. (Did anyone ask how the disabled voted before the advent of electronic voting machines?) The twisted logic prevailed. HAVA does not mandate electronic voting machines, contrary to popular belief, but HAVA does mandate that a single disabled-accessible device, a paperless, direct recording electronic machine (like Diebold’s), be installed in every precinct in the United States. The act also contains some really dandy suggestions for improving our elections. Voter IDs, for example, called an unofficial poll tax in some quarters, and “ineligible voters” lists–think Jeb Bush’s purge lists–to ensure that only the right voters do the voting. Unlike the Indian tribes dealing with Jack Abramoff, the voting machine companies got their money’s worth. Ney’s former employee, DiStefano and his partner Roy C. Coffee received at least $180,000 from Diebold to lobby for HAVA and “election reform.” Beginning in 2002, DiStefano and Coffee contributed $20,000 to Ney’s campaigns. Diebold paid at least $275,000 lobbying fees to Greenberg Traurig, Jack Abramoff’s firm, to influence members of Congress.
The most succinct account of this can of worms or, better, this bucket of snakes, appears in the April 22, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
After the Scotland junket, Ney met with the Tiguas and promised to amend his national election-reform bill to override the closing of their Texas casino. Abramoff had the Tiguas contribute $32,000 to Ney’s campaign committee and a political action committee. But the tribe got stiffed, as was often the case when they dealt with or through Abramoff. Ney unsuccessfully attempted to insert their amendment into his national “election- reform” bill, and the Texas casino remains closed. Ney cozied up closer to Abramoff when Abramoff and his partner-in-crime Adam Kidan were bullying Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis into selling them the SunCruz fleet of casino boats Although Ney represents a rural Ohio district and had no business getting involved with the Florida negotiations, he inserted derogatory comments about Boulis into the Congressional Record, calling him “a bad apple.” After the sale, Ney inserted a statement in the Record, lauding Kidan as “a solid individual and a respected member of the community” and as someone “who has a renowned reputation for honesty and integrity.” After Boulis was gunned down in Fort Lauderdale on February 6, 2001, two associates of Kidan and one Gambino mob henchman were charged with the murder. At present, there are two different criminal prosecutions against Jack Abramoff, one in Florida and one in the District of Columbia.
The Justice Department is conducting the second prosecution against Abramoff and Michael Scanlon in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They are charged with bribing public officials and defrauding Abramoff’s Indian clients. Abramoff pled guilty January 3, 2006 to three counts: Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Mail Fraud, and Tax Evasion. Scanlon pled guilty November 21, 2005 to Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. Representative Ney is under investigation for accepting bribes from Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon. He was named as a coconspirator (Representative #1) in Abramoff’s plea and (Legislator #1) in Scanlon’s plea. Now we come to Representative Tom Feeney (R-Fla.). Remember him? After inventing a “constitutional crisis” in 2000 when he was Speaker of the House in Florida, Feeney moved up to the U.S. congress.
Brad Friedman was way ahead of the pack in exposing Feeney’s questionable entanglement as general counsel and registered lobbyist with client YEI:
Feeney has been more than casual and less than forthcoming about his extensive pre-paid traveling at home and abroad. He was “misled” about his Scottish golf trip sponsored by Abramoff. He first reported that his $2000 trip to West Palm Beach in 2003 was sponsored by a lobbyist. When reporters pointed out that he had violated House rules, a year passed before he “updated” the identity of the sponsor as a conservative foundation. A charity registered as a foreign agent sponsored an Asian trip in 2003, a clear violation of House rules. The Korea-U.S. Exchange apologized for “their” mistake. Feeney received $4000 from felon Abramoff and three of his clients, $5000 from felon “Duke” Cunningham, and is a key supporter of indicted Tom Delay. With friends like these, he doesn’t need enemies to take him down. Unclean machines Defense contractor SAIC has been charged with fraud and has a history of security breaches in its systems, but it still gets big contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA, where some of its executives have previously served. It is moving up fast in the field of electronic vote-counting.
After firing O’Dell, Diebold announced that it was withdrawing from its contract with North Carolina. A barrage of complaints and lawsuits forced the firm to reorganize. You’ll agree that they had a lot of reorganizing to do after you read Ann Ryder’s account of Diebold’s latest acquisition, Global Election Systems, which counted much of the vote in the Florida 2000 presidential election. Ryder’s story, entitled, “Voting Machine Dirt and Then Some,” appeared in North Carolina Conservative.com
One or two bad apples? Well, no. There are more. Diebold’s election division is headed by Bob Urosevich. Todd Urosevich, Bob’s brother, is an executive at ES&S. Daniel Hopsicker of MadCowMorningNews investigated the sorry background of the major vote machine companies and found evidence in the public record that Sequoia Pacific, a company counting one in three American votes, “has been run, perhaps for decades, as a Continuing Criminal Enterprise specializing in blatant and widespread bribery of public officials, with numerous felony convictions, Mob ties, and a history replete with stories of threats, coercion, and even murder.”
In 2000, Louisiana newspapers bruited the story of Commissioner of elections Jerry Fowler, “convicted of taking as much as ten million dollars over a period of a decade from Sequoia’s Southeast Representative, a man named Pasquale ‘Rocco’ Ricci, from Marlton, New Jersey.” Fowler was sentenced to five years in prison. Court documents from the case revealed that Sequoia Pacific and ES&S colluded to buy and sell voting machines to each other until they reached the figure they would ask the state of Louisiana to pay. Hopsicker also discovered that Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of dummy front companies. Uni-lect, International Voting Machines, Garden State Elections, and Elec-tec were some of Sequoia Pacific’s aliases. When it wasn’t colluding with a competitor, it was colluding with itself. But in the voting machine business, shell companies and shell games are commonplace. How are some of the smaller companies? Not so good. By Angry Girl, November 3, 2004
It’s enough to make Luddites of us all. But before we rush the polling booths armed with sledgehammers, let’s demand that Congress REPEAL HAVA and return to paper ballots. We’ve already mentioned that in 1994, Chuck Hagel, former CEO of ES&S, was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska. He ran again in 2000 and, according to his Web site, “was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska.” The top purveyor of computerized voting systems in the U.S. is ES&S, which counts 80% of Nebraska’s vote. It’s probably a mere coincidence that Hagel was formerly chief executive officer of ES&S and owns a substantial share of the company.
In Minnesota, after unbeatable Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash days before the election, popular Democrat Walter Mondale replaced him on the ballot and led in the polls, Then a miracle happened. In the last seconds of machine vote-counting, a huge shift to the Republican candidate took place, and Norman Coleman unexpectedly defeated Mondale. How often does that happen? Probably a coincidence. In Georgia, popular Democratic senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion, was defeated by Saxby Chambliss. During the election, Diebold applied uncertified patches for malfunctioning machines, and, purely by coincidence, 60% of the electorate by county switched their party allegiance between the primaries and the general election. That’s 60% . Probably a coincidence. (Applying uncertified patches is business-as-usual for Diebold, but they admit it only when caught red-handed.) There were other curious results in Texas, Missouri, and Alabama, but surely the strange counts were mere happenstance, accidents, coincidence. __________ Part 2 of this essay deals with the GAO report, exit polls, and the 2004 election. |