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List:       dmca-discuss
Subject:    [DMCA_Discuss]
From:       "Jon O." <jono () microshaft ! org>
Date:       2004-02-28 21:08:02
Message-ID: 20040228210802.GA12753 () networkcommand ! com
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/022804D.shtml

Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
By Bob Fitrakis
The Columbus Free Press

Wednesday 25 February 2004

     The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state
officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad
Street. This is the so-called "Golden Finger," the safe route
through the majority black inner-city near east side. The Broad
Street BP station, just east of downtown, is the place where
affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up, get their
coffee and New York Times. Those in need of cash visit BP's
Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM machine which provides a
paper receipt of the transaction to all customers upon request.

     Many of Taft's and President George W. Bush's major donors,
like Diebold's current CEO Walden "Wally" O'Dell, reside in
Columbus' northwest suburb Upper Arlington. O'Dell is on record
stating that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the President" this year. On September 26,
2003, he hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush's
re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the
fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O'Dell's fundraising
letter urged those attending to "Donate or raise $10,000 for the
Ohio Republican Party."

     According to the Columbus Dispatch: "Last year, O'Dell and
his wife Patricia, campaigned for passage of two liquor options
that made their portion of Tremont Road wet.

     On November 5, Upper Arlington residents narrowly passed
measures that allowed fundraising parties to offer more than
beer, even though his 10,800-square-foot home is a residence, a
permit is required because alcohol is included in the price of
fundraising tickets. O'Dell is also allowed to serve "beer, wine
and mixed drinks" at Sunday fundraisers.

     O'Dell's fund-raising letter followed on the heels of a
visit to President Bush's Crawford Texas ranch by "Pioneers and
Rangers," the designation for people who had raised $100,000 or
more for Bush's re-election.

     If Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell
has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch
screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of
these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.

     Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary
business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold
point out that virtually every other machine the company makes
provides a paper trail to verify the machine's calculations.
Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.

     State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill
167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio
generate a "voter verified paper audit trail." Secretary of
State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper
trail as an effort to "derail" election reform. Blackwell's
political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black
activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform,
became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a
prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor's mansion.

    Voter fraud

     A joint study by the California and Massachusetts
Institutes of Technology following the 2000 election determined
that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were not counted due to
confusing paper ballots or faulty equipment. The federal
government's solution to the problem was to pass the Help
America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

     One of the law's stated goals was "Replacement of punch
card and lever voting machines." The new voting machines would
be high-tech touch screen computers, but if there's no paper
trail, how do you know if there's been a computer glitch? How
can the results be trusted? And how do you recount to see if the
actual votes match the computer's tally?

     Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in
the 21st Century, argues that without a paper trail, these
machines are open to massive voter fraud. Diebold has already
placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record
is causing Harris, Johns Hopkins University professors and
others great concern.

     Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security
Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold's electronic
voting software contained "stunning flaws." The researchers
concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting
machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the
Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to "a
multitude of false conclusions."

     Perhaps to settle the issue, someone illegally hacked into
the Diebold Election Systems website in March 2003 and stole
internal documents from the company and posted them online.
Diebold went to court to stop, according to court records, the
"wholesale reproduction" of some 13,000 pages of company
material.

     The Associated Press reported in November 2003 that:
"Computer programmers, ISPs and students at [at] least 20
universities, including the University of California, Berkeley,
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received cease and
desist letters" from Diebold. A group of Swarthmore College
students launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign to
keep the hacked documents permanently posted on the Internet.

     Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the
mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as
winner of Florida after someone "subtracted 16,022 votes from Al
Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous
votes to George W. Bush." Hours later, the votes were returned.
One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now
Diebold, reads: "I need some answers! Our department is being
audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give
me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus
16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded." Another hacked internal
memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and
Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents
"unauthorized" replacement votes in Volusia County.

     Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report
and noted, "According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000
votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the
election for Bush." The first person to call the election for
Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage
of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and
Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

    Incestuous relationships

     Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation
have looked to Diebold's history for clues. The electronic
voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations -
Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold
and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box
electronic votes.

     In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded
ES&S's originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained
financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which
purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World
Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data
Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American
Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long
documented the Ahmanson family's ties to right-wing evangelical
Christian and Republican circles.

     In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, ". . . primarily
funded by evangelical Christians - particularly the wealthy
Ahmanson family of Irvine - the [Discovery] institute's
$1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of
conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and
postdoctoral research." The chief philanthropists of the
Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and
education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

     According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson,
Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for
National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant
Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other
Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members
like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan
fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press.
But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more
forthcoming on Ahmanson's politics.

     "On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and
Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over
several decades to political projects both high (setting up the
Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan
presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President
Clinton's sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White
House insider Vincent Foster)," wrote The Independent last
November.

     The Sunday Mail described an individual as, ". . . a
fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S.
multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his fortune to
promote so-called traditional family values . . . by waving
fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson has the ability to cajole
candidates into backing his right-wing Christian agenda.

     Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon
Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction movement.
The movement's philosophy advocates, among other things,
"mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards."

     The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American
Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald
Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public
documents that he was the Chairman of American Information
Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the
McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased
Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election
company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners
was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which
supplied much of the original money for the Council on National
Policy.

     In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska
senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election
where the votes were verified by the company he served as
chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996
and 2002 elections, Hagel's ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his
winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services,
confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the
company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel's first
election victory was described as a "stunning upset" by one
Nebraska newspaper.

     Hagel's official biography states, "Prior to his election
to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the private sector as the
President of McCarthy and Company, an investment banking firm
based in Omaha, Nebraska and served as Chairman of the Board of
American Information Systems." During the first Bush presidency,
Hagel served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of
the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations (G-7 Summit).

     Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before
being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems
and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created
Diebold's original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the
brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure
in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic voting in the
United States.

     Like Ohio, the State of Maryland was disturbed by the
potential for massive electronic voter fraud. The voters of that
state were reassured when the state hired SAIC to monitor
Diebold's system. SAIC's former CEO is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens
served as a military aide to both Vice President Dick Cheney and
former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who now works with
George H.W. Bush at the controversial Carlyle Group. Robert
Gates, former CIA Director and close friend of the Bush family,
also served on the SAIC Board.

    Diebold's track record

     Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic
Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for
scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S.
mid-term elections were "fixed by electronic voting machines
supplied by Republican-affiliated companies." The scoop
investigation concluded that: "The state where the biggest upset
occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with
the most electronic voting machines." Those machines were
supplied by Diebold.

     Wired News reported that ". . . a former worker in
Diebold's Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches
on its machine before the state's 2002 gubernatorial election
that were never certified by independent testing authorities or
cleared with Georgia election officials." Questions were raised
in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each
received exactly the same number of votes - 18,181.

     Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the
company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines
installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its
equipment.

     Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of
the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush
administration in the 1980s was to control countries by
manipulating the election process. "CIA apologists leap up and
say, 'Well, most of these things are not so bloody.' And that's
true. You're giving politicians some money so he'll throw his
party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on
your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but
it's still illegal intervention in other country's affairs,
raising the question of whether or not we're going to have a
world in which laws, rules of behavior are respected," Stockwell
wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush
administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega's
rise to power in Panama and in Marcos' attempt to retain power
in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration's
staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National
Policy.

    The perfect solution

     Ohio Senator Fedor continues to fight valiantly for Senate
Bill 167 and the Holy Grail of the "voter verified paper audit
trail." Proponents of a paper trail were emboldened when Athan
Gibbs, President and CEO of TruVote International, demonstrated
a voting machine at a vendor's fair in Columbus that provides
two separate voting receipts.

     The first paper receipt displays the voter's touch screen
selection under plexiglass that falls into a lockbox after the
voter approves. Also, the TruVote system provides the voter with
a receipt that includes a unique voter ID and pin number which
can be used to call in to a voter audit internet connection to
make sure the vote cast was actually counted.

     Brooks Thomas, Coordinator of Elections in Tennessee,
stated, "I've not seen anything that compares to the Gibbs'
TruVote validation system. . . ." The Assistant Secretary of
State of Georgia, Terrel L. Slayton, Jr., claimed Gibbs had come
up with the "perfect solution."

     Still, there remains opposition from Ohio Secretary of
State Blackwell. His spokesperson Carlo LoParo recently pointed
out that federal mandates under HAVA do not require a paper
trail: ". . . if Congress changes the federal law to require it
[a paper trail], we'll certainly make that a requirement of our
efforts." LoParo went on to accuse advocates of a paper trail of
attempting to "derail" voting reform.

     U.S. Representative Rush Holt introduced HR 2239, The Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, that would
require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail so
that voters may verify that their screen touches match their
actual vote. Election officials would also have a paper trail
for recounts.

     As Blackwell pressures the Ohio legislature to adopt
electronic voting machines without a paper trail, Athan Gibbs
wonders, "Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like
Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it
makes except its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to
verify its numbers, it hides behind 'trade secrets.'"

     Maybe the Diebold decision makes sense, if you believe, to
paraphrase Henry Kissinger, that democracy is too important to
leave up to the votes of the people.

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