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DIEBOLD, ELECTRONIC VOTING
& THE VAST RIGHTWING CONSPIRACY
“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
White House insider Vince Foster)," wrote The Independent
last November.
The Sunday Ma//described “...a fundamentalist Christ
ian...in the mold of U.S. multimillionaire Howard Ahmanson,
who uses his fortune to promote so-called traditional family
values....(B)y waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson
has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his rightwing
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
Corporation (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company
Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners
was Carolyn Hunt of the rightwing 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.
Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS,
before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Elect
ion Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S.
Bob created Diebold's original electronic voting machine soft
ware. Thus the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the
far-right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of elect
ronic voting in the United States.
WASSERMAN (THE BOSTON GLOBE)
BY BOB FITRAKIS
“it’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.”
—BOSS TWEED
Diebold’s current CEO Walden “Wally” 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
reelection at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the fund
raiser cost $1000 per couple, but O'DeH’s fundraising letter
urged those attending to “Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio
Republican Party." O’Dell's fundraising letter followed on the
heels of a visit to Bush’s Crawford,Texas ranch by “Pioneers &
Rangers,” the designation for people who had raised $100,000
or more for Bush's reelection.
If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Black-
well 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 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 denounced any attempt to require
a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform.
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 govern
ment’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 comp
uters, but if there is no paper trail, how will you know if there
has 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 Tamper
ing in the 21st Century, argues that without a paper trail, these
machines are open to massive voter fraud.* Diebold has 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.
Harris wrote that the hacked documents expose how the
mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as the
winner of Florida after someone “subtracted 16,022 votes from
Al Gore, and in some still undefined way added 4,000 erroneous
votes to George W. Bush." Hours later, the votes were returned.
One memo by Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now
Diebold, reads: ”/ 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 memo,
by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research & Development for
Diebold Election Systems, documents "unauthorized" replace
ment votes in Volusia County.
•See July/August NCTE, www bigbrothergov
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Harris 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 on conferring
with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Governor of
Florida Jeb Bush.
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
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 rightwing 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.” Chief philanthropists of the Discovery
Institute, which 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. Sing-
laub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former
Ku Klux Kian members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a
savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream
U.S. media. But English newspapers like The Independent are a
bit more forthcoming.
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.
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 the state with the most electronic
voting machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold.
Wired News reported that “...a former worker in Die
bold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches
on its machines 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 uncerti
fied 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 admin
istrations 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 they’ll throw their party in this
direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf,
or something like that. It may be nonviolent, but it’s still illegal
intervention in other countries’ 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 administrations supported
computer manipulation in Noriega’s rise to power in Panama
and Marcos' attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many
of the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were
members of the Council on National Policy.
Ohio Senator Fedor continues to fight valiantly for the
Holy Grail of the “voter verified 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.
“Why would you buy a voting machine from a company
like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every machine it
makes except its voting machines," Athan Gibbs asked. “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, the democracy is too important
to leave up to the votes of the people.
218 WEST MARINE DRIVE
ASTORIA, OREGON 97103
(503) 325-8708
This article has been excerpted from The Columbus
Free Press, which is published in Columbus, Ohio.
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