Gerry Bello, Bob Fitrakis, and Harvey Wasserman : Do the Romneys Own Your E-Vote?

Photo by Brian Snyder / Reuters / Salon.
Does the Romney family
now own your e-vote?

A candidate for the presidency of the United States -- and his brother, wife, and son -- have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election.

By Gerry Bello, Bob Fitrakis, and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 23, 2012

See Thorne Dreyer's interview with journalist Harvey Wasserman and author Tova Andrea Wang about voter suppression and election theft, and listen to the podcast of the October 5 Rag Radio show with Wasserman and Wang.

Will you cast your vote this fall on a faulty electronic machine that's partly owned by the Romney Family? Will that machine decide whether Romney will then inherit the White House?

Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son, and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States -- and his brother, wife, and son -- have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House.

They are especially crucial in Ohio, without which no Republican candidate has ever won the White House. In 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term.

A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus percent shift occurred between 12:20 and 2 a.m. election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In defiance of a federal injunction, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed all election records, making a recount impossible. Ohio's governor and secretary of state in 2004 were both Republicans, as are the governors and secretaries of state in nine key swing states this year.

As we have previously reported, H.I.G. Capital has on its board of directors at least three close associates of the Romney family. H.I.G. Capital directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers. So is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign. Fully a third of H.I.G.'s leadership previously worked at Romney's old Bain firm.

But new research now shows that the association doesn't stop with mere friendship and business associations. Mitt Romney, his wife Ann Romney, and their son Tagg Romney are also invested in H.I.G. Capital, as is Mitt's brother G. Scott Romney.

The investment comes in part through the privately held family equity firm called Solamere, which bears the name of the posh Utah ski community where the Romney family retreats to slide down the slopes.

Unlike other private equity firms, Solamere does not invest in companies directly. Instead, Solamere invests in other private equity funds, like H.I.G. Capital. Solamere calls them partners. These partners, like H.I.G., then invest in various enterprises, like Hart Intercivic, the nation's third-largest voting machine manufacturer.

As reported by Lee Fang of The Nation, Solamere was founded by Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick, Papa Romney's campaign finance chair. Ann Romney and Mitt's brother G. Scott Romney are also invested. Mitt himself threw in $10 million "seed money" to get the fund going, and spoke personally to its first full investors conference.

Solamere's public web presence has been reduced to a front page only, so a complete list of it's partners can not be found. But reportage by The New York Times, Boston Globe, Esquire, and The Nation have slowly given us a partial picture of which funds are being funded by Solamere. Some $232 million has been raised so far, according to SEC filings and industry publications.

In addition to Romney's finance chair Spencer Zwick, Solamere has also provided the campaign with its finance director, Richard Morley, and a western regional finance coordinator, Kaitlin O'Reilly. O'Reilly is listed as an executive assistant at Solamere, and also at SJZ LLC, which was founded by her boss Spencer Zwick.

The SJZ LLC campaign finance consulting firm has billed Mitt's campaign over $2 million this election cycle as well as doing another $9,687,582 in billing to various Congressional Campaigns. The host of the private fundraiser at which Romney made his infamous "47%" speech was Marc J. Leder, co-CEO of Sun Capital, another "partner" of the Solamere fund.

As in virtually every close presidential race, Ohio may well hold the key to the Electoral College decision as to who will become the nation's next chief executive. The presence of Hart Intercivic machines in Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati, means there is a high likelihood the votes that will decide the presidency will be cast on them. Major media like CBS have begun reporting that Cincinnati could be "ground zero" in this year's election.

But these Hart machines are deeply flawed and widely know to be open to a troubling variety of attacks and breakdowns. There is no legal or other means to definitively monitor and re-check a tally compiled on Hart or other electronic voting machines. Ohio's current governor and secretary of state are both Republicans.

Does this mean the Romney investment in Hart Intercivic through H.I.G. Capital and Solamere will yield it not only financial profits but the White House itself?

Tune in during the deep night of November 7, when the electronic votes in swing state Ohio are once again opaquely reported to the nation and the world, without meaningful public scrutiny or legal recourse.

[Gerry Bello is chief researcher for Free Press. Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of five books on election protection, including Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, an e-book at freepress.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:

• "Romney Family Investment Ties To Voting Machine Company That Could Decide The Election Causing Concern" by Rick Ungar at Forbes
• "About that Voting Machine Company Tied to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital..." by Brad Friedman at The Brad Blog.
• More Rag Blog articles by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman on election theft and the dangers of electronic voting.
• More reporting on this issue at Free Press.

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Will E-Voting Machines in Ohio Give Romney the Election?

Political cartoon by Dan Wasserman / Boston Globe
Will Ohio’s H.I.G.-owned e-voting machines
give Romney the White House?

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 16, 2012

See Thorne Dreyer's interview with journalist Harvey Wasserman and author Tova Andrea Wang about voter suppression and voter theft -- including issues discussed in this article -- at The Rag Blog, and listen to the Rag Radio podcast.

Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney’s business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O’Donnell reported for NBC’s Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio’s Hamilton County is “ground zero” for deciding who holds the White House come January 2013.

O’Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has EVER won the White House without Ohio’s electoral votes.

As we document in the e-book Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio’s then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state’s committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility.

It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell’s Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio’s votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold’s founder, Walden O’Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes -- and thus the presidency -- to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O’Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart’s machines are infamous for mechanical failures, “glitches,” counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections.

As in 2004, Ohio’s governor is now a Republican. This time it’s the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio’s very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio’s electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney’s campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

U.S. courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio.

The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.

So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from “ground zero” in Cincinnati, don’t hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive swing state are owned, programmed, and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign’s closest associates.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, their fifth book on election protection. It is available as an e-book at harveywasserman.com and freepress.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Tova Andrea Wang & Harvey Wasserman on Voter Suppression in America

Author Tova Andrea Wang and journalist Harvey Wasserman were Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio, produced in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, on Friday, Oct. 5, 2012.
Rag Radio podcast:
Tova Andrea Wang and Harvey Wasserman
on voter suppression in America

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / October 11, 2012

Author Tova Andrea Wang and journalist Harvey Wasserman discussed voter suppression and voter theft in America on Rag Radio, Friday, October 5. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio show produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, a cooperatively-run, all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Wang and Wasserman talked about the racially-charged issue of "voter fraud" and the controversy over Voter IDs and the related court cases; the dangers posed by electronic voting machines and the history of alleged election theft in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere; and the use of voter suppression in partisan politics, almost exclusively (in recent history) by the Republican Party.

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Rag Radio interview with Tova Andrea Wang and Harvey Wasserman here.


Rag Radio features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. It is broadcast live on KOOP Fridays at 2 p.m. (CDT) and streamed live on the Internet, and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Sunday mornings at 10 (EDT).

Tova Andrea Wang, a nationally-known expert on election reform and political participation, is Senior Democracy Fellow at Demos. She was Executive Director of the Century Foundation's Post-2004 Election Reform Group, and was staff person to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform. She is the author of The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans’ Right to Vote, a Century Foundation Book published this year by Cornell University Press.

Wang told the Rag Radio audience that "voter fraud at the polling places is virtually nonexistent, as has been proven time and time again," but that efforts at voter suppression, especially on the part of Republican-led state legislatures,  "has been extraordinary. An assault on voting rights that we haven’t seen in many years. Probably not since the civil rights movement in the Sixties."

She also pointed to right-wing groups like the Houston-based True the Vote ("a bunch of white people going primarily to African-American precincts and challenging people") that is "vowing to recruit a million people to go to the polls" and harass potential voters.

"Of course, historically, race has been a factor," in voter disenfranchisement, she said. "But it has always been to some degree coupled with partisanship. It’s no secret to anyone that African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. And so, from the Republican perspective, if you’re willing to go to any lengths to win an election, then excluding blacks from the voting process is part of your campaign strategy."

And now, with polls showing that Latinos are going "probably more than two-to-one" for the Democrats, they "have a big target on them, as people that the Republicans will want to keep from voting," Wang said. "And it all gets tied up in anti-immigrant rhetoric... to make people fearful, even people who are lawful citizens."

Tova Andrea Wang's commentary on election reform has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other print outlets, and she has frequently appeared on national radio and television programs, including NBC's Today Show and ABC's Nightly News and Good Morning America, and on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.

Joining Wang on Rag Radio was longtime alternative journalist Harvey Wasserman, who is the author or co-author of a dozen books. With Bob Fitrakis, he broke a number of stories about the alleged theft of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. Their investigative reporting at www.freepress.org prompted Rev. Jesse Jackson to call them "the Woodward and Bernstein of the 2004 election." Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election? is their fifth book on election protection.

Wasserman believes that, "unless Barack Obama is way, way ahead on election day... it is a virtual guarantee that Mitt Romney is going to become president -- because of the voter suppression that could eliminate 10 million or more likely Democratic voters," as has been estimated by the Brennan Center at New York University, and because of "the relative ease by which the electronic voting machines can be flipped" in nine key states with Republican governors.

"We saw it happen in 2004 in Columbus, Ohio. John Kerry was ahead by four points on election night," he said, "and then there was a so-called glitch in the vote count, and the tallies stopped coming. And then suddenly at two in the morning George W. Bush was ahead by two points. That was a flip of six points which is a virtual statistical impossibility."

Wasserman says that electronic voting machines are a special danger because "legitimate monitoring" of them "is not physically possible," and that most "are owned and operated by Republican companies." He thinks that there should at least "be paper ballots as a backup at every polling station."

Another related issue, according to Wasserman, is the Electoral College ("the only college in which George Bush actually excelled"). "We still have in place this anachronism that allows the guy who comes in second to become president," he said. "The electoral college narrows down the number of states you have to steal or buy in order to put someone in the White House," and it discourages political involvement in parts of the country that aren't in play in the presidential election.

"No one else has an electoral college like this. It’s a holdover from slavery."

Harvey Wasserman is also a political activist who, with Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and others, helped found www.nukefree.org. His writing is published at The Huffington Post, BuzzFlash, and CounterPunch, and his reports on election theft and nuclear power issues appear regularly on The Rag Blog.

The news isn't all bad, according to Tova Wang. "A coalition of civil rights groups has been able to have a great impact over the last year, and were able to get a number of governors to veto voter ID laws," she said. "And in some places, like Virginia for example, we were able to soften the type of ID law."

"But there is tremendous confusion" about the laws, and, "between now and election day, we need to educate, educate, educate."

"We have had some success in the courts" against repressive ID laws, Wang says, but "it’s kind of sad that we’re back to relying on the courts for voting rights."

Harvey Wasserman adds, "It's part of our American heritage that people have the right to vote, and we need to get people to come out to be poll workers," and to make sure that potential voters aren't intimidated.

And Tova Wang points out that "we were all excited with a 61 percent turnout in 2008. That’s terrible."

"The problem in this country is that not enough people vote. Let’s talk about what we’re going to do about that, which is the real crisis in our democracy."

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009, is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The host and producer of Rag Radio is Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

All Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts and can be found at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, October 12, 2012: Peace and Justice activist Tom Hayden speaks on "The Peace Movement, the Drug War, and the Legacy of Port Huron."
October 19, 2012: Singer-Songwriter, Satirist, Mystery Writer, and Politician Kinky Friedman.
October 26, 2012: Historian Martin Duberman, author of Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left.

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Could Nine GOP Governors Flip the Vote?

Boss Tweed: "As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?” Cartoon by Thomas Nast / Harper’s Weekly, October 7, 1871. Image from Scoop Independent News.
Will nine GOP governors electronically
flip Romney into the White House?

In tandem with the GOP's massive nationwide disenfranchisement campaign, they could -- in the dead of election night -- give Romney a victory in the Electoral College.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 27, 2012

Journalist Harvey Wasserman and author Tova Andrea Wang will discuss Voter Suppression in America with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, October 5, 2012, 2-3 p.m.(CDT), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the Internet. Rag Radio is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Scranton and Mt. Cobb, PA, Sunday mornings at 10 (EDT).

Nine Republican governors have the power to put Mitt Romney in the White House, even if Barack Obama wins the popular vote.

With their secretaries of state, they control the electronic vote count in nine key swing states: Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, and New Mexico. Wisconsin elections are under the control of the state’s Government Accountability Board, appointed by the governor.

In tandem with the GOP's massive nationwide disenfranchisement campaign, they could -- in the dead of election night -- flip their states' electronic votes to Romney and give him a victory in the Electoral College.

Thankfully, resistance has arisen to the disenfranchisement strategy, which seems designed to deny millions of suspected Democrats the right to vote. The intent to demand photo ID for voting could result in some 10 million Americans being disenfranchised, according to the Brennan Center at New York University. Other methods are being used to strip voter rolls -- as in Ohio, where 1.1 million citizens have been purged from registration lists since 2009. This "new Jim Crow" -- personified by groups like Houston-based True the Vote -- could deny the ballot to a substantial percentage of the electorate in key swing states.

This massive disenfranchisement has evoked a strong reaction from voting rights activists, a number of lawsuits, major internet traffic and front page and editorial coverage in The New York Times.

But there has been no parallel campaign to guarantee those votes are properly counted once cast. Despite serious problems with electronic tabulations in the presidential elections of both 2000 and 2004, electronic voting machines have spread further throughout the country.

In Ohio, former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell awarded a no-bid state contract to GovTech -- a well-connected Republican-owned company which no longer exists -- to help count Ohio’s vote. GovTech contracted with two equally partisan Republican companies: Smartech for servers and Triad for IT support (Push and Pray Voting).

Electronic voting machines with ties to Republican-connected companies have proliferated throughout Ohio. Federal money from the Help America Vote Act has helped move electronic voting machines into other key swing states in substantial numbers that are not easy to track.

The machines can quickly tabulate a winner. But their dark side is simple: there is no way to monitor or double check the final tally. These partisan Republican vote counting companies have written contracts to avoid transparency and open records laws.

American courts have consistently ruled that the hardware and software used in e-voting machines is proprietary. For example, California’s Public Records Act (CPRA) contains a Trade Secret Exemption. The courts in California apply a “balancing test” to determine whether the Trade Secret Exemption applies, but the contracts with voting machine vendors are written in such a way that the court usually has no other choice but to side with the vendors and the state and county election officials who inked the contract. High priced attorneys like Daniel McMillan of the Jones Day firm are often hired to "clarify" the law for the court.

In a filing with the Voting Systems Procedures Panel of the California Secretary of State’s office during the 2004 election, McMillan hammered out a “Stipulated Confidentiality Agreement” that states in part that a public records request by a voting activist “contain[s] confidential proprietary or trade secret information” and thus, is not a public record.

Also that year, McMillan showed up in Georgia on behalf of the infamous Diebold Election Systems company and invoked the Peach State’s Trade Secret Exemption to the open record law. McMillan wrote: “If information constitutes a trade secret under the Georgia Trade Secrets Act, the government agency in custody of the information has a duty to protect the information” from public scrutiny.

McMillan goes on to argue that there’s also a Computer Software Exclusion that, “To the extent that any request is made for Diebold’s computer program or software, such a request would not be a valid request for a public record.” Diebold’s attorney cited the concern that “...it makes it easier to sabotage and hack the system and circumvent security features” if there’s transparency.

That same year in Ohio, Diebold’s secret pollbook system "accidentally" glitched 10,000 voters in the Cleveland area from the registration rolls. During the 2004 election in Toledo, thousands of voters lost their votes on Diebold optiscan machines that were improperly calibrated or had the wrong markers. How the calibration and markers work is a trade secret.

So, even the election boards that buy them cannot access their tabulation codes. The bulk of the major e-voting machine companies are owned by Republicans or by corporations whose roots are difficult to trace. While We Still Have Time by Sheila Parks of the Center for Hand Counted Ballots warns that we enter the 2012 election with no reliable means of guaranteeing that the electronic vote count will be accurate.

In fact, whether they intend to do it or not, the Republican governors of the nine key swing states above have the power to flip the election without significant public recourse. Except for exit polls there is no established way to check how the official electronic vote count might square with the actual intent of the electorate. And there is no legal method by which an electronic vote count can be effectively challenged.

There is unfortunate precedent. In the heat of election night 2000, in Volusia County, Florida, 16,000 electronic votes for Al Gore mysteriously disappeared, and 4,000 were erroneously awarded to George W. Bush, causing an incorrect shift of 20,000 votes. This was later corrected. But the temporary shift gave John Ellis at Fox TV News (Ellis is George W. Bush’s first cousin) an opening to declare that the GOP had won the presidency. NBC, CBS, and ABC followed Fox’s lead and declared Bush the winner based on a computer error. That "glitch," more than anything else, allowed the Republicans to frame Gore as a “sore loser.”

In Ohio 2004, at 12:20 election night, the initial vote tabulation showed John Kerry handily defeating Bush by more than 4%. This 200,000-plus margin appeared to guarantee Kerry’s ascent to the presidency.

But mysteriously, the Ohio vote count suddenly shifted to Smartech in Chattanooga, Tennessee. With private Republican-connected contractors processing the vote, Bush jumped ahead with a 2% lead, eventually winning with an official margin of more than 118,000 votes. Such a shift of more than 6%, involving more than 300,000 votes, is a virtual statistical impossibility, as documented in our Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?.

That night, Ohio’s vote count was being compiled in the basement of the old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The building also housed the servers for the Republican National Committee and thus the e-mail of Bush advisor Karl Rove. Secretary of State Blackwell was co-chair of the Ohio Committee to Re-Elect Bush and Cheney. He met earlier that day in Columbus with George W. Bush and Karl Rove. That night, he sent the state’s chief IT worker home early.

The official Ohio vote count tabulation system was designed by IT specialist Michael Connell, whose computer company New Media was long associated with the Bush family. In 2008 Connell died in a mysterious single-engine plane crash after being subpoenaed to testify in the federal King-Lincoln-Bronzeville voter rights lawsuit (by way of disclosure: Bob is an attorney and Harvey a plaintiff in this lawsuit).

FreePress.org covered the vote shift in depth. The King-Lincoln suit eventually resulted in a federal injunction ordering Ohio’s 88 counties to turn over their ballots and election records.

But 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties violated the injunction and destroyed their election records. Thus no complete recount of Ohio 2004 has ever been done. More than 90,000 “spoiled” ballots, like those in Toledo, went entirely uncounted, and have since been destroyed.

No way was ever found to verify the 2004 electronic vote count. There are no definitive safeguards in place today.

In 2008, swarms of election protection volunteers filled the polling stations in Ohio and other swing states. They guaranteed the right to vote for many thousands of Americans who might otherwise have been denied it.

They had no means of guaranteeing the accuracy of the electronic vote count. But Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan all had Democratic governors at the time. Florida’s governor was the moderate Republican Charlie Crist, not likely to steal an election for a party he would soon leave.

At the time, we advocated banning money from electoral politics, abolishing the Electoral College, universal automatic voter registration for all U.S. citizens, universal hand-counted paper ballots, and a four-day weekend for voting, with polls worked and ballots counted by the nation's students.

But as Sheila Parks puts it in her new book, which is subtitled The Perils Of Electronic Voting Machines and Democracy's Solution: Publicly Observed, Secure Hand-Counted Paper Ballots (HCPB) Elections: "In 2010, ultra-right-wing Republican governors were elected in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. In several of these states, these governors were not part of a long line of Republican governors. In fact, in some of these states, these governors interrupted a long line of Democratic governors."

So this year Rick Scott is governor in Florida, Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania, John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Jan Brewer is in Arizona. All are seen as hard-right Republicans unlikely to agonize over flipping a Barack Obama majority into a victory for Mitt Romney.

That doesn’t mean they would actually do such a thing. But the stark reality is that if they choose to, they can, and there would be no iron-clad way to prove they did.

Another stark reality: hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to win this election by multi-billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Charles and David Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, and other corporate interests. For them, spending a few extra million to flip a key state's electoral votes would make perfect sense.

While Obama seems to be moving up in the polls, the huge reservoir of dollars raised to elect Mitt Romney will soon flood this campaign. We might anticipate well-funded media reports of a “surge” for Romney in the last two weeks of the election. Polls could well show a "close race" -- for Congress as well as the presidency -- in the early hours of election day.

And then those electronic voting machines could be just as easily flipped on election night 2012 as they were in Ohio 2004.

Would this batch of swing state Republicans do that for Romney? We don’t know.

COULD they do it? Absolutely.

Would you be able to find definitive, legally admissable proof that they did it? No.

Would the courts overturn such a tainted victory? Not likely.

What could ultimately be done about it?

In the short term: nothing.

In the long-term, only a bottom-up remaking of how we cast and count ballots can guarantee this nation anything resembling a true democracy. It is, to put it mildly, a reality worth fighting for.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, their fifth book on election protection. It is available as an e-book at harveywasserman.com and freepress.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Will the GOP Steal the Election?

Political cartoon by Bob Englehart / Hartford Courant. Image from Collin Dems.
Will the GOP steal America's 2012 election?

Would the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, the Chamber of Commerce, and their related billionaires spend tens of millions of dollars to win the White House but stop short of spending the relatively small amount it would take to flip the vote?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2012

The Republican Party could steal the 2012 U.S. presidential election with relative ease.

Six basic factors make this year's theft a possibility:

1. The power of corporate money, now vastly enhanced by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens' United decisions;
2. The Electoral College, which narrows the number of votes needed to be moved to swing a presidential election;
3. The systematic disenfranchisement of -- according to the Brennan Center -- 10 million or more citizens, most of whom would otherwise be likely to vote Democratic. More than a million voters have also been purged from the rolls in Ohio, almost 20% of the total vote count in 2008;
4. The accelerated use of electronic voting machines, which make election theft a relatively simple task for those who control them, including their owners and operators, who are predominantly Republican;
5. The GOP control of nine of the governorships in the dozen swing states that will decide the outcome of the 2012 campaign; and,
6. The likelihood that the core of the activist "election protection" community that turned out in droves to monitor the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 has not been energized by his presidency and is thus unlikely to work for him again in 2012.

Winning a fair and reliable electoral system can be achieved only with a massive grassroots upheaval.

The power of money is now enshrined by the infamous Citizens United decision. In at least 90% of our congressional races and at least 80% of our U.S. Senate races, the candidate who spends the most money wins.

From the presidency to the local level, our elections -- and thus control of our government -- are dominated by cash.

For more than a century, the ability of corporations and the super-rich to buy in directly has been legally constrained. But the concentration of media ownership in the hands of ever-fewer corporations has vastly enhanced their power.

Already in 2012, the tsunami of dollars pouring in from corporations and super-rich individuals has soared to entirely new levels. Even the floodgates opened by Citizens United can't handle the flow. With its June decision denying Montana's attempt to keep some spending restrictions in tact, the John Roberts U.S. Supreme Court has inaugurated an era in which virtually unrestrained "pay-to-play" money will redefine the electoral process. Republicans in the U.S. Senate have also blocked attempts to require that these campaign "donations" be made public.

It's not hard to guess where this leads. The June 2012, recall election in Wisconsin saw at least eight times as much money being spent on protecting Republican governor Scott Walker as was spent to oust him.

Barack Obama has spent much of his presidency courting corporate interests. But he will be out-raised by the corporate/super-rich 1% backing Mitt Romney. A handful of high-profile billionaires will spend "whatever it takes" to put the GOP back into the White House. Just a dozen of them have already provided more than 70% of Romney's early campaign budget.

Most of this corporate money is being used to persuade voters to oust Obama, which they may well decide to do. But U.S. history shows that some of it can also restrict the ability of Americans to vote. It can then "bend" the vote count in ways the public may not want.

Our nation's history shows that given the same chance, the Democrats would gladly do the same to the Republicans. And it's happened many times, especially in the Jim Crow south.

But in 2012, it will be primarily Republicans using gargantuan sums of corporate money to take control of the government from Democrats, and democracy be damned.


We are not writing this in support of Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. We are mystified by their unwillingness to fight for meaningful electoral reform. Both Al Gore and John Kerry were legitimately elected president, but neither was willing to fight for significant change, or even to discuss the issue. When we broke many of the major stories on the theft of Ohio 2004, it was the Democrats who most fiercely attacked us.

We're continually asked why the Democrats have been willing since 2000 to sit back and let the GOP get away with this. Frankly, we have no answer.

But for us, the more important reality is that this electoral corruption dooms the ballot as an instrument of real democracy. A system this badly broken means a bipartisan oligarchy can always deny third and other grassroots parties the use of elections to challenge the status quo, in this case one increasingly defined by war, bigotry, injustice, moneyed privilege, and ecological suicide.

Thus it's been a century since the last significant electoral challenges to the Democrat-Republican corporate domination of the political system.

That challenge was staged by the People's (Populist) and then Socialist Parties. In rapid succession they rallied huge grassroots followings demanding core changes to the corporate domination of American politics. The 30-year upheaval they represented laid the groundwork for major changes. But it failed to crack the corporate domination of our political system.

The Populists were shattered in 1896 with a combination of cooption by William Jennings Bryan's Democratic Party and election theft engineered by Mark Hanna's Republicans. (Republican strategist Karl Rove, a serious student of the 1896 election, considers Mark Hanna to be one of his great heroes.)

The Socialists were co-opted and divided in 1916 by the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who then crushed them in the most violent wave of physical repression ever imposed by a U.S. President on a mass movement that derived from the heart of America's working public.

No third party has since risen up with enough real political clout to threaten corporate power through the electoral system. As long as our ballot box is corrupted and unaccountable, none will.

That one party could steal an election from the other means our democracy, if it could still be called that, is essentially in shambles.

Would the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, the Chamber of Commerce, and their related billionaires spend tens of millions of dollars to win the White House but stop short of spending the relatively small amount it would take to flip the vote?

Thankfully, we are citizens of a nation born with the bottom-up overthrow of the planet's then-most powerful king. As believers in grassroots democracy, we know that the survival instinct is ultimately more powerful than the profit motive. When it comes to the basics, we have no doubt the power of the people will ultimately prevail.

For those working on the 2012 election, and for democracy in general, that will mean an extraordinary commitment to protecting the registered status of millions of Americans, getting them to the polls, guaranteeing their right to vote once there, and making sure there is an accurate vote count -- electronic and otherwise -- once those votes are cast.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, their fifth book on election protection. It is available as an e-book at harveywasserman.com and freepress.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Defending Democracy Against Stolen Elections

In a landmark report, the NAACP directly takes on the new Jim Crow tactics passed in 14 states. Image from NAACP.org.
Has America’s stolen election
process finally hit prime time?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 3, 2012

It took two stolen U.S. presidential elections and the prospect of another one coming up in 2012.

For years the Democratic Party and even much of the left press has reacted with scorn for those who’ve reported on it.

But the imperial fraud that has utterly corrupted our electoral process seems finally to be dawning on a broadening core of the American electorate -- if it can still be called that.

The shift is highlighted by three major developments:

1. The NAACP goes to the United Nations

In early December, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights organization in America, announced that it was petitioning the United Nations over the orchestrated GOP attack on black and Latino voters.

In its landmark report entitled "Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America," the NAACP directly takes on the new Jim Crow tactics passed in 14 states that are designed to keep minorities from voting in 2012.

The report analyzes 25 laws that target black, minority and poor voters “unfairly and unnecessarily restrict[ing] the right to vote.” It notes “a coordinated assault on voting rights.”

The Free Press has been reporting on this coordinated assault since the 2000 election, including the heroic struggle of voters in Ohio to postpone the enactment of the draconian House Bill 194 that was the most restrictive voting rights law passed in the United States. (See "Voting rights activists fight back against new Republican Jim Crow attack in Ohio.")

The NAACP points out that this most recent wave of voter repression is a reaction to the “historic participation of people of color in the 2008 presidential election and substantial minority population growth according to the 2010 consensus.”

It should be no surprise that the states of the old Confederacy -- Florida, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina -- are in the forefront of repressing black voters. Three other Jim Crow states with the greatest increase in Latino population -- South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee -- also implemented drastic measures to restrict minority voting.

The report documents that a long-standing tactic under fire since the 1860s -- the disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions -- is back in vogue. This has been coupled with “severe restrictions” on persons conducting voter registration drives and reducing opportunities for early voting and the use of absentee ballots complete these template legislative acts.

Most of these new Jim Crow tactics were initially drafted as model legislation by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a secretive and conservative corporate policy group whose founder, according to the NAACP, is on record in favor of reducing the voting population in order to increase their own “leverage.”

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that the 25 laws passed in these 14 states could prevent as many as 5 million voters from voting, a number easily exceeding the margin of victory in numerous presidential elections.

Ohio’s HB 194, which awaits a 2012 referendum vote, would disenfranchise an estimated 900,000 in one of our nation’s key battleground states.

An important statistic in all the legislation is that 25% of African Americans lack a state photo identification, as do 15% of Latinos, but by comparison, only 8% of white voters. Other significant Democratic constituents -- the elderly of all races and college students -- would be disproportionately impacted.

Ohio voters have just repealed a draconian anti-labor law passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and the state’s far-right governor John Kasich. Whether they will do the same to this massive disenfranchisement remains to be seen. But the fact that it’s on a state ballot marks a major leap forward. Ohio activists are also drafting a constitutional amendment that includes revamping the registration, voting, and vote count procedures. (See "Post-Buckeye Election Protection?")

The Justice Department has called South Carolina's new voter ID law discriminatory. Image from TPM.

2. The Justice Department awakens

On Friday, December 23, 2011, the U.S. Justice Department called South Carolina’s new voter ID law discriminatory. The finding was based in part on the fact that minorities were almost 20% more likely than whites to be without state-issued photo IDs required for voting. Unlike Ohio, South Carolina remains under the 1965 Voting Rights Act and requires federal pre-approval to any changes in voting laws that may harm minority voters.

The Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley denounced the Justice Department decision as “outrageous” and vowed to do everything in her power to overturn the decision and uphold the integrity of state’s rights under the 10th Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the requirement of photo ID for voting. Undoubtedly the attempt by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to challenge this will go to the most thoroughly corporate-dominated Court in recent memory. The depth of the commitment of the Obama Administration to the issue also remains in doubt.

3. The EAC finally finds that voting machines are programmed to be partisan

Another federal agency revealed another type of problem in Ohio. On December 22, 2011, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) issued a formal investigative report on Election Systems & Software (ED&D) DS200 Precinct County optical scanners. The EAC found “three substantial anomalies”:

• Intermittent screen freezes, system lock-ups, and shutdowns that prevent the voting system from operating in the manner in which it was designed
• Failure to log all normal and abnormal voting system events
• Skewing of the ballot resulting in a negative effect on system accuracy

The EAC ruled that the ballot scanners made by ES&S electronic voting machine firm failed 10% of the time to read the votes correctly. Ohio is one of 13 states that requires EAC certification before voting machines can be used in elections.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in 2010 that the voting machines in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County had failed during testing for the 2010 gubernatorial election. Cleveland uses the same Republican-connected ES&S ballot scanners -- the DS200 opti-scan system. Ohio’s Mahoning County, home of the Democratic enclave of Youngstown, also uses the DS200s. The same opti-scan system is also used in the key battleground states of Florida, Illionois, Indiana, New York, and Wisconsin.

Voting rights activists fear a repeat of the well-documented vote switching that occurred in Mahoning County in the 2004 presidential election when county election officials admitted that 31 of their machines switched Kerry votes to Bush.

But a flood of articles about these realities -- including coverage in The New York Times -- seems to indicate the theft of our elections has finally taken a leap into the mainstream of the American mind. Whether that leads to concrete reforms before another presidential election is stolen remains to be seen.

But after more than a decade of ignorance and contempt, it’s about time something gets done to restore a semblance of democracy to the nation that claims to be the world’s oldest.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books about election protection. Bob's Fitrakis Files are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at HarveyWasserman.com, along with Solartopia! Our Green-powered Earth. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Post-Buckeye Election Protection?

Political cartoon by Steve Bell / About.com.
Can we transform labor's Buckeye victory
into a new era of election protection?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 14, 2011

The crushing defeat Ohio's working people dealt 1% politicians last week has critical implications for a whole other issue -- election protection.

In a voting process that might otherwise have been stolen, a concerted effort by citizens committed to democracy -- NOT the Democratic Party -- guaranteed an official Ohio tally that finally squares with reality. The defeat of millionaire Republican Governor John Kasich's union-busting Issue 2 by more than 20% actually squared with exit polling and other reliable political indicators.

In the 2008 election, Richard Charnin has demonstrated how there was a more than 5% shift towards the Republican presidential candidate John McCain than predicted by the highly accurate exit polls, the gold standard for detecting election fraud. In Ohio’s 2010 election, exit polls revealed a 5.4% unexplained “red shift” towards the Republican Party. The shift led to the defeat of Democratic Governor Ted Strickland as well as Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray.

But both of those elections were administered under a Democratic governor and secretary of state. This year's reasonable vote count on Issue 2 came under Republican Secretary of State John Husted and Republican Governor John Kasich who had a strong interest in seeing the opposite outcome. For those of us in Ohio, that was the REAL groundshaker of Issue 2's defeat.

The most shocking news from Ohio’s 2011 election was the inability of Franklin County Board of Elections officials to post election results at the precinct level due to faulty software programming. In a close election, this could have been pivotal in allowing electronic election fraud. See: "Election night computer software meltdown in Franklin County."

Can we now build on this to bring reliable vote counts to the entire nation? See the proposal below.

But first, understand: Since 2004, Ohio has been the poster chlld for the art and science of stealing elections. When Karl Rove and then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell flipped a 4%-plus victory for John Kerry into a 2%-plus victory for George W. Bush, they forged overnight a new frontier of high-tech election thievery. See "New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked."

The fraud was carried out with a stunning array of techniques. More than 300,000 likely Democratic voters were knocked off the registration rolls. Grassroots registration efforts were intimidated and shredded. Voting machines were shorted, manipulated, and flipped. Voters were misled and misguided. Whole bags of ballots disappeared. Electronic screen tallies jumped from Kerry to Bush. Polls closed illegally and often. You name it, the GOP did it... and then some.

In our How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election we documented well over a hundred different ways the Republicans robbed the process to give George W. Bush a second term.

Not only did John Kerry and the Democrats say nothing about it. Kerry conceded with nearly a quarter-million votes uncounted, then used a Republican law firm to attack election rights activists’ attempts to reveal what had been done.

Then, in 2005, Blackwell and Rove outdid themselves. A grassroots-based election reform referendum ran right up to voting day with a 25-plus margin of victory. It mandated extended voting access for all Ohio citizens and a range of other reforms. With clear benefit to the vast majority of Ohio voters, all major polls showed that year's Issue 2 passing with ease. See "Has American Democracy died an electronic death in Ohio 2005's referenda defeats?"

But somehow, on election day, it went down in flames. Ohio's electoral process remained a thieves' paradise.

In 2006, amidst massive GOP scandals and Blackwell's impossible run for the statehouse, the Democrats swept in. They oversaw Obama's victory in the Buckeye state, a key to all presidential elections.

They did virtually nothing to reform the structure of Ohio's electoral process. But the grassroots strength of those committed to democracy became established.

This year, democracy advocates were again out in force. Independent monitors showed up at polling stations throughout the state, sponsored by the Free Press’ Election Protection project and Green Party observers were active as well. A careful eye was kept on electronic voting machines. Ballot custody was tracked and potential fraud was challenged. Numerous pollworkers contacted the Free Press when they were unable to post precinct-level results.

And thus this critical election was not stolen, as well it might have been. Labor's critical victory was preserved, and perhaps a new era has opened in our national politics, aimed at rolling back the reactionary tide of corporate personhood and its minions of mammon.

But it cannot proceed without election protection. Our voting process is non-transparent, inherently corrupt, unfair, and prone to theft by the highest briber.

So we are now in the process of drafting a constitutional amendment. It can go state by state, and nationwide. Language will vary and evolve. We hope you will join the process and use it to define the electoral process in years to come:

A protection amendment for the states and nation:

1. All citizens shall be automatically registered to vote upon turning 18 years old. Registration is lost only upon revocation of citizenship or death.
2. A legal signature, accurately provided under penalty of felony law, shall be sufficient to procure a ballot
3. Voting shall take place by mail, as prescribed by local officials, and at voting stations open on a designated four-day period including Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.
4. All ballots shall be printed on recycled paper.
5. All ballots shall be hand-counted, and preserved for at least 10 years after every election.
6. All polling places shall host exit polls conducted by independent agencies under the supervision of an independent non-partisan agency.

An informed, committed citizenry will still be needed to guarantee fair elections. Reform of the financial aspects of election campaigns also needs to be addressed.

But in terms of guaranteeing an accurate vote count, we believe these six measures are key. We are sure these reforms will come over a long, difficult process.

But paper ballots are used in Germany, where vote counts square to within 0.1% of exit polls, and in Japan, Switzerland, Canada, and elsewhere. Elections on paper can certainly be stolen, but it's a lot harder to do than with the absurdly corruptible electronic voting machines and non-transparent hardware and software manufactured by partisan corporations.

No system is flawless. But think about where America would be right now if the 1% had stolen Ohio's labor law and destroyed its public unions.

Our survival as a nation depends on establishing a fair, reliable voting process. We believe this is a start. Won't you join us?

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books about election protection. Bob's Fitrakis Files are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. is at HarveyWasserman.com, along with Solartopia! Our Green-powered Earth. Read more of Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis' writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman : Rove Served for Election Theft

Danse Macabre: MC Karl Rove, choreographer of election theft. Photo from AP.
Facing the nation:
Karl Rove deposed for election fraud

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 26, 2010

Election woes got you down?

Imagine the look of contempt on Karl Rove’s face this past Sunday as he swaggered toward his star turn on CBS’s Face the Nation only to be served with our subpoena sanctioned by the Secretary of the State of Ohio.

The federal subpoena orders Rove to testify in deposition. Our attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, intends to ask Mr. Rove about his role in the theft of the 2004 election, and to discuss his orchestration of tens of millions of corporate/billionaire dollars in the one coming up on November 2, 2010.

As co-counsel and plaintiff in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit, we have fought for six years to win justice and full disclosure in an election that Rove stole for George W. Bush.

In the course of this civil rights federal suit, we have seen the illegal destruction of hundreds of thousands of paper and electronic ballots that were supposedly protected by federal law.

We have seen 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroy most of their poll records, making a full recount of the 2004 vote an impossibility. Some of this destruction, for which no one has been prosecuted, was done in defiance of federal law and a federal court order.

We have also seen the very mysterious and disturbing death of Michael Connell, Rove’s former chief computer guru. Rove used Connell to establish the electronic tools and architectural framework through which the vote count manipulations that shifted the election from John Kerry to Bush were accomplished.

An experienced professional pilot, Connell died improbably in a fiery crash at his home airport in Canton in December 2008. Connell had been deposed the day before the November 2008 election. Attorney Arnebeck was in the process of preparing for another round of questioning when Connell’s life was ended.

Our subpoena is aimed at letting Rove explain all he did to give himself, Bush, and Dick Cheney another term in the White House.

But there is much more. With the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, the floodgates have opened to an unprecedented wave of cash coming from corporations and billionaire donors such as the Koch Brothers. By many accounts at least $150 million in corporate/billionaire lucre is being laundered through Rove’s American Crossroads.

Under Rove’s orchestration, this money is being used to wipe Democrats out of Congress and to take control of the apportionment process at the state level throughout the country.

“Rove is the de facto head of a coordinated Republican national campaign in which Tom Donahue of the Chamber of Commerce is a senior partner, while the Republican National Committee has been relegated to junior partner status,” says Arnebeck.

“Rove has filled the airwaves with high-priced attack ads funded by the mega-corporations and billionaires that stand to benefit most from another assault on the public trust and treasury.

“He and the Koch Brothers have also funneled large bundles of cash to a Tea Party astroturf organization meant to give the Republican campaign a grassroots veneer.

“From the fiasco of Florida 2000 through the theft of Ohio 2004 to the present, there has been no significant federal reform of the electoral process or curtailment of the use of easily manipulated electronic voting machines,” adds Arnebeck. “With the added tsunami of cash from Citizens United, Rove's role as the principal perpetrator of a racketeering conspiracy, as defined by the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act, has been vastly enhanced."

"Our lawsuit stemming from the widespread 'irregularities' that defined the 2004 election has never been settled," concludes Arnebeck. "With the approval of the out-going Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, we have served Mr. Rove with a legally binding requirement that he answer a few questions."

Stay tuned.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-counsel and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit, and have co-authored four books on election protection at www.freepress.org, where donations to this lawsuit can be made via the CICJ election protection at the online store, where the Fitrakis Files also appear. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States is at www.harveywasserman.com.]

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Rage Against the Machine : Diebold and the Massachusetts Election

Illustration by Doug Potter / The Austin Chronicle.
Hacking the vote:
Will Diebold steal the Senate?

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 18, 2010

The same types of machines that helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, and “reelect” him in 2004, may now decide who wins the all-important “60th Senate seat” in Massachusetts. The fate of health care and much much more hang in the balance.

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

A paper ballot of sorts does come through these machines. But the count they generated was seriously compromised in the Florida 2000 election that put George W. Bush in the White House. Similar machines played a critical role skewing the Ohio 2004 vote count to fraudulently reelect him.

In 2004 in Lucas County (Toledo) Ohio, incorrectly calibrated Diebold scantron machines left piles of uncounted ballots in heavily black districts in the inner city.

The Free Press also found that on optiscan machines in Miami County, Ohio the reported totals were significantly higher than the actual number of people who signed in to vote.

Ironically, the cheated candidate in that election was Massachusetts’ now-senior Senator John Kerry. Kerry is circulating email appeals warning that this election is a "jump ball" in which "shady right-wing organizations and out of state conservatives have descended upon the state in droves."

But Kerry himself has infamously said nothing about the theft of the 2004 election. Neither he, the Democratic Party, nor the Obama Administration have done anything to change a system in which elections can be stolen by the very well-funded Republican-owned companies that make and administer the vote-counting machines. A dozen election protection groups from around the country have now issued an "orange alert" warning that the Massachusetts vote count could be "ripe for manipulation."

Thus Kerry’s new colleague could be “selected” by the same means that deprived him of the White House.

According to Selectman Dan Keller of the western town of Wendell, some Massachusetts communities -- including his -- do have hand-counted paper ballots.

But most of the state relies on Diebold scantron counters which can be manipulated in numerous ways, including by switching calibrations and moving ballots from precinct-to-precinct or county-to-county, thus reversing intended votes from one candidate to another.

According to Brad Friedman at BradBlog LHS Associates sells and services many of the machines being used in this special election. Though the vast majority of elected officials in Massachusetts are Democrats, control of the vote count can be a grey area where voting machines are involved, especially given Sen. Kerry’s six-year stupor over the stolen 2004 election, a record of inaction amply matched by the Democratic Party and Obama Administration.

According to Friedman, LHS “has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections,” and has a Director of Sales and Marketing who has been “barred from Connecticut by their Secretary of State.”

The stakes in this election cannot be overstated. The deceased Senator Kennedy’s seat holds the key to a filibuster-breaking 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, is a supporter of the Obama health care plan, and an opponent of atomic power.

Coakley’s opponent, conservative Republican State Senator Scott Brown, has been running a Tea Bagger-style “populist” campaign.

Poll results differ substantially as the campaign winds down, but all show a close race. Thus Diebold, a thoroughly tainted player with deep Republican roots, could hold the key to the election by shifting the outcome in just a few key precincts.

After internet-based reporting broke the story of the stolen 2004 election, thousands of election-protection activists turned out to monitor the 2008 vote count. Among other things, careful exit polling was done to provide a close reality check on official vote counts. Poll monitors interviewed voters and carefully scrutinized voting procedures and how ballots were handled and counted.

Often overlooked are voter registration manipulations, which were used in Ohio and elsewhere to strip hundreds of thousands of voters of their right to cast a ballot. In Ohio alone, more than 300,000 legally registered voters were electronically removed from the voter rolls between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Most were in heavily Democratic urban areas.

In 2008, the Free Press found that the number of purged Ohio voters jumped to more than a million.

Thus the fact that the electoral apparatus in Massachusetts is apparently in the hands of Democrats may not matter. Private vendors like LHS and Diebold have the actual control over the final numbers.

In Massachusetts, a recount only occurs if the final results are less than half of one percent, and as election reform activist John Bonifaz points out, Massachusetts does not require random audits of the computerized vote counting machines to compare the computer results to the optical scan ballots marked by the voters. Bonifaz notes that in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman Minnesota Senate race in 2008, “everything was ultimately hand-counted.” The problem in Massachusetts hinges on whether the race is close enough to trigger a recount, which candidates can petition for within 30 days.

Exit polls remain the gold standard for election integrity throughout the democratic world. But in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls indicated that the election results were reversed and that Kerry actually won. Jonathan Simon, election integrity expert, points out that the exit polls in 2008 in Minnesota “had Franken winning by 10%! This is a huge disparity, not remotely reflected by the recount.”

“Could the exit poll have been that badly off? Or could a large number of ballots, 200,000 or so, have been swapped out before the recount? Here is where the chain of custody, or lack thereof, comes in. These ballots were not exactly under heavy surveillance during the month-long period between election day and recount completion,” Simon said.

What will matter in Massachusetts is how thoroughly election-protection advocates are able to scrutinize voter certification, access, and ballot security. Billions of dollars -- and much more -- are riding on the outcome of this election. Those who believe it cannot or would not be stolen are simply in denial.

Given the Democratic party’s astonishing lack of leadership on so many issues, it is entirely possible that Scott Brown could legitimately beat Martha Coakley in this election.

But it is also possible that the outcome could be manipulated by the companies in control of the registration rolls and vote counts. It will be up to citizen election protection activists to make sure that doesn’t happen yet again.

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman broke many of the major stories surrounding the theft of the 2004 election, and have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at www.freepress.org, where they are publisher and senior editor, and where this story also appears.]

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