Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy'
By Bob Fitrakis
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.
Dr.
Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press (http://freepress.org),
a political science professor, and author of numerous articles and books.
(c) 2004 The Columbus Free
Press
Reprinted from The
Columbus
Free Press
