Welcome back for the conclusion of my interview with Black Box Voting's founder, Bev Harris. So, Bev, what happens now with the anti-trust probe, which has proceeded, thanks to the ample documentation you provided the DOJ?
The DOJ can require
ES&S to divest itself of the Diebold Premier Election Solutions
acquisition. Diebold sure as heck won't want it back they practically gave it
away by selling it for just $5 million and agreeing to remain responsible for
the liability and lawsuits. ES&S wouldn't need to sell it back to Diebold;
they'd just need to divest themselves of it.
It's not the direct profit potential that ultimately drives this acquisition,
nor any subsequent acquisition if divestiture is required. This is actually about
power. What's at stake has a much higher value than you'll ever see on the
balance sheet.
Omaha's Kiewit outfit got into trouble a while back for
bid-rigging and was banned from bidding for several government projects. So
then Kiewit said "Here we go Loopdy-Loo" and started creating
entities inside of other entities. It got pretty nutty. At one point, a bunch
of White Kiewit golfing buddies from Omaha pretended to be Black women from
Seattle. They hid real corporate identities in Oklahoma too, where they had
been banned from doing work with the government, creating a maze of confusion
over true ownership during government procurement cycles. Some of Kiewit's
executives were indicted in schemes to bid-rig and cover up true ownership. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
ES&S does have origins that lead back to the Kiewit bunch, but true to
form, you have to jump through so many hoops to follow their corporate
permutations that you end up getting lost in the forest. I mentioned the Kiewit
connections in our DOJ complaint, and I outlined some of the Kiewit backdrop
behind ES&S here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
In my opinion, it is essential for the DOJ to unravel true ownership behind
ES&S, because if they don't, how will they know that the next entity is not
just the same guys hiding behind a different screen? And how would we know that
a divestiture wasn't just the same game, different name?
So ES&S will probably be required to divest itself of its Diebold election
purchase, but the devil will be in the details. We'll have to be exceptionally vigilant
to find the real identities behind whoever picks it up from there.
Another consequence would be nice: There is precedent for the DOJ to recover
costs for their investigation and any litigation when there is a wrongful acquisition
under anti-trust laws. It would be justified in the ES&S acquisition,
because ES&S has done this before! In 1997, ES&S acquired Business Records
Corporation, triggering anti-trust action by the SEC. The company certainly
knew better, but tried to create a monopoly again. They should pay.
All this being said, the bigger problem we are facing is concealment of key
steps in elections from the public. If you conceal essential steps in a public election
from the public, it ceases to be public. And if you cease having public
elections, you no longer have liberty -- a violation of our highest-level human
rights.
So while the antitrust investigation can at least hold another monster at bay,
it doesn't solve the core issues. It does have potential to open some helpful information
up for public examination, because the subpoenas will be flying, not only from
the US DOJ but from the 14 states, and in most cases the responses to those
documents will be obtainable through Freedom of Information actions. However,
it took me four years to obtain the DOJ freedom of information documents on the
investigation they did into me back in 2004, so let's not hold our breath for
the document dump. And we can't request the records until after the
investigation is closed.
In the mean time, we need to keep our eye on the ball: We need to restore
public right to see and authenticate every step of elections. I can't emphasize
enough how dangerous the situation is right now: We have destabilized our form
of government through centralization of control, and we have transferred power
to
insiders by authorizing undemocratic concealment of public election processes.
Before we conclude, do you want to
elaborate a little on what you said before about the core problem of
"concealment of key steps in elections from thepublic?"
What is the nature of this biggest problem facing our elections today?
Because we cannot see electrons, computerized counting conceals an essential
step in public elections and therefore violates public right to know. Concealed
vote counting systems have been deemed unconstitutional by the German
equivalent of our Supreme Court, which has ruled that no public election can conceal
any essential step in the election from the public.
Principles of public sovereignty over government are embedded into our
Declaration of Independence (the document which provided much of the argumentation
for women's suffrage), and are also internationally recognized and contained in
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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