All Hail our new US Election Assistence Commission

[donhakman]

Pictures to come soon

Who made this new commission that should be called the US election abolition commission?

IT was brought to you by the same people who fixed the last eletion.


Quotes:

The unelected Bush Regime now controls the government, the military, the judiciary -- and the machinery of democracy itself. Absent some unlikely great awakening by the co-opted dullards of the corporate media, next November the last shreds of a genuine American republic will disappear -- at the push of a button.

Chris Floyd
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing.
Those who count the votes decide everything."
-- Josef Stalin

"Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

--James Carville
Monday, January 13, 2003 NEW YORK — Six major news organizations announced Monday the breakup of Voter News Service, the consortium they had built to count votes and conduct surveys on Election Day. The decision follows two major election-night failures in a row by VNS.



THE PLAYERS
Diebold-Global: Corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year. The election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob was the co-founder of American Information Systems which became ES&S. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.
Diebold-Global's top managers, Howard Van Pelt and Larry Ensminger, recently moved to Advanced Voting Solutions-Shoup.

Election Systems and Software (ES&S): ES&S claims to have counted 56% of the vote in the last four presidential elections. Was formed as a result of the merger of AIS and Business Records Corporation. Bob and Todd Urosevich founded its predecessor AIS in the 1980's. Bob is now president of Diebold-Global, while brother Todd is a vice president at ES&S. Business Records Corp. which was merged with AIS to become ES&S, was partially owned by Cronus, a company that seems to have a lot of connections to the infamous Hunt brothers from Texas, as well as other individuals and entities, including Rothschild, Inc.. Right wing Republicans Howard Ahmanson (who financed AIS) and Nelson Bunker Hunt have both heavily contributed to The Chalcedon Institute, an organization that mandates Christian "dominion" over the world. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and -- we kid you not -- slavery, "one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws."

Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&S, whose former CEO is Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes; needless to say, his initial victory was reported as "an amazing upset." Hagel still has a million-dollar stake in the parent company of ES&S. In Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his 1998 gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.

According to U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel's (R-NE) press office, in 1995 Hagel resigned as CEO of American Information Systems (AIS), the voting machine company that counted the votes in his first Senatorial election in 1996. In January 1996 Hagel resigned as president of McCarthy & Company, part of the McCarthy Group that are one of the current owners of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which itself resulted from the merger of AIS and Business Records Corporation. According to Bev Harris, Hagel is still an investor in the McCarthy Group. ES&S is now the largest voting machine company in America and one of its largest owners is the ultra-conservative Omaha World-Herald Company.

According to Nebraska's Elections Office, ES&S is the only voting machine company certified to count votes in the state. Twenty percent of the vote in Nebraska is hand-counted.

Sequoia Voting Systems: appears to be the second largest voting machine company, accounting for about 1/3 of the voting machine market. As of May 2002, Sequoia was purchased by Great Britain's De La Rue from Ireland's Jefferson Smurfit Group, who retain a 15% share. Smurfit was just bought by Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity investment firm. De La Rue owns 20% of the Great Britain's national lottery. Sequoia also has a colorful history, most recently in Louisiana, where it was the center of a massive corruption case that sent top state officials to jail for bribery, most of it funneled through Mob-connected front firms. In 1995 the Security and Exchange Commission filed charges against four employees of Sequoia, alleging that they inflated revenue and pre-tax profits. In 1999 the Justice Department filed federal charges against employees of Sequoia alleging that during a 10-year period $8 million in bribes were paid out. Louisiana's Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler had run up some big gambling debts in Atlantic City, according to reporter Daniel Hopsicker. In all, 22 people were indicted, 9 plead guilty. Fowler went to jail, but Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci of New Jersey got one year of home detention. Sequoia executives were also indicted, but escaped trial after giving immunized testimony against state officials. The British-owned company's corporate parent is private equity firm Madison Dearborn -- a partner of the Carlyle Group, where George Bush I makes millions trolling the world for war pork, privatizations and sweetheart deals with government insiders.


Science Applications International Corporation Fourth largest counter of votes behind the other three above. This shadowy defense contractor SAIC has jumped into the vote-counting game, both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney and Carlyle honcho Frank Carlucci, and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security lapses in its electronic systems hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors -- and will doubtless pose little obstacle to its entrance into election engineering.


All of these companies are hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election.

Choice Point The mad rush to install unverifiable computer voting is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush last year. The chief lobbying group pushing for the act was a consortium of arms dealers -- those disinterested corporate citizens -- including Northop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. The bill also mandates that all states adopt the computerized "ineligible voter purge" system that Jeb used to eliminate 91,000 eligible black voters from the Florida rolls in 2000. The Republican-run private company that accomplished this electoral miracle, ChoicePoint, is bagging the lion's share of the new Bush-ordered purge contracts.

Advanced Voting Solutions is the new name of another voting company, Shoup Voting Solutions. Their current top management, Howard Van Pelt and Larry Ensminger, were executives for Diebold-Global until last year. Officers of Shoup Voting Machine Co. were indicted for allegedly bribing politicians in Tampa, Florida in 1971, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Ransom Shoup was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever machine-counted election in Philadelphia. Shoup got a three-year suspended sentence. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has bought new voting machines from Danaher-Guardian, which appears to only sell voting machines formerly known as the "Shouptronic."

Danaher-Guardian is owned by billionaire brothers Steven M. and Mitchell P. Rales, who were described by columnist Jack Anderson in 1988 as "a pair of corporate raiders out of Washington DC." Again, Danaher-Guardian appears to only sell formerly Shouptronic voting machines.

Global Eye -- Vanishing Act By Chris Floyd - The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called "amazing" upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient "glitches" in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched" local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the "trade secrets" of the private companies who make them.

Voting Machine Companies Come Under Scrutiny by Lynn Landes


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TruVote Vote Validation System
If they were so worried about these machines that they had to kill the inventor, Athan Gibbs, then they must be awesome!

Let's not let Mr. Gibb's work and his death be in vain. Lets all work toward having these machines put in place wherever people are considering the installation of electronic voting machines.

--editor
Death Of A Patriot: No More 'Blind Faith Voting' By Bob Fitrakis March 17, 2004 - No business in America would buy a machine that didn’t provide a paper trail to audit and verify its transaction. Now, they want the people to purchase machines that you can’t audit? It’s absurd.”