Hi-tech computer voting is now the order-of-the-day in America. In October 2002 the US Administration passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which authorised $4 billion for states to use the Direct Recording Election system (DRE) equipment which would have to meet certain standards (set by the Act) by the year 2006. At which point, the states will be under obligation to have purchased said new equipment. As of December 2003, 36 states have agreed to these obligations.(1)
In the evolution in voting methods in America, from the mechanical lever machine of 1892, through the punch card, as used in the 1964 primaries, to the marksense optical scan, to the latest Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) system, voting methodology has become increasingly complex and more vulnerable to manipulation. This is not to say that the simple paper ballot cannot be rigged (after all, a vote can be bought in more than one way) but it is verifiable; whereas the subsequent methods, particularly the more recent ones such as the DRE, are not verifiable, because of the legally-held proprietary rights of the machine owners. In simple terms, the voter has no access to the vote-count.
One of the earlier punch-card voting devices used was the Harris-designed IBM Votomatic. The punch-card machine was first used officially in 1965 in Fulton and DeKalb Counties, Georgia, even though problems often occurred with the ballot when it is put through the reading machine because punch card machines were extremely fallible.(2)
‘After several years, IBM realized that the Votomatic voting machine…….was actually a Pandora’s box……and IBM eventually sold its rights in the company after IBM’s president, Thomas Watson, read an article that implied he might be trying to install IBM voting machines in enough precincts to win him the first electronically rigged election for President of the United States..'(3)
Spurred by reports and rumours of earlier cases of vote-rigging in Dade County, Florida, two brothers, Jim and Ken Collier, decided that one of them, Ken, would run for Congress against the sitting Democrat congressman, Claude Pepper, in the 1970 election in Dade County. Pepper won in what the brothers soon realised had been a manipulated vote involving county officers, police, FBI, and judiciary. Their subsequent years of investigation only confirmed that vote-rigging was alive and well in America.
One episode in the Colliers’ investigation in the aftermath of the 1970 election is pertinent. They had learned that the 1,648 mechanical lever vote machines used in their election were probably stored at the Opa-Locka airport hangar. They obtained a court order and went to find the machines there. Producing their court order, and indicating one of the machines, Ken asked the man in charge, ‘How can you rig this thing?’ Assuming that their presence had been authorised, the man explained that there were two simple ways: either by putting labels over the counter, or by predetermining the counter reading ‘by shaving the plastic wheel inside so that it slips ahead 100 or 200 or 300 votes. Any good mechanic can do it with a razor blade.’ And he gave them a shaved, predetermining counter to keep.(4)
Also unearthed by the Collier brothers from the Library of Congress was a 1980 study of the US electoral system commissioned by the CIA-linked Air Command and Staff College in co-operation with the University of New Mexico. This study was subsequently distributed to selected government agencies. Following are brief quotes from it:
‘The United States government has no elections office and does not attempt to administer congressional elections……The responsibility for the administration of elections and certification of winners in the United States national election rests with a consortium of private entities, including 111,000 members of the national League of Women Voters….In the case of counting actual ballots on national election night, public officials have abdicated responsibility of aggregation of election night vote totals to a private organization, News Election Service of New York (NES)……This private organization performs without a contract: without supervision by public officials. It makes decisions concerning its duties according to its own criteria……The question and accountability of News Election Service has not arisen in the nation’s press because the responsibility NES now has in counting the nation’s votes was assumed gradually over a lengthy period without ever being evaluated as an item on the public agenda.’ (5)
The following recent cases illustrate the possibility of vote-rigging.
Bush Senior
In 1988 ex-CIA Director George Bush was elected President. As is well-known, the New Hampshire primary is a crucial forerunner for any presidential candidate. Senator Robert Dole was the clear favourite for the Republicans but Bush snr. won unexpectedly. The Governor of New Hampshire was one John Sununu, a computer engineer, and the computer voting machine being used was a Shouptronic Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine, supplied by Ransom Shoup, who had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia. The DRE machine completely lacked an audit trail – an independent record that could be checked in case the machine broke down – or its results were challenged.
‘A source close to Governor Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering. The concept is clear, simple and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer.'(6)
On becoming president, Bush appointed Sununu Chief of Staff in his administration.
Count your own votes
Chuck Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems (AIS), a computer voting machine company until 1995, when he resigned in order to run for the Senate in Nebraska in 1996. He unexpectedly won and thus became the first Republican to do so in 26 years. AIS counted the votes. In 1999 AIS merged with Electronic Systems and Software (ES and S). In the following 2002 election, Hagel retained his seat, this time by a landslide (83%). ES and S counted the votes.
AIS had been founded by brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich, in turn funded by the Howard F. Ahmanson Co., which therefore still has a stake in what is now ES and S.(7) The parent company of ES&S, in turn, was McCarthy & Co., founded in the 1990s by Michael McCarthy who subsequently acted as campaign director to Hagel in his two elections and is now Hagel’s treasurer. Further, Hagel had been president of McCarthy and Co., and though he resigned following his election in 1996, he remains a major investor in the company.(8)
Felons counting votes
Jeffrey W. Dean was the senior vice president and a director of Global Election Systems in 2000/1. He had been released from prison in August 1995 after having served a sentence for theft. While in prison he had become friends with John Elder, who was serving 5 years for cocaine trafficking. After release, Dean and his wife became owners of Spectrum Printing and Mailing (the funding for this remains a mystery) and in 2000 sold this firm to Global Election Systems (GES) for $1.6 million. As a result of which, Dean served as Senior Vice-President and director of GES. In January 2002 GES was bought out by one of the larger computer-voting companies, Diebold Election System, who, in 2001, had contracted to build voting machines for GES. Dean was retained as consultant for Diebold. In February 2002, John Elder (see above) was made general manager of the Printed Products branch of Diebold. (9)
Database Technologies (DBT Online) was founded by Hank Asher, and was a company involved in the George Bush Jnr. election fraud. The group once had a data management contract with the FBI. However, this was terminated following allegations that Asher was associated with Bahamian drug dealers. In 1998 the state of Florida signed a $4 million contract with DBT Online, which later merged into ChoicePoint, for the purposes of providing a central voter file listing those barred from voting.(10) The state of Florida contracted with DBT in November 1998, following the controversial Miami mayoral race of 1997. The 1998 contracting process involved no bidding and was worth $2,317,800.
On 17 April 2000, at a special Congressional hearing in Atlanta, ChoicePoint Vice-President James Lee testified that Florida had ordered DBT to add to the list voters who matched 80% of an ineligible voter’s name; and by manipulating such names – reversing forenames and surnames, dropping middle names etc – ensured that black Democratic Party voters would constitute the majority of such ‘ineligibles’. On February 16, 2001, DBT Senior Vice-President George Bruder testified before the US Civil Rights Commission that the company had misinformed the Florida Supervisors of Elections regarding the usage of race in compiling the list. ChoicePoint Vice President Martin Fagan admitted that at least 8,000 names were incorrectly listed in this fashion when the company was passed on a list given by the state of Texas; and these 8,000 names, most of them black Americans unlikely to vote Republican, were removed prior to the election. He described the error as a ‘minor glitch’. He is also quoted as saying, ‘Given the outcome of our work in Florida and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country.’
In January 2000, Pennsylvania terminated its contract with ChoicePoint after alleging that the firm had illegally sold citizens’ personal information. In 2002 ChoicePoint generated earnings of $200 million on revenue of $791 million. The company employs 3,500 people at 52 locations within 26 states.(11)
According to Mark Lewellen-Biddle of Purdue University, the three largest voting machine companies in America are Election Systems and Software, Sequoia and Diebold, Sequoia being the second largest with roughly one third of the voting machine market. In 1999, the Justice Department filed federal charges against Sequoia alleging that employees paid out more than $8 million in bribes. In 2001, election officials in Pinellas County, Florida, cancelled a $15.5 million contract for voting equipment after discovering that Phil Foster, a Sequoia executive, faced indictment in Louisiana for money laundering and corruption. (12)
Which brings us back to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, and its effect on the coming presidential election this year. Of one thing we can be sure: votes will once again be rigged, unless the American enfranchised public wake up very quickly and take the matter into their own hands. There is little sign of this so far.(13)
Further reading on vote-rigging in the US can be found at:
- PBS – Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at All
<www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211.html> - Scoop: Inside A US Election Vote Counting Program
<www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm> - US election fraud scandal looms?
<www.theinquirer.net/?article=10393> - Black Box Voting: Ballot – Tampering in the 21st Century
<www.blackboxvoting.com/> - New Scientist – E-voting system flaws ‘risk election fraud’
<www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994862> - Infernalpress – How George W. Bush Won the 2004 election
<www.infernalpress.com/Columns/election.html> - Guardian Unlimited – US elections 2004: The hacks in the machine
<www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/> - Electronic Voting: A Path to Election Fraud
<www.rossde.com/editorials/edtl_voting.html> - US Electronic Voting Machines – not trustworthy
<www.stevenbryant.com/election_fraud.php> - US Vote Fraud : How To Rig An Election In The United States
<www.whatreallyhappened.com/vote_fraud.html> - Voting machine companies: Ownership disclosure
<www.talion.com/election-machines.html> - Electronic Voting System Is Vulnerable To Tampering
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/07/030725081820.htm - Election FRAUD
<www.betterworldlinks.org/book109h.htm>
Notes
1 <www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/vote-d24.shtml>
2 <http://nairobi.mwc.edu/~rdean8it/HIST200R/types.html>
3 James and Kenneth Collier, Votescam: The Stealing of America, (Vistoria House Press, 2000) pp. 18,19. Though the major book chains banned distribution of the book it is available on the internet at <www.votescam.com/orderbook.html>.
4 Votescam (see note 3) pp.84-88
5 Votescam pp.22,23 ENS is owned by a group of US media companies.
6 Votescam (see note 3) pp.13-16.
7 Howard Ahmanson belongs to the Council for National Policy, a hard right wing organization, and also helps finance The Chalcedon Institute, a fundamentalist religious group.
8 <www.globalresearch.ca/articles/INF307A.html>. ES and S also has a connection to the Bush family. Jeb Bush’s first choice as running mate in 1998 was Sandra Mortham who was a paid lobbyist for ES and S and received a commission for every county that bought its touch-screen machines.
9 <www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm> Weldon O’Dell, CEO of Diebold, donated over $200,000 to the Republican Party in the 2000 and 2002 campaigns but is better known for his recent letter in which he promised to deliver Ohio’s votes to George W. Bush in 2004!
10 As of 2002, Florida was the only state which had hired a private firm for these purposes.
11 For details of ChoicePoint’s role in the Florida fraud see <http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/ ChoicePoint> and Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, (London: Pluto, 2002), chapter 1.
12 <www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=490_0_1_0_C >
13 But see ‘Diebold Facing Ban in California’ at <www.truthout.org/docs_04/050304J.shtml>