Abramoff and vote fraud

Are the two major scandals of out time -- computerized vote theft and Abramovian wheeling-dealing -- linked? You bet! If you haven't read Brad Friedman's blockbuster investigation, do it now.

And finally then, it has recently been revealed that Diebold itself was also paying Abramoff's firm Greenberg Traurig directly for work in June of 2004 which has yet to be fully detailed or explained in any way.

A payment stub [PDF] and pre-check-register [PDF] revealing a $12,500 payment for the month, made from Diebold to Greenberg Traurig was discovered in a dumpster at Diebold's McKinney, TX facility in July of that year by electronic voting watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org.

Perhaps that payment was part of the $275,000 we mentioned previously, as reportedly paid to Diebold.

There's much, much more; the Bob Ney connection is absolutely damning.

One of the ironies of this scandal is that Indian tribes were forced to fork over a chunk of their gambling profits to Godfather Jack. Evidence suggests that some of that dough may have funded vote-rigging -- while other evidence suggests that in the American southwest, Indians were the primary victims of vicious Republican election tactics.

I'd love to know what the folks in those tribes think about that particular situation...

Also on the vote fraud front: A "free market" think tank called the Pacific Research Insitute has issued a statement calling paper trails a "policy blunder":

The new law "may force California to relive the mistakes of America's punch-card voting past," the group said, and will make voting "increasingly difficult and negate the original virtues of e-voting: speed, cost-savings and efficiency.''

"We're moving in the wrong direction," said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies for the institute. "The whole point of e-voting is to move away from paper."

The "mistakes" of our "punch card past"? How can those "mistakes" possibly be worse than the nightmare of an unverified vote? In election after election after election, the Republicans magically do better than the polling would indicate. We're not kids. We know what's going on.

The whole "think tank" system has turned into a racket. If you have a college degree and you're too lazy to get a real job -- and you don't mind prostituting your brainpower -- send your resume to a think tank. They just may offer you a cozy gig as an in-house propagandist.