Fake Diebold offices! And other vote fraud news...

Here are a few scattered reports concerning the ongoing battle against corrupt elections...

I say thee Ney: Bob Ney, whose ties to vote fraud were discussed earlier, is stepping down from his Chairmanship position. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy -- after all, Ney had a huge claw in the drafting of HAVA, which we may now dub "the Diebold Act." To help grease the way for passage of that disastrous legislation, Diebold paid a ton of money to Ney's Chief of Staff David DiStefano...

Abramoff: Just how much of the Abramoff scandal is really about funneling money to the string-pullers and pocket-stuffers and programmers and "computer repairmen" who rig elections? Note that Tom Feeney was thisclose to Abramoff, and that eyewitness testimony connects Feeney to an attempt to write vote-rigging software.

I'm sure it was just coicidence that Abramoff had one of his Indian tribes give some dough to the New Hampshire Republican Party just before operatives of that party did their illegal best to ruin Democratic "get out the vote" efforts. And I'm sure it is just coincidence that Diebold's troubles began not long after Abramoff's operation was shut down.

For more on this topic, check out this Democratic Underground thread.

While I can't claim a Wilkes/Diebold connection, I'd like to draw your attention to a little-known story in which our unfavorite voting machine company showed a decidedly Wilkesian attitude toward running a business. According to the wonderful Kathy Dopp, things weren't what they seemed in Utah...

Diebold sold its voting equipment in Utah in part by convincing Utah decision-makers that it had "about 20 offices in Utah" and so was a big company with substantial presence.

However, a local volunteer noticed that only one of Diebold's Utah office (in Evergreen Business park) answered its phones and that all the others listed in the white pages never answered its phones.

See White Pages (type in Diebold as the business and select Utah)

A few days ago this volunteer drove around to all Diebold's locations in 3 counties and discovered that of the 18 Utah offices listed in White Pages - 16 of the listed Diebold locations were phoney and the addresses belonged to either a Walmart or a Sam's Club or no building at all.

(My emphasis.) Many thanks to Dopp for this remarkable catch, and thanks as well to blogger Dee Taylor for publishing it.

We should conduct similar investigations in other states. How much of Diebold is a Potemkin village?

Vermont has now made plans to institute telephone voting systems for the disabled. Remember, one of the big arguments in favor of compu-voting had to do with the notion of making things easier for such individuals. Seems to me that a wheelchair-bound person would find voting at home much easier than a trip to see the kindly old lady down the street who has turned her cramped living room into a computer-filled polling station...

John Dean, certainly a friend to this blog, has another segment of his ongoing series on the conspiracy to malign Bev Harris. As you know, my own feelings toward her have been conflicted. But I respect Dean and urge you to give his research a fair and thorough hearing. He makes three points I cannot deny...

1. It was Bev Harris who discovered that "Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., had an ownership share in Election Systems & Software (ES&S)" and "ES&S voting machines count all the votes in Hagel's home state of Nebraska, except in those counties that tally ballots by hand...When she posted the information about the situation on her (previous) Web site, she promptly received a cease-and-desist order from ES&S lawyers. She e-mailed the cease-and-desist order to 3,000 of her media contacts."

2. It was Bev Harris who found the Diebold source code on the internets, and took the appropriate steps to get it in the hands of people to examine and determine its flaws.

3. It was Bev Harris who first posted internal Diebold/Global Election Systems emails online, and took the appropriate steps to spread them far and wide. Diebold shut down her blackboxvoting.org site for 30 days as a result, during which time she did not have access to her files, the emails, the source code, or membership lists. But David Allen did.

Meanwhile, In Ohio: A couple of evangelical churches may have given illegal partisan aid to Kenny the Kapo, who is running for governor:

In a rare and potentially explosive action, the moderate ministers signed a complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate World Harvest Church of Columbus and Fairfield Christian Church of Lancaster and determine if their tax-exempt status should be revoked.

Hee hee hee. Let's see what happens.

California: In Sonoma and Mendocino counties, the election board has asked to have a mail-only primary -- with no polling places open. While this system (actually, any system) would be preferable to Diebold-style compu-voting, I'm still not sure I like the idea. Helping the disabled vote is one thing; absentee ballots are another thing. But making an entire election "go postal"? Man. I just don't know about that.

Frankly, my first reaction was to ask: "What have those guys been smoking up there in Sonoma?" But the question answers itself...

Finally: Mark Crispin Miller's Buzzflash interview is just about the finest thing you can find on the internet right now. The subject is vote fraud, but the conversation covers much wider territory. One section had me applauding my cathode-ray tube (no, I don't yet have a flat screen):

When it comes to the Enemy, the Other, we can draw whatever war-like inferences we like, make whatever dark associations we might feel like making, speculate as grimly as we may, without any need for evidence or historical background or even logic. So, for example, the fact that Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party and al-Qaeda are both Arab movements, and both Islamic (although only nominally so in the Iraqi case), means that we may freely argue that they partnered up against us on 9/11. Never mind that those movements were in fact at violent odds, and even though there wasn't a scintilla of real evidence that they were in cahoots, the theory is not just permissible but "evidence" of one's "realism." It's like the old theory that the Soviets were in collusion with Red China, or the view that Vietnam was China's cat's-paw, or, to bring the fiction home, that the anti-war movement in the Sixties was a Soviet operation. The enemy is seen not as a mere human entity, subject to accident and chance and human nature, just like us, but as a ubiquitous demonic force with special powers.

This coincides with a point I've made for years: You have to be a conspiracy theorist in order to engineer a conspiracy. You have to believe in your heart that you are getting them before they get you. (That's why conspiracy theory is always a dangerous thing -- even when your suspicions have a factual basis. Yes, I know full well how strange that sentiment must sound coming from me.)

More:

But it is not so easy to distinguish between cynicism and sincerity within the minds of many leading propagandists. Certainly Karl Rove is cynical, and so is Tom DeLay. They're the types who say or do whatever they believe it takes to do the party's business. On the other hand, there is a genuine vindictive zeal with which the likes of Rove, DeLay and other poison-spewers hold forth. They are not clinically detached. In other words, the boundary line between cynicism and conviction is unclear even to them.

And as it is within such characters, so is it in the movement overall. For every William Kristol - who seems to be a largely sane and savvy far-right operator - there are many true believers, who are effective rabble-rousers, not despite their vehemence, but because of it. With, say, the Limbaugh brothers, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, the zeal is not completely phony. David Limbaugh evidently does believe that there's a giant secular conspiracy against Christianity. O'Reilly evidently does believe that there's a plot to ruin Christmas. And, in my view (a lot of people disagree with this), Dick Cheney really does believe that there are, or were, "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, just as Bush really believes that he's on God's side, fighting "evil-doers" who otherwise would kill all Christians.

It's ultimately all about projection. All the malevolence that they decry, all the conspiratorial intent that they deplore, comes only and directly from within themselves.

Every reader must come to his or her own conclusions regarding the sincerity of these various propaganda bombardments. Personally, I think O'Reilly's "plot against Christmas" hogwash was utterly disingenuous. One could almost smell the big, fat ciger he lit up after every broadcast while muttering "Suckers!" That said, one should not underestimate the fanaticism factor at work in these psyches...