Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Bribery and the great vote scandal

The November 2006 election is still not over. Florida's ultra-strange congressional contest between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings remains a gripping drama. Buchanan is ahead in the official tally by a mere 367 votes.

The key number in this race is the bizarre undervote of 18,000 ballots. Some 13% of the touch-screen voters in that district didn't vote in the second-biggest race on the ballot. Such an undervote is unheard-of.

Worse, the undervote rate was a mere 1.8% in the absentee ballots. When you see a wide discrepancy between the paper results and the compu-ballots, you have prima facie (PREE-ma FAH-kee-eh -- honest!) evidence of computerized tampering.

Now Daniel Hosicker has uncovered some further details. He has sent out the following precis:
The election company executive responsible for the touch-screen electronic voting machines in Sarasota County Florida which failed to register fully one of every seven votes cast in last week's hotly-contested Congressional race to replace Rep. Katherine Harris has a checkered past that includes involvement in several election bribery scandals, the MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively.

The most recent rocked voters in North Carolina in 1999, resulting in the supervisor of elections in North Carolina's Mecklenburg County being sent to federal prison for taking over $130,000 in payoffs from the election company where he was the national sales director.

As vice president of Election Software & Services (ES&S), Gary L. Greenhalgh was instrumental in the effort led by Sarasota County election supervisor Kathy Dent in 2001 to persuade the County to pay over $4 million for touch-screen electronic voting machines, and was then the project manager overseeing their installation.
You will find much more on Hopsicker's site. I have tried to emphasize the point that the touch-screen scandal is, in a very real sense, a bribery scandal. How else could the big voting machine companies keep so many local election officials wedded to these unpopular and untrsutworthy devices?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

joseph,

kudos to you for this post.

One wonders how many local election officers, county supervisors and others may be accepting bribes to throw elections to the highest bidder.

also keep in mind that last June the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted to approve Sequoia electronic voting machines against the vocal opposition of many citizens who testified against this because they were "approved" by the State of CA.

check out this article from last month:

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=10-17-06&storyID=25320

The non-profit Voter Action organization has already filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court in Oakland against the county and the registrar of voters office, claiming that independent security testing had not been done on the new Sequoia voting machines as required by county supervisors.

Last June, supervisors approved a $13 million contract with Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems to provide scanners and touchscreen voting machines for Alameda County elections.

Until last June’s primary, elections in Alameda County had been conducted for several years on Diebold touchscreen voting machines. Changes in state law and changes in community attitudes caused Alameda County to adopt a different system this year, with most voters beginning in November voting on paper ballots, with computerized touchscreen voting machines available at each voting place for disabled individuals who need to use them and any other voters who wish to use them.

Anonymous said...

This is good and important information from a guy who has done some good work in this area.

With all the coverage of this issue recently, I am glad to see some of thoe who toil for the republic get recognition. However, I am troubled by the lack of attention given to the true pioneers of this effort.

The late James M. Collier and his brother, Kenneth F. Collier published "VOTESCAM" in 1992, after more than 20 years of incredible work on the story. These current developments are in every sense a continuation of the processes they discovered in 1970 and published in 1992, and whaich they trace to decisions made in the wake of the assassination of JFK.

Whether or not you ascribe to the "Unified Field Conspiracy Theory" they hypothesize, this book is essential for anyone trying to understand what has happened and what is happening to our vote.

The book is still in print. FOr that reason, I have listed the Votescam site as my web page in this particular comment.