Archive for month: May, 2006

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Don’t Reward Kerry’s Betrayal

So John Kerry’s giving the commencement speech at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. The college’s press release reads: “Thanks to record student voter participation, Kenyon College was among the last polling places in the nation to close on Election Day 2004.”

Talk about spin. The reality is that 1300 students registered to vote, and there were only 2 voting machines instead of the 13 required by an Ohio court decision, based on 1 per 100 voters. At worst there should have been 6 or 7 machines there, even if counties pleaded poverty. And on Election Day 2004, one machine broke down. Matthew Segal, a Kenyon College student, testified about the eleven-hour wait to vote and how the polls closed around four in the morning when he addressed Rep. John Conyers and the Minority members of the House Judiciary Committee, who held hearings in on December 13, 2004 in Columbus to determine what had gone wrong with the Ohio vote.

Meanwhile, a few miles away on Election Day 2004, at the pro-Bush right-wing Mt. Vernon Nazarene College, there were plenty of voting machines and no wait. Scores of people illegally registered to vote at the school’s business office, according to records at the Licking County Board of Elections. Emails flying around that not-for-profit institution  endorsed Bush for President, a clear violation of IRS laws.

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How I Would Clean Up Elections

I’m speaking in Athens, Ohio at Ohio University to the Political Science Majors Association on the Culture of Corruption in Ohio. My B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. are all in political science, but I learned more about the corruption in Ohio as an investigative journalist.

Let’s recall some of the recent scandals in Ohio. In 2001, the former director of the Ohio Department of Human Services pleaded guilty to improperly steering $60 million, primarily in the form of no-bid contracts. As governor, I would end the use of no-bid contracts and make all contracts competitive. So corrupt is Ohio that even the Ohio Consumer Counsel, who advocates on behalf of all Ohio consumers, resigned and was later convicted for accepting gifts from utility lobbyists. Then there was the pay-to-play scheme involving brokers who received contracts from former State Treasurer Joe Deters’ office. Deters was a typical pious Republican invoking the name of God every few seconds while taking pieces of silver from Caesar, or at least Caesar’s lobbyist.

The Coingate scandal has passed into the realm of Ohio legend. Noe, the former hobby shop owner who sold beanie babies, baseball cards and some coins, is planning to plead guilty to stealing between $4.5 and $6 million, and he was indicted for laundering that money into the Bush re-election campaign. Governor Taft’s Chief of Staff was convicted for renting Tom Noe’s $1.8 million Florida home at below market rates. Taft was convicted on four misdemeanor charges of filing incomplete financial disclosure statements and failing to report golf outings and other gifts. One of those outings was with Noe, who claimed he told Taft about his secret and bizarre little rare coin investment scheme backed by the Bureau of Worker’s Compensation.

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Taking Home the Ballot Box

After Hackwell and his Republican cohorts at Diebold and ES&S test-marketed how to destroy democracy in the November 2005 election in Ohio, the company and its machines are working to destroy the republic nationwide. Predictably, more than 100 voting machines failed today in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania – foreseeable because that’s where Pittsburgh, a Democratic enclave, is located. The Pennsylvania primary may go down as one of the great unnatural disasters in voting history. In Philadelphia, hundreds of ES&S machines melted down. The only highlight of the day is the report that right-wing Senator Rick Santorum was locked out of a polling place and unable to cast a ballot in the morning. We don’t know whether or not he’ll blame this on gay activists, or men who prefer to have sex with dogs.

Meanwhile, back in Franklin County, in Ohio, a $750,000 contract for ES&S voting machine storage carts is now being investigated by a Franklin County Commissioner, Paula Brooks. She asked the obvious questions: “Were the carts even needed?” But as we’ve written before, the real problem is the bipartisan collusion to steal contracts and elections in Ohio. Whether it’s Republican Party Chair Robert Bennett in Cuyahoga County pulling Michael Vu, the Democratic BOE director’s strings, or the big old bepartisan hug-a-thon in Franklin County, we cannot trust the unethical political hacks that occupy the election boards throughout Ohio.

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Both D’s and R’s Play the Game

The Columbus Dispatch shed some light on the bipartisan nature of corruption at county boards of elections. Democrat and former Deputy Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections Michael R. Hackett is working with SST Systems, a New Albany company that supplied storage carts for voting machines. The Dispatch describes Franklin County BOE Director, Republican Matt Damschroder, as a “close friend of Hackett’s.” Damschroder, who has become legendary for his blunders, incorrectly informed the Franklin County election board that he had “…consulted with the county prosecutor and there are no conflicts of interest” in regards to Hackett moving from his position on the BOE to working for a voting machine cart vendor.

One might wonder why the Republican director and Democratic co-director are so cozy. Under Ohio law, the Democrats and Republicans completely control the county boards of elections. They set the rules, they cover up for each other. When Damschroder forgot to put out 124 voting machines during the 2004 election, all of them in Columbus, it was Democratic Party Chair and Chair of the Franklin County BOE Bill Anthony who rushed to Damschroder’s defense, even after Damschroder had sworn that there were no machines available. They later modified it to say 75 were in the warehouse or riding around on a truck somewhere. Hackett also defended Damschroder’s actions.

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Fox News Skews the Average

My favorite recent poll is the OpEdNews/Zogby poll (http://tinyurl.com/hgkgl) of Pennsylvania residents, which found that “39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. But let’s look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically.”

Here, from that poll, are the stations listed as first choice by respondents and the percentage of respondents who thought the election was stolen: CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%; FOX 0.5%.

With 99% of Fox viewers believing that the election was “legitimate,” only the constant propaganda of Rupert Murdoch’s disinformation campaign stands in the way of a majority of Americans coming to grips with the reality of two consecutive stolen elections.

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NYT and WSJ Finally Get It

At last, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times seem to be slightly comprehending the horrors of e-voting. Granted that mainstream corporate papers are usually willfully ignorant on the great issues of the day, but their glacial pace in reporting on e-voting problems ranks as one of their all-time blunders. Nevertheless, WSJ ran the following kicker: “Some former backers of technology seek return to paper ballots, citing glitches, fraud fears.” They could have run that story last year, after the bipartisan commission on federal election reform, co-chaired by President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, noted in no uncertain terms that: “Software can be modified maliciously before being installed into individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.” Indeed. There’s every reason to trust them less than anybody else, because of the unprecedented power and money involved in U.S. politics.

With the recent e-voting primary meltdowns in Texas, Illinois and Ohio, even the most ardent attackers of e-voting critics are finally getting the message. Remember that the New York Times originally, without any facts, denounced as a as a “conspiracy theorist” anyone suggesting that voting fraud was a possibility. Today, they were forced to quote Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Michael I. Shamos, stating that the Diebold touchscreen voting machines had “the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system.” University of Iowa professor Douglas Jones, also a computer scientist, told the Times, “This is the barn door being wide open while people were arguing over the lock on the front door.”

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Ohio: A “Bill of Rights Enforcement Zone”

As governor, I will proclaim Ohio a “Bill of Rights Enforcement Zone,” unlike the current governor Bob Taft, who has joined the U.S. government in illegally spying on U.S. citizens. I would move to expose any illegal spying programs on the people of Ohio and the citizens of the United States. A few years back, Taft pledged to turn over Ohio public records to the government when it was plotting its infamous “Total Information Awareness” campaign. Thankfully, civil libertarians killed the Pentagon’s attempt to spy on U.S. citizens.

Revelations in the USA Today documenting the largest databank in U.S. history run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and three phone companies – AT&T, Verizon and Bell South – should be seen as another move by the authoritarian right to harass and intimidate U.S. citizens. Recall that the NSA was behind MH-Chaos in the 1960s. Its domestic arm run by the FBI, COINTELPRO, functioned to illegally spy on, disrupt and harass the peace and civil rights movement.

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“American Blackout” – A Must-See Film

Whether Ken Hackwell wins in Ohio as governor may depend on whether or not there’s a blackout on one of the most important movies of the year – “American Blackout,” a winner at Sundance and the Cleveland Film Festival this year. American Blackout documents and reminds us of the blatant racism in our voting system. While focusing on Republican attempts to defeat Rep. Cynthia McKinney, the film also documents a triumph by underfunded grassroots forces against the slush-fund money-laundering organized crime approach preferred by the Republican Party.

Rep. McKinney made an appearance at the Arena Grand Theatre last Sunday night in Columbus, where “American Blackout” played to a nearly full crowd. McKinney also spent some time afterwards at Victorian’s Midnight Café with director Ian Inaba and local activists, like Cliff and Sibley Arnebeck. McKinney suggests that there needs to be a grassroots tour for the film throughout Ohio, particularly in the heavily African American wards of Ohio’s inner cities. She believes that the African American community needs to be reminded of how they were treated as second class citizens on November 2, 2004.

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Diebold and Dead Canaries

Reuters is reporting that Diebold, the notorious and partisan maker of electronic voting machines, now faces an informal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inquiry about how the company reports its revenue. As the saying goes in the voting machine business, there’s not much profit in selling machines, but there’s a lot in selling election results. Maybe that’s why Venezuela recently got into the voting machine business. They recently bought Sequoia, a major e-voting machine company used in the United States.

Critics have long charged that the Diebold machines are easily susceptible to manipulation, a fact confirmed by the General Accountability Office (GAO) regarding e-voting machines in general. News reports show election officials with Diebold machines across the nation are close to hitting the panic button. They already have in Pennsylvania, where
on Friday, May 5, 2006, elections officials impounded all of their Diebold touchscreen electronic vote machines “after a major firmware flaw was revealed which constitues a ‘major national security risk.'” Hacking into and disturbing election results fits nicely into what the Pentagon warned about in its briefing paper “Info Wars.”

And Diebold has had more than its share of malfunctions and problems. Utah officials are worried about their Diebold opti-scan machines – the same ones used in Cleveland and the same technology used in Toledo that malfunctioned so famously in the 2004 election. The covers of the November 2004 issues of both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics warned of the dangers of e-voting machines. The recent Cuyahoga County fiasco is just another dead canary in the cage. At a certain point we’ll realize they’re not dying of natural causes. We’ll find out that there is a deadly poison in our democratic system.

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Obvious Conflicts of Interest

Finally, Ohio Democratic Party Chair Chris Redfern has requested the obvious. That Hackwell remove himself from investigating the voting malfunctions in Cuyahoga County based on conflict of interest. Hackwell is responsible for negotiating the unbid contract with Diebold in Ohio. Diebold is a partisan, Republican firm that practice nontransparency in all its software and hardware. Hackwell and former Dieblod CEO Wally O’Dell worked together to get Bush re-elected.

Hackwell is a partisan hack who has taken advantage of his public office to become a multimillionaire. Hackwell should neither be responsible for counting the votes in his own election nor for investigating election irregularities in Cleveland. Hackwell will treat the information as practice for sabotaging this November’s election in the Democrat-rich city of Cleveland.

Hackwell believes in purging voters, switching precincts at the last second, changing long-standing precincts to confuse voters, causing long lines at the polls, and finding obscure and ancient Ohio laws in order to suppress votes. Hackwell’s speaking style is to mouth clichés like “Earth to Barbara Boxer,” or “He can run (Strickland), but he can’t hide,” and pretend like he invented them and that they’re very profound.

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