Archive for category: Clean Elections

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
October 26, 2010

Election woes got you down?
Imagine the look of contempt on Karl Rove’s face this past Sunday as he swaggered toward his star turn on CBS’s Face the Nation only to be served with our subpoena sanctioned by the Secretary of the State of Ohio.

The federal subpoena orders Rove to testify in deposition. Our attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, intends to ask Mr. Rove about his role in the theft if the 2004 election, and to discuss his orchestration of tens of millions of corporate/billionaire dollars in the one coming up on November 2, 2010.

As co-counsel and plaintiff in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit, we have fought for six years to win justice and full disclosure in an election that Rove stole for George W. Bush.

In the course of this civil rights federal suit, we have seen the illegal destruction of hundreds of thousands of paper and electronic ballots that were supposedly protected by federal law.

We have seen 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroy most of their poll records, making a full recount of the 2004 vote an impossibility. Some of this destruction was done in defiance of federal law and a federal court order, for which no one has been prosecuted.

We have also seen the very mysterious and disturbing death of Michael Connell, Rove’s former chief computer guru. Rove used Connell to establish the electronic tools and architectural framework through which the vote count manipulations that shifted the election from John Kerry to Bush were accomplished.

An experienced professional pilot, Connell died improbably in a fiery crash at his home airport in Canton in December, 2008. Connell had been deposed the day before the November 2008 election. Attorney Arnebeck was in the process of preparing for another round of questioning when Connell’s life was ended.

Our subpoena is aimed at letting Rove explain all he did to give himself, Bush, and Dick Cheney another term in the White House.

But there is much more. With the US Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, the floodgates have opened to an unprecedented wave of cash coming from corporations and billionaire donors such as the Koch Brothers. By many accounts at least $150 million in corporate/billionaire lucre is being laundered through Rove’s American Crossroads.

Under Rove’s orchestration, this money is being used to wipe Democrats out of Congress and to take control of the apportionment process at the state level throughout the country.

“Rove is the de facto head of a coordinated Republican national campaign in which Tom Donahue of the Chamber of Commerce is a senior partner, while the Republican National Committee has been relegated to junior partner status,” says Arnebeck.

“Rove has filled the airwaves with high-priced attack ads funded by the mega-corporations and billionaires that stand to benefit most from another assault on the public trust and treasury.

“He and the Koch Brothers have also funneled large bundles of cash to a Tea Party astroturf organization meant to give the Republican campaign a grassroots veneer.

“From the fiasco of Florida 2000 through the theft of Ohio 2004 to the present, there has been no significant federal reform of the electoral process or curtailment of the use of easily manipulated electronic voting machines,” adds Arnebeck. “With the added tsunami of cash from Citizens United, Rove’s role as the principal perpetrator of a racketeering conspiracy, as defined by the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act, has been vastly enhanced.”

“Our lawsuit stemming from the widespread ‘irregularities’ that defined the 2004 election has never been settled,” concludes Arnebeck. “With the approval of the out-going Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, we have served Mr. Rove with a legally binding requirement that he answer a few questions.”

Stay tuned.

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-counsel and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit, and have co-authored four books on election protection at Free Press where donations to this lawsuit can be made via the CICJ election protection at the on-line store, where the Fitrakis Files also appear. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the US is at Harvey Wasserman

Original Article posted @ https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2010/3977

By Bob Fitrakis
Aug. 15, 2010

The teaser in Thursday, August 12th’s Dispatch proclaimed “Diebold deal helps counties.” It should have read “Diebold settles lawsuits by offering free and discounted shoddy election hardware and software.”

This is the equivalent of the Ford Motor Company settling the lawsuit against its incredible exploding Pintos by offering the dead driver’s family free leases and discounts to buy car that blows up.

So, Diebold gets caught not counting people’s votes – the solution: allow them to destroy democracy on a grander scale.

In the bizarre settlement, more than half of Ohio’s county boards of elections will receive free and discounted voting machines and software from Premier Election Solutions (formally Diebold). This is a result of an August 2008 lawsuit against Diebold by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. In the counterclaim filed by Brunner, she alleged that Diebold voting equipment “dropped votes in at least 11 counties.” The failure to count votes occurred when Diebold memory cards were uploaded to computer servers.

Diebold voting machine malfunctioned during the 2008 primary election prompted Cuyahoga County election officials to accuse the company of breach of contract, negligence and fraud. Diebold filed the original suit against Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) in May 2008 seeking payment and claiming that it had satisfied its contractual obligations in providing touchscreen voting.

Brunner intervened by filing a counterclaim in Franklin County, the state capitol, arguing breach of contract, warranty violations, and misrepresentation by Diebold representatives.

Brunner was elected as an election reformer after the debacle of the 2004 Ohio presidential election. In that election, the then-CEO of Diebold Walden “Wally” O’Dell, pledged to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to George W. Bush. O’Dell was a major donor to the Bush campaign and a visitor to the president’s Crawford ranch.

In Lucas County, Diebold optiscan machines malfunctioned in the mostly Democratic inner city wards during the 2004 presidential election. Thousands of ballots that were rejected by the Diebold voting machines were never counted.

The settlement that affects 47 counties offers less than half a million dollars in payments, but Diebold is eager to give away and discount its software and hardware. Diebold’s General Election Management Software (GEMS) has come under attack for being designed in a way that allows for two sets of databases independent of each other. Diebold has agreed to give up to $2.4 million of free software licensing to Ohio counties over the next two years.

Along with the suspect Diebold software, the company will give away nearly 3,000 free voting machines in Ohio, up to 15% of a county’s total.

In the 2004 election, Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Triad all were criticized for partisan IT maintenance of election software and hardware. Specific charges made by voting rights activists were that maintenance workers helped rig the recount in Ohio. A Hocking County election official sent an affidavit to U.S. Rep. John Conyers noting that a Triad company worker had installed a new hard drive and had visited several other counties prior to the recount.

An ES&S worker, Sam Hogsett, was also accused of inappropriate behavior during the recount.

Diebold is discounting its maintenance fee by 50% if the counties continue to allow them to service their equipment. Diebold is now owned by the Nebraska-based ES&S and the two companies are estimated to be involved in the counting of 80% of the nation’s ballots using their secret proprietary software.

If counties no longer trust the non-transparent touchscreen Premier machines, the company is offering a 50% discount on new optiscan voting machines. The Free Press documented election tampering in the 2004 election in Miami County (Ohio) involving optiscan machines.

The net effect is that the notorious malfunctioning Diebold machines will be able to drop even more Ohio voters. County board of elections have 75 days to decide to accept Diebold’s partisan hardware and software. Since Diebold’s equipment has historically purged Democratic voters including its infamous purging of nearly 10,000 voters in Cleveland just prior to the 2004 election, you can county on most rural Republican-dominated counties to accept Diebold’s offer.

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
January 18, 2010

The same types of machines that helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, and “re-elect” him 2004, may now decide who wins the all-important “60th Senate seat” in Massachusetts. The fate of health care and much much more hang in the balance.

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

A paper ballot of sorts does come through these machines. But the count they generated was seriously compromised in the Florida 2000 election that put George W. Bush in the White House. Similar machines played a critical role skewing the Ohio 2004 vote count to fraudulently re-elect him.

In 2004, Lucas County (Toledo) Ohio, incorrectly calibrated Diebold scantron machines left piles of uncounted ballots in heavily black districts in the inner city.

The Free Press also found that on optiscan machines in Miami County, Ohio the reported totals were significantly higher than the actual number of people who signed in to vote.

Ironically, the cheated candidate in that election was Massachusetts’ now-senior Senator John Kerry. Kerry is circulating email appeals warning that this election is a “jump ball” in which “shady right-wing organizations and out of state conservatives have descended upon the state in droves.”

But Kerry himself has infamously said nothing about the theft of the 2004 election. Neither he, the Democratic Party, nor the Obama Administration have done anything to change a system in which elections can be stolen by the very-well-funded Republican-owned companies that make and administer the vote-counting machines. A dozen election protection groups from around the country have now issued an “orange alert” warning that the Massachusetts vote count could be “ripe for manipulation.”

Thus Kerry’s new colleague could be “selected” by the same means that deprived him of the White House.

According to Selectman Dan Keller of the western town of Wendell, some Massachusetts communities — including his — do have hand-counted paper ballots.

But most of the state relies on Diebold scantron counters which can be manipulated in numerous ways, including switching calibrations and moving ballots from precinct-to-precinct or county-to-county, thus reversing intended votes from one candidate to another.

According to Brad Friedman at BradBlog (http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650 ) LHS Associates sells and services many of the machines being used in this special election. Though the vast majority of elected officials in Massachusetts are Democrats, control of the vote count can be a grey area where voting machines are involved, especially given Sen. Kerry’s 6-year stupor over the stolen 2004 election, a record of inaction amply matched by the Democratic Party and Obama Administration.

According to Friedman, LHS “has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections,” and has a Director of Sales and Marketing who has been “barred from Connecticut by their Secretary of State.”

The stakes in this election cannot be overstated. The deceased Senator Kennedy’s seat holds the key to a filibuster-breaking 60-seat Democratic majority in the Senate. State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, is a supporter of the Obama health care plan, and an opponent of atomic power.

Coakley’s opponent, conservative Republican State Senator Scott Brown, has been running a Tea Bagger-style “populist” campaign.

Poll results differ substantially as the campaign winds down, but all show a close race. Thus Diebold, a thoroughly tainted player with deep Republican roots, could hold the key to the election by shifting the outcome in just a few key precincts.

After internet-based reporting broke the story of the stolen 2004 election, thousands of election-protection activists turned out to monitor the 2008 vote count. Among other things, careful exit polling was done to provide a close reality check on official vote counts. Poll monitors interviewed voters and carefully scrutinized voting procedures and how ballots were handled and counted.

Often overlooked are voter registration manipulations, which were used in Ohio and elsewhere to strip hundreds of thousands of voters of their right to cast a ballot. In Ohio alone, more than 300,000 legally registered voters were electronically removed from the voter rolls between the 2000 and 2004 elections. Most were in heavily Democratic urban areas.

In 2008, the Free Press found that the number of purged Ohio voters jumped to more than a million.

Thus the fact that the electoral apparatus in Massachusetts is apparently in the hands of Democrats may not matter. Private vendors like LHS and Diebold have the actual control over the final numbers.

In Massachusetts, a recount only occurs if the final results are less than half of one percent, and as election reform activist John Bonifaz points out, Massachusetts does not require random audits of the computerized vote counting machines to compare the computer results to the optical scan ballots marked by the voters. Bonifaz notes that in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman Minnesota Senate race in 2008, “everything was ultimately hand-counted.” The problem in Massachusetts hinges on whether the race is close enough to trigger a recount, which candidates can peition for within thirty days.

Exit polls remain the gold standard for election integrity throughout the democratic world. But in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls indicated that the election results were reversed and that Kerry actually won. Jonathan Simon, election integrity expert, points out that the exit polls in 2008 in Minnesota “…had Franken winning by 10%! This is a huge disparity, not remotely reflected by the recount.”

“Could the exit poll have been that badly off? Or could a large number of ballots, 200,000 or so, been swapped out before the recount? Here is where the chain or custody, or lack thereof, comes in. These ballots were not exactly under heavy surveillance during the month-long period between election day and recount completion,” Simon said.

What will matter in Massachusetts is how thoroughly election-protection advocates are able to scrutinize voter certification, access and ballot security. Billions of dollars—and much more—are riding on the outcome of this election. Those who believe it cannot or would not be stolen are simply in denial.

Given the Democratic party’s astonishing lack of leadership on so many issues, it is entirely possible that Scott Brown could legitimately beat Martha Coakley in this election.

But it is also possible that the outcome could be manipulated by the companies in control of the registration rolls and vote counts. It will be up to citizen election protection activists to make sure that doesn’t happen yet again.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman broke many of the major stories surrounding the theft of the 2004 election, and have co-authored four books on election protection, which appear at www.freepress.org, where they are publisher and senior editor, and where this story first appeared.

The ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg…

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / September 24, 2009

Unless U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America’s electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America’s future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold in tandem will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it’s even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t.

Let’s do a quick review:

1. ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;
2. As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, the scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;
3. The source code on all U.S. touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines — including ES&S — are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work;
4. Although there are official mechanisms for monitoring and recounts, none carry any real weight in the face of the public’s inability to gain control or even access to this electronic source code, whose proprietary standing has been upheld by the courts;
5. With the newly merged ES&S/Diebold now apparently controlling 80% of the national vote through hardware and software, this GOP-connected corporation will have the power to alter virtually every election in the U.S. with a few keystrokes. Unless there is a massive, successful grassroots campaign between now and 2012, the same will hold true for the next US presidential election;
6. Aside from its control of touchscreen machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S also controls a significant percent of the electronic optiscan tabulators to count cards on which voters use pencils to fill in circles, indicating their vote. Accounts of fraud, rigging, theft and abuse of these optiscan systems are well-documented and innumerable. Any corporation that prints these ballots and runs the machines designated to count them can control yet another major piece of the US vote count;
7. The merged ES&S/Diebold now also controls the electronic voter registration systems in many counties and states. With that control comes the ability to remove registered voters without significant public accountability. In the 2004 election, nearly 25% of all the registered voters in the Democratic-rich city of Cleveland were purged, including 10,000 voters erased “accidentally” by a Diebold electronic pollbook system. So in addition to controlling the vote counts on touchscreen and optiscan voting machines, the merged Diebold/ES&S and sympathetic hardware and software companies that service computerized voting equipment will control who actually gets to cast a vote in the first place.

Lest we forget: in 2000, long before this ES&S/Diebold purchase was proposed, Choicepoint, a GOP-controlled data management firm, hired by Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, removed up to 150,000 Florida citizens from voter rolls on the pretense that they were ex-felons. The vast majority of them were not.

Computer software “disappeared” 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s column at a critical moment on election night, allowing George W. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, a Fox News analyst, to proclaim him the winner. The election was officially decided by less than 700 votes and a 5-4 Supreme Court vote preventing a full recount. An independent audit later showed Gore was the rightful winner.

In 2004, more than 300,000 Ohio citizens were removed from voter rolls by GOP-controlled county election boards (more than one million have been removed since).

Various dirty tricks prevented still tens of thousands more Ohioans from voting. The vote count was marred by a wide range of official manipulations coordinated by then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Diebold was a major player in the 2004 Ohio elections, but was joined by numerous other computer voting firms and their technicians in “recounting the vote” which confirmed the Bush “victory,” despite exit poll results and other evidence to the contrary. In defiance of a federal court order, 56 of 88 Ohio counties destroyed some or all of their ballots or election records. No one has been prosecuted.

In short, the ES&S purchase of Diebold’s voting machine operation is merely the tip of a toxic iceberg. Voiding the merger will do nothing to solve the REAL problem, which is an electronic-based system of voter registration and ballot counting that is potentially controlled by private corporations and contractors whose agenda is to make large profits and protect the system that guarantees them.

Although elections based on universal automatic registration and hand-counted paper ballots are not foolproof, they constitute a start. Stealing an election by stuffing paper ballot boxes at the “retail” level is far more difficult than stealing votes at the “wholesale” level with an electronic flip of a switch.

As it’s done in numerous other countries throughout the world, the only realistic means by which the U.S. can establish a democratic system of ballot casting and counting is to do it the old-fashioned way. With human-scale checks and balances we might even be secure in the knowledge that our elections and vote counts will truly reflect the will of the people. What a concept!

[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, available at freepress.org at, where this article also appears, and where Bob’s Fitrakis Files are also available. Harvey Wasserman’s History of the U.S. is at harveywasserman.com.]

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