Archive for category: Fighting Corruption

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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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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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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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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