[This from www.bestoftheblogs.com. Haven't had a chance to track down the various bits to see if they're true/valid. It seems like a really bad idea for a single, privately held company to have a monopoly on computerized voting systems in the US.
Well, unless your friends with the guy who holds the monopoly, I guess. The original copy at http://www.bestoftheblogs.com has the appropriate links. --jet] Wednesday, February 05, 2003 Chuck's Ball, Chuck's Game Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory and the revelation that Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel once ran and is still a major stockholder in the company that owns the company that counted 85 percent of the votes cast in his very own 2002 and 1996 election races is a potential doozy. His 1996 victory, some will recall, was considered one of the biggest upsets of that election; he was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. On January 29, The Hill reported that Hagel had reported a financial stake worth $1 million to $5 million in the McCarthy Group Inc., a private merchant banking company based in Omaha. But he did not report the company's underlying assets, choosing instead to cite his holdings as an "excepted investment fund," and therefore exempt from detailed disclosure rules. As The Hill suggests, that claim is false or, at least was, until the Senate Ethics Committee's new staff director Robert Walker met with Hagel's staff and changed the rules after The Hill began snooping around. A major asset of the McCarthy Group (not listed by Senator Hagel in his disclosures) is the nation's largest vote counting firm Election Systems & Software (ES&S) [called American Information Systems until the name was changed in 1997]. Hagel resigned as CEO of AIS in 1995 to run for the Senate. Following his election, he resigned as president of the parent company McCarthy & Company. Today, the McCarthy Group is run by Michael McCarthy, who happens to be campaign treasurer for--you guessed it--Chuck Hagel. Hagel's financials list the McCarthy Group as an asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million. In short, Hagel controlled and still partly owns the only voting machines that counted his votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. But, wait. There's more. The majority stake in ES&S is owned by Howard F. Ahmanson and the Ahmanson Foundation, heirs to the Home Savings of America fortune. Howard Ahmanson has long been associated with Christian Reconstruction, a radical faction of the Religious Right that seeks to replace American democracy with a theocracy based on biblical law and under the "dominion" of Christians. For years, the Orange County, California multimillionaire served on the board of the Chalcedon Foundation, the lunatic Right's think tank. He has channeled millions from his family's fortune to a variety of causes designed to discredit and defeat Darwin's evolution theory. He currently is a member of ultra-right Council for National Policy. Christian Reconstructionists have been instrumental in getting at least 24 conservatives into the California legislature; launching prop. 209, California's successful anti-affirmative action law; financing Prop. 22, California's effort to ban gay marriages; and financing the Chalcedon Institute, which reportedly believes in the death penalty for homosexuality and other "sins." Let me draw a picture here: about 60 percent (and growing) of the computerized ballots cast in elections in the United States now pass through machines whose software is owned, designed and controlled by people who are soul brothers of the Taliban. Like the other handful of secretive companies that produce computerized voting systems and depend upon the kind of political patronage that Republicans excel at, ES&S is extremely well-connected. Jeb Bush's first choice as running mate in 1998 was Sandra Mortham who, according to the Tallahasee Democrat (October 6, 2002, Page B6), was a paid lobbyist for ES&S and received a commission for every county that bought its touch-screen machines. Virtually all of the information in this post (as well as The Hill article) was unearthed in nearly two thousand hours of research by a tenacious writer and publicist named Bev Harris, who is the author of a forthcoming book Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century. Harris owns a PR firm called Talion in Renton, Washington, which is just southeast of Seattle. She says she began researching voting machine companies when she discovered that unauditable private, proprietary codes are used for vote-counting, and that ownership of voting machine companies is often kept secret. You'll find virtually all of Harris' supporting documentation and backup materials here. If all these dots can be connected, she's onto one hell of a story. Thom Hartman has additional details at Common Dreams By the way, Bev, I don't mean to tell you your business but it's usually best to wait until your book is in the store before you spring this sort of thing. Posted by Jerry Bowles at 12:35 AM comments(2) Comment -- J. Eric Townsend -- jet spies com buy stuff, damnit: http://www.spies.com/jet/store.html
