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You would think that after Enron,
Worldcom, and especially the lingering stain of Florida 2000, Bush2 would want
to have clean hands working 2004, not companies that have been convicted of
fraud, civil fraud in contracts, bribery, and at least didn’t headquarter
offshore. KWC
Maybe Bush already knows something that the rest of us
doesn't know about these machines. And he's not worried.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2003 9:51
PM
Subject: [Futurework] Voting Machine
Madness
Here’s another article for your files, and
attached to share, for those who are following what may be the most critical
issue in politics today: If we can’t trust and believe that our elections are
fair and true, all else pales in comparison. Even if you want to give these
corporations the benefit of the doubt, you must operate with a heavy dose of
skepticism, ask and demand answers and accountability. To do less would be
disrespectful for all that preceded
us.
This confirms that the overseas
military/absentee vote is contracted to yet another company with previous
scandals and conflict of interest ties.
You would think that after Enron, Worldcom, and especially the
lingering stain of Florida 2000, Bush2 would want to have clean hands working
2004, not companies that have been convicted of fraud, civil fraud in
contracts, bribery, and at least didn’t headquarter offshore.
KWC
By
Mark Lewellen-Biddle | 12.11.03
Voting
Machines Gone Wild!
As the
federally mandated deadline nears for state election officials to replace
lever and punch-card voting machines with electronic systems, disturbing and
systemic problems are emerging.
E-voting has obvious downsides—no ability to check recorded votes, no
ability to perform meaningful recounts and susceptibility to electronic voting
fraud. Nonetheless, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandates that by
January 1 states submit plans to make the switch in time for the 2006
elections.
More troubling, the backers of the act and the manufactures
of e-voting machines are a rat’s nest of conflicts that includes
Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and
Accenture. Why are major defense contractors like Northrop-Grumman and
Lockheed-Martin mucking about in the American electoral system? And who are
Accenture and EDS?
Until January 1, 2001, Accenture was known as Andersen
Consulting, a part of Arthur Andersen. Despite
having offshore headquarters, Accenture
is a member of the U.S. Coalition of Service Industries (USCSI), an industry
association that promotes vastly extending the privatization and free trade in
services via the WTO and GATT. It also is a member of U.S. Trade, the
coalition that pushed for fast-track trade authority. In February 2001,
Accenture and election.com, the leading global election software and services
company, formed “an alliance to jointly deliver comprehensive election
solutions to governments worldwide. … The companies will combine their
strengths and experience in the development of election software and the use
of technology to offer governments new efficiencies that aid election
administration.” Election.com also has a
contract with the Federal Voter Assistance program to provide online absentee
balloting for the armed services. It is expected to be completely electronic,
that is, have no paper trail against which to check results.
This is
worrisome because Accenture already has been involved in scandals in the
United States and Canada. In the late ’90s, the company was hired to overhaul
Ontario’s welfare service for $50 million-$70 million. By 2002, the project
was capped at $180 million, although the total reached $246 million. To meet
its contractual agreement with Accenture, the Ontario government was forced to
cut welfare payments to $355.71 per child in poverty and fire large numbers of
social service workers. Election.com also had problems in Canada. The company
contracted to provide online Internet voting for the National Democratic Party
in 2003, but hackers paralyzed the central computer and disrupted voting. The
security and accuracy of election.com’s voting software has since come under
attack by Canadian voters who also challenged the ballotless
software.
EDS, another
internationally oriented information technology corporation, recently received
a $51 million subcontract from Sytel Inc, a software and service provider to
the Army, Air Force and Dow Chemical, among others, to “support personnel
systems including personnel management, hiring and job postings, employee
training, job exchange programs and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
complaint tracking for the Department of
Homeland Security.”
Partisan
ties
Why
Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, EDS and Accenture have been hired to alter
the election process in America becomes clear when personnel is considered.
The three largest voting machine companies in America are Election Systems and
Software (ES&S), Sequoia and Diebold. Like Accenture, they, too, have
tarnished pasts.
ES&S, formerly American Information Systems, is
owned by the McCarthy Group,
which was founded in the ’90s by Michael McCarthy, campaign director to Sen.
Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) during the 1996 and 2002 elections. In a January
interview with Bev Harris on talion.com, McCarthy said that “Hagel still owns
up to $5 million in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group” and that
“Hagel also had owned shares in AIS Investors Inc., a group of investors in
ES&S itself.” According to Harris, “Hagel did not disclose owning or
selling shares in AIS Investors Inc.” to the Senate Ethics Committee, “nor did
he disclose that ES&S is an underlying asset of McCarthy Group.” In an
October article in the London
Independent, Andrew Gumbel writes that Hagel “became the first
Republican in 24 years to be elected to the Senate from Nebraska, cheered on
by the Omaha World-Herald
newspaper which also happens to be a big investor in ES&S.” In what can
only be called a glaring conflict of interest, “80 per cent (sic) of Mr.
Hagel’s winning votes—both in 1996 and in 2002—were counted, under the usual
terms of confidentiality, by his own company.”
Sequoia is the second-largest company,
with roughly one-third of the voting machine market. In 1999, the Justice
Department filed federal charges against Sequoia alleging that employees paid
out more than $8 million in bribes. In 2001, election officials in Pinellas
County, Florida, cancelled a $15.5 million contract for voting equipment after
discovering that Phil Foster, a Sequoia executive, faced indictment in
Louisiana for money laundering and corruption.
Diebold is probably the best known of the
three because of its recent unsuccessful attempt to quash the release of
thousands of inter-office memos over the Internet. The memos show that Diebold
executives were aware of bugs in the company’s software and warn that the
network is poorly protected against hackers. The company also came under
scrutiny because of voting irregularities caused by its machines in the 2000
election in Florida.
Diebold’s CEO, Walden O’Dell is an avid supporter
of George W. Bush and has come under attack for penning a fund-raising letter
in which he promised to help deliver Ohio’s votes to Bush in 2004. Diebold has
been retained by the state of Maryland to provide voting software for the 2004
election, but because of ongoing negative publicity, Diebold hired Scientific
Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego, to assess the
security of the company’s voting software.
But
wait, there’s more
Many
SAIC officers are current or former government and military officials. Retired
Army Gen. Wayne Downing, who until last summer served as chief
counter-terrorism expert on the National Security Council, is a member of
SAIC’s board. Also on the board is former CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman, who
served as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the CIA
and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. During the first Bush
administration and while on the board of SAIC, Immen was a member of the
National Foreign Intelligence Board, an advisory group that reports to the
president and to the director of Central Intelligence.
Retired Adm.
William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who sits on
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, served as SAIC’s
president and CEO and until recently was its vice chairman. He now is chairman
of the board of VoteHere, which seeks to provide cryptography and computer
software security for the electronic election industry. Robert Gates, ex-CIA
director, former SAIC board member and a veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal,
also is on the board of VoteHere.
SAIC
has a history of problems.
In a 1995 article in Web Review, investigative journalist Stephen Pizzo notes
that in 1990 the Justice Department indicted SAIC on 10 felony counts for
fraud, claiming that SAIC mismanaged a Superfund toxic cleanup site. SAIC
pleaded guilty. In 1993 the Justice Department again brought charges against
the company for “civil fraud on an F-15 fighter contract.” In May 1995, the
company was charged with lying “about security system tests it conducted for a
Treasury Department currency plant in Fort Worth,
Texas.”
It
is not clear how SAIC became the company of choice to evaluate security
standards of the voting machine industry.
Under HAVA, Bush is required to establish an “oversight committee, headed by
two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine
standards for new voting machinery. The four commission heads were to be in
place by last February, but [as of October 13] just one has been appointed.
The technical panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines
it is supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities,” Gumbel
says.
Many computer experts agree that electronic voting represents the
most feasible means of conducting large-scale elections, but not until
security of the software can be established. But the voting machine companies
want to retain secrecy over their codes as well as maintain control over the
entire voting process, including the counting of ballots. Most voting machines
do not provide a paper trail so, in the case of a recount, all one can do is
push a button and watch as the computer spits out the same set of
numbers.
Americans are being rushed into this electronic voting
frontier with little public awareness of the consequences. Diebold already has
between 35,000 and 50,000 machines in place around the country. With the
government investing nearly $4 billion in voting machines, those who insist on
ensuring that the system is secure have been shunted aside.
Perhaps
this is how the administration intends to bring democracy to the world: Hold
elections using voting machines supplied by Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia and
elect friendly governments. Then, hope that those people who have never
experienced the democratic process won’t know the difference. More troubling
is that many Americans may not know the difference, either. ![]()
Mark
Lewellen-Biddle is working
on his Ph.D. in American Studies and Political Science at Purdue
University
http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=490_0_1_0_C
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