Editor
Possible Election Fraud Worth Investigating
Wed Nov 17, 2004 00:12
64.140.158.23

Possible Election Fraud Worth Investigating
Published on 11/16/2004

Letters To The Editor:
To what extent was the 2004 election marred by vote suppression, computer glitches and outright fraud?

Many activists, as well as six members of Congress, including John Conyers Jr., ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, would like to know. They're calling for an investigation of the more than 30,000 complaints regarding the election. Among the concerns:

• In Sarper County, Neb., a computer problem doubled the votes in half the precincts, adding 3,000 votes to the totals.

• In Guilford County, N.C., a computer threw away 22,000 votes for Sen. John Kerry.

• In Franklin County, Ohio, one precinct recorded 4,258 votes for President George W. Bush, although only 638 voters cast ballots.

• In Warren County, Ohio, officials blocked anyone from observing the vote count because, they said, they were afraid of a terrorist attack.

Other documented problems include lost absentee ballots, long lines in Democratic districts and voting machines that registered votes for Mr. Bush when people tried to vote for Sen. Kerry. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the possibility of vote tampering. The electronic voting machines used by one-third of American voters leave no paper trail, are manufactured by major donors to the Republican party and are vulnerable to hacking. Does that prove anything? No. But it does mean that when we have discrepancies of up to 15 percent between exit polls and final results (and when such discrepancies only exist in states without paper trails, we shouldn't be so quick to label exit polls inaccurate. When international observers monitor elections in other countries, they consider such discrepancies a sign of fraud.

We need to restore confidence in our democracy. We need paper trails. We need to investigate this election and fix whatever problems the investigation reveals
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=BD15719B-64F5-4930-A088-BA66EDDFE644
-------------------------
Investigation into Trashed Voter Registrations
http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe
-------------------------
A Tale of Two Brothers: Voting Fraud in the USA Posted by: outsidethebox on Nov 08, 2004 - The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

Diebold-Global: Corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year. The election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob was the co-founder of American Information Systems which became ES&S. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.
Diebold-Global's top managers, Howard Van Pelt and Larry Ensminger, recently moved to Advanced Voting Solutions-Shoup.
Articles on Diebold:
Major bugs found in Diebold vote systems Washington, DC, Nov. 12, 2004

Election Systems and Software (ES&S): ES&S claims to have counted 56% of the vote in the last four presidential elections. Was formed as a result of the merger of AIS and Business Records Corporation. Bob and Todd Urosevich founded its predecessor AIS in the 1980's. Bob is now president of Diebold-Global, while brother Todd is a vice president at ES&S. Business Records Corp. which was merged with AIS to become ES&S, was partially owned by Cronus, a company that seems to have a lot of connections to the infamous Hunt brothers from Texas, as well as other individuals and entities, including Rothschild, Inc.. Right wing Republicans Howard Ahmanson (who financed AIS) and Nelson Bunker Hunt have both heavily contributed to The Chalcedon Institute, an organization that mandates Christian "dominion" over the world. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and -- we kid you not -- slavery, "one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws."

Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&S, whose former CEO is Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes; needless to say, his initial victory was reported as "an amazing upset." Hagel still has a million-dollar stake in the parent company of ES&S. In Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his 1998 gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.

According to U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel's (R-NE) press office, in 1995 Hagel resigned as CEO of American Information Systems (AIS), the voting machine company that counted the votes in his first Senatorial election in 1996. In January 1996 Hagel resigned as president of McCarthy & Company, part of the McCarthy Group that are one of the current owners of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which itself resulted from the merger of AIS and Business Records Corporation. According to Bev Harris, Hagel is still an investor in the McCarthy Group. ES&S is now the largest voting machine company in America and one of its largest owners is the ultra-conservative Omaha World-Herald Company.

According to Nebraska's Elections Office, ES&S is the only voting machine company certified to count votes in the state. Twenty percent of the vote in Nebraska is hand-counted.

Sequoia Voting Systems: appears to be the second largest voting machine company, accounting for about 1/3 of the voting machine market. As of May 2002, Sequoia was purchased by Great Britain's De La Rue from Ireland's Jefferson Smurfit Group, who retain a 15% share. Smurfit was just bought by Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity investment firm. De La Rue owns 20% of the Great Britain's national lottery. Sequoia also has a colorful history, most recently in Louisiana, where it was the center of a massive corruption case that sent top state officials to jail for bribery, most of it funneled through Mob-connected front firms. In 1995 the Security and Exchange Commission filed charges against four employees of Sequoia, alleging that they inflated revenue and pre-tax profits. In 1999 the Justice Department filed federal charges against employees of Sequoia alleging that during a 10-year period $8 million in bribes were paid out. Louisiana's Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler had run up some big gambling debts in Atlantic City, according to reporter Daniel Hopsicker. In all, 22 people were indicted, 9 plead guilty. Fowler went to jail, but Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci of New Jersey got one year of home detention. Sequoia executives were also indicted, but escaped trial after giving immunized testimony against state officials. The British-owned company's corporate parent is private equity firm Madison Dearborn -- a partner of the Carlyle Group, where George Bush I makes millions trolling the world for war pork, privatizations and sweetheart deals with government insiders.

Science Applications International Corporation Fourth largest counter of votes behind the other three above. This shadowy defense contractor SAIC has jumped into the vote-counting game, both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney and Carlyle honcho Frank Carlucci, and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security lapses in its electronic systems hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors -- and will doubtless pose little obstacle to its entrance into election engineering.

All of these companies are hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election.

Choice Point The mad rush to install unverifiable computer voting is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush last year. The chief lobbying group pushing for the act was a consortium of arms dealers -- those disinterested corporate citizens -- including Northop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. The bill also mandates that all states adopt the computerized "ineligible voter purge" system that Jeb used to eliminate 91,000 eligible black voters from the Florida rolls in 2000. The Republican-run private company that accomplished this electoral miracle, ChoicePoint, is bagging the lion's share of the new Bush-ordered purge contracts.

Advanced Voting Solutions is the new name of another voting company, Shoup Voting Solutions. Their current top management, Howard Van Pelt and Larry Ensminger, were executives for Diebold-Global until last year. Officers of Shoup Voting Machine Co. were indicted for allegedly bribing politicians in Tampa, Florida in 1971, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Ransom Shoup was convicted in 1979 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to an FBI inquiry into a lever machine-counted election in Philadelphia. Shoup got a three-year suspended sentence. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has bought new voting machines from Danaher-Guardian, which appears to only sell voting machines formerly known as the "Shouptronic."

Danaher-Guardian is owned by billionaire brothers Steven M. and Mitchell P. Rales, who were described by columnist Jack Anderson in 1988 as "a pair of corporate raiders out of Washington DC." Again, Danaher-Guardian appears to only sell formerly Shouptronic voting machines.

Global Eye -- Vanishing Act By Chris Floyd - The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called "amazing" upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient "glitches" in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched" local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the "trade secrets" of the private companies who make them.

Voting Machine Companies Come Under Scrutiny by Lynn Landes

Con Job at Diebold Subsidiary Associated Press Dec. 17, 2003
http://www.nogw.com/electionfraud.html
----------------------------------------
A Movement and Country in Denial
With it's 11,000 lawyers and millions of dollars the democrats are doing virtually nothing about the stolen 2004 election. Instead they are once again blaming someone. This time the 'red states'. And they are already talking about strategies for 2008 as if that one will somehow magically be fair. Knowingly or unknowingly they work to prevent real dissent, and protect the status quo. This sort of thinking permeates many leftist media outlets and indymedia is not exempt. If you go to NYC Indymedia, their front page has not a single headline about vote fraud. Likewise if you read the latest NYC Indypendent, there is almost no mention of vote fraud in this post election issue which is billed as an election wrap-up.

This while hundreds of stories are accumulating from many states, and dedicated individuals nationwide work to raise the issue to national prominence and challenge the results before the Electoral College convenes on Dec. 13th. Not only do they have to struggle against the mainstream corporate media nearblackout, but against the denial of much leftist media as well. Bush is not yet (s)elected. Now is the time to ACT!
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/electionfraud/

When It Doesn't Add Up — Rick Anderson, Wed Nov 17 00:13
• Ohio Vote Fraud: More Bush "Voters" Than Residents — ConspiracyPlanet.com, Wed Nov 17 00:15
• A Legitimate Recount Effort in Ohio 11/16/04 — Steven Rosenfeld, Wed Nov 17 00:19