- It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate
brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole,
where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian
fascists,
CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers and presidential family
members
lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded,
half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic
security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected
by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the "world's
greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush
will almost certainly be the next president of the United States no matter
what the people of the United States might want.
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- The American vote-count is controlled by three major
corporate players Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia with a fourth, Science
Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies
all of them 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. These glitch-riddled
systems many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper
trail at all are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to
corporate
whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other
universities.
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- 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.
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- Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell:
The corporate lines even the bloodlines of these "competitors"
are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold whose 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'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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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. 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.
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- Meanwhile, the 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.
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