- 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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- 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.
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- The unelected Bush Regime now controls the government,
the military, the judiciary -- and the machinery of democracy itself. Absent
some unlikely great awakening by the co-opted dullards of the corporate
media, next November the last shreds of a genuine American republic will
disappear -- at the push of a button.
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- http://www.tmtmetropolis.ru/stories/2003/09/19/120.html
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