Election Issues

Unless US Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America's electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America's future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine)

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

I’m always amazed at the political career of Matt Damschroder, Deputy Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections. He’s just been named to the bipartisan Committee to Modernize Voter Registration (CMVR).

Matt first came to political prominence in Columbus when he managed the right wing “Flag Lady’s” campaign for City Council. The visibility of her little flag shop on High Street allowed her to do much better than expected in a close defeat.

Matt went on from there to be known as “the chauffer” – the guy who drove around and literally wheeled around former Franklin County Republican Party Chair Michael F. Colley. He went from being Colley’s wheel-man to replacing Colley as the Franklin County Republican Party Chair.

The death of former Philippine President Corazon Aquino on August 1, 2009 should be remembered for many reasons: not just because she led the People Power revolution in the Philippines that stood for peace and human rights, and not just because she did it after the brutal Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos had her husband assassinated, but most importantly, she stood up to one of the first documented stolen elections.

While the American mainstream media steadfastly refuses to recognize the use of both computer hardware and software in modern election manipulation, President Ronald Reagan’s good buddy Marcos immediately knew the score with the new technology and blatantly used mainframe computers to rig his 1986 election. With the support of the Reagan administration, Marcos simply had the vote count shut down until “new tapes” were brought in that reversed Aquino’s victory.

Iran's Ayatollahs have just admitted that in some 50 cities there were as many as 3 million more votes cast than there were voters in the recent presidential election.

But, they say, that's not enough to change the outcome. So, like Florida in 2000 and Ohio 2004, there will be no total recount and no new election. Election theft should be opposed, whether it's sanctioned by a supreme Ayatollah or the U.S. Supreme Court.

It's as if the Iranian government is being advised by Ohio's former Imam J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio's 2004 Secretary of State, purged hundreds of thousands of voters, and stole, switched and disappeared enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House for a second term. The dubious Iranian tallies look very similar to the inflated Bush outcomes in 12 Republican southwest Ohio counties, most notably Warren, Clermont and Butler. They are reminiscent of the vote counts in two precincts in Perry County that reported turnouts of 121% and 118% of registered voters.

The chief difference between Iran 2009 and Ohio 2004---and Florida 2000----is in the opposition. Iran's Mir Hussein Moussavi has vowed martyrdom.

The parallels between the stolen Iranian election of 2009 and the American of 2000 and 2004 are tragic. The histories---and futures---of the two nations are inseparable. Bound up in their tortured half-century of crime and manipulation are the few glimmers of hope for lasting peace in the Middle East.
In both countries, a right-wing fundamentalist authoritarian with open contempt for human rights and the Geneva Convention has come up a winner, with catastrophic consequences. In both countries, the blowback of two George Bushes loom large. <

In the US, two “defeated” candidates---Al Gore and John Kerry---said and did nothing in the face of two stolen elections. But an unprecedented voter protection movement arose from the ashes of those defeats to assure the 2008 victory of America's first African-American president.

In Iran, the “defeated” candidate---Mir Hussein Moussavi---is fighting back, along with massive grassroots resistance. How far they get will define the Iranian future---as well as that of the Middle East.

In a fluid and unpredictable situation, here are some indisputables:

One of the nation's leading election integrity watchdogs, John Gideon, 62, passed away Monday April 27. Gideon was editor of the very widely distributed "Daily Voting News," featured on Bradblog. Together with Ellen Theisen, he co-founded the prominent election integrity Web site VotersUnite.org. In the early days of Black Box Voting, John Gideon played an important role by corresponding with each and every new member in our forums. He also helped assist VerifiedVoting.org when it was a fledgling organization.

He succumbed rather suddenly to bacterial meningitis. He passed away with his family by his side.

John Gideon earned a reputation for painstaking accuracy. He developed a breadth of knowledge about certification processes and all major voting machines. Yet more impressive (for some of us middle-aged folk), he had an amazing ability to remember details whenever needed, synthesizing knowledge from thousands of articles, research papers and visits.

There's been a frenzy of activity in the Florida legislature of late. In week seven of this nine-week session, sweeping legislation was introduced in both houses with little fanfare, and Republican lawmakers discouraging debate or public input. A Gainesville Sun editorial summed it up: "Florida's lawmakers should be making voting easier and the elections process more transparent. Instead, they have produced a so-called reform that fails on all counts."

Ohio election officials purged more than a million voters between the 2004 and 2008 elections. The number is three times that of voters purged between the 2000 and 2004 elections in that key swing state.

The Free Press Election Protection Project requested data from Boards of Elections in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. A detailed analysis of the records reveals shocking and unprecedented purges. The total number of people whose names were removed from the voting rolls is a stunning 1.25 million.

The Ohio data shows enormous disparities in the number of people purged in different categories from county to county. These results suggest obvious violations of equal protection and due process. The documents demonstrate that the voting rights of a million Ohioans were destroyed based on the arbitrary whims of local election officials. Purging appears to be subject to widely diverse interpretations of state and federal laws by different Ohio Board of Elections officials.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with election integrity hero, Steve Heller. Our last interview was back in August, 2007.

You achieved notoriety a few years back. You stole the Diebold documents in January of 2004, the search warrant was served on your house in August of 2004, you were indicted on three felony charges in February of 2006, and you pled guilty to one felony count of unauthorized access to a computer in November of that same year. [For more background and details, all of the press and many of the blog posts on Steve Heller's case can be found here .] So what's happened since then?

Well, in terms of my case, what's happened is that when I pled guilty, I had to pay $10,000 in restitution to the law firm from which I stole the Diebold documents, and I was put on felony probation for three years. After one year, we petitioned the court for a reduction of my sentence from a felony to a misdemeanor. That petition was granted, and as of now, I remain on misdemeanor probation.

The Free Press National Affairs Editor, David S. Lewis, interviews field correspondent, Kendra R. Chamberlain, on assignment in Washington D.C. She covered the events and atmosphere surrounding the inauguration of President Barack Obama.