Is there a connection between Bush and the makers of the electronic voting machines?

This election is rigged and Bush will win no matter what.

Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia, are the companies that are making and distributing the new electronic voting machines.  These machines are being programmed by a man who some have suggested has a significant number of legal entanglements.  

The machines are programmed with two sets of books and no paper trail.  With the use of a two digit code, the election committees can change the voting tallies in favor of one candidate.  For example, if a majority voted is for Kerry, enter the two digit code and all the votes go to Bush.

In one round of testing, observers notice that even when they voted for the opposition, the vote was always recorded as a vote for Bush – I reported on this to Pravda.ru's readership.

Are there hints of mutual cooperation?  Yes, there is.  Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia all have more than strong ties to Bush and other Republican leaders. 

Diebold in an effort to take the onus off themselves has contracted Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego, to take responsibility for security issues within their software. But this has heavy implications also – SAIC has strong ties to Donald Rumsfeld.

He who is without sin, cast the first stone. Each one of the three companies has a past plagued by financial scandal and political controversy:

In 1999 the Justice Department filed federal charges against Sequoia alleging that employees paid out more than 8 million dollars in bribes. Shortly thereafter, election officials for Pinellas County, Florida, cancelled a fifteen-million-dollar contract with Sequoia after it was discovered that Phil Foster, a Sequoia executive, faced indictment for money laundering and bribery.

In addition:
• Michael McCarthy, owner of ES&S (formerly known as American Information Systems), served as Senator Chuck Hagel's campaign manager in both the 1996 and 2002 elections. Senator Hagel owns close to $5 million in stock in the ES&S parent company. In 1996 and 2002 eighty percent of Senator Hagel's votes were counted by ES&S.

• Diebold, the most well known of these three major groups, is under scrutiny for a memo that Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, sent out promising Ohio's votes to Bush in the 2004 election. Beyond this faux pas, intra-office memos were circulated on the Internet stating that Diebold employees were aware of bugs within their systems and that the network is poorly guarded against hackers.

SAIC has had a series of charges brought against them including indictments by the Justice Department for the mismanagement of a Superfund toxic cleanup and misappropriation of funds in the purchase of F-15 fighter jets.

One company that has been a major contributor to the Republican Party is Accenture.  Accenture was involved in financial scandals, and charged with incompetence in both Canada and the US throughout the '90s and 2000s.  Government defense contractors like Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), are also heavy contributors to the Republican Party.

I wish to extend my thanks to Andy Merrifield Ph.D., Wendy Ostroff, Ph.D., Scott Gordon, Ph.D. Student Researcher: Adam Stutz. 

And,
IN THESE TIMES, December 2003
Title: “Voting Machines Gone Wild”
Author: Mark Lewellen-Biddle
INDEPENDENT/UK, October 13, 2003
Title: “All The President's Votes?”
Author: Andrew Gumbel
DEMOCRACY NOW!, September 4, 2003
Title: “Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another Election?”
Reporter: Amy Goodman and the staff of Democracy Now!

Michael Berglin