Vanishing Act

by Chris Floyd

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.

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 computerisation 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.

The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term 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 computerised 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 Democrat 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.

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.

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.

Sequoia also has a colourful history, most recently in Louisiana, where it 
was the centre of a massive corruption case that sent top state officials 
to jail for bribery, most of it funnelled through Mob-connected front 
firms. Sequoia executives were also indicted, but escaped trial after 
giving immunised 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 Snr makes 
millions trolling the world for war pork, privatisations and sweetheart 
deals with government insiders.

Meanwhile, the shadowy defence contractor SAIC has jumped into the vote-
counting game, both directly and through spin-offs 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.

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 computerised "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.

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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Moscow Times