Category Archives: Aftermath Election 2002

Time To Get Involved In Our Elections

The morning after the November 5, 2002 election, I wrote this post.
In many ways, I regret making that post before all of the facts were in — even if I was correct in my assumptions. (It’s just a bad practice in general for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain here.)
However, now that the facts are in, it would appear that the situation is actually even worse than I feared.
We need to work together to not only get to the bottom of this stuff (purge lists, lack of exit polls or conflicting exit poll results, computer voting manipulation, conflict of interests/politicians owning stock in voting machine companies) — but keep focusing on the big picture: a fair election in 2004.
That means it will be more important to make sure everybody knows who these people are — and work with the good guy democrats and republicans to reform our system — and fast — and, in many ways, leave it at that.
If we’re not careful, we’ll get caught up in some “make the skapegoats pay” bullshit session while the real people responsible for what’s is happening quietly steal another election.
Attention Geeks, Newbies, and Those of You Who May Not Have Ever Voted Before In An Election: Your country needs you. It’s time for us all to get hands-on in a big way with our country’s elections.
This post was actually inspired by Douglas Rushkoff’s threatening to not write about politics anymore. On the countrary Doug. After this beautiful post, it is my hope that you will be writing about politics more than ever!
After Democracy

As is becoming increasingly clear, the system through which we are supposed to elect our government has been subverted. I’m not just talking about black people in Florida being taken off the voting rolls, or poor people in Maryland being handed flyers that tell them the wrong day to vote or that they’ll have to pay traffic tickets before voting. True enough, machines at which black people were likely to register their votes were set differently than in white, Republican districts. (In white areas, ballots with errors were re-read; in black areas, they were destroyed.) But that’s not the kind of subversion of democracy I’m concerned about right now.
As is now being reported widely in the ‘alternative’ press, in the last midterm election, the computers responsible for exit polling – an unofficial but telling check on the official vote count – were suspended without adequate explanation. Shortly later, the exit polling company went out of business. Meanwhile, an increasing number of districts came under the control of a private vote-counting company owned and, sometimes, operated – surprise – by Republican Chuck Hagel. His polling machines may or may not be responsible for his and other recent Republican electoral victories that confounded pollsters and analysts in the United States and abroad. (Republicans won by landslides in largely black districts that had never voted Republican, before. And then there is the question of memos with the subject line “how we stole the election”.) But they sure don’t inspire confidence. (For more, see the links at SeetheForest)
The Democrats might best use their remaining time in elected positions to safeguard what is left of the electoral system, or begin supporting Republican candidates who might have the resolve and patriotism necessary to dismantle the corrupted aparatus and voluntarily submit themselves to fair elections.

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U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Now Admits Ownership In Voting Company (ES&S)

U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel Now Admits Ownership In Voting Machine Company – Senate Ethics Committee Director Resigns

On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming “Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering” in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel’s votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings today and uncovered more details.
Hagel’s campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, now admits that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group. ES&S counts approximately 60 percent of all votes cast in the United States. According to the Omaha World-Herald which is also a beneficial owner of ES&S, Hagel was CEO of American Information Systems, now called ES&S, from November 1993 through June 2, 1994. He was Chairman from July 1992 until March 15 1995. He was required to disclose these positions on his FEC Personal Disclosure statements, but he did not.
Hagel still owns up to $5 million in the ES&S parent company, McCarthy Group. But Hagel’s office, when interviewed by Channel 8 News in Lincoln, Nebraska for the evening news on October 22, 2002, said he had sold his shares before he was elected. His office issued a fact sheet claiming that he had made full disclosure.
Last week, Hagel’s campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy (currently an owner and a director of ES&S) admitted to Alexander Bolton of The Hill that Hagel is still an owner of ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group, and said that Hagel also had owned shares in AIS Investors Inc., a group of investors in ES&S itself. Yet Hagel did not disclose owning or selling shares in AIS Investors Inc. on his FEC documents, a required disclosure, nor did he disclose that ES&S is an underlying asset of McCarthy Group, in which he lists an investment of up to $5 million in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001.

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Major Conflict Of Interest In Nebraska?

“If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines”
by Thom Hartmann for CommonDreams,

You’d think in an open democracy that the government – answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders – would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You’d think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You’d think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.
You’d be wrong.
The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill (www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

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Notes from the “Day After” Nov 5, 2002

Notes I forgot to upload from November 6, 2002:
I had no idea until this afternoon that an aquaintance of mine was a poll volunteer for every election. I, of course, wish that I had known that before yesterday’s election, so I could have asked him about the process ahead of time. (Or, for that matter, I wished I’d have asked the volunteers at my polling precinct more questions about everything, in retrospect.)
He said that everything went pretty smoothly at his station yesterday. They didn’t run out of ballots or anything like that . He did, however, “have to keep telling the other volunteers to stop sending people away.”
He said that it was his understanding that, even if your name is not on the list, that they are supposed to give you a “provisional” ballot and let you vote and include an explanation of the circumstances. When the people that count the votes get the ballot, they can look you up in the database, and if they can verify that you are currently registered in the database, your vote will count.
The number one question I am asked on a regular basis from people is what to do if they move and didn’t re-register at their new address. Just yesterday I told a lady in a coffee shop that I didn’t know what to do in that situation and that she “might be out of luck.” It seems like this is believed to be the case by most of the General Public — although I am going to need to find out for sure.
Well my poll volunteer acquaintance (who asked that his name be witheld because he was worried about getting into trouble if he was wrong about any of this) believes that this is not the case. That you can vote with a provisional ballot and they can look you up in the database, if you were registered previously, and just changed addresses, you should still be registered.
RE: ID — It was his understanding that they are NOT supposed to require ID for anyone whose name is on the list. ID was requested as a means of providing a current address for the people who hadn’t re-registered under the new address. If the people didn’t have ID, they could provide two pieces of mail to show they had received mail at the address they claimed to reside at.
Even if the person cannot provide any of these things, it was his’s understanding that you have to let people vote. You can’t turn anyone away.
This all just reminds me that I need to register to be a poll worker, so I can understand more about how everything works.

The Trouble With Florida’s New Voting Machines

A bunch of Poll volunteers were either fired or forced to resigned because of problems they were having with the new machines. The corporate answer: recruit a whole crop of new volunteers (your employees), give them a bunch of training at the last minute, and give them the day off of work (I hope with pay) to go give it their best shot at helping the other hapless victims, I mean voters, to figure out what they themselves just learned.
I wonder what was wrong with the other batch of volunteers?
I need to volunteer as a poll worker so I can learn about this stuff first hand.
Volunteers help cover poll worker gaps

After the September primary dozens of poll workers at various polling locations either resigned or were fired because of the problems relating to operating the new machines. Two months later after the primary and dozens of volunteers helped close the gap left by those poll workers no longer associated with the 2002 election. The new poll workers, who were trained by the state, sacrificed work on Tuesday to make sure that the polls and election ran smoothly…
Two hundred-eighty seven volunteers from thirty-one corporate teams were involved in the program including tams from companies such as Stein Mart, Convergys, and Wachovia.

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What’s A Couple 100,000 Votes Here or There?

Broward officials misplace 103,222 votes, but outcomes are unchanged
By Scott Wyman for the Sun-Sentinel.

Between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday, the elections office found it had left 103,222 votes out of the total ballots cast, including 34,136 votes for the governor’s race — even though the total announced at 1 a.m. was given as a 100 percent count…
… Some remained skeptical about what happened and raised the possibility that the county was double-counting votes. “It’s another screw-up, and I’m not satisfied this is correct,” Broward Republican leader George Lemieux said.

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Harvard Civil Rights Project Report On Disfranchised Voters

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University published a report on Oct 22, 2002 that better explains the problem of disenfranchised voters.
(Note: It is correct to use either disfranchised and disenfranchised, in case you’re curious.)
Democracy Spoiled: National, State, and Local Disparities in Disfranchisement Through Uncounted Ballots

# Spoilage Rates Are Most Prevalent In Counties With High Concentrations Of Minority Voters. Of the 100 counties with the highest spoilage rates, 67 have black populations above 12%. Of the top 100 counties with the lowest spoilage rates, the reverse is true – only 10 had sizeable black populations, while the population of 70 of the counties was over 75% white. There is also a strong correlation between uncounted ballots and black population; specifically, as the black population in a county increases, the uncounted ballot rate correspondingly increases.
# Various Factors Cause the Substantial Disparities in Ballot Spoilage Rates And Mere Technological Improvements Will Not Sufficiently Address These Problems. Evidence from various studies note that while improved voting technology reduces the percentage of discarded ballots across the board, these improvements still do not fully address the disparities between voting precincts, particularly between high-minority and low-minority districts. Indeed, despite popular belief, punch card machines had low ballot spoilage rates in many jurisdictions in 2000, refuting the notion that machine engineering is the critical issue.

Move Along, There’s Nothing To See Here

A particularly inspired Florida poll worker hams it up for the camera

The picture suggests that all went well yesterday — but this is actually the picture that goes with the previously blogged story below, which details some of the various situations in which things did not go smoothly at the polls.
I’ve been watching this on TV all morning — news coverage saying there was no voting troubles, with headlines running across the bottom at the same time regarding all of the voting trouble that actually took place.