Hard on the heels of reports of Sherrod Brown's all-expense-paid trips to Florida, Europe, and The Orient, Ohio, vying with New Jersey for the most corrupt state in the nation by all appearances, finds out that
Ken Blackwell owns stock in Diebold. Not inherently bad, of course, since Diebold will keep winning elections for Republicans into the foreseeable future and God only knows that they will be richly rewarded for it. It's bad because this particular bible-thumping, abortion-hating Republican candidate for governer is the Secretary of State and was responsible for forcing Diebold machines on thousands of precincts in Ohio.
You would think that crooks would make some effort to be less transparent. Not in Ohio! Here's from a Kos diary - "Hypothetically Speaking" - in 2005:
Ohio's capital city is being rocked by a story this morning in the Columbus Dispatch in which Matt Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, says a representative of Diebold paid $10,000 in January 2004 to the Franklin Co. GOP in an attempt to sway the the county's decision on voting machines. Damschroder, a Republican and former county chair of the party, also claims that the Diebold rep, Pat Gallina, boasted about a $50,000 donation he had written to a political group associated with Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.
So: Blackwell got $50k from a Diebold Rep in 2005, when in August of 2003,
we read this:The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
That's right: the letter that started it all was addressed to Blackwell. And he couldn't persuade his broker to avoid buying Diebold stock?
By all rights, this would spell the end of the Republican party in Ohio (if Noe, Petro, Taft, Montgomery, and Ney weren't enough to put a stake through their calcified heart). It won't. It won't, it won't it won't. Unless....