On September 27, 1999, John McCain announced his candidacy for President. As you are well aware, Bush fought a very dirty smear campaign against John McCain. A famous technique he used was the push poll. Here is a sample of a push poll done in South Carolina (from Al Franken's book: Lies and the Lying Liars that tell them):
Caller: Hi. I am calling from an independent polling company and I was wondering if I could have a minute of your time to conduct a survey.
"Unsuspecting Voter: Uh...sure
"Caller: Great! If you knew that Senator John McCain was a cheat and a liar and a fraud, and that he has fathered an illegitimate black child, would you be more likely to vote for him or less likely to vote for him?
"Unsuspecting Voter: Hmm. Probably less."
Now Al may have been exaggerating a little bit here to make a point. But what is frightening is that this company, Voter/Consumer Research, still works very closely with the Bush Administration. Voter/Consumer Research (V/CR) is a full service public opinion research firm. V/CR was founded in 1991 by Dr. Jan van Lohuizen, an expert in the field of public policy and public opinion research. The company has a branch in both Houston and Washington D. C.
Joshua Green also wrote an interesting article on how Bush's team uses Polling Companies.
Bush's public opinion operation is split between Washington, D.C., where van Lohuizen's firm, Voter/Consumer Research, orchestrates the primary polling, and Southfield, Mich., where Steeper's firm, Market Strategies, runs focus groups. What the two have in common is Karl Rove. Like many in the administration, Steeper was a veteran of the first Bush presidency, and had worked with Rove on campaigns in Illinois and Missouri. Van Lohuizen has been part of the Bush team since 1991, when Rove hired him to work on a campaign to raise the local sales tax in Arlington, Texas, in order to finance a new baseball stadium for Bush's Texas Rangers.
It's really interesting that Van Lohuizen's polling company, VCR, was formed the same year that Rove used him to campaign for a new baseball stadium for Bush's Texas Rangers. According to an article by
Vincent Jauvert this company collected information on everyone that was registered to vote in 2004.
With the Bush team, fishing for votes is no longer an art; it's a state-of-the-art technique. Jan van Lohuizen, recounts: "In the swing states, we succeeded in reaching millions of Republican sympathizers, one by one, in a personalized way." How? The operation, which mobilized all the best programmers, is unique in American political history. "In America," he explains, "there are companies that specialize in collecting and selling information about individuals. It's entirely legal. They can supply an incredible amount of data about each person: the brand of their car, their income, their level of education, their favorite magazines, their favorite television programs, whether the person is a home owner or a renter, the number of telephone calls made abroad, the church a person goes to, their children's schools... Big firms like Visa constantly use this information for their advertising operations." But no one had used it yet to get a president elected. "We bought all the data about everyone registered to vote," Van Lohuizen explains. One important point: some citizens' party affiliation was known from these lists. We crunched all this information in our computers. That allowed us to identify about thirty different types of voter and then to imagine the most convincing arguments for each one of those types. Then all we had to do was classify each individual within those categories and send that person the corresponding message."
What companies does Jan van Lohuizen use to collect all of this data. Do you remember how Kathleen Harris managed to purge thousands of voters from the registration rolls? The company that sold this data to Ms. Harris was DataBase Technology (DBT)/ChoicePoint. Choicepoint was hired by Florida's Secretary of State to purge felons from the Florida registers. According to this MSNBC article, ChoicePoint's stock went from 500 million in 1997 to 4.1 BILLION dollars.
Greg Palasts' article in December of 2000 points out that ChoicePoint is a very republican organization.
Florida is the only state in the nation to contract the first stage of removal of voting rights to a private company. And ChoicePoint has big plans. "Given the outcome of our work in Florida," says Fagan, "and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country."
Especially if that president is named "Bush." ChoicePoint's board and executive roster are packed with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone, a company director who was chairman of the fund-raising committee for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aborted run against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Langone is joined at ChoicePoint by another Giuliani associate, former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir. And Republican power lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber lobbies for ChoicePoint in Washington. Just before his death in 1998, Rick Rozar, president of a Choicepoint company, CDB Infotek, donated $100,000 to the Republican Party.
Jfern wrote a diary the other day regarding this
MSNBC article: Database giant give access to fake firms. The Database company this article refers to is of course, ChoicePoint.
Last week, the company notified between 30,000 and 35,000 consumers in California that their personal data may have been accessed by "unauthorized third parties," according to ChoicePoint spokesman James Lee.
ChoicePoint notified California's consumers in late January/early February, over four months after it happened. Why so long?
Victims told months after the fact
The incident was discovered in October, when ChoicePoint was contacted by a law enforcement agency investigating an identity theft crime. .......
The firm was only given clearance by law enforcement officials to disclose the incident two weeks ago, Lee said.
According to this same article, the personal data theft may not be limited to just California.
California law requires firms to disclose such incidents to the state's consumers when they are discovered. It is the only state with such a requirement but such data thefts are rarely limited to a single geographic area.
In what other states could this have happened? It just smells funny that consumer data was stolen by ChoicePoint before the election but the law enforcement officials did not give clearance to disclose the incident until after the inauguration.
If you do not like my diary and thought it was poorly written, please at least congratulate me in figuring out how to do the little grey boxes and embedded web links. It took me a long time and it was really hard work.