Keep an eye on H D T V [Hold down the Vote] efforts by the GOP. The tactics rely on intimidation, lies, discrimination and -with a new twist- technology. In the 1981 NJ governor's race between Tom Kean, Sr. and Jim Florio,
intimidation earned the GOP a DOJ warning and consent decree after Kean, Sr. took a 1,797-vote (out of 2.2 million)lead - after the GOP's "Ballot Security Task Force" posted illegal signs and hired off-duty police to walk the polls, exclusively in minority precincts.
The RNC... hired an army of workers to patrol targeted black and Hispanic polling places... prominently displayed revolvers and BSTF armbands.
Since the DoJ order, the RNC has switched methods.
To deny a voter the ballot relies now on 1) VoterID, and 2) central databases —sold by contractors to the states— that mechanically lose and purge voters. The databases are built by vendors Covansys, Accenture, ES&S, Diebold/DIMS, Unisys, PCC Tech and Saber Consulting. Below, the campaign gifts(+party leanings) of the companies that build the voter databases. For starters, donations listed for employer Covansys in the last 2 elections:
Link to donations listed under employer Covansys - Center for Responsive Politics
(You can also search FEC records for more $$ given under Covansys' earlier name, Complete Business Solutions, or CBSI).
Donations of the founder and chairman:
Covansys partners with PCC Technology to program the database for:
West Virginia, Nevada, NJ, Idaho, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine.
Covansys sold its public sector division to Saber Consulting of Oregon. Saber contracted separately to create the voter databases in Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, and NY (pending).
PCC Technology and Saber's contributions are shown here:
States and localities have had problems with the Covansys and PCC technology: Nevada + NJ + Maine stopped deployment of the Covansys-PCCT databases because of pitfalls in validating and invalidating voters.
In trials of the NJ database the state found major "programming problems during testing that could disenfranchise voters, officials said." [Newark Star Ledger, Oct. 13] Hunterdon County will be the alone among NJ's 21 counties in going ahead with the Covansys centralized database that has had a problem converting data from local voter rolls and verifying a registrant's identity.
County officials reject [SoS Dean] Heller's new voter registration system
Las Vegas Sun
Dec. 6, 2005
Clerks and voter registrars from the 17 counties that now handle the elections said the system under development is unreliable, inaccurate and should be scrapped in the 2006 election. . . . .
[Clark County Registrar Larry] Lomax said "the Covansys system cannot be relied upon to conduct candidate filing, to print a voter registration card, to process a petition, to conduct early voting, to conduct absentee voting,
"In responding to phone calls our departments receive every day, election workers could no longer provide directions to a voter's polling place, provide voters the names of the elected officials who represent them, or tell voters in what contests they are eligible to vote."
Access to more than 1 million documents scanned into the current Clark County system would be lost because the identifying batch numbers are not accessible in the Covansys system, Lomax said.
"The (Covansys) system remains unacceptably burdensome to navigate and operate," Lomax said. "Tests in Clark County indicate that for many of the most frequently required tasks, the time required to enter or extract data is more than doubled."
Both the Democratic registrar [Betty Bondi] and Republican registrar [Karen Lyons] of Norwalk, Conn. were fined for refusing to submerge the local voter rolls in 2004 into the statewide database introduced by PCC Technology.
The Norwalk registrars encountered >>>
... problems, such as the elimination of voters, each time the local rolls were converted to the state registry.
"One thing that Ms. Bondi and I do agree on is the state system is fraught with errors and problems, and you can see that in many cities," Lyons said.
The two registrars stopped inputting information into the centralized registry, leaving, according to Bondi, about 12,600 additions, changes of addresses, deletions and voter reactivations [updated in the local rolls but not transferred to the statewide system]. . . . .
... Despite not being hooked up to the system, the city's Nov. 2 elections appeared to have been successful.
The Republican and Democratic registrars were eventually ordered by the state to convert to the central system and each pay a $1,500 civil fine for their first refusal in 2004. [See the minutes of the State Elections Enforcement Commission, Feb 16, 2005, scroll to pg 4, item 7]
Another vendor, Accenture, has ties to (can you guess) the Republican Party.
The "SURE" database for Pennsylvania is used by all 67 counties; Wisconsin's is due to be deployed in '07.
But state officials in Kansas, Wyoming and Colorado grew frustrated with the progress and direction of Accenture's projects, and cancelled the state contracts with Accenture.
[Soft money donations by Accenture] >>
PAC donations for 2006
Link for 2004 PAC $
Donations by the Group Chief Executive, Governement:
Here's the executive leadership list
Also for Rohleder, Stephen COO -->>>>> $18,565 ($8,800 non-PAC)
William D. Green chairman, CEO $5K to GOP candidates
Meg, McLaughlin $2,000 ($1,000 non-PAC)
-- chief executive, eDemocracy Services
In 2004, the Secretary of State of Florida had to withdraw its felon purge list created by Accenture when it was found to be skewed to exclude Latinos who vote more favorably toward Republican candidates in Florida then in the rest of the country.
The paucity of Hispanic voters on the felon list was first reported Wednesday by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but officials said then that the problem was not systematic. After The New York Times examined the data, state officials acknowledged that the method for matching lists of felons to those of voters automatically exempted all felons who identified themselves as Hispanic.
Hispanic Republicans outnumber Hispanic Democrats by about 100,000 voters in Florida.
ES&S, headquartered in Nebraska, is the contractor for voter-registration databases for New Mexico, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska.
Two buyers in 1987 purchased stakes in ES&S that were held previously by the Ahmanson family: the McCarthy Group and the World-Herald Company, Inc. (publisher of the Omaha World Herald). ES&S was known then as American Information Systems. The investor McCarthy Group, in turn, funds Chuck Hagel's Sandhills PAC, shown here, as originally tracked by Bev Harris.
In recent giving by employees of ES&S, I haven't found any affinity for Democrats in the federal candidates' database. Here's for Tom Eschberger, vice president of ES&S, Addison Texas, and by senior VP, John Groh. The President/CEO Aldo Tesi bio, a director at Commercial Fed'l Bank, was a $1,200 donor in the 2000 election cycle to a bank PAC that gives overwhelmingly to GOP candidates. http://www.opensecrets.org/...
Voter Purges by Elections Officials - Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina. 10% of valid voters were removed from the list, until a judge intervened to reverse the purge.
The biggest problem at the polls today will come from duly registered voters not found with the electronic matching databases centralized by the states and administered by Election Boards using software from Diebold/DIMS [Maryland, Los Angeles County, Cuyahoga County Ohio], ES&S, Unisys, Saber, Accenture and Covansys.
New voterID requirements will throw many thousand of voters to "provisional" ballots, where many truly registered voters' ballots won't be validated due to technical mismatches (including missing middle initials, or voters not returning with full ID). The disqualified ballots of registered voters are nothing more than "placebo" ballots. 100% of votes cast to voting machines are admitted to the count; among provisionals, 30% of them can be shaved away, making them moot.
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My favorite incident about the hurdle of voterID comes from Indiana — where Julia Carson, a 5-term US congresswoman [juliacarson.house.gov], was stopped at the poll because her federal congressional photo-ID was not good enough in the primary in May.
Also, Notre Dame student Steve Przywara was turned away from voting when his university ID card together with his out-of-state (Ohio) driver's license was not adequate as ID. Read it here >>
New Voter ID Law Snags Indiana Congresswoman - AP
Eventually, pollworkers let Carson vote anyway, but not the college student. Her federal photo ID was not worthy because it had no expiration date!
From the same report at the site of WCPO-TV -
In Evansville, election officials denied ballots to about a third of the few voters who showed up because they were at the wrong location.
The precinct was redrawn after the last election.
For a list of database vendors hired for each of the 50 states, check this site (scroll past the map).
Watch closely the races for Senate in NJ and Missouri.
NJ has switched to touchscreen voting by Sequoia Voting Systems (now owned by Smartmatic, a Venezuelan company). Recent news of an investigation by the administration of ties to Venezuela would try to paint Sequoia as a company with liberal leanings and roots. Not to worry about any liberal roots!
Sequoia has always been foreign owned, first by an Irish company, Jefferson Smurfit/Smurfit Stone Container -- whose campaign donations were always overwhelmingly to the GOP.
Smurfit sold Sequoia a few years ago to DeLaRue, a British-owned company with the contract to print the new currency for Iraq after we toppled Saddam. DeLaRue bailed out on Sequoia last year and sold it for a song to Smartmatic.
Donations of original owner:
Sequoia's present CEO, Jack A. Blaine, is no lefty. He was hired over from Unisys Corporation; his past donations here.
[Unisys's PAC in the 1999-2000 cycle gave $6K to GW Bush and more $ to Republican than to Democratic candidates for Congress.]
In Bernalillo County, New Mexico in 2002, 25% of early voting ballots (a 12,000-vote gap) were untallied/ not accumulated by Sequoia touchscreens until a lawyer for an opposition candidate found the missed-votes discrepancy (10 days after polls closed).
I suggest watching voter access in key states, with an eye on NJ, present and past.
Apart from the Kean (Sr.) 1981 voter intimidation incidents, the next Republican winner in 1993 in NJ, Christie Whitman, also benefited from Hold-Down-the-Vote tactics, acknowledged by Carl Golden, Whitman's campaign manager and GOP strategist Ed Rollins.
According to Rollins, workers who had been hired to help get out the Democratic vote were told, "How much have they paid you to do your normal duty? . . . We'll match it. Go home, sit, and watch television." In addition, Rollins said, "We went into black churches and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed Florio, 'Do you have a special project?' And they said, 'We've already endorsed Florio.' And we said, 'That's fine, don't get up on the Sunday pulpit and preach. . . . Don't get up there and say it's your moral obligation that you go out on Tuesday and vote for Jim Florio.'" Ministers who cooperated, Rollins said, received contributions to their "favorite charities." As a result, Rollins said, "I think, to a certain extent, we suppressed their vote."
Golden told a reporter: "Sometimes vote suppression is as important in this business as vote getting."
Please be sure to watch also the central counts for early and absentee voting. One of the county clerks has been pushing hard for absentee/early voting, taking out interactive ads to encourage it.
Ostensibly a Democrat, he has been known for odd power plays. A voter took him to task for aiding GOP elections: "What [C. Durkin] did locally to get Republicans into power ... was a disservice to every Democrat."
The absentee vote counts across the states do need to be audited. And we cannot let provisional ballots go by the wayside.
This diary is a bit disorganized, but I'm rushed for time!
UPDATE
I would like to add for the record 1 more tidbit of perhaps the least well covered moment in recent election history. It comes from USA Today, buried as commentary on pg 15A. This "hold down the vote" initiative equaled a (minus) -16,022 votes. It was a temporary "glitch."
These numbers, fed to the data stream, led the networks
to call Florida for a Bush surge, before the data error was reversed and later data showed the race was a tie.
This moment changed history in the US, in Iraq and for the world.
[Link1]
Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, is a USA TODAY consultant and member of its board of contributors.