The currently recommended diary "Willard's spawn buys voting machines" makes some great points on the dangers of private, proprietary voting machines and the recent news of Romney's son Tagg having an investment in Ohio and other states voting machines. Ed Schultz spent time yesterday focusing on this as well.
Scanning through the comments there seems to be a meme pushing through that Tagg is some 3rd degree away and this is just an investment and ho-hum no cause for concern. As much as I hate to concern troll.. I think the larger point is being lost here. Tagg Romney is only the shining bit on the rock that made it interesting to turn over. Flipping the rock finds some other nasties crawling under the surface. It seems a group of Romney's big money buddies decided last summer was a good time to get into the voting machine business.. More after the flipdeedoo..
So the puzzle is like this:
Hart InterCivic is a national provider of election voting systems that are used in swing-states Ohio and Colorado...
Private equity firm H.I.G. Capital, LLC bought out a “significant” portion of Hart in July of 2011, and now the majority of Hart’s board directors are employees of H.I.G.
Four of H.I.G.’s directors, Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman, and Brian D. Schwartz, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.
Two of H.I.G.’s managing directors, Douglas F. Berman and Brian D. Schwartz, were present at the $50,000 per plate fundraiser where Mitt Romney made his notorious ”47%” comments.
H.I.G. is the 11th largest donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign. H.I.G. employees have given $338,000 to the Romney campaign, outpacing even Bain Capital itself, which gave $268,000.
The source of the above information is the article at
The Daily Dolt and I have no idea the reliability of this source -- it was a Google top hit when I searched for 'tony tamer mitt romney' .. The main points of the story are linked throughout so it seems to be reliable. The fact that it's from 2 weeks ago underscores the other kos diarist's point that nobody seems to care.
There's also the Forbes article from Saturday:
two members of the Hart Intercivic board of directors, Neil Tuch and Jeff Bohl, have made direct contributions to the Romney campaign. This, despite the fact that they represent 40 percent of the full board of directors of a company whose independent, disinterested and studiously non-partisan status in any election taking place on their voting machines would seemingly be a ‘no brainer’.
So the Tagg connection may be degrees of separation away: (forbes again)
Solamere Capital—the investment firm run by Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg, and the home of money put into the closely held firm by Tagg’s uncle Scott, mother Anne and, of course, the dad who might just be the next President of the United States—depending upon how the vote count turns out, in our little tale, in the State of Ohio—have shared business interests with H.I.G. either directly or via Solamere Advisors which is owned, in part, by Solamere Capital, including a reported investment in H.I.G. by either Solamere Capital or Solamere Advisors.
But the voting machine company itself has at the very least the appearance of impropriety and conflict of interest. So I won't say "the election is rigged". But I will say - yeah let's keep an eye on these guys.
Or more importantly win by so much it won't matter. Then we need to create a movement towards opening up the source code for all voting apparatus. There should be nothing private or proprietary about the meters of the democratic process.
This was already diared here and here but didn't get much traction. Only the Willard Spawn diary seems to have caught fire.