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Thursday, February 06, 2003
Votegate Continued
The Chuck Hagel “Votegate” scandal now unfolding in the Blogosphere raises a number of disturbing questions that cry out to be addressed by the mainstream press. If this much information can be dug up by a bunch of amateur/part-time journalists, imagine what a New York Times or Wall Street Journal team with some investigative resources could come up with. The angles are endless:
--The remote, but uninvestigated, possibility that Senator Hagel’s election victories in Nebraska in 1996 and 2002 were rigged. Huge, Watergate-level story if true. More likely, (I hope) is that it is a story about the judgment and propriety of his participating in elections in which most of the votes were counted by a company he once ran and is still a major investor in.
--The very real possibility that he attempted to disguise from the Senate Ethics Committee his financial ties to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a company that makes nearly half the voting machines used in the United States, including all those used in his native Nebraska.. Sidebar is the lengths to which his staff went to try to prevent The Hill from reporting this story.
--The troubling issues of security, programming errors and potential fraud raised by the growing use of unauditable electronic voting machines in elections across the country. Stanford University computer science professor David Dill explains the dangers on his Web page and offers the following resolution:
"Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. It is therefore crucial that voting equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, by which we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked. Many of the electronic voting machines being purchased do not satisfy this requirement. Voting machines should not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail; when such machines are already in use, they should be replaced or modified to provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. Providing a voter-verifiable audit trail should be one of the essential requirements for certification of new voting systems."
The unsinkable Bev Harris, who has been pushing this story for months, has a new report at Scoop today about “a file-sharing system that amounts to a colossal security flaw” at Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplied all the voting machines for the surprising Georgia upset. Diebold is now preparing to convert the state of Maryland to its no-paper-trail computerized voting.
--The domination of the electronic voting machine market by a handful of highly secretive private companies whose real ownership is unknown, whose officers are sometimes related financially or, in one major case, by blood, and whose technology is proprietary, thus not open to verifiable inspection.
--The relationship of this handful of highly secretive private firms to the Christian Radical right. Most troubling so far is the fact that Hagel’s company Election Systems & Software (ES&S) got its original financing from right-wing billionaire Howard F. Ahmanson, a Christian reconstructionist who has said "My purpose is total integration of Biblical law into our lives." Ahmanson bankrolls Christian Right groups and political campaigns, largely through an unincorporated entity called the Fieldstead Company.
--The “meta” story here is the degree to which the radical Christian right controls the heart and agenda of our simple-minded President and his snake-handling, tongue-speaking, Crisco-anointed, Holy Roller attorney general who are steadily pushing the boundaries of church and state in the wrong direction.
More to come on all this later but here’s a starter. After the elections last fall, newly-elected Hawaii governor Linda Lingle returned $3,000 she received from Howard Ahmanson after receiving a letter from Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church which read in part:
Of particular concern is the participation of Howard F. Ahmanson, who contributed $3,000 through the Fieldstead Company. Mr. Ahmanson is a well known financier of the Christian Reconstruction movement; an extremist faction of the Religious Right which advocates that conservative Christians should take "dominion" over American society. Under their version of "biblical law," the death penalty would be required for over a dozen categories of offenders, including adulterers, homosexuals, witches (sic), incorrigible children and those who spread "false" religions. They regard the teaching of evolution as part of a "war against God."
Ahmanson and his partners founded the Chalcedon Foundation, a Christian Right think tank which advocates the imposition of an "Old Testament" legal code in America. Ahmanson thinks stoning is the biblically preferred form of capital punishment. He notes that the means of execution are cheap and readily available and that stoning demonstrates the whole community's responsibility for crime prevention.
By accepting campaign contributions from Ahmanson and other proponents of Christian supremacy, you endorse these views and their effect on our society. These Christian supremacists are not interested in religious freedom, diversity, and pluralism. They seek to establish, by force if necessary, a nation of laws based on the Bible and Christian rule.
Better have your fun now, kids. The Taliban are coming soon to a mall near you.
posted by Jerry Bowles
9:21 AM
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