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A RETURN TO SANITY – WHY WE MUST ELIMINATE COMPUTERIZED CONTROL OF OUR ELECTION SYSTEM:
By andi novick (about the author) Page 2 of 11 page(s)
– In an antitrust case that involved charges of bid-rigging in New Orleans, Kiewit pleaded no contest and paid $100,000 in fines and $300,000 in a civil settlement.
– In South Dakota, a Kiewit subsidiary pleaded guilty to bid-rigging on road contracts and paid a fine of $350,000.
– In Kansas, a Kiewit subsidiary was found guilty of bid-rigging and mail fraud on a federal highway project. The firm was fined $900,000 and a company official was sentenced to a year in jail.
– In Nebraska, a Kiewit subsidiary paid $1.8 million for bid-rigging on a state highway project and a Kiewit vice president was jailed.
When the state of Oklahoma forbade Kiewit to bid on any projects, Kiewit set up a different company and lied in a sworn affidavit to the transportation department saying it had no parent company, affiliate firms or subsidiaries. When Oklahoma found out, it pulled all of Kiewit's contracts.
Continuing in its deceitful practices, Peter Kiewit & Sons took contracts in Washington State under the guise of a minority-owned firm. Kiewit paid more than $700,000 in fines.
In 1997 AIS acquired election-industries giant Business Records Corp (BRC), formerly a Texas-based election company "embarked on such an acquisitions blitz you'd almost think they
wanted to corner the elections industry". Upon purchasing BRC, AIS changed its name to Elections Systems and Software (ES&S). Apparently the SEC objected to the merger of BRC and AIS on antitrust grounds, but for some reason the SEC withdrew its objection after an arrangement was made in which the assets of BRC were shared between ES&S and Sequoia, the third largest voting machine vendor.
Just about the same time that AIS bought up BRC to become ES&S, curiously Bob Urosevich, one of the two founding brothers of what is now ES&S, moved to Global Election Systems (which subsequently became Diebold Elections Systems).
Diebold Election Systems: Early Founders and High-Level Employees Were Convicted Felons:
Diebold Election Systems (Diebold) was formed when in 2002 Diebold Inc. of Ohio acquired Global Election Systems, Inc. a Canadian Company. Global Election Systems (Global) was originally 'Macrotrends' at its founding in 1988. Macrotrends had a US subsidiary, North American Professional Technologies (NAPT), which became the manufacturing body of Global and later Diebold.
Founders:
Norton Cooper - who marketed for NAPT and Macrotrends had been jailed for defrauding the Canadian government in 1974. He also served a year in jail in the mid-1980s for fraud against the Canada government; he was part of the collapse of the Vancouver stock exchange and was ordered by decree not to pitch stock after 1992 or so because, in the words of Barron's and Forbes, he was a "hazard to avoid at the golf course".
Charles Hong Lee - a director of both NAPT and Macrotrends was Cooper's partner pitching deals, stock schemes, etc. Lee was ordered to pay $555,380 in restitution when he and Norton were sued. In 1994 Lee and another partner, Michael Graye, defrauded 43 Chinese immigrants out of $614,547 which fees were paid to a corporation controlled by Lee and Graye.
Michael K. Graye - When in 1991 NAPT and Macrotrends were reorganized and the name changed to Global Election Systems, Graye became a director. In 1996 Graye was arrested on tax fraud and money laundering charges, but before he was sentenced in Canada he was indicted in the US on stock-fraud charges in another company he ran with Lee. He spent 4 years in prison. In April 2003 he admitted to the misappropriation of $18 million from 4 corporations and tax fraud back in the late 1980s. He was returned to prison.
By the time Diebold had taken over Global in 2002, the above people were gone, mostly due to jail terms. But the programmers they'd hired and managed are now key people in Diebold and some of them are convicted felons as well.
Key Personnel:
Jeffrey Dean – had been convicted in the early 1990s of 23 counts of computer-aided embezzlement . He was a computer consultant for a large Seattle law firm and defrauded them of about $450,000 in what US courts called a "sophisticated computer-aided scheme". Dean was made a director of Global in 2000 and then made head of research and development with access to all components of the voting system.
John Elder - is a convicted cocaine trafficker who met Dean in prison. By the late1990s Elder handled ballot printing for Global and went on to direct the punch card printing.
Talbot Iredale – had been designing and programming voting machines for Diebold Elections Systems and its predecessors since 1988. No one has discovered a criminal record, but he has have been involved in Global from day one (1988) and was one of the first employees directly hired by Cooper, Lee and Graye. He is now the chief technical officer of Diebold. (Iredale was Global's master programmer at the time of the 2000 election. Two months after the election an internal memo from Iredale blamed the problem which cause the networks to call the election for Bush (that had then caused Gore to concede) on a memory card that had allegedly been improperly uploaded. According to the RFK Jr. article, Will the Next Election by Hacked?, Iredale conceded, "There is always the possibility that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source." Iredale was also involved in the debacle that was the first all-Diebold election in Georgia in 2002, see below).
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Oppose all DREs. Accept Optical Scanners only with sufficient hand counting protocol.
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ElectionTransparencyCoalitition.org
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