Diebold Election Systems Inc does not show up on the 2001-02 HAVA lobbying forms, but did lobby for elections issues in 2004 and 2005.
Also notably missing are the firms referenced by R. Doug Lewis of "The Election Center" in an August 2003 meeting. In this tape recorded meeting, he said that HAVA was put into place by an election systems task force which included Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, EDS, and Accenture.
Of these, only Accenture shows up the lobbying forms, and there is no entity called Election anything, except for Election System & Software and another company, election.com, which lobbied for Internet voting. (See Chapter 8 of Black Box Voting for more on the Saudi-owned election.com, which was later taken over by Accenture - http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf - See Chapter 16 for more information on the tape recorded meeting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-16.pdf )
What about Choicepoint? Choicepoint says it didn't lobby for HAVA. Choicepoint says it hasn't had any involvement in elections.
The lobbying forms don't show lobbying for voting machines, but a lobbying firm called Fleishman-Hillard Government Relations filed a registration form in 2002 indicating they planned to lobby for "Election Reform" on behalf of Choicepoint. Muddying things up, no 2002 lobbying form appeared showing that they did. In 2001, however, a lobbying form clearly puts Choicepoint in the middle of HAVA lobbying, showing that Choicepoint was involving itself in lobbying for the voter registration component of HAVA.
Choicepoint has repeatedly stated that they have "no involvement whatsoever" in elections, and in rebuttal to a controversial article that appeared for a short while on OpEd News, Choicepoint came on to deny that they lobbied for HAVA. More on Choicepoint here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17778.html
Choicepoint, a controversial database broker, clearly cannot state that it has "no involvement in elections."
Choicepoint stakeholder Donna Curling, wife of Choicepoint chief Doug Curling, has continued to fund election reform lobbying by providing funding for some of the activists working on the Holt Bill.
THEY THOUGHT DRE VOTING MACHINES WOULD HELP THEM BUILD THE DEMOCRATIC BASE
Those who lobbied for HAVA were convinced that the DRE machines would solve problems, helping more people vote.
1. Many of the HAVA reformers believed that with DREs, people with less education would be more likely to fill out the whole ballot. In fact, they reasoned, the DRE machines would be easier to use for educationally disadvantaged populations, minorities, non-English-speaking voters, and the disabled.
Few studies back these conclusions up, and those that do have generally not been replicated, or were not peer reviewed, and sometimes show methodology that is as flawed as the lemons HAVA bought. The occasional studies that have been done -- even those prepared by DRE advocates -- sometimes end up with troubling caveats. A Georgia study purported to show that "most people like voting on the DREs" (but rarely mentions the small print: The same study showed that the African-Americans surveyed distrusted the touch-screens).
2. The citizens' right to oversee local elections -- and especially the citizens' right to even get access to information -- has been all but eliminated through the implementation of HAVA. The original civil rights concept was virtuous.
Federal Government is the entity that enacted civil rights, HAVA reformers reasoned, so therefore let's ask the federal government to fix our elections process.
Be careful what you ask for. It just might get "fixed."
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
