In 2002, the New Hampshire GOP received three $5,000 checks, just in time to pay $15,600to a telemarketing company that jammed the phone lines of the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote campaign in the morning hours of the election.
The three $5,000checks? One each from two separate Abramoff tribal clients and the third from K Street loyalist Tom DeLay's PAC. (7)
The phone jamming trick, contributing to GOP Senator Sununu's narrow win, shows the magical rabbits that can pop out of a hat when Capital Hill lobbyists focus their attention on elections.
The K Street project also influenced the most sweeping election reform ever enacted: the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA architect, former Congressman Bob Ney, is also now in federal prison.
(8)
Among other things, HAVA delivered a multibillion dollar payoff to the electronic voting industry, including Greenberg Traurig's client, Diebold Election Systems.(9)
In its heyday, the K Street Project held election "reform" dead center in its crosshairs. Project activities like New Hampshire's phone jamming, Ohio's "Coingate" and Tom Delay's Texas "PAC-gate", spun lobbyist money into election fraud gold.
The Project-sponsored HAVA was equally subversive. HAVA fed billions of dollars to an unsavory e-voting industry and created a White House agency with unprecedented power over the nation's elections.
HAVA, with its deep K Street roots, is a study in legislative alchemy, where K Street money was spun into a sparkling, rich, complex and intricate golden gateway to perpetual election fraud.
In its masterful diversion of funds influencing various election campaign, policy, and process activities around the nation, the K Street Project might reasonably be characterized as one big money-laundering-for-election-fraud apparatus.
Election 2000 – Election Reform 2002
In the aftermath of Election 2000, the American people struggled to understand the Supreme Court's preventing the counting of the vote and deciding for us our next president.
The Bush v. Gore decision (10) dealt one terrible blow after another to our nation's democracy. The subversion of the democratic process that began with this decision continued with HAVA, which, among other things, created an agency of perpetual subversion in the form of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).(11)
The K Street-influenced Congress passed the massively complex HAVA legislation with theatrical fanfare worthy of any great magic show. Election reformers and the American people, still reeling from Election 2000, received it with a wholesale willingness to suspend disbelief.
But when the smoke had cleared, a closer look revealed that HAVA had codified, rather than fixed, Election 2000's largely unreported but most egregious trespasses of democracy (12):
- Electronic voter registration databases: In Florida 2000, up to 94,000 eligible voters – all identified as "Democratic-leaning"- were unjustifiably purged from electronic voter databases and not allowed to vote.
- Electronic voting machines: Florida 2000's electronic voting equipment mistabulated countless votes. In Volusia County alone, computers tabulated for Candidate Al Gore negative 16,022 votes.
- Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: Florida 2000's vote count was stopped by the Supreme Court, effectively deciding the election for us.
HAVA alchemy transformed these three root causes of the Election 2000 catastrophe into the law of the land:
