Recall that Georgia was one of the first states to adopt Direct Recording Election (DRE) machinery prior to the passage of HAVA in late 2002. DRE totals cannot be audited or recounted, both actions that might have affected the results as long as tampering was not involved. But the suspicion is that it was. DREs are also completely tamperable, notoriously so.
Now Chambliss since then was elected U.S. Senator from Georgia, so people cared even less, or were even less informed than they should have been. Where was the press? That's how I got into the Election Integrity movement in the first place--by attending a rally protesting press's lack of attention to election corruption scandals--Florida 2000 at that point.
The scoop on our current Secretary of Defense, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel goes back even farther and is also rooted in election corruption, alas. I may be one of the few people in this country who guessed why Hagel did so badly during his Senate confirmation hearings--called by the Guardian "an embarrassment for all concerned."
Did the mainstream press wonder why he had done so badly?
This is my theory: He didn't want it.
I surmised the reason: he had a skeleton in his closet. He was a former chairman of and shareholder in the Nebraska election machine manufacturer Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), largest of its kind, at the time, in the U.S. He claimed to have stepped down from this position to run successfully for the Senate [R-NE] in 1996 and then won again in 2002, beating a popular former governor of the Cornhusker State by the largest margin in the state's history--including a huge number of votes he amassed from all-black precincts.
Most votes in Nebraska were counted by ES&S machinery, by the way.
In 2003 pioneer election integrity activist Bev Harris and others complained to the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee about Hagel's questionable victories given his former close affiliation with the king (at the time) of election machinery manufacturers.
The chairman took the rap and stepped down. Hagel did not run for reelection in 2008 and resumed his private life. I don't know if he resumed his ES&S affiliation. So with this scandal on the records of the Senate Ethics Committee (I hope), no wonder he did not seem too happy to join President Obama's cabinet in 2013.
So I thought. And since then, this country has gone to war on numerous fronts. What power. I have this much to say for Hagel. He was neither the first nor the last politician to have assumed such important offices under such questionable circumstances. Another was the war president Lyndon Baines Johnson (nicknamed "Landslide Lyndon" when he first won a seat in the House in 1946, I believe, because of the slender margin of victory that put him in office), who escalated the Vietnam war to such tragic consequences and ultimate defeat. But he also gave this country Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
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And so, to lend circularity to this article, let's go back and remember how I got onto this long tangent--longer than the article I sat down to write.
It was Gail Collins's mention of U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, simply in passing, as the incumbent Senator against whom David Perdue, her focus, is running in Georgia. Collins doesn't delve into Chambliss's rise from obscurity to become a U.S. Senator. Then, speaking of promotions from questionable elections to positions of crucial power in the U.S. government, I climbed up to President Obama's cabinet to find a situation infinitely more execrable than plagiarizing a workable economic policy from a leader whose deeds in other realms were called execrable [not a direct quote] by the Times.
Let's say "emulate" instead of "plagiarize," since the credit was belatedly restored to its source. But how many of those who will vote for U.S. Senator in Georgia this November read the New York Times anyway? Collins is more interested in politicians' gaffes than in spreading the word about Perdue's plagiarism or discussing other, more serious wrongdoings. Sen. Chambliss will probably win again, he of the meteoric rise out of DRE malfunction or tampering.
If we all have skeletons in our closet--and President Obama's is his current Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, a patroness way back when, according to Greg Palast--I must say that some skeletons are scarier than others.
That highly educated Times editors' favorite commenter today who blamed our problems on
the uneducated was pretty scary, but perhaps ignorant of the Powell memo that
planned to dumb enough of us down so that, so that, uh . . . .
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