In one fell swoop, NASED took away American voters’ ability to oversee our own elections. Under NASED, source code – the keys to the electronic kingdom - became proprietary. The secret vote-counting software now belonged to the voting machine vendors who would pay for the testing and certifying of their own software and hardware. And how convenient and suspicious that the first NASED-certified voting systems – Microvote and AIS - were repped by ex-Election Center director Gary Greenhalgh. Another key Election Center/NASED election official who left “public service” to hawk NASED-certified systems was Deborah Seiler, (see Kudzu List #16) who became a sales director for Diebold, then Sequoia (PDF B).
Greenhalgh (PDF 1A) founder of The Election Center, is presently VP of ES&S. That’s Election Systems and Software, the largest election services company in the world.
I think it is correct to point directly to Karl Rove as the mastermind behind this successful Plan to corrupt America’s democratic process. Rove’s m.o. is always to do his dirty work through a surrogate. A cut-out.
Both Karl and Carol Garner, the Republican operative who became director of The Election Center after Greenhalgh, (PDFs 10 & 11) worked on the 1978 Clements campaign for Governor of Texas (PDF 12). After Clements’ election, Rove was hired as Chief of Staff to the Governor. Garner continued her work for the Governor in “Ballot Security.”
In this 1989 letter (PDFs 17A & B) Garner proposed that the Election Center take over from the FEC the task of managing the testing and certifying of the voting machines. And incredibly, the FEC agreed. Another indication that Rove might have been pulling these strings, is the appointment of Tom Harrison as the first Executive Director of NASED in 1990 (PDF 19). At the time, Harrison was “special assistant for elections” to Rove’s client, Governor Clements. In 1991, Harrison worked to bring the newly-certified DREs to Texas, (PDF 20) and establish national Voting System standards that recommended that all certified software “should not be public information.” (PDF 21) Under Harrison, NASED established once and for all that vendors had ownership over secret voting-counting software – dealing a terrible blow to our democracy.
(Two excellent articles on Bradblog and VoteTrustUSA address the ongoing failures of NASED that could have disastrous results this election.)
If only we had been awake in 1988, when the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, urged the creation of a testing system where “vendors would be required to provide software that could be readily analyzed.”
Just a thought… Maybe there’s another reason why ”genius” Karl was able to turn Texas from blue to red in such a short time. Not only was Harrison in Austin working in the Secretary of State’s office to bring DREs to Texas, but Election Center operatives were “counting” the vote on hackable voting machines in key Texas cities: Connie McCormack in Dallas, (Kudzu List #11 & pdf 25) and Beverly Kaufman in Houston (see Kudzu List #9).
Another link between Karl, the Election Center and The Plan is Doug Lewis, (see Kudzu List #10) who took over from Carol Garner as director of the The Election Center in 1994 - the same year that GW Bush was “elected” Governor of Texas. In 1978, when Rove rolled into Houston to work for Bush Sr, Lewis was raising money for John Connally Citizen’s Forum. Two Republican operatives raising money in Houston, I’ve got to imagine their paths crossed…
As Turdblossom explains in his “secret” online lecture, once the “hanging chad” charade played out in Florida in 2000 with Election Center officials in key supervisory positions, (PDF 26) Doug Lewis and his gang were center stage calling for an overhaul of our “broken” election system. Lewis bragged in his alma mater’s magazine, Spotlight of Emporia State:
“ Few could have been more relieved by the relative success of Election 2004 than R. Doug Lewis (BA 1968). As head of the Election Center, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that works with election administrators to improve the voting process, Lewis found himself in the spotlight in 2000. In the 24-hour period after the election, he had requests for more than 200 interviews, and found himself granting 30 or 40 a day. CNN. C- SPAN. The Today Show. They all wanted to know – what went wrong.
Congress turned to Lewis and the Election Center for assistance in evaluating Election 2000. The two-year report resulted in the Help America Vote Act, which reforms the election process with $3.5 billion in Federal funding to modernize the process, from voting equipment to policies and procedures.”(#23 p.12)
Why do we have a badly broken election system in America? I’ll bet that Rove and his operatives pushed for the passage of HAVA, in order to install unreliable, hackable voting machines across the country. And, that once HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission, the same anti-democracy operatives packed the Advisory Board, the Voting Systems Standards Board and the four-person Commission. (See The Kudzu Effect Chart)
The EAC has failed to contact election officials around the country about the voting machine failures, failed to safeguard our democracy, because that’s The Plan. I’ve got to conclude that my hero Cheryl in Ohio is not any better off in 2008 than she was in 2004. In fact, it’s looking a lot worse for a lot more of us.
I was writing a book with all this research, but I really worried that the people I needed to reach, the young voters, would never read it. So, we created a short animated film to grab them for six minutes and urge them to protect their vote. Of course, the film is for everyone. But, I really worry (right now, I worry A LOT) that if this election is swiped out from under their noses, our country will lose a generation of hopeful young citizens.
We cannot let Turdblossom call this election!
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