THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
September 2006
Week Three
- September 19: Public policy professor Arthur Blaustein describes the GOP's November election strategy as the same one it has used in 2002 and 2004: "Scare the hell out of the American people." But there is a problem with that strategy. Republican congressmen and women in swing states are vulnerable, and the "terrorize the voters" strategy isn't enough for many of them. Blaustein writes, "They're just like Tony Blair, fatally weakened in Britain and derided in Europe as 'Bush's poodle' for rolling over for the US president's every policy demand. Republicans in Congress, however much they may try now to distance themselves from a deeply unpopular president, are in trouble for having stood on their hind legs and jumped through hoops every time the White House has fed them a new policy biscuit." So Blaustein is giving the same advice many other Democrats are recommending: hang Bush around these candidates' necks and let the president's unpopularity drag them down to defeat. Blaustein's political analysis differs little from others': though both the Senate and the House are in play, and though Democrats only have to gain six seats (perhaps seven) in the Senate to win control of that body, the House, once considered an impenetrable stronghold for Republicans, is a better bet for Democrats to gain control. Of the 40 or so House seats considered in play, Democrats are predicted to win in 28 of those, giving them a slender two-seat majority in the House -- still, enough to take control of the House committees, set priorities, introduce legislation, issue subpoenas, and launch investigations. (Mother Jones)
- September 20: The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concludes that Bush's frequent use of signing statements to allow him to ignore and flaunt laws he himself has signed into law is "an integral part" of his "comprehensive strategy to strengthen and expand executive power" at the expense of the legislative branch.
"Unitary executive"
The CRS says in its 28-page report that the Bush administration is using signing statements as a means to slowly condition Congress into accepting the White House's broad conception of presidential power, which includes a presidential right to ignore laws he believes are unconstitutional. The "broad and persistent nature of the claims of executive authority forwarded by President Bush appear designed to inure Congress, as well as others, to the belief that the president in fact possesses expansive and exclusive powers upon which the other branches may not intrude," the report says. - Bush's use of signing statements to duck complying with laws he signs into effect is flatly unconstitutional, says almost every Constitutional scholar and law expert not working with, or for, the White House. The CRS report says that the administration has suggested repeatedly that Bush has exclusive authority over foreign affairs and has an absolute right to withhold information from Congress. Such assertions are "generally unsupported by established legal principles," the report says.
- Demonstrably, Bush cares little for the law. Last week, he signed the 2007 military budget bill, but then issued a statement challenging 16 of its provisions. The bill bars the Pentagon from using any intelligence that was collected illegally, including information about Americans that was gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable government surveillance. In Bush's signing statement, he said that he alone would decide whether the Pentagon could use such information. His signing statement instructed the military to view the law in light of "the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief, including for the conduct of intelligence operations, and to supervise the unitary executive branch." He also challenged three sections that require the Pentagon to notify Congress before diverting funds to new purposes, including top-secret activities or programs. Bush said he was not bound to obey such statutes if he decided, as commander in chief, that withholding such information from Congress was necessary to protect security secrets.
- The American Bar Association, which recently called on Bush to stop using signing statements to flaunt the law, called them "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers." (Boston Globe)
- September 20: Even though GOP congressman Bob Ney has agreed to plead guilty to a raft of corruption, bribery, and fraud charges, he will still be eligible for his federal pension once he completes his jail sentence. Ney voted four months ago to deny federal pension benefits to members of Congress found guilty of felony charges relating to their office, but the bill Ney voted for did not pass the Republican-led House. The House version approved in May would have prohibited lawmakers convicted of a felony relating to their official duties from receiving their pensions, but House and Senate negotiators have not agreed on a final version of the bill. When the House approved its bill, Ney issued a news release saying he was "proud to help" pass the measure. The release noted he had insisted that the final version of the bill require that any member convicted of bribery or extortion lose their federal pension. Mary Jo Kilroy, the Democrat running for Ney's seat against the GOP's Deborah Pryce, says Congress should "strip Ney of his federal pension so that taxpayers are not left funding a felon's future. That money should be donated to the US Treasury to pay down the federal deficit." But Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says there is little chance that Congress would swiftly move to revoke the pension of a member convicted of a crime. "It's really pretty outrageous," she says. "They are committing crimes involved with their office and they still get their pensions. The tax dollars shouldn't be used to pay the pensions of crooked members of Congress." Although a member of Congress can collect a pension worth as much as 80% of his or her $165,000 congressional salary, it is doubtful that Ney's pension would be that lucrative. Ney has served 12 years in the House and cannot even begin to collect his pension until he reaches age 56 in 2010. And if he begins collecting his pension before age 62, he would receive a reduced amount of money. (Columbus Dispatch)
Electronic voting machines poised to steal 2006 elections
- September 21: As has been documented many times elsewhere, electronic voting machines -- touted as the savior of American elections after the 2000 debacle -- are actually making it easier for hackers and the politically motivated to steal an election. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, already having made waves with an earlier Rolling Stone article detailing how the 2004 election was hacked in Ohio to snatch the presidency from John Kerry, gives examples and details of just how likely the possibility of another snatch job is in November 2006
- What has already happened is bad enough in the 2006 primaries alone. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio, a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County. Since most voting machines don't produce paper records for recounting purposes, any malicious tamperings or vote frauds can, and will, go unreported and uncorrected. Election supervisor Ion Sancho, of Florida's Leon County, says, "Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election. Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."
- Chris Hood knows full well what can happen. In 2002, Hood was a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, promoting Diebold's new electronic voting machines. In Georgia in 2000, over 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted during the presidential elections, almost double the national average, and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly. Cox had signed a state contract for $54 million to have Diebold install 19,000 voting machines throughout Georgia. Hood knew the contract was suspicious. Diebold, one of the world's largest suppliers of ATMs, had just completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia; more telling, Diebold's bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in. "The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award," Hood recalls, "and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn't want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest" about the lack of a fair bidding process. Perhaps the fact that Cox's predecessor as Georgia's secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company, had something to do with the contract. Diebold had only five months to install the new machines, and as Hood notes, that was a "very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment." The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. The only way for the job to get done was to allow Diebold to take complete control over everything related to voting in Georgia. Cox did just that, signing an agreement that in essence privatized Georgia's voting through Diebold. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state, all without any official supervision. "We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."
- In July, the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrived from his Texas headquarters. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done." While Georgia law requires any changes in voting machines be certified by the state, because of the agreement, Diebold was allowed to, in essence, certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood recalls. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level." Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties -- the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 am and were out by 11," he says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others. The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine. Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes. The patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election. "There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results," says Hood. "Your program says, 'I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.' Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it's done."
- Whether this happened or not is impossible to know; Diebold's machines have no paper trails. But the results in Georgia were astonishing. Incumbent Democrat senator Max Cleland, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, was ahead of Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss by five points in the polls the day of the election. The governor's race, between Democrat Roy Barnes and Republican Sonny Perdue, was even less contentious, with Barnes holding a decisive 11-point edge. But on Election Day, Chambliss garnered 53% of the vote, and Perdue garnered 51%. Cleland's loss ensured that the Republicans would gain control of the US Senate. Diebold insists that the patch was installed "with the approval and oversight of the state." But after the election, the Georgia secretary of state's office submitted a "punch list" to Bob Urosevich of "issues and concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold to address." One of the items referenced was "Application/Implication of '0808' Patch." The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not require that the system "be recertified at national and state level" as well as "verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system." In a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold's use of substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes. The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until "these punch list items will be corrected and completed." Diebold's response has not been made public, but its machines remain in place for the November 2006 elections.
- Hood says it was "common knowledge" within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries, a charge the company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business and became a whistle-blower. "What I saw," he says, "was basically a corporate takeover of our voting system."
- Only four companies -- Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, and Hart InterCivic -- tabulate 80% of the ballots cast in America. America is one of the very few major democracies that let private, partisan outfits secretly count and tabulate votes. It is far too easy to breach these companies' machines, by insiders or outsiders. Of the four companies tabulating American votes, three have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the US Senate from Nebraska in 24 years, winning a close race in which 85% of the votes were tallied by his former company. One of Hart InterCivic's largest investors is GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 -- including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a now-infamous 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004.
- The election debacle of 2000 was triggered by electronic voting machines. Fox News' fateful decision to call Florida for Bush, followed minutes later by CBS and NBC, came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore's total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as "critical" in the network's decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election -- then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes. Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly and unnecessarily uploaded. "There is always the possibility," Iredale conceded, "that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source." But with the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots, the issue of the "faulty" memory card was all but ignored. Instead of sharing culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine companies used their political clout to present their product as the solution.
- In October 2002, Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal of largely Republican vendors. The primary author and steward of HAVA was Representative Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines. Ney's former chief of staff, David DiStefano, also worked as a registered lobbyist for Diebold, receiving at least $180,000 from the firm to lobby for HAVA and "other election reform issues." Ney, who accepted campaign contributions from DiStefano and counted Diebold's then-CEO O'Dell among his constituents, made sure that HAVA strongly favored the use of the company's machines. Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would not be required to equip their machines with printers to provide paper records that could be verified by voters. In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail, supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy. The provision was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies. The NFB maintained that a paper voting receipt would jeopardize its members' civil rights, a position not shared by other groups that advocate for the blind. Before pleading guilty to federal corruption charges related to his Abramoff connections, Ney used his position as committee chairmen to block a bill sponsored by 212 congressmen from both parties from even getting a hearing.
- Thanks largely to Ney, instead of truly reforming America's deeply flawed voting system, HAVA ensured that the system would now be run by private, for-profit companies with Republican connections. Diebold alone has sold more than 130,000 voting machines, for revenues of at least $230 million. "This whole undertaking was never about voters," says Hood, who saw firsthand how the measure benefited Diebold's bottom line. "It was about privatizing elections. HAVA has been turned into a corporate-revenue enhancement scheme." Kennedy presents the 2002 midterm elections in Maryland as another searing example of Diebold disenfranchising the electorate. Election night, Hood accompanied Urosevich and marketing director Mark Radke to the tabulation center in Montgomery County where the votes would be counted, Hood was floored to see that no one was there. "Not a single Maryland election official was there to retrieve the memory cards," he recalls. As cards containing every vote in the county began arriving in canvas bags, the Diebold executives plugged them into a group of touch-screen tabulators linked into a central server, which was also controlled by a Diebold employee. "It would have been very easy for any one of us to take a contaminated card out of our pocket, put it into the system, and download some malicious code that would then end up in the server, impacting every other vote that went in, before and after," says Hood. "We had absolute control of the tabulations. We could have fixed the election if we wanted. We had access, and that's all you need. I can honestly say that every election I saw with Diebold in charge was compromised -- if not in the count, at least in the security."
- After the election, Maryland planned to install Diebold's AccuVote-TS electronic machines across the entire state, until four computer scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice universities released an analysis of the company's software source code in July 2003. "This voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts," the scientists concluded. It was, in fact, "unsuitable for use in a general election." Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins currently studying electronic voting, says, "With electronic machines, you can commit wholesale fraud with a single alteration of software. There are a million little tricks when you build software that allow you to do whatever you want. If you know the precinct demographics, the machine can be programmed to recognize its precinct and strategically flip votes in elections that are several years in the future. No one will ever know it happened." In response to the study, Maryland commissioned two additional reports on Diebold's equipment. The first was conducted by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a company that, along with Diebold, was part of an industry group that promotes electronic voting machines. SAIC conceded that Diebold's machines were "at high risk of compromise," but concluded that the state's "procedural controls and general voting environment reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report." Despite the lack of any real "procedural controls" during the 2002 election, Governor Robert Ehrlich gave the state election board the go-ahead to pay $55.6 million for Diebold's AccuVote-TS system. Ehrlich, not surprisingly, is a Republican.
- The other analysis, commissioned by the Maryland legislature, was a practical test of the systems by RABA Technologies, a consulting firm experienced in both defense and intelligence work for the federal government. Computer scientists hired by RABA to hack into six of Diebold's machines discovered a major flaw: the company had built what are known as "back doors" into the software that could enable a hacker to hide an unauthorized and malicious code in the system. William Arbaugh, of the University of Maryland, gave the Diebold system an "F" with "the possibility of raising it to a 'C' with extra credit -- that is, if they follow the recommendations we gave them." But not only did Diebold refuse to follow up, it actually covered up the recommendations. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "We made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold to fix these issues," he writes, "but were rebuffed by the argument that the machines were physically protected and could not be altered by someone outside the established chain of custody." Wertheimer adds that Diebold and state officials worked to downplay his team's dim assessment. "We spent hours dealing with Diebold lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our impact," he recalls. "The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency and potential catastrophe."
- During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in place across the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month before the vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in Baltimore. "What's really worrisome," says Hood, "is that someone could get hold of all the technology -- for manipulation -- if they knew the inner workings of just one machine." Election Day was a complete disaster. "Countless numbers of machines were down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold's system," says Hood, who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making sure that the polls were up and running. "Memory cards overloading, machines freezing up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of losing votes." After the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up to collect the memory cards containing the votes found that many were missing. "The machines are gone," one janitor told Hood -- picked up, apparently, by the vendor who had delivered them in the first place. "There was major chaos because there were so many cards missing," Hood says. Even before the 2004 election, experts warned that electronic voting machines would undermine the integrity of the vote. "The system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually nonexistent," Michael Shamos, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, testified before Congress that June. "It must be re-created from scratch."
- Two months later, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team -- a division of the Department of Homeland Security -- issued a little-noticed "cyber-security bulletin." The alert dealt specifically with a database that Diebold uses in tabulating votes. "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account," the alert warned, citing the same kind of weakness identified by the RABA scientists. The security flaw, it added, could allow "a malicious user [to] modify votes." Such warnings, however, didn't stop states across the country from installing electronic voting machines for the 2004 election. In Ohio, jammed and inoperable machines were reported throughout Toledo. In heavily Democratic areas of Youngstown, nearly 100 voters pushed "Kerry" and watched "Bush" light up. At least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for flipping Kerry votes to Bush. Similar "vote hopping" was reported by voters in other states. [Editor's note: As documented by Greg Palast, Mark Crispin Miller, and others, every single one of these "anomalies" were in favor of Republicans.] The widespread glitches didn't deter Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who also chaired Bush's re-election campaign in Ohio, from cutting a deal in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual monopoly on vote counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the deal, which came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in Diebold stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and competitive bidding process. Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow other companies to provide machines as well. This November, voters in forty-seven counties will cast their ballots on Diebold machines in a pivotal election in which Blackwell is running as the Republican candidate for governor.
- Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush "beat" Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state's official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: "The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004." The three counties with the most discrepancies -- Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade -- were also the most heavily Democratic. Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. "No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," said Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and methodology, was initially skeptical of the study, but was unable to find any flaw in the results. "You can't break it -- I've tried," he told the Washington Post. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."
- Questions also arose in Texas in 2004. William Singer, an election programmer in Tarrant County, wrote the secretary of state's office after the vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved software during the presidential primaries. "What I was expected to do in order to 'pull off' an election," Singer wrote, "was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election industry." The company denies the charge, but in a recent e-mail, Singer elaborated that ES&S employees had pushed local election officials to pressure the secretary of state to accept "a software change at such a last minute there would be no choice, and effectively avoid certification." Despite such reports, Texas continues to rely on ES&S. In primaries held in Jefferson County earlier this year, electronic votes had to be recounted after error messages prevented workers from completing their tabulations. In April, with early voting in local elections only a week away, officials across the state were still waiting to receive the programming from ES&S needed to test the machines for accuracy. Calling the situation "completely unacceptable and disturbing," Texas director of elections Ann McGeehan authorized local officials to create "emergency paper ballots" as a backup. "We regret the unacceptable position that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their contracted vendor," McGeehan said.
- In October 2005, the Government Accountability Office issued a damning report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread irregularities and malfunctions, the government's top watchdog agency concluded that a host of weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology "could damage the integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by allowing unauthorized modifications." Some electronic systems used passwords that were "easily guessed" or employed identical passwords for numerous systems. Software could be handled and transported with no clear chain of custody, and locks protecting computer hardware were easy to pick. Unsecured memory cards could enable individuals to "vote multiple times, change vote totals and produce false election reports." An even more comprehensive report released in June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law, echoed the GAO's findings. The report, conducted by a task force of computer scientists and security experts from the government, universities and the private sector, was peer-reviewed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Electronic voting machines widely adopted since 2000, the report concluded, "pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections." While no instances of hacking have yet been documented, the report identified 120 security threats to three widely used machines: the easiest method of attack being to utilize corrupt software that shifts votes from one candidate to another. Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can "infect" other units in a voting system, committing "widespread fraud" from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election. And touch-screen technology continues to create chaos at the polls. On September 12th, 2006, in Maryland's first all-electronic election, voters were turned away from the polls because election officials had failed to distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold machines. By the time the cards were found on a warehouse shelf and delivered to every precinct, untold numbers of voters had lost the chance to cast ballots.
- Kennedy writes, "It seems insane that such clear threats to our election system have not stopped the proliferation of touch-screen technology." While 80% of Americans will cast their votes on an electronic voting machine in 2006, some efforts are being made to fight back. Kennedy notes Brad Blog and Black Box Voting as two Web-based sites for information and activism. Lawsuits to block the proliferation of electronic voting machines are working through the courts in five states. In California, voters filed suit last March to challenge the use of a Diebold touch-screen system, a move that has already prompted eight counties to sign affidavits saying they won't use the machines in November. Kennedy's solution is simple, especially for an ATM manufacturer like Diebold: "equip every touch-screen machine to provide paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted in the event of malfunction or tampering." "The paper is the insurance against the cheating machine," says Rubin. In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to count paper ballots by hand after they've already been tallied by machine. But 27 states now require a paper trail, and others are considering similar requirements. In New Mexico, Governor Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective, slow and unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going to go through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems, is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is counting." Kennedy concludes, "You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important -- and too hard won -- to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests."
- On September 26, Diebold president David Hood wrote a letter in response to Kennedy's article. He contends that Kennedy's article is biased and incomplete, says that Kennedy made no effort to contact Diebold for a response, and in particular challenges Chris Hood's veracity, saying that in July 2002, Hood was removed from his position as vote outreach instructor because of what he calls "poor performance." He says Hood mischaracterized the software patch used to possibly affect the votes in Democratic strongholds in Georgia, and says the patch was not implemented until two weeks after Hood was relieved of his position. Byrd also disputes Hood's contention that the patch was installed surreptitiously, and Kennedy's assertion that uncertified software was installed in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries." Byrd disputes the fact that Diebold employees and their families contributed $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998. He contends that Ohio did not use Diebold touch-screen machines during the 2004 elections, and only two counties of 88 total used Diebold optical scan machines. He says neither Broward, Palm Beach, nor Miami-Dade counties used Diebold voting machines in 2004. Byrd goes on to call the Princeton study "deeply flawed," calls the problems in Maryland's 2006 election human error, says that the accuracy of voting machines is improving dramatically, says the government report showing Cuyahoga County had large, unexplained discrepancies in vote totals was proven to be in error, and makes other assertions.
- Kennedy responds to Byrd in early October. The article contains numerous responses from Diebold that Kennedy and Rolling Stone researchers obtained from official Diebold sources. Kennedy then tackles the Hood smear, noting that while Diebold supposedly fired Hood for poor performance, in reality it sent Hood to Maryland to help roll out Diebold's machines for the fall election. Kennedy also notes that Diebold gave Hood a contract to continue working for the company through the 2004 elections. Kennedy does note that Hood made an error in stating the date he was ordered by Bob Urosevich to install the unauthorized patch; in reality, Hood made the change several weeks earlier, while he still worked for Diebold in Georgia. Kennedy saw to it that a correction was made in the online version of the article. He also admits that he was wrong in saying Diebold machines counted nearly half of the votes in Ohio in 2004. The correct year is 2005. Again, Kennedy made the correction in the online version. However, according to Kennedy, these are the end of his mistakes. "On every other point in its response, however, Diebold is misleading or flat-out wrong," he writes. "In its most ridiculous sleight of hand, the company asserts that none of the three counties in Florida with the most discrepancies during the 2004 election used Diebold machines. That is absolutely correct. What the company neglects to mention is that my article never suggests that they did. I note only that all three counties used electronic voting machines -- which experts from the University of California concluded may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 of the state's votes to Bush. Diebold offers similar non-denials regarding its generous campaign contributions to Republicans, its failure to follow-up on most of the recommendations in the RABA report, and the fact that it got into the election business only a few months before it began rolling out voting machines in Georgia. It calls the Princeton study and the Cuyahoga County report 'deeply flawed' and 'proven to be in error,' even though its criticisms of them have failed to undercut their alarming conclusions. And it dismisses September's primary disaster in Maryland as 'human error' -- despite the fact that the catastrophe was created, in no small part, by its own failure to properly test its software and to provide it to the state in time to train poll-workers."
- Diebold's assertion that the software it deployed during the 2004 presidential primaries was fully certified is a flat lie, proven in part by the banning of Diebold machines from four California counties that year after the company failed to properly secure and certify its equipment. Diebold not only agreed to pay the state $2.6 million for making false statements about its certification, but Urosevich himself conceded at a public hearing that the company's actions resulted in the disenfranchisement of untold numbers of voters. Kennedy writes, "Indeed, what is most striking about the company's response to my article is what it fails to deny. As I documented in my article, hackers can easily rig electronic voting machines to fix an election -- and can design their tampering to go undetected. This represents a grave threat to the integrity of our elections. If Diebold were really committed to the 'bright light of truth,' as it insists, it would move immediately to equip all of its machines with paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted by officials in the event of vote rigging or equipment malfunction. Without such transparency, our votes remain in the hands of Diebold and other private companies -- and our democracy remains at risk." (Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone)
- September 21: Author Max Blumenthal writes a revealing expose of the moral and journalistic corruption at the heart of the conservative Washington Times. It is owned by representatives of the South Korean cult leader and evangelist Sun Myung Moon, and has emerged over the years as the premier newspaper outlet for conservative and Republican viewpoints. It currently has a circulation base of around 100,000, and has never turned a profit, instead burning through far more than the $1.7 billion previously alloted to it by Moon and its other financiers. Now, the paper is facing a crisis of leadership, "puncuated," in Blumenthal's words, "by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct, that has implications far beyond its fractious newsroom." The battle is over who will succeed editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden. Inside sources say that Preston Moon, the youngest son of the Korean church leader, wants someone besides Pruden's handpicked successor, managing editor Francis Coombs.
- Moon wants to shift control away from Pruden's and Coombs's style of old-school, hard-line racist, and neo-Confederate conservatism, instead replacing Pruden with a more palatable and less polarizing conservative. The search committee is headed by Times senior editor Arnaud De Borchgrave, who edited the Times himself from 1985 through 1991. De Borchgrave was a staunch supporter of the Reagan administration who helped channel funds through the Times to the Nicaraguan Contras, but has written a number of scathing editorials criticizing the junior Bush's foreign policy. De Borchgrave is apparently leaning towards his former UPI colleague, editor emeritus Martin Walker. Walker used to write for the liberal British newspaper the Guardian, and is a vocal supporter of Tony Blair's earlier New Labour politics.
- Coobms and Pruden are battling an array of complaints from former and current employees about their racism and sexual harassment of their subordinates. Blumenthal interviewed over a dozen Times sources, some who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs. All of the sources agree that Coombs and Pruden have fostered an atmosphere of racial animus and woman-bashing; Preston Moon has a legal firm investigating the allegations. The aging Pruden is described as an "absentee landlord," allowing Coombs to handle the paper. Coombs's virulent anti-immigration stance, which veers right over the edge into blatant racism, has, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok, helped fuel the nativism that has seized control of many Republican campaigns this year. Potok says, "The Times is a terrible little newspaper that unfortunately has vastly disproportionate influence on the right wing of the Republican Party. The vast majority of people who read it don't realize that this paper is in bed with bigots and white supremacists. The Times is a key part of the radical right's apparatus in the United States." Pruden and Coombs have blocked Moon's investigation and threatened to go public with their own charges that Moon has attempted to inject Unification Church propaganda into the paper's coverage. Times president Douglas Joo, a business rival of Preston Moon, is backing Pruden and Coombs; he knows that Moon would strip him of his position and send him to Korea if both Pruden and Coombs leave the paper. "This is a cancer that goes all the way to the top," says a senior staffer of the paper's tolerance of bigotry. "And if you don't root out the cancer, it will kill you. If this ever got out to the mainstream press, we would be finished as a paper."
- Sun Myung Moon has always enjoyed, and used, a bizarre and inexplicable (at least on the surface) partnership with America's hard right, and allowed his paper to be used by the right in return. Ronald Reagan gave the Times special access to the White House. During the Whitewater investigations, the Times was a prime outlet for anti-Clinton propaganda, and a favorite outlet for leaks from the Kenneth Starr investigation. Former editorial page editor Tony Snow, now Bush's press secretary, is just one of the many conservative pundits and writers who have cut their journalistic teeth at the paper. Snow still serves as a key link between the Times and the Bush administration. Says the National Review's John O'Sullivan, also under consideration for Pruden's post, "The Times is an extremely important paper for conservatives because it's in Washington and it has great influence with the administration." In January 2005 Bush hosted Coombs, Pruden and a handful of Times principals for an exclusive interview and tour of the Oval Office. Two months later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was queried about her presidential ambitions by Pruden, Coombs and several Times reporters at the paper's offices.
- But throughout its existence, the Times has been a hotbed for hard-line racists and neo-Confederates. Pruden was their leader. His father was a Baptist minister who served as the chaplain for the Capital Citizens Council in Little Rock, Arkansas, the leading segregationist group in that city. When Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to protect nine black teenagers integrating Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, the elder Pruden told an assembled mob, "That's what we've got to fight! N*ggers, Communists and cops!" In 1993 Pruden gave an interview to the now-defunct neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, which routinely published proslavery apologias and attacks on Abraham Lincoln. Pruden boasted, "Every year I make sure that we have a story in the paper about any observance of Robert E. Lee's birthday.... And the fact that it falls around Martin Luther King's birthday." When former Times reporter George Archibald was assigned to travel to Arkansas in 1992 to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton, the first man Pruden sent him to see was "Justice" Jim Johnson, a leader of the Capital Citizens Council chapter that the elder Pruden belonged to. And Pruden took part in the infamous "Arkansas Project," the group funded by Richard Mellon Scaife that concocted anti-Clinton stories throughout his tenure as president.
- Coombs fit right in with Pruden's virulent racism. Joining the Times in 1998, he caught Pruden's eye when, among other things, Coombs gave a 1993 speech in Washington praising Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Pruden recalled for the Partisan, "I read the speech and it was quite good. I was originally asked to speak, but I was going to be out of town and Fran filled in for me. He was telling me what a thrilling thing it was to stand there and sing 'Dixie' in the statuary hall of the US Capitol. I would have liked to have been there just for that." If anything, Coombs was, and is, even farther to the right than Pruden. A senior Times staffer says, "The thing about Wes is, he has other vices. He loves a good meal, loves to have his ego stroked, he loves women, the social scene. As for bashing blacks and Hispanics, he shares Fran's views, but he has other preoccupations. Fran is the really hard-core ideological white supremacist." Coombs believes immigration is "the number-one issue in America today," and has played an instrumental role in pressing far-right positions into the mainstream. On August 22, 2006, Coombs featured a favorable review of Pat Buchanan's book State of Emergency on the paper's front page. Buchanan's book is a diatribe calling for an immediate moratorium on all immigration, to stave off the demise of Western civilization. "There were a lot of other things going on [in the news] that day," a Times senior staffer says. "Any other paper would have reserved that for the book review section, but Coombs had to have Buchanan on the front page." Coombs, the staffer continues, "will literally stand there and scan websites and look for anything that's anti-Hispanic, that's immigrant-bashing, and he will order the editors to go with it." According to Archibald, in 2001 Pruden issued a memo instructing reporters to stop using the term "illegal immigrant" and instead use "illegal alien" -- a lead the rest of the conservative media soon followed. Coombs saw to it that the Times lavished plenty of coverage on the anti-immigrant Minuteman patrols along the US-Mexico border, routinely inflated the number of volunteers involved, and refused to report on the number of white supremacists involved in the Minutemen. Coombs is quite proud of his influence on the immigration debate. "Every article [in other media outlets] used to be about how the government abuses immigrants," Coombs says. "Not one showed the negative impact of immigration. I don't want to suggest we led the way, but we were the first or one of the first to discuss immigration not from some feel-good perspective."
- Coombs is not just anti-immigrant. Archibald recalls listening to a diatribe about interracial marriage from an enraged Coombs, and remembers Coombs using the phrase "the n*ggerfication of America." According to Archibald, "He said, 'Not in my lifetime. If my daughter went out with a black, I would cut her throat.'" Archibald remembers Coombs saying he is for abortion, justifying his position by saying, "'How do you think we're going to stop the population growth of the minorities and all the welfare people?" Another Times senior staffer recalls similar statements about abortion and race by Coombs at a party, where Coombs called himself a "racial nationalist." A former staffer alleges that Coombs used racial slurs including "spic" and "towel-head" inside the Times. Coombs denies using any such slurs. Coombs has also worked to increase the numbers of neo-Confederates at the paper. For years, one of Coombs's closest friends at the paper was the late Samuel Francis, a right-wing intellectual who joined the Times as an editorial writer just as he plunged headfirst into white nationalism. Pruden fired Francis in 1995 after conservative author Dinesh D'Souza reported on Francis's remarks at the American Renaissance conference, a gathering of academic racists, international neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis. At the conference, Francis said, "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." It seems likely that Pruden was not bothered by Francis's viewpoint, but didn't want him embarrassing the paper by such publicly overt racism. Coombs recently praised Francis as "the voice of the Founding Fathers speaking down through the ages." In 1997 Coombs and his wife organized a dinner for American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor, a man the SPLC describes as "a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist." That same year Coombs recruited a reporter from a paper in rural Georgia, Robert Stacy McCain, to work at the Times as his national assistant editor. McCain belonged to the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, which routinely promotes slavery apologias and favors a "second secession" of the South from the Union. By 2002 McCain had been promoted by Coombs to edit the Times's Culture Briefs section. In short order, McCain turned that section into a bulletin board for the racialist far right. At Coombs's behest, McCain attended four American Renaissance conferences as a Times correspondent, only once reporting criticism of the group's white supremacist agenda.
- Blumenthal writes, "By deliberately soft-pedaling the racial ideology of groups like American Renaissance and the Minutemen, the Times under Coombs has coated them in the balm of mainstream conservatism. True to form, Coombs defended McCain and American Renaissance against allegations of racial extremism. 'My understanding,' Coombs told me, 'is there were some academics at the conference, people like Joe Sobran, and other people who don't fall into that [racist] category. So maybe there's some guilt by association.' (Sobran is a right-wing columnist drummed out of his post at [the] National Review for his anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism. The Times syndicated his columns until 1999.)" McCain's racist views are well known. Archibald says he heard McCain say in 2002, during a newsroom discussion about civil rights, that slavery was "good for the blacks and good for property owners." Archibald calls McCain "a complete animalistic racist." Again, Coombs denies the statement. But former Times arts section editor Marlene Johnson, herself an African-American, calls Coombs "a racist" and says, "You had a guy, Stacy McCain, who was an avowed segregationist, and Fran always overlooks that, he overlooks McCain's behavior." Johnson says that while at the Times, she was given an order from Pruden, delivered to her by Coombs, to stop doing "so many black stories." Coombs and Pruden placed McCain on adminstrative probation in August, not for his racism, but for his failure to produce content.
- Coombs's wife, Marian, herself a frequent American Renaissance attendee, also writes for the paper. She says her views are quite different from her husband's, calling herself a "populist" and "in many ways...an unreconstructed Marxist. I basically am pro-working class and I think globalization and the policy of mass immigration is bad for the common man." But many of her own op-eds for the Times dovetail with her husband's jingoism, and her work has appeared in many far-right and white supremacist publications. She wrote on American Renaissance's Web site in 2001, "Whites do not like crowded societies, and Americans would not have to live in crowds if our government kept out Third-World invaders."
- After Clinton's election, the Times chose to begin pounding the political drums for the concept of "family values," mostly by attacking Bill Clinton's sex life. Unfortunately for their stance, Coombs was racking up a reputation for what Blumenthal calls "boorish behavior and misogyny." One senior staffer recalls Coombs saying, "Women are naturally inferior to men" and that women "tend to be dumber, more emotional and less dependable than men." One female former Times staffer describes Coombs as hostile toward female employees. "I'm anything but a feminist," she says. "If anything, I'm against them. But it was illuminating -- his tactics toward women are to terrorize them and scream and intimidate. This guy was a sicko." In 2004 Coombs was accused of sexual harassment. The accusation stemmed from a series of incidents involving then-Times marketing consultant Melissa Hopkins during the Republican National Convention. In a letter written by her lawyer, Lynne Bernabei, that was delivered to then-Times senior counsel Allen Farber, Hopkins alleged that over cocktails one night at the convention Coombs grew belligerent and called her work "lame," and then suggested she go to his room for a "nightcap." When Hopkins refused, she claimed, the harassment increased. According to the letter, the next evening, while sharing a cab back to their hotel, Coombs pulled her toward him and attempted to kiss her. "Ms. Hopkins, who as Mr. Coombs is aware, is married and the mother of three children," the letter states, "resisted and tried to pull away, but Mr. Coombs succeeded in forcibly kissing her."
- Hopkins complained to Pruden and vice president and general manager Dick Amberg, but nothing was done. Hopkins said that in the meantime, Coombs was savaging her at the paper, removing videos she had shot at the convention from the Times Web site, and "directed reporters and editors not to communicate with her." Three weeks after Hopkins formally complained to the Times's human resources department and a subsequent investigation by Farber, the paper's lawyer, went nowhere, she demanded a settlement. Instead, a year later, in October 2005, after the statute of limitations in which she could have filed a criminal complaint against Coombs expired, the Times terminated her contract without explanation. Archibald, a close friend of Hopkins, says, "Fran absolutely vilified Melissa [Hopkins]. She almost had a nervous breakdown." Coombs denies any wrongdoing, claiming he is a "Southern gentleman" who "does not take advantage of ladies."
- Meanwhile, Times president Joo has stood by Pruden and Coombs. In June 2006, he tossed aside a memo detailing specific charges of sexual harassment and racism against Coombs, telling Preston Moon and other Times owners from News World Communications, "I don't f*cking care." Joo has his own agenda going, primarily a powerful desire to insert himself as a negotiator for the Bush administration with North Korea. He has traveled repeatedly to that insular nation to meet with dictator Kim Jong Il. "What Wes does," Archibald explains, "any time any crisis happens, he just goes marching into Joo's office and he says, 'I can call George W. Bush up any time I want. You need me. I'm running this ship.' It isn't true that he can get Bush on the phone, but that's what he says." One source close to senior management claims Pruden has guaranteed Joo that he will deliver an appearance from President Bush at the Times's 25th anniversary in 2007, and the source says Joo is bedazzled by Pruden's promise.
- Pruden strongly desires Coombs to become his successor, to extend his legacy and guarantee his own "golden parachute." Says Archibald, "Pruden will defend Coombs at any cost so he can walk out with a quarter-mil-plus comp package. He doesn't want anything to interfere with that, so he's defending his boy Fran." Archibald explains that Coombs and Joo have promised Pruden a position as "editor emeritus" that will allow him to maintain his biweekly column and hefty paycheck. Right now Pruden, Coombs, and Joo are functioning as a triumvirate to ensure their continued control over the Times. One senior staffer says, "This is everything to them. And they will do anything they have to in order to survive. It's slash and burn." Pruden has enlisted the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, a firm with deep ties to the Republican Party, to attempt to discredit media reports alleging racist and sexist behavior by him or Coombs. Blumenthal writes, "Like cornered animals, Pruden and Coombs are growing increasingly aggressive in their tactics. Archibald said that the conservative magazine Human Events had planned to publish an article by him this September detailing instances of racism and sexism at the Times but that, under pressure from Pruden and Coombs, Human Events editor in chief Thomas Winter spiked the piece. On September 6, the day before the story was killed, Marian Coombs sent Archibald an e-mail warning, 'I've just seen what you're writing about the Times, my husband, Wes Pruden, and others.... Have you no shame? If you possess any residual genuine belief in God, you must also realize that such shameless, hate-filled behavior will harm your own soul terribly."
- Blumenthal concludes by writing that Coombs has called numerous Times reporters to warn them that if he leaves, a new "left wing" editorial staff will fire them all. But Coombs seems to have little support among the rank and file. "If Fran and Wes were to be replaced," says a staffer, "the newsroom would be like Rio if Brazil won the World Cup. The champagne would be popping like crazy." Many inside the newspaper already refer to Pruden's and Coombs's possible departure as "liberation day." (The Nation)
