http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ES%26Shttp://www.bestoftheblogs.com/2003_02_05_bestof.htmlhttp://benalexandra.com/cool_stuff/diebold_ess.htmhttp://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.htmlhttp://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.htmlhttp://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Landes_Ambush.htmhttp://www.votersunite.org/info/ES&Sinthenews.pdfhttp://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000895.phphttp://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=589188http://starbulletin.com/2000/06/07/news/story3.htmlhttp://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=84http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htmhttp://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0307/S00147.htmhttp://www.opednews.com/lang_071304_voting_dinner.htmhttp://www.ballotintegrity.org/DCForumID78/1.htmlhttp://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,62206,00.htmlhttp://www.evoting-experts.com/index.php?p=81http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1113recount13.htmlhttp://www.votingindustry.com/TabulationVendors/1stTier/ESS/ess_louis.htmhttp://www.cjrdaily.org/politics/high_stakes.phphttp://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/feb04/208610.asphttp://www.newtimesbpb.com/Issues/2004-07-01/news/norman.htmlhttp://www.madcowprod.com/RussIlene.htmlhttp://www.sequoiavote.com/article.php?id=26http://www.sequoiavote.com/article.php?id=24http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/090204K.shtmlhttp://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,96652,00.htmlhttp://www.republicandictionary.com/article_republican_electrons.shtmlHow ES&S counts our votes:
http://nesara.insights2.org/Votes.htmlhttp://www.fairelections.us/article.php?id=104Ohio has from my understanding, narrowed their choices down to Diebold and ES&S. Of course you know about Walden O'Dell promising to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, O'Dell is also a member of the elite "Pioneers and Rangers" Bush fundraising organization and recently held a fundraiser in his home for Dick Cheney in July, 2003 raising $500,000 for Bush/Cheney in 2004. ES&S is connected to Diebold and have given bribes and kickbacks
to election officials in both Arkansas and Louisiana. Former AR Secretary of State Bill McCuen was indicted, and imprisoned. The salesman that bribed him was promoted to Vice President of ES&S after testifying against the former Secretary of State for immunity. Ensminger has now departed ES&S and has gone to Shoup. Another racketeer convicted of bribery. Of course, now France wants to prosecute Cheney on bribery charges associated with Halliburton. How Diebold could even be considered as a possible vendor based on Walden O'Dells declaration of August 14, 2003 to the RNC fundraiser is mind boggling. ES&S vice president is the brother to the Diebold President Bob Urosevich. The Urosevich's were fronted monies to start ES&S and then what is now Diebold by extreme right wing financier Howard Ahmanson. Mr. Ahmanson was behind the California recall of Govenor Gray Davis and believes that slavery is a 'biblical right.' There is a serious problem here that must be corrected immediately.
In Louisiana, 22 election officials were indicted and 9 charged with taking bribes and kickbacks totaling $8 million dollars from then Sequoia salesman Phil Foster--who also testified against their Election Commissioner ,Jerry Fowler for immunity. All charges against Foster were dropped and he was promoted to Vice President of Sequoia Pacific. Sequoia Pacific was recently acquired by De LaRue, British owned company that is a member of the Carlyle Group. Does this get any worse? Absolutely. There is no conspiracy theory involved with evm vendors, the facts are indisputable.
http://www.satyamag.com/oct03/pascarella.htmlFormer Florida Secretary of State Sandra Mortham (R) and Former State Election Supervisor of California Lou Dedier (R) both have ties to Election Systems and Software (ES&S), one of our nation’s leading voting machine manufacturers and tabulators. Sandra Mortham was a lobbyist for ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties during the same time period. The Florida Association of Counties made $300,000 in commissions from the sale of ES&S’s voting machines.
In Georgia’s most recent election, William Wingate, a lobbyist for ES&S, contributed $7,000 to Gov. Roy Barnes (D), $1,000 to Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor (D), and $500 to Secretary of State Cathy Cox (D).
Michael McCarthy is the Chairman of the McCarthy Group, of which ES&S is a subsidiary. According to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) filings, McCarthy is also the Primary Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who (according to FEC filings) is also financially tied to the McCarthy Group by substantial investments (valued between one and five million dollars). According to officials at Nebraska’s Election Administration, ES&S machines tallied around 85 percent of votes cast in Hagel’s 1996 and 2002 senatorial races.
Bill McCuen (D), former Arkansas Secretary of State, pled guilty to felony charges that he took bribes, evaded taxes, and accepted kickbacks. Part of the case involved Business Records Corp. (now merged with ES&S) for recording corporate and voter registration records.
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Nov2003/solo1103.htmlTo adjudicate these competing claims a look at real world experience may help. In August 2002, the results of at least 18 suburban Dallas County elections were delayed through vote-counting problems using ES&S software. The Dallas Morning News report on the glitch referred to “Election Systems & Software, the company that sold the previously trouble-free equipment to the county four years ago.”
Trouble free? Here’s what the Venezuelan national electoral authority had to say about ES&S in May 2000. “We say ES&S has not been sufficiently efficient in testing what it was supposed to have supplied...the National Electoral Council cannot accept such a failure of responsibility by this North American company.” So the Venezuelan elections scheduled for May 28 that year were cancelled. In November 1998, faulty ES&S voting machines used in Hawaii on election day “led to Hawaii’s first ever statewide election review and a first in the history of the United States.”
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050815/NEWS01/508150415Election Systems & Software agreed to pay cash and provide voting equipment for problems dating back to 2003, shortly after it signed an $11.1 million contract with the county. The action could set a precedent for 32 other counties under contract with ES&S as election officials scurry to have polling sites in compliance with the Help America Vote Act by 2006.
Problems first surfaced in 2003 when ES&S provided software that was not fully certified by the Indiana Election Commission for the optical scan machines. Also, officials discovered ES&S had installed uncertified software on the touch-screen machines. The company replaced the software, but that new software was incompatible with software that compiles the results.
In fall 2003, more than 9,000 absentee ballots for the City-County Council election had to be hand-counted over two days because ES&S had not obtained certification for software on a central counting machine.
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http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/8458.html?1122793255Tom Eschberger, of ES&S, got a little taint spilled on him in an Arkansas voting machine case scandal. He accepted an immunity deal for cooperating with prosecutors in a case against Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, who pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks and bribes in a scheme related to computerized voting systems. (4)
Eschberger is listed in the May 2005 Louisiana document on behalf of ES&S
(1) The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 July 2000: "A DIFFERENT KIND OF GATED COMMUNITY"
(2) Saturday State Times/Morning Advocate, 29 April 2000: "Judge frees Bankston case figure"
(3) The Baton Rouge Advocate, 15 January 1997: Civil Court Records
(4) Baton Rouge Advocate, 2 Feb. 2002: "Bill McCuen, guilty plea to charges of bribery, tax evasion, and accepting kickbacks."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2003Dec/0164.htmlMiami-Dade County election officials have hired the head of a computer firm that served as a subcontractor for Election System & Software Inc., the vendor for the county's touch-screen voting system.Michael Johnson, former president of M. Johnson & Associates, topped 65 other applicants to become Deputy Supervisor of Elections. His job: overseeing electronic voting.
But controversy doesn't end with Diebold alone. Rival voting machine company ES&S also came under scrutiny when it surfaced that it was run by Chuck Hagel until two weeks before his own election. Senator Hagel won by the biggest landslide in Nebraskan history; a victory the press characterized as a "stunning upset". His company, ES&S, counted 83% of the votes.
Hagel left out details of his ES&S involvement in his SEC filings, and, when the discrepancy surfaced, two days after a closed-door meeting with Hagel SEC legal counsel Victor Baird resigned and the matter was dropped. And Hagel, who prior to his stewardship of ES&S was head of the Private Sector Council for George H.W. Bush, has bigger plans: Harris says the domain name "Bush-Hagel2004.com" was purchased last year but subsequently released and the Senator has already bought the rights to "hagel2008.com" and "ChuckHagel2008.com".
Meanwhile Hagel campaign manager Michael McCarthy owns over 30% of ES&S's parent company, and even the Senator hasn't fully divested himself of ownership -- he still has a $5 million stake in ES&S parent company the McCarthy Group.
http://www.votefraud.org/News/2000/10/102700.htmlWhether it was the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100 (PBC), the Optech Eagle III, the Model 100 Optic Mark Reader (OMR), or the Votronic touch-screen system that counted your vote, these machines have something in common: they are all designed and operated by Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) -- and they each contain a two-- way modem, allowing them to communicate - and be communicated with - while they are in operation. What is particularly troubling about these machines is the fact that they contain an internal modem, which enables anyone with a modem-equipped computer, -- from hackers and vendors to telephone company personnel and politicians, -- to potentially access and alter the computer’s tally of the votes.
ES&S is “the largest company in the world focusing solely on automating the election process.” The company “provides specialized systems and software to automate the entire election process for local, state, and national governments worldwide.” ES&S is a reorganized company that was given a new name in November 1997 after combining two of the largest election machine companies: Business Records Corp. (BRC, formerly part of Cronus Industries) and American Information Systems, Inc. (AIS). ES&S is a privately held company owned by unknown investors and headed by Aldo Tesi, who refers to the democratic franchise as “the election industry.” The company is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska and supplies “thousands and thousands of machines being used across the country” to more than 2,200 U.S. jurisdictions in 49 states. Cook County bought nearly 5,000 PBC machines from ES&S at a cost of $25 million for the suburbs and the city of Chicago in what a company spokesman called a “huge contract.”
ES&S FIASCO IN VENEZUELA
ES&S supplied Model 100 ballot-counting machines (through a Madrid-based company called Indra – Note the use of pagan deity names) for the elections in Venezuela. It was reported (in the Omaha World Herald, whose publisher, John Gottschalk is one of the directors of ES&S) that the head of Venezuela’s National Elections Council, Etanislao Gonzalez, placed the blame for the technical difficulties during the election on the Nebraska-based ES&S. Gonzalez said, “the firm flagrantly failed to meet its commitments and the failure had destabilized the country’s electoral process.”
A Venezuelan air force jet flew to Omaha to fetch experts to “salvage” the election. It was reported that more than 6 percent of the 7,000 voting machines broke down during the Venezuelan election and that there were major “technical glitches”. ES&S said that the rate of failure in the Venezuela election was "slightly higher than we would expect."
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htmES&S partners with contract manufacturers like Ricoh Electronics Inc. in Tustin, CA, for the ES&S AutoMARK and with Pivot International in Kansas City, KS, for large demand quick turn final assembly. “No matter where each unit is produced, all final products are processed through the Omaha facility,” explains Schmidt. “The units are shipped from the contract manufacturer back to us. Here we take the unit through the final configuration and quality assurance steps to insure it has the correct hardware configuration and certified firmware version for the destination state. It is of the utmost importance that every unit is configured to the certified version for the state where it will be shipped. Because of that importance, we feel it is necessary to conduct that final step ourselves.”
As far as we know, some guy from Russia could be controlling the outcome of computerized elections in the United States. In fact, Vikant Corp., a Chicago-area company owned by Alex Kantarovick, formerly of Minsk, Belorussia (also known as White Russia, formerly U.S.S.R.), supplies the all-important 'control cards' to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the world's largest election management company, writes reporter Christopher Bollyn. According to ES&S, they have "handled more than 40,000 of the world's most important events and elections. ES&S systems have counted approximately 60% of the U.S. national vote for the past four presidential elections. In the U.S. 2000 general election, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots."
Getting back to Kantarovich, he would not disclose where the control cards are made, except they aren't made in America, writes Bollyn. Nor would he discuss his previous employment. Bollyn says he got some not-too-thinly-veiled threats from Kantarovich. Kantarovich sounds more like the Russian mafia, than a legitimate businessman.
But the really big deal is this....all of ES&S's touch screen machines contain modems, "allowing them to communicate—and be communicated with—while they are in operation," reports Bollyn. That communication capability includes satellites. "Even computers not connected to modems or an electronic network can still be manipulated offsite, not during the election, but certainly before or after," says voting systems expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. ES&S supplied the touch screens for Miami-Dade and Broward counties where the worst machine failures occurred. But the debacle was nothing new for ES&S. Associated Press (AP) reporter Jessica Fargen wrote in June 2000, "Venezuela's president and the head of the nation's election board accused ES&S of trying to destabilize the country's electoral process. In the United States, four states have reported problems with equipment supplied by the company. Faulty ES&S machines used in Hawaii's 1998 elections forced that state's first-ever recount."
http://www.opednews.com/ebbets_neocons_have_determined_that_ele.htmPrior to Florida's outrageous September 10, 2002 primary election, poll data showed heavy support for Janet Reno in Broward County, but election results from one Broward precinct alone revealed an impossible 0% turnout among more than 800 registered voters. Reno requested a recount of eighty precincts containing 31,375 registered Democrats because they reported only 1,952 votes. Her request was immediately turned down by the State Elections Board. According to an AP analysis, if those precincts matched the average county turnout, they should have produced 10,260 votes, more than five times the number recorded by the Election Systems & Software (ES&S), iVotronic touch-screen voting machines.
Almost two months later on election night, November 5th, 2002, tens of thousands of Floridians experienced difficulties using the iVotronic machines. Voters called in to Neil Rogers AM radio talk show the day after the election and complained of “broken” voting machines, and machines that voted multiple times for Bush when McBride was selected. Electronic voting expert, Rebecca Mercuri told American Free Press, “Numerous severe voting system problems occurred throughout Florida electronic voting on November 5th, but none of the major news networks are covering these problems,” On November 6th, David Host, spokesman for the Florida Secretary of State, declared the elections, "an unqualified success", and the Associated Press reported, “The closely watched contest for governor in Florida was decided without a hitch.” This propaganda might have been believed if 103,222 ballots in Broward County alone had not been “misplaced”.
Katherine Harris is infamous for using her position as Florida’s Secretary of State during the 2000 election to unjustly purge over 90,000 predominantly black and Hispanic Democratic voters from the rolls. People remembered how Harris had taken away their civil rights when she prevented them from voting. On November 5th, 2002, most of the Democratic electorate of 3.7 million people turned out to vote for Jan Schneider who ran against Harris. Although registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 340,000, it was too late, the new ES&S iVotronic machines had already been installed in eleven key Florida counties. On November 5, 2002 Jeb Bush became governor of Florida again, and Katherine Harris was given a seat in the House of Representatives with only 138,940 votes, defeating Democratic opponent Jan Schneider's oddly low 114,618 votes.
This wasn’t the first Republican victory involving “Election Systems & Software” (ES&S). Former right wing radio talk-show host and CEO of ES&S, Chuck Hagel, decided he would run for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska with his own ES&S machines counting the votes. Hagel failed to mention that he had been both CEO and Chairman of ES&S on his disclosure documents, or that he was an owner in the company that installed, programmed, and operated the voting machines used by most of the citizens of Nebraska. In 1996, Republican Hagel won the race in Democratic Nebraska for the U.S. Senate easily carrying both the primary and general elections. According to Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.com, Hagel scored lopsided victories in almost every demographic group, including Black communities that had never voted for a Republican. With the widest margin of victory in state history Hagel became the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska. On November 5, 2002 Hagel ran against Democrat Charlie Matulka and was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate by an unreal 83% of the vote. Again, the votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines built programmed and installed by Hagel’s company Election Systems & Software.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18549Landis just confirms what is already known about "sketchy" electronic voting and how it invites vote tampering. Her connection between election machinery, vote totals and the AP, however, has not previously been made.
She goes on to explain that, "AP spokespeople would not give out information on who sits on their board, however AP leadership appears quite conservative."
Landis continues: "Burl Osborne, chairman of the AP board of directors, is also publisher emeritus of the conservative The Dallas Morning News, a newspaper that endorsed George W. Bush in the last election. Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of AP, was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News before joining AP. Carroll is also on the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME)'s 7-member executive committee. The APME "works in partnership with AP to improve the wire service's performance," according to their website. APME vice president, Deanna Sands, is managing editor of the ultra conservative Omaha World Herald newspaper, whose parent company owns the largest voting machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software (ES&S)."
It's a cozy relationship considering that ES&S voting machines count 50% of all the votes in the country. The second largest company, Diebold, is also tied to the Republican Party and promised (in a comment by Wally Diebold that got widespread attention on the internet) to "deliver the vote" in Ohio to President Bush.
http://www.corpwatch.org/print_article.php?id=11518The controversy in Maryland subsequently caused Ohio, who was in the midst of contract negotiations to purchase electronic voting machines, to investigate the security software of all four major vendors. The December, 2003, report to the Ohio secretary of state found Diebold machines possessed 15 security risks, while ES&S machines had 17, Sequoia machines had 15, and Hart InterCivic machines had 10. Of those risks identified, Diebold machines had five that the report considered "high." The report also found a number of "high" risks among the other DRE manufacturers: four for Hart Intercivic, three for Sequoia, and one for ES&S.
Among the high security risks was Diebold's policy of providing "supervisor cards" that allow the voting session to be started or terminated, which had the same security PIN code nationwide. ES&S machines had a function, intended to retrieve votes from a broken machine, which could add votes multiple times to the overall tally without any warning. Also, the process of opening and closing the entire polling station on ES&S machines was controlled by a supervisor function that did not require a password, and provided no warning to a worker that the poll was about to be closed. Sequoia polling stations could be closed by flipping a switch on the back of the DRE that was accessible to all voters.
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The other three major DRE manufacturers, while still contributing heavily, tend to cultivate both major parties. In 2001, ES&S and its executives gave $21,900 to Republicans and $24,550 to Democrats, Sequoia and executives gave $3,500 to Republicans and $18,500 to Democrats, and Hart InterCivic and executives donated $3,750 to Republicans and $2,500 to Democrats.
All four major electronic voting manufacturers are actively engaged in lobbying. Between 2001 and 2003, the latest year for which data is available, the four companies had lobbyists in at least 21 states, mostly seeking to procure funding for the purchase of their machines. One such lobbying effort was that launched to pass California's Voting Modernization Bond Act of 2002, or Proposition 41, that allowed the state to secure a $200 million bond to purchase DREs. The two largest contributors in favor of the proposition were Sequoia and ES&S, contributing $100,000 and $50,000 respectively. After a flurry of television ads, the proposition passed with a bare 51.6 percent majority.
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ES&S product manuals:
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5189