Dyke, J

===
hmmn
http://konformist.com/archives/2006/01-2006/kn4m0102.txt
<pre>Elections & Voting

Fake voting rights activists and groups linked to White House

By Bob Fitrakis

Online Journal Guest Writer

Dec 31, 2005

Top level Republican operatives with ties to the White House, Senate Majority Leader William Frist and the Republican National Committee (RNC) not only engaged in the suppression of poor and minority voters in the 2004 Ohio presidential election, but they spun the election irregularities into a story linking blacks to cocaine and voter fraud. Bush allies in Ohio are now using this myth of voter fraud to pass a repressive "election reform" bill.

In the month prior to and immediately after the 2004 presidential election, the Republican Party engaged in an orchestrated campaign to divert the mainstream media focus away from election fraud and irregularities in Ohio and manufactured the myth of "voter fraud."

According to a former Columbus Dispatch reporter, Ohio Senator Mike DeWine sent his spokesperson, Mike Dawson, to meet with the editorial board of the Dispatch and other Ohio newspapers. The primary talking point for the GOP was that there was no evidence of irregularities in Ohio.

The Republican state legislature used the "voter fraud" spin to introduce the draconian Ohio House Bill 3. The "election reform" bill has passed both Republican-dominated houses and is awaiting a conference committee at the start of the new year.

HB 3's most publicized provision will require voters to show their ID before casting a ballot. But it also opens voter registration activists to criminal prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. HB 3 will also reduce voter rolls by ordering county boards of elections to send cards to registered voters every two years. If a card comes back as undelivered, the voter must rely on a provisional ballot.

As the League of Women Voters put it in a letter to Republican legislative leaders, "Its [HB 3's] purported purpose of preventing voting fraud is based on the fallacy that there was widespread fraud perpetrated by voters in Ohio. In fact, the fraud was committed against Ohio voters by inadequate preparation that suppressed the votes of those whose registrations were not recorded correctly, those who could not wait for hours to vote, or those whose votes were not counted because of misdirection or mishandling."

The Senate sponsor of HB 3, Kevin Coughlin, could only cite the names of a few cartoon characters and celebrities on voting registration forms, which were easily weeded out by county election boards, as the reason for his repressive legislation.

Fake Voting Rights Groups Tied to the White House

In March 2005, Congressman Bob Ney held a U.S. House Administrative hearing at the Ohio Statehouse where a general counsel for the brand new voting rights group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), told the congressional committee that the voting problems in Ohio were the result of the NAACP paying people with crack in order to entice them to register to vote. ACVR's general counsel, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, turned out to be the former national general counsel for Bush-Cheney '04, Inc., with no history of working in a voting rights organization. Hearne relied on a lawsuit filed against the NAACP in Wood County, Ohio, "alleging fraudulent voter registration under the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act."

Hearne wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice in March 2005 claiming there was "substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing by organizations such as Americans Coming Together ("ACT"), ACORN and the NAACP -- Project Vote."

"We understand that local Ohio law enforcement authorities are pursuing criminal prosecution against some of the individuals involved in this activity, which activities include paying crack cocaine for fraudulent voter registration forms," Hearne wrote.

Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney representing the NAACP, denounces this as a deliberate racist disinformation campaign to divert attention from Ohio's election theft. "Crack cocaine, the NAACP -- Hearne and the Republicans are using racist code words," Arnebeck said. The Wood County case was withdrawn in June 2005, but not before it was revealed that the plaintiff, Mark Rubick, had been "indemnified" and held "harmless" by an obscure group, the Free Enterprise Coalition, with ties to the Republican Party. Signing as the "Authorized representative" for the coalition was one Alex Vogel.

Who Is Alex Vogel?

This is the same Alex Vogel who is now identified as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's attorney. Vogel was busy in December explaining why Frist's so-called AIDS charity, World of Hope, Inc., paid nearly a half million dollars in consulting fees to his "political inner circle," according to the Washington Times.

While Vogel fights to keep secret the amount of money that Frist's 96 World of Hope donors gave to the "charity," his top-level political connections are emerging in the media. Vogel co-founded a lobbying firm with Bruce Mehlman, the brother of Republican National Committee Chair Ken Mehlman. Vogel and Mehlman's lobbying firm has close ties with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Arnebeck recently won a ruling against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which he claims gave $14 million secretly to Ohio Republican candidates in the 2002 and 2004 election cycle, allowing the GOP to dominate Ohio's Supreme Court.

Vogel also served as a member of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and as parliamentarian at the 2004 Republican Party platform hearings.

Other Players Tied to Bush-Cheney

While Vogel helped create the voter fraud myth and Hearne acted as the group's general counsel, a man named Jim Dyke acted as spokesperson for the dubious ACVR. Dyke served for many years as Republican National Committee Communications Director. In October, Dyke emerged as a White House spokesperson on National Public Radio pushing the ill-fated nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

Dyke and Hearne incorporated their "nonpartisan" tax-exempt voting rights organization in Dallas, Texas, only three business days prior to the Ney hearings in Ohio's capital. Despite its lack of history, the ACVR was the only "voting rights group" called to testify on election irregularities in Ohio. With a few exceptions, like Raw Story and Bradblog, news organizations have ignored these obvious political connections.

Other interesting individuals involved in so-called "election reform" activities in Ohio are William E. Franke of Gannon Technologies Group and Steve Hertzberg of the Election Science Institute.

Franke, a close friend of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, installed a computer operating system for Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. The Gannon Technologies website bragged that the Ohio Secretary of State joins the FBI and a host of other government agencies as clients of "an innovative system that compiles records in different formats via an imaging program with 100 percent accuracy." One worker who helped install the technology warned the Free Press that there were possible back doors into the system and it may have "points of vulnerability."

Franke came to national attention during the 2004 election as the man heading the operations of the Swift Boat Veterans and Vietnam POWs for Truth. Their nasty attack ads against John Kerry became legendary.

Hertzberg, the project director of Election Science Institute (ESI), received a contract in 2005 from the Franklin County commissioners to monitor and certify new voting machines. Hertzberg's website is dedicated to disputing any scientific claims of election fraud in Ohio. Oddly, Hertzberg's biography posted at the ESI website shows he has no advanced degrees in political science, only a bachelor of science in aerospace engineering from Purdue University. As Hertzberg explains it, he "spent the first several years of his career as a civilian within the U.S. Department of Defense" also " . . . serving as a Project Manager and Test Director for highly visible military development programs. . . ."

Hertzberg launched an organization called Vote Watch in 2002 before renaming it Election Science Institute in 2005. Recent ESI publications seek to discredit real social scientists with Ph.D.s who claim there was election fraud.

The ability of the Bush-Cheney White House to both blatantly repress poor and minority voters in the 2004 election and divert attention from these activities to spin this political operation into a bogus election reform bill bodes well for their ability to win the 2006 mid-term elections, despite a majority of the voters disapproving of the president's performance.

Bob Fitrakis is the co-editor of "Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election?" with Harvey Wasserman (www.freepress.org) and co-counsel with Cliff Arnebeck in the Alliance for Democracy suit against the Hocking County Board of Elections.

*</pre>

===
    Manufacturing Voter Fraud

The issue of fraudulent voters undermining American democracy did

not spontaneously erupt. To promote national concern about voter fraud,

in March 2005 GOP operatives with ties to the White House established a

501(c)4 organization called the American Center for Voting Rights

Legislative Fund (ACVR). The group went public by establishing a Web

site, ac4vr.com. (The site has since been taken down for unknown

reasons.)

According to its 990 tax forms, ACVR is based in Midlothian, Va.,

and its executive director is Robin DeJarnette, who is also the founder

and executive director of the Virginia Conservative Action PAC.

However, according to the registration form for its Internet domain

name, the group's address is a mailbox at a UPS Store in Dallas. The

chairman of ACVR is Brian Lunde, a former Democratic National Committee

official from Texas, who in 2004 was head of Democrats for Bush.

ACVR specializes in issuing studies that purport to document a

host of voter fraud cases, like the report titled: "Democrat operatives

far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression in 2004 than

Republicans."

On March 21, 2005, four days after ACVR went public, Rep. Bob Ney

(R-Ohio), then chair of the Committee on House Administration, opened

hearings on 2004 election irregularities. One person who testified was

ACVR National Counsel Mark "Thor" Hearne II, who described himself as "a

longtime advocate of voter rights and an attorney experienced in

election law." In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential campaign,

Hearne was dispatched to Florida as a Republican observer in Broward

County's manual recount, and in 2004 he worked as the national general

counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc.

In his testimony, Hearne described ACVR as "committed to

defending the rights of voters and working to increase public confidence

in the fairness of the outcome of elections." And he submitted to the

committee a copy of the ACVR's "Ohio Election Report," of which he was

the lead author. That report read in part:

<blockquote>This [Democratic] voter registration effort was not limited

to registration of legal voters but, criminal investigations and news

reports suggest, that this voter registration effort also involved the

registration of thousands of fictional voters such as the now infamous

Jive F. Turkey, Sr., Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins. Those individuals

registering these fictional voters were reportedly paid not just money

to do but were, in at least one instance, paid in crack cocaine.</blockquote>

And in testimony on Dec. 7, 2006, the same day the prosecutors

were fired, Hearne told the Election Assistance Commission: "Recent

press reports suggest that voter registration fraud remains a

significant issue in the recent mid-term elections."

The press contact for ACVR is Jim Dyke, who was the

communications director of the Republican National Committee during the

2004 election. In the fall of 2005 he was working in the White House

trying to get Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court, before moving on to

work in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Brad Friedman of <a target="_blank" href="http://bradblog.com/">BradBlog.com</a>

reported that according to internet records, Dyke registered the ACVR

Internet domain name, ac4vr.com, in December 2004. Those records have

since disappeared from public view. (The source of ACVR's funding is

also mysterious. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "When asked

to name any contributors to his nonprofit, Hearne claimed he did not

know but said Lunde did. When Lunde was asked, he claimed he did not

know but said Hearne did.")

Dyke is a good friend of his fellow Arkansan Tim Griffin, the new

U.S. attorney in Arkansas. In 2004, both worked at the Republican

National Committee helping Bush get re-elected. Dyke has been a vocal

defender of Griffin's appointment as U.S. Attorney. "He has a real

passion for the law," Dyke told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Rounding out the GOP operatives is Pat Rogers, who sits on the

board of ACVR. An attorney for the Republican Party in New Mexico, he

has been a vocal critic of fired U.S. Attorney Iglesias. According to

the Albuquerque Tribune, Rogers is on the short list to replace

Iglesias.

Rove's Role
==
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=2262

<div class="ItemHeadline"><a href="http://bradblog.com/?p=2262">The Soon-to-be-Indicted Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio's Connection To Electoral Fraud</a>

</div>

            </font><div class="ItemSubHeadline"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Dots Connect Between

Abramoff, Ohio 2004 Election Smokescreen and Ney's Former Staffer

Revealed to be on Diebold's Payroll While Working for White House Law

Firm

</div>

            </font><div class="ItemSubSubHeadline"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">All the While as HAVA --- America's 'Election Reform' Bill --- is Used for Political Payoff in the Bargain...</font></div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">

     </font><div class="BloggedBy"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">By <span style="font-weight: bold; text-transform: uppercase;"><a href="http://bradblog.com/?author=3" title="Posts by Brad Friedman">Brad Friedman</a></span> on 1/10/2006, 11:21am PT&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">

    </font><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">There's

been a great deal of speculation over the last several days,

particularly in the light of Jack Abramoff's recent guilty pleas,

concerning the connection of Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) to Election

Fraud in Ohio, vis a vis his stewardship and authoring of the Help

America Vote Act (HAVA) back in 2001 and 2002. The heavy-handed tactics

he has taken since, in order to keep the flawed act from being changed

in any way over the years, along with going to great lengths to keep the

nation's eyes off of massive electile dysfunction in Ohio and elsewhere since 2004, may finally get the attention it all properly deserves.

Both Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon have directly informed

prosecutors of Ney's alleged wrong-doing in regard to money and gifts

given to Ney, in apparent exchange for support on various legislation

and even personal business deals. Ney, who chairs the important U.S.

House Administration Committee, has been fingered, and now subpoenaed,

for accepting illegal trips, gratuities and other apparent quid pro quo

deals with Abramoff's former firms, partners, friends and groups who had

paid both him and Scanlon as lobbyists.

His direct connection to the HAVA Election Reform bill passed in the

wake of the 2000 Florida Election Debacle, and his various extraordinary

efforts to specifically block amendments to the bill and to smokescreen

attempted investigations into his home state's conduct during the 2004

Election Debacle, has been less widely reported. Until now.

While <a href="http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:NKx0JlDTOeQJ:www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/%257BFB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-BD4429893665%257D/HAVA%25203.pdf+common+cause+diebold+greenberg+traurig&hl=en">Common Cause quietly reported</a> in December of 2004 that Diebold --- the <a href="http://www.BradBlog.com/Diebold.htm">much-beleagured-of-late</a> American Voting Machine company --- paid as much as $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig for lobbying work, <a href="http://www.BradBlog.com">The BRAD BLOG</a> has now found additional details that begin to shed new light on Ney's personal connections to Diebold lobbyists.

Such

personal connections include those with Ney's former chief of staff

turned lobbyist, David DiStefano, who has been working on behalf of

Diebold, Inc. and at least one other Voting Machine Company as a

registered lobbyist in the House going back to at least 2001. One of

DiStefano's <a href="http://www.strategichealthcare.net/Bio/David_DiStefano.htm">online bios</a>

crows about his having "an insider's edge to hard-to-reach political

officials." That "insider's edge" has proven to have been a very

worthwhile investment for the Voting Machine Companies who'd purchased

access into Ney's political office.

<a href="http://sopr.senate.gov/cgi-win/m_opr_viewer.exe?DoFn=3&CLI=DIEBOLD&CLIQUAL==">Congressional lobbying records</a>

reveal that Diebold, Inc. has paid at least $180,000 to DiStefano and

eventually his partner, Roy C. Coffee, to lobby for the "Help America

Vote Act" and other "Election Reform Issues" in Congress since 2003.

Another Electronic Voting Machine Company, AccuPoll, Inc., also paid

DiStefano some $70,000 to lobby for HAVA on their behalf in 2002,

although that relationship was apparently terminated once the

legislation was passed by Congress.

In turn, Ney's former employee DiStefano and Coffee themselves have

given nearly $20,000 to Bob Ney's campaigns dating back to 2002.

The connections of DiStefano and Coffee don't stop at Congress,

however. Both lobbyists now work out of the new Washington office of the

Texas-based law firm of Lock, Liddell & Sapp LLP --- the firm of George W. Bush's White House Counsel Harriet Miers. And Coffee, himself, had previously worked as a senior aide to then-Governor Bush back in Texas.

In addition to lobbying in favor of Electronic Voting, DiStefano and

Coffee were also paid thousands to lobby Ney on behalf of an obscure

firm by the name of FN Aviation, which later became known as FAZ

Aviation. FN/FAZ Aviation, the <a href="http://www.dispatch.com/news-story.php?story=dispatch/2005/12/09/20051209-A8-00.html&chck=t">Columbus Dispatch reported</a>

last December, paid for Ney's 2003 trip to England. On that trip, Ney

met at a casino with FN Aviation's director, Nigel Winfield, a

three-time convicted felon, and Fouad al-Zayat, the Syrian-born head of

FN Aviation. Zayat, <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7833922/">as reported by NBC News</a>, is known as "one of London's biggest gamblers."

As has also been reported by NBC and others, the apparently once-very

lucky Ney reported winning some $34,000 a few months later at that same

London casino, after an initial $100 bet "on two hands of a three-card

game of chance," according to his spokesperson Brian Walsh. Ney, who

coincidentally carried at least $30,000 in credit card debt in 2002, was

fortunate to be able to report that the debt was paid off in full by

the end of 2003.

The dots begin converging, however, in regard to both large campaign

contributions and lobbying done by Ney's former chief of staff,

DiStefano along with Coffee on behalf of both FN/FAZ Aviation and

Diebold, Inc.

Ney was one of the original authors and lead co-sponsors of HAVA, and a fierce defender of both the act and the effort to keep

further legislation from moving forward in Congress that would mandate

Voter Verified Paper Ballots for electronic voting machines made by

Diebold and other e-voting vendors.

In 2004, prior to the Presidential Election, Ney went so far as to

send a "Dear Colleague" letter signed along with the other HAVA

co-sponsors, to members of congress urging them not to amend the

original legislation. He argued at the time that paper records on such

machines would somehow disenfranchise disabled voters, who had been

cleverly afforded a special provision in the bill which mandated at

least one disabled-accessable device in every voting precinct in

the country. That device, of course, would be a paperless touch-screen

electronic voting machine, like the ones made by Diebold, which,

legislators, vendors and lobbyists would later proffer, were required to

meet provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Ney had also personally gone out of his way to keep Rep. Rush Holt's

(D-NJ) "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" (HR 550),

which would mandate paper records for all votes cast, from ever seeing

the light of day in the House Administration Committee. That, despite

Holt's bill having now nearly 160 bi-partisan co-sponsors. Ney has

succeeded brilliantly at squashing Holt's bill, first proposed as HR

2239 back in 2003, as it continues to both gain co-sponsors and gather

dust as the powerful Republican committee chair still refuses to allow

it even to be brought up for hearings.

The American Prospect's Art Levine broke a <a href="http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9658">superb exposé</a>

last May concerning Ney's alleged payoffs from a number of the Indian

tribes that now-disgraced, once-uber-lobbyist Abramoff was representing

in exchange for promises to support their hope for new gambling

legislation back in 2002.

"Just met with Ney!!! We're f'ing gold!!!! He's going to do Tigua,"

wrote Abramoff to Scanlon in an Email, after Ney reportedly promised to

add the Tribe's hoped-for legislation to HAVA while the bill was still

pending.

Ney then told the tribes --- who had been instructed by Abramoff and

Scanlon to give tens of thousands of dollars to his campaign and to pay

for a $100,000 trip to play golf at St. Andrews in Scotland --- that he

was working with the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd, to

add gambling language in HAVA that would be favorable to the tribes.

In reality, Dodd had rejected the idea early on in no uncertain

terms, as Levine reports, but that didn't keep Ney from spinning tales

to the tribal groups. He told them on several occassions, at least once

personally, that things were moving smartly forward as he kept accepting

more cash and gifts from them along the way.

Finally, when the HAVA legislation was passed, and the promised

language was nowhere to be found, Ney informed the tribes that Dodd had

reneged on the deal at the last minute.

That was, of course, not true, since Dodd had rejected the plan months earlier.

But as the spotlight of corruption has finally begun to shine

bright and clear in the Mainstream Media onto Ney, renewed interest in

his support and authorship of HAVA itself --- along with the connections

between that legislation, chicanery in Ohio's Election, Abramoff and

several other GOP operative and lobbying firms' merry band of

pay-for-players --- are helping to bubble up towards the surface a few

previously overlooked, but very important, details that may finally now

receive the attention they always deserved from the Mainstream Media...

<a href="http://www.BradBlog.com">The BRAD BLOG</a> has been <a href="http://www.BradBlog.com/ACVR">reporting since early 2005</a>

about Ney's role in authoring and co-sponsoring HAVA along with his

various attempts to keep it from being amended to require Voter Verified

Paper Ballots with every vote cast. More so, we've been reporting on

his very specific efforts to smoke-screen the mountain of evidence

suggesting massive fraud in Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election by ---

among other things --- holding hearings in his House Administration

Committee meant quite clearly to deflect the focus from the rampant Electoral Fraud in the Buckeye State in 2004 towards the trumped-up <a href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050823/the_hype_over_voter_fraud.php">imaginery epidemic</a> of Voter Fraud in that state and elsewhere around the country.

Ney's hearings, ostensibly publicized as "investigations" into the

many Election Irregularities in Ohio, even went so far as to hear

testimony from a self-described "voting rights" group calling themselves

the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). The tax-exempt 501(c)3,

self-proclaimed "non-partisan" group was the only such "voting rights"

group to give testimony to the committee. However, as <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001276.htm">The BRAD BLOG discovered at the time</a>,

the brand-new organization was little more than a phony GOP front

group. It had been co-founded by two top-level Bush/Cheney/RNC

operatives, Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and Jim Dyke.

As we reported back then, the phony ACVR had been formed just days

prior to their giving testimony to Ney's congressional committee. The

hearings --- held in Columbus, OH --- were on March 21, 2005. Yet the

first known record of ACVR's emergence in the world was on its <a href="http://samspade.org/t/lookat?a=www.ac4vr.com">Internet domain registration</a> (AC4VR.com) which was created on March 17, 2005 --- just two business days prior to the hearings!

Hearne --- who had been National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. --- <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001281.htm">identified himself</a>

in his testimony at the hearings only as "a longtime advocate of voting

rights and an attorney experienced in election law." He then was

allowed to go on to testify about unsubstantiated, and later completely

discredited charges of voter fraud while others testified misleadingly about long voting lines in all

of Ohio's counties, instead of just those precincts which leaned

heavily Democratic. Many of those Left-leaning precincts turned out to

have had, in several cases, fewer voting machines deployed in the

November general election than they reportedly had in the primary races

just several months earlier.

For his part, Hearne's partner Dyke had been the RNC's Communication

Director up to that point. Dyke now works in the office of

Vice-President Dick Cheney and apparently continues his affiliation with

the "non-partisan" ACVR in the bargain.

The HAVA legislation, while it does not explicitly require states or counties to upgrade their voting equipment to electronic touch-screen systems

made by Ohio's Diebold, Inc. and others --- even while the

opportunistic Voting Machine Vendors and the lazy Mainstream Media have

otherwise perpetuated that myth for several years --- it does

mandate that every precinct have at least one voting device that is

accessable to disabled voters so that they may be able to cast their

ballots secretly and without assistance.

Hence, Ney and the other original authors and lead co-sponsors of

HAVA --- Dodd (D-CT) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the Senate and Steny

Hoyer (D-MD) in the House --- have been playing up the "Disabled Voters

Need Electronic Voting Machines!" card since its inception by hauling

out various spokespeople from disabilities groups such as the National

Federation for the Blind (NFB) and the American Association of People

with Disabilities (AAPD). Representatives from those groups have

testified at hearings and elsewhere to help make the case that their

members simply must have computerized voting machines --- with no paper ballots --- or their civil rights will be denied.

What is rarely reported, when folks such as the AAPD's Jim Dickson

inevitably show up at these hearings to testify, is that the NFB

received a contribution of one million dollars from Diebold and

Dickson's AAPD has received at least $26,000 from them as well, <a href="http://www.wheresthepaper.org/NYT06_11DisabilityLobbyAndVoting.htm">as reported by the NY Times</a> and others.

(NOTE: Those spokespeople from disabilities groups not on the Diebold payroll, who don't

buy into the tortured notion that they must have paperless touch-screen

voting machines in order to protect their civil-rights --- folks like

David Dixon of Florida's Handicapped Adults of Volusia County (HAVOC)

--- are rarely called to testify at such hearings as those trumped-up by

Bob Ney and friends.)

In addition to the "Dear Colleague" letter that Ney wrote (signed by

him and his co-sponsors of the HAVA legislation) in 2004, asking members

of congress not to amend the act to require paper trails, Ney

has made every effort to ensure that the myriad reports of massive voter

disenfranchisment and electoral irregularities that occurred in Ohio

remain little more than "conspiracy theory", as far as both the

Mainstream Media and the majority of the American electorate perceive

the matters. He, and others who have lobbied hard on behalf of Diebold

have continued to misleadingly forward the idea that what occurred in

2004, and subsequently in 2005 --- where some 44 out of 88 counties in

Ohio went electronic for the first time --- is no cause for alarm. It's

all little more than the imaginery ruminations of Democratic-party John

Kerry supporters, according to such folks. That, despite the fact that

it has been the Green and Liberterian parties who have, by and large,

waged the most aggressive attempt to have votes counted in Ohio, along

with the extraordinarily well-documented reports of chicanery exposed

nationally throughout various local media. More information in that

regard will likely surface via the still-pending lawsuit on all of this

brought by the League of Women Voters in Ohio.

Add that to the <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002015.htm">"staggeringly impossible" results</a> of the 2005 Election results there which were stunning, to say the least, and the shamefully under-reported story of the non-partisan <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001940.htm">Governmental Accountability Office's (GAO) damning report on HAVA and its gross failures</a>

released last September. All told, it would seem that Ney and the

Voting Machine Companyies like Diebold have had every reason to squash

whatever reporting they could on these matters, and so far, they've

gotten the job largely done. At least in the mainstream outlets.

And finally then, it has recently <a href="http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/15714.html">been revealed</a>

that Diebold itself was also paying Abramoff's firm Greenberg Traurig

directly for work in June of 2004 which has yet to be fully detailed or

explained in any way.

A <a href="http://www.bbvdocs.org/moneytrail/greenberg.pdf">payment stub [PDF]</a> and <a href="http://www.bbvdocs.org/diebold/pre-check-register.pdf">pre-check-register [PDF]</a>

revealing a $12,500 payment for the month, made from Diebold to

Greenberg Traurig was discovered in a dumpster at Diebold's McKinney, TX

facility in July of that year by electronic voting watchdog group <a href="http://www.BlackBoxVoting.org">BlackBoxVoting.org</a>.

Perhaps that payment was part of the $275,000 we mentioned

previously, as reportedly paid to Diebold. Though we've yet to find a

reference to the work by Abramoff's old lobbying firm on behalf of

Diebold listed in the Congressional lobbying database. So exactly what

those payments were meant for, and where they ultimately ended up,

remains unclear, at least to us, at this time.

It seems that the Tigua Indian tribe, which paid $32,000 to Ney and

his political action committee on Abramoff and Scanlon's directive, and

the two other tribes who paid $100,000 to send them all golfing in St.

Andrews ultimately received little if anything for their investment.

Diebold, Inc. on the other hand, seems to have received quite a bit

in return for their investment. At least in light of the continued lack

of media scrutiny and congressional oversight their electronic

touch-screen voting machines --- now <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002156.htm">proven</a> on several occassions to be fully hackable and <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001838.htm">wholly unsecure</a>

--- have received from legislators like Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. The same

Bob Ney who has worked so hard on their behalf --- not the voters' ---

to ensure that all of those poor disabled folks would have at least

one voting machine of the type manufactured by Diebold Inc., in every

single precinct, in every single county, in every single state in the

country in 2006. It's mandated by law, after all, by Bob Ney's Help

America Vote Act of 2002. In this case, it seems, they got what they

paid for.
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