Voting Machines Switching Votes In Multiple States: Can Election Results Be Trusted? Superstorm Sandy Plays A Wild Card

“I’m not sure we’ve made forward progress since 2000,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and co-author of a book published this year, “Broken Ballots.” “We’ve put a tremendous effort into changing the voting systems, but in many cases we’ve discarded systems too quickly and replaced them with systems that we haven’t examined enough.” 

Jones said technology used on some vote machines is now close to a decade old and should be updated. And some systems have security flaws or may not allow for recounts or audits, he noted. “Whenever an election is close all of the weaknesses become apparent,” he said. “I expect there will be some states where the margin is so close that people will raise questions about irregularities.” 

A frequent target for critics is the use of touchscreen voting machines, which lack a paper backup. Around 25 percent of Americans are expected to use paperless electronic voting, according to the Verified Voting Foundation. A report earlier this year by two activist groups and the Rutgers University School of Law said systems used in 20 states were either “inadequate” or needed improvement. That includes 16 states which use paperless machines in some or all jurisdictions. Six states were ranked “good” and 24 “generally good.” 

Q: Does Mitt Romney’s son Tagg own Ohio’s electronic voting machines?

A: There’s no evidence of that. A spokesman for Tagg Romney’s private equity firm states that it has no stake in Hart InterCivic, a supplier of voting machines in two of Ohio’s 88 counties.

FULL QUESTION

Is it true that Tagg Romney owns voting machines in Ohio?

FULL ANSWER

We have received a lot of emails from readers with questions about Ohio’s voting machines — all prompted by a conspiracy theory that suggests Mitt Romney supporters will “steal” the election by tampering with voting machines in the critical swing state of Ohio.

This theory has been fostered in recent weeks by some liberal bloggers and fanned by some Democrats, including Jennifer Brunner , who oversaw Ohio elections as the state’s secretary of state.Brunner told MSNBC , “It doesn’t look good for a presidential candidate’s son to be an investor in a voting machine company.”

But the facts are that Tagg Romney’s company, Solamere Capital , does not own Hart InterCivic , the company that provides voting machines in Ohio, and there’s no evidence that Solamere has even invested in it. Solamere says that it has no investment in Hart InterCivic and, therefore, no direct or indirect control over it.

It’s true that the voting machine supplier is controlled by an investment firm whose executives are some of the biggest donors to the Romney campaign, and it’s also true that Tagg Romney has done business with that investment firm. However, Hart InterCivic supplies electronic voting machines in just two of Ohio’s 88 counties, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer .

A Flawed Conspiracy

The conspirators focus on the relationship between three companies:

Solamere Capital, a private equity firm founded by Tagg Romney

H.I.G. Capital , an investment firm whose employees have contributed nearly $450,000 to Mitt Romney’s campaign

Hart InterCivic, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of voting machines

In 2008, Tagg Romney, along with Spencer Zwich (currently Mitt Romney’s national finance director ), founded Solamere Capital. Mitt and Ann Romney contributed $10 million to the firm.

A spokesman for Solamere, who called us after we contacted the Romney campaign, told us that the company has 22 investments — including one in H.I.G. BioVentures , a medical device fund that was started by H.I.G. Capital.

In 2011, H.I.G. Capital made a controlling investment in Hart InterCivic — the voting machine vendor. Three of Hart InterCivic’s five board members are H.I.G. executives: Neil Tuch, Jeff Bohl and Amanda Kalin.

Romney’s critics are mixing up two different funds, the Solamere spokesman told us.

“Solamere invested in a fund that has absolutely nothing to do with the fund that invested in [Hart InterCivic],” he said. “It invested in a fund that invested in medical devices. It is wholly and entirely separate.”

The spokesman identified the fund as H.I.G. BioVentures.

“Neither Solamere nor its principals as individuals have any investment in the company or the fund that controls the company that makes the voting machines,” the spokesman said.

A Solamere spokesman gave similar statements to Forbes’ op-ed contributor Rick Ungar and the Weekly Standard .

More on this story here: http://factcheck.org/2012/11/does-tagg-romney-own-ohio-voting-machines/

In 2006, a computer programmer testified that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the House of Florida at the time, currently US Representative representing) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts.

COLORADO SETS THE STAGE FOR A BOGUS ELECTION - Colorado election integrity and transparency is now officially out the window, with a series of corruption protection rules and new laws.  http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

1. Let’s begin with the unflappable Donetta Davidson, who collaborated with convicted embezzler Jeffrey Dean(1) to remove voter privacy, through a contract specification that required him to redo his absentee mail software in order to embed a method to tie voted ballots to the voters. This shifty business, which now includes all absentee ballots cast on Hart eSlate machines, has led to a blockade on ALL Colorado election accounting records (see #4, below). 

2. Next, in a move that has most of us scratching our heads, Colorado Sec. State Gessler proposed new rules in December 2011 to remove requirements for continuous video surveillance.(2) Though billed as “cost saving,” note that most video surveillance nowadays is simply piped into digital files stored on a Web site. Since cameras are already installed, there is no significant cost savings in allowing non-continuous surveillance. 

3. Sec. State Gessler also decided to reduce the number of seals on voting machines,(2) to the chagrin of election integrity groups like Voter Action, whose investigations and litigation demonstrated vulnerabilities requiring the seals in the first place. The “cost savings” in this measure can be counted in pennies. 

4. A number of protective accounting measures crucial for evaluating election tampering have been taken off the table though a new law to block election-related public records examination. 

Donetta Davidson led the lobbying for this law. Davidson had become a commissioner of the U.S. Election Assistence Commission, then took a step down to take over the Colorado Clerks Association. In this capacity she led a fight to block the media and citizens from examining the ballots. And no wonder: She knew that due to changes made under her administration, private companies had marks embedded on the ballots enabling them to harvest data tying votes to voters. 

Thanks to a lawsuit by Colorado citizen Marilyn Marks, of The Citizen Center, sponsored and assisted by Black Box Voting, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed right to examine ballots. Marks was shocked when she discovered that identifying marks on the ballots allowed her to immediately associate every voted ballot with the voter who cast it. Marks, The Citizen Center, (and Black Box Voting) are now involved in litigation to permanently prohibit this harvesting of personal political information. In the interim, Sec. State Gessler has required that the identifiers be removed for November 2012 only. 

With ballot examination affirmed to be in the public domain, Davidson’s next move was to block ballot examination until after all remedies had expired. Using her clout, she lobbied successfully for the removal of ballots — AND OTHER CRUCIAL ELECTION RECORDS, SUCH AS POLL LISTS — from any access by election watchdogs until 45 days after the election.(3) 

One telltale sign of election tampering is when thousands more votes than voters show up. But in Colorado, neither the media nor the public will be allowed to examine the poll lists or the list of names for voters said to have voted absentee, until too late to do anything about discrepancies. 

5. And then there is the matter of alleged Romney ties to the second-biggest voting machine manufacturer in America. These connections are being minimized by Internet outlets like Snopes, but the straight truth is that Hart Intercivic, the firm that supplies two-thirds of Colorado counties with their voting machines, is now owned by a spin-off of Bain & Company (H.I.G. Capital).(4) 

A majority of Hart’s directors are now H.I.G. guys, and the directors of H.I.G. are Romney bundlers and donors who don’t hedge their bets by donating to any other presidential candidate. 

This isn’t the first time Romney has had his buddies in charge of crucial election processes this year. Some weeks after the misreported figures in the Iowa caucus, which incorrectly cited Romney as the winner, Black Box Voting uncovered that Romney staffers had been brought in to run the Iowa Caucus, and the Nevada Caucus too. Besides heading Romney campaign functions, these guys were associated with an odious Colorado political firm which narrowly escaped prosecution for maliciously misleading political ads.(5) 

And the Romney affiliation with Hart Intercivic doesn’t rule out his buddies — or Obama’s buddies — or George Soros — or the Chinese, for that matter — owning the other companies. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) does not reveal who its owners are, and we don’t know who owns Dominion either. ES&S directly handles voting machines in three Colorado counties; it co-produces elections on the old Diebold equipment with Dominion, with ES&S supplying technicians in some U.S. locations and Dominion in others. Dominion owns Sequoia Voting Systems (or does it? No one seems to be quite sure…), used in large… More 

The video shows how voting machines can be compromised and modified by a virus that steals votes from unsuspecting users