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Judy Williams
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Judyw
Post Number: 3
Registered: 01-2006
Best of Black Box? 
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 8:40 am: | 
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I've been wondering if anyone at BBV has made up a flowchart showing the spiderweb of people connected with HAVA who have an interest in building a permanent Republican majority? I envision it taking the shape of an hourglass with lines flowing from the private companies who make the machines, from legislators and lobbyists, through the neck of HAVA and back out again to the Secretaries of State.
This kind of flowchart could serve as a great teaching tool to help people understand the complex danger that faces this country, while also revealing the pressures on, and the powers of, the Secretaries of State. I know I've been reading as much as I can about this matter and I still have trouble visualizing all the connections.
A flowchart might also prove to be a great gateway tool to get more media coverage. Besides reporters not wanting to open up questions in peoples' minds about the safety of our voting system, I also think the subject is so complex they don't want to make the effort to figure it out themselves and distill it for public consumption. I won't even go into the motives of their corporate handlers.
I have neither the intricate understanding of the spiderweb (which is why I'd love to see a flowchart), the software to develop such a chart, nor the artistry to create something so compelling people will clamor to see it; but I hope somebody here does, because I'm still hopeful enough to think it might really help us get our message out. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 1623
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 8:58 am: |
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I agree with Judy that a flowchart or some other kind of visual would be useful and necessary.
Several might be needed, for different issues.
It would probably be possible to have a flow chart that's non-partisan, seeing as both major parties seemed happy enough with HAVA. Any chart should reflect the realities--non-partisan or otherwise--that are revealed by the facts.
(Message edited by catherine_a on February 02, 2006) |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 3494
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 9:55 am: |
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Hi, Judy, and welcome to Black Box Voting!
Note: HAVA architects were Republican Bob Ney, Democrat Steny Hoyer.
HAVA was not put in to enable Republicans, and it does damage to the elections integrity movement to keep spreading this spin. HAVA was put in by key people in Republican and Democrat parties who had a variety of agendas, but the agendas of Ney and Hoyer were almost certainly financial.
Hoyer was actively courting the K Street lobbyists -- they weren't coming to him, so HE WENT TO THEM. He wanted a piece of the financial pie.
HAVA was about profit opportunity and, perhaps, about ensuring power for corporatist politicians in both parties.
As for the flow chart, yes -- I spent hours last weekend with lobbyist forms, and identified a bunch of the key players funneling money into HAVA. One thing that hampers this research is the big whopper-lobbyists for firms like Unisys, who vaguely identify only "procurement related activities" rather than identifying that they were lobbying for election reform legislation or HAVA.
Big corporate players included:
Accenture
Votehere -- extremely large lobbying expenditures, and report talking to the president as well as senators and representatives. Votehere's lobbying expenditures on HAVA were 20 times what any other voting system vendor reported.
Unisys - probably.
There are others.
HAVA needs to be dissected into its parts, no doubt about it, but take the blinders off about the Democrat involvement in this fiasco, especially the greedy-fingered Steny Hoyer.
Also, check out Linda Lamone's past involvement as a lobbyist. She lobbied for gambling interests, I think..I'd have to check. (Thanks to Kathleen for finding that). Linda Lamone is the state elections director in Maryland, where Steny Hoyer is from. |
Judy Williams
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Judyw
Post Number: 4
Registered: 01-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 12:59 pm: |
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Believe me, I have no blinders on when it comes to the Democrats. My concern is that most people don't want to look at this because it's too complex, too overwhelming... and that includes me, until recently. I'm still overwhelmed by the technical stuff. To change people's minds in a big way, we have to get the media reporting on it. |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 3497
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 5:59 pm: |
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Judy,
Back in 2003, when the story I wrote about the GEMS defect broke, Alastair Thompson of Scoop News in New Zealand put up a screaming headline: "Bigger than Watergate!" he wrote. He was ridiculed.
But it turns out he was right. The voting machine scandals are, of course, much bigger than Watergate. Like Watergate, the election scandals are complex and multilayered.
These kinds of stories are dangerous, too. Watergate, for nearly a year, was covered by only ONE newspaper. The election machine scandals have been covered by dozens of news outlets, but that has the disadvantage that -- unlike Watergate -- no one traditional media outlet has done an adequate series on the issue.
Watergate was covered in a series of integrated articles seen through the perspective of the same handful of reporters and the same few editors, for hundreds of stories, before it got legs enough for other mainstream media outlets to cover it. That uniformity of focus helped develop that complex story.
This one is more challenging, because it's so much more scattered. However, we still need to avoid the temptation to take the popular route, focusing on Republicans vs. Democrats. That angle makes the voting machine story appealing to hundreds of thousands of people, but ultimately leads people down unproductive paths in trying to solve it.
The American people are tough. They are sensible. True, many are in denial and don't want to tackle this bad boy. But the numbers are growing, the media coverage is improving.
It will continue to grow and improve as long as we focus on truth, and that will mean facing the complexities one by one until we've painted a picture that people can "see." |
Brant Lamb
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Brantl
Post Number: 355
Registered: 01-2005
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2006 - 8:32 pm: |
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Hava is poorly worded, but may at root have been well-intended by many that voted for it. I would't call Ney one of the good guys, though. The fact that it is poorly worded and executed account for a lot of it's deficiencies, don't they? |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 3502
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 3, 2006 - 6:12 am: |
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An examination of HAVA shows that they were effective in stitching together diverse interest groups -- the civil rights community was lured into HAVA due to the Choicepoint/Database Technologies felon purge. Civil rights groups, stung by that injustice, wanted to make sure the ability to vote by provisional ballots was enacted.
The disabilities community was tapped for support for electronic technology.
But the primary driving force was money and profit opportunities. And Democrat HAVA architect Steny Hoyer is just as odious as Bob Ney.
Note that some of the primary backers of Democrats are also some of the primary funders of certain components of the election reform movement. They do it in a way that attaches strings to the message and demands partisanship. I know. I've had the truly excruciating task of turning down such grants, which are the largest ones we've been offered and yes, we need the funding or we won't be around long. If that's the case, then so be it. We're not going to compromise on true nonpartisanship and if that puts us out of business, that's just how the cookie crumbles.
Partisan funding of the voting reform movement -- and believe me, it comes with an insistence on "input" into the message and expected access to investigations (couched in terms of personal progress reports) -- is one of the main reasons election reformers are looking only at Rebublican problem children like Bob Ney, and very few have been investigating Steny Hoyer. This is just damage control. It's just taking a story that is getting out of control and amputating half of it so, if/when the unpleasant facts surface, you can blame them on the opposing party.
Partisanship in this issue has caused activists to look only at federal races, missing the boat on what's driving resistance to change and how the patchwork of local opportunity is exploited in order to affect federal races. Because of this partisan driving of the message, activists don't get it: The locals need tamperable machines even more than the federal candidates. Local land developers need them. Try doing a news search on "councilman" and "guilty" and -- figuring that fewer than 1 out of a hundred people are actually caught, and only 1/10th of those are ever convicted, do the math. Federal legislators aren't eager to piss off their constituents, and their REAL constituents are local and state party political hacks and corporate backers.
Partisanship has caused selective reporting of the facts, ranging from avoidance of obvious anomalies in Democrat areas to refusal to include effective reform groups and activists in meetings if they don't cozy up to the Democrat political establishment.
Now I'm hearing -- from various other forums and in my email -- that if we don't keep this partisan, we'll lose people's attention.
At the same time, corporate donors are creeping into the mix. Some of these agendas have to do with a vested interest of keeping technology firmly in place. The corporate influence, which is also happening through developing personal liaisons with activists, is one step removed. For example, a company that wants certain technologies in place in order to tap into a subset of those technologies for its own later profits snuggles up to activists, waiving Democrat "credentials" and enthusiasm for the cause.
At Black Box Voting, we believe truth has a way of coming out.
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Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 1631
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 3, 2006 - 7:05 am: |
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Can this thread be retitled HAVA flowchart?
Would that be ok with you, Judy?
And/or copied to another thread?
These are major, fundamental issues--corporate and political influence of HAVA, election reform, and electronic voting. If they end up buried in a thread entitled "Flowchart" it's not likely they'll be seen by many people.
Bev, that news about being offered funding with certain strings attached (e.g. a partisan message) is a bombshell. It is a confirmation of how deeply non-partisan this issue actually is, and how much people on all sides want to hijack it for gain of one kind or another.
I hope folks from all political sides appreciate:
1) how important it is that BBV remain non-political in its investigations, and
2) BBV's commitment to revealing findings regardless of who/what party is implicated.
I hope BBV readers back this appreciation up with financial contributions, regardless of where they place themselves on the political spectrum. |
Judy Williams
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Judyw
Post Number: 5
Registered: 01-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 3, 2006 - 7:25 am: |
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I have absolutely no problem with you renaming this thread.
Bev, thank you for pointing out the differences between Watergate coverage and what's going on now. I'm very aware of them because I actively followed Watergate. I also worked in TV for 30 years and realize that if you have a visual, you're much more likely to get coverage, whether the story has merit or not. I just thought a flowchart would make it a more 'saleable' story.
I totally appreciate the non-partisan work you're doing. I just get very riled up and the only people in my circle who seem to care are the Democrats, Greens, and Independents... so if I pushed too hard from that point of view, I apologize. This is a national, not a partisan, crisis. You're doing fantastic work for the American people. Thank you so much. |
Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a
Post Number: 1632
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 3, 2006 - 7:32 am: |
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You're right that visuals matter and they would help a lot to getting the message out. A few good visuals would make it easier to understand--whether by media, election officials, and the general public.
Perhaps visuals could also be used to demonstrate the non-partisan nature of the problem.
One of the problems with political parties is that at some stage there is a strong temptation to participate in "anything that helps my particular club/side win or look better". |
Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 3509
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Friday, February 3, 2006 - 8:46 am: |
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Actually, with HAVA, there were some really good people involved. What they did was hand out carrots to the civil rights community in the form of "protecting" against purging voter lists through making provisional ballots available. Then, typical for the sausage factor that is government legislation, they required no real accounting of the provisionals and as we all know, the provisional ballots become one more way to disenfranchise voters.
Obviously, HAVA architects also took advantage of very legitimate concerns in the disabled community, then laced it with more questionable situations like the Diebold-infused cash to players like the National Federation of the Blind (over $1 million documented, in the guise of a completely atypical "settlement" on an ATM matter which also served as a shakedown to force banks to switch to Diebold ATMs).
My first run-through of a HAVA flow chart type thing made the issue muddier than it already is. You have to actually go in and isolate the players to see which part of HAVA roped them in.
BBV invested a couple days of Kathleen Wynne's time into Steny Hoyer backgrounding, which is why we know he is a lobbyist's best friend. Google Steny Hoyer and "K Street." |
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