Bush wants absolute power to run a war that he lied to start.

It must be the thinning hairline effect. Don't worry Jack, it happens to the best of us. (Myself included)

Two documents just posted:

Diebold check stub to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig:
$12,500 to Greenberg Traurig

This one's a doozy: Diebold "Success fees" and a $100,000.00 "Unidentified security expense"

Anyone care to explain these success fees?

Cheers,

Bev Harris, Kathleen Wynne

Those success fees were for marketing fancy hats!

They were probably for product placement in conspicuous places such as BradBlog! (or whatever the equivalent was in 2003)

Didn't you know that Diebold was into hats? Seriously, they are. Just check it out. You can trust me--I'm always serious.

And the payment to Abramoff's firm was a completely legit fee for modeling services. Diebold needed Abramoff to gives its wide-ranging hat line credibility and crass--oops, I mean, class.

Diebold got into the hat line in one of its corporate acquisitions, and because the due diligence was a little slipshod they ended up with this cool hat line and so they decided to make the most of it. Their hat line was almost--but not quite--enough to make up for the company's poor performance in their voting machine division.

#3 Knowing that seems kind of convenient that Abramoff is now pleading guilty. Come on Abby don't you know about the 500$ toilet seats and 100$ hammers? Guess he didn't do his homework but as you know only bad kids don't do their homework.

Good Lord! Is that a cloven hoof, front and center?

Maybe Abramoff will turn out to be a god-send, if he brings down 60 members of Congress, and exposes what we all thought: American government is for sale to the highest bidder, and it's not middle-class/poor Americans.

I just hope that somehow the electronic voting machine scandals are somehow tied into Abramoff.

WOW! I didn't ever read Bev Harris' comment above, about Abramoff/DIEBOLD links, before I made the previous post! It makes sense. One of the names Abramoff will bring down is Ney of Ohio. Need I say more?

Abramoff->GOP->electronic voting machines->Corporate America->stealing elections->Rove's permanent Republican majority

Connecting the dots. Every single one of these things will be linked and tied together, because THEY ARE TOGETHER!!! It's one plan, with many parts that haven't been connected yet.

Here's another prediction: somehow Tom Feeney's name will pop up in all of this Abramoff stuff.

Abramoff wears a rug folks.

This seems like a rehash of something I've seen before. Almost Star Wars esque. You know, in the beginning there was unrest because a rebellion was growing and unrest in the force. The dark lords were working their power to take over the senate by staging an attack on naboo that would most certainly result in the ousting of the former chancellor. When Senator Palpatine took over he asked that he be given special powers to quell the insurgency and that he would give up those powers when and if the resistance stopped. Instead of giving up his powers he added to them making him eventually supreme chancellor. When he had the power to control the army he eventually began using his dark powers to corrupt the minds of the good to join his evil regime. Then the rebellion decided that it was enough and had given away enough of their freedom and fought back (In other words, most of us) and brought back hope,peace and freedom to the galaxy.

There was some Luke's and Chewbaccas in the story too but you get the picture. (I hope)

You know what Bev, and Catherine I'm really curious about something:

It says in this check register more than 8 checks to Diebold are "blank"

What in the world does this mean?

Why would they in Greenberg write eight seperate checks which were blank for zero dollars?!??? That doesn't make sense and it happened all the way from May to July.

Also this is duly strange all of the checks were written in 2004 during the summer....

Doug E.

To Bev and others,

Who the hell are these people, does anyone know???

The Election Center for American Elections

They claim to represent voting-reform nationwide and globally, yet apparently almost 10% of their funding comes exclusively from voting company vendors. North Carolina is talking about them?

Who are they? Any idea on their financial statistics yet?

Doug

Gaia sighs #6 said:

"Good Lord! Is that a cloven hoof, front and center?"

ROFLMAO

I hadn't even noticed - could it be a catcher's mit to go with that cap?

You also know, that Californias workers compensation
systems
main insurance company is AIG, aka Greenberg Traurig

With Maurice Greenberg as CEO of AIG

Doug #12, #13
Those are great questions and I have no idea what the answers might be. To make sure Bev sees these you might want to post them at BBV and report back here with any new info.

Correction: These checks were written to Diebold Inc.

Why would Diebold write to itself at least 8 seperate checks for 0 dollars and then 12,500 to Greenberg Traurig?

Check register for Diebold Inc

And who is the election center that North Carolina claims gets funding from vote-vendors?

Doug E.

Doug Eldritch #13

I went to the site for 'The Election Center for American Elections' and poked around some. It seems to be a resource for election and registration personel etc.

They had a section containing all the curren new legislation which has been introduced such as John Conyer's HR 533 and Barack Obama's S17.

They also have lists of members etc.

Under their "Code of ethics" link it sounds legit and on the up and up.

" We subscribe to these Principles:

Freedom is an inherent human right, but it is also fragile and can be lost through neglect or abuse.

* Freedom requires responsibility.
* Freedom can be best maintained and nurtured through the democratic process. The success of the democratic process requires fair and open elections which accurately reflect the intent of the electorate.
* Therefore, it is our unique role as elections officials to serve as the gatekeepers of Democracy. "

That is if they are really are on the up and up of course!

Corporate membership is $750 for the first member and $75 for each additional. A platinum membership tops at $1200.

Found no other references at their site regarding funding.

Can't buy a lot of influence for $1200.

I'll await Bev's judgement!

Check this out for a minute, its an article from '03 Here

how to hide a bullet proof skull cap ,wear a hat that matches your bullet proof vest

So this is who Election Center is....

How the hell could this level of secrecy get underneath all the citizens noses?!???

This is just disturbing, Conyers, Jones, Feeney, all of the congress seems to be members of Election Center.

For verified voting they say....

Yet who heads the damn commission but R. Doug Lewis, someone who nobody seems to know a thing about.....

This is called transparency!?!??? No I don't think so, this is called the most outrageous abuse of power ever. This "Election Center" knew about the banned code years ago yet....DIDN'T say anything, and now we're JUST finding out none of them should be used....and effectively illegal!?!??

NO, it doesn't pass the smell test. I'm interested in any real analysis about "Election Center" because it appears to me these guys are the biggest sack of corruption in our system next to the FEC now......

Doug E

Doug, I don't know if u read this , but it gets uglier

And this one from Prison Planet really takes the prize

Here

Oh these guys are just peachy keen aren't they...

Mr. Thomas P. Anderson VP & COO Raytheon Company
Mr. Harvey V. Braswell President ACS Government Solutions Group
Mr. Martin Cummings VP, Homeland Sec & Civil ProgIntegic Corporation
Dr. Renny DiPentima Pres, Consulting & Systm Intg SRA International, Inc.
Ms. Ellen Glover President, Impact Washington Impact Innovations Group
Mr. Thomas A. Grissen President & General Manager Maximus
Mr. Stanley J. Gutkowski Mngng Prtnr, US Gov't Mrkt Accenture
Mr. Roland S. Harris III Gen'l Mgr, Public Sector IBM Global Services
Mr. Thomas L. Hewitt President Global Governments, Inc.
Mr. Rodney P. Hunt President & CEORS Information Systems, Inc.
Mr. L. Kenneth Johnson President CACI International Inc.
Mr. Steve Kalish Pres., Federal Sector Computer Sciences Corporation
Mr. James Kane President & CEO Federal Sources, Inc.
Mr. Ira D. Kirsch President, US Fed Gov't Grp Unisys
Mr. Ronald J. Knecht Sr. Vice President SAIC
Mr. Robert B. Laurence President & CEOLYCEUM
Mr. Robin S. Lineberger SVP & General Manager BearingPoint
Mr. Louis G. Matrone President & COO IMC
Ms. Valerie W. Perlowitz President & CEO Reliable Integration Services
Mr. James J. Perriello President, Gov't Solutions Northrop Grumman Information Technology"

Raytheon technology where have I seen that before......Able-Danger...

These guys are pure neocons through and through, it goes clear to the top, I was wondering about this.....Now, note that the unconfirmed "history" of Howard Ahmanson sticks out like a sore thumb he traditionally owns the voting companies (apparently he is above both the Urosovich brothers) but also is a direct friend to Raytheon, ACS, Accenture, and obviously AIG corporation on top of all that.

Well, while the Ahmanson character is connected to Abramoff there is no proof that they recently worked together. Ergo if you look over their history, you can find Greenberg Traurig and Goldman Sachs but when it comes to Grover Norquist that is where someone should really be looking deep...
Ahmanson lies right in the middle

It is my understanding that Norquist created K-Street and thus has more than direct responsibilities for the voting machines...you'll notice in those "meetings" they keep insisting, we need to get the critics on our side. This is just lovely isn't it.

Also there is no proof any of these scammers were ever real christians, they'e been involved in a christian hoax alright but it looks like their whole purpose in life was really to kill off christianity.

The issue is curious...

Doug E

Re: The $0.00 checks to Diebold. These appear to be intercompany transactions from DESI (Diebold Election Systems Inc., a subsidiary of Diebold Inc.) to Diebold Inc. The $0.00 amount is curious, but could be explained as an accounting transaction that has to appear on the books, but is ascribed no dollar value. Sometimes this happens when an inventory item is shipped from one branch of the company to another. Properly designed accounting systems force an audit trail of inventory. You can't just give away inventory, once it's listed as an asset on the books, without creating a transaction. If you want to give it from one company entity to another, one way to balance the inventory tracking with the financial transactions is to treat each inventory item given to the parent corporation as a transaction of $0.00 value.

I don't know that this is the case, but I've seen such transactions before. This, by the way, is an example of an accounting system with "referential integrity" --- it does NOT LET YOU create transactions that don't appear on the books in each relevant area. The Diebold GEMS program, however, doesn't have referential integrity. Vote totals for whole precincts can be entered out of balance or in such a way that they do not appear on the books. That's why our source, "Cape Cod," who had designed accounting software spotted the GEMS defect so quickly, leading to our expose on July 8 2003.

Now, as to The Election Center: We have corporate documents for this group in our document archive. In a nutshell, one of its founders is Abe Frank, who was also with the Council of State Governments, a privatization group. When you review all the Diebold financial documents we have in our archives, you'll see a payment or two to The Election Center, though not large.

This is a very curious entity. You can find a little more about it, and R. Doug (Lewis?) the director whose resume does not seem to check out, in Chapter 5 or 6 of the Black Box Voting book, found on the right side of our web site, available for free.

The Election Center takes in a considerable amount of fees for it's rather exhorbitantly priced "certification" program, but its financials are certainly interesting. What it does is even more interesting. Pat Vesely has a good understanding of its overall role as well --- basically, an entity needed to be formed to propagandize and get all elections officials on the same page. The Election Center was supposedly formed as a clearinghouse, but actually served as an organizer and "training center" (read: pro-privatization, pro-vendor propaganda). One of the most inappropriate roles it played was setting up the ITAA lobbyist for the vendors.

You can get a feel for its director, R. Doug (Lewis?), in the "correspondence" section of our document archive. There is an item there, 3,000 pieces of correspondence it's called, which has a lot of whiny letters from R. Doug. He is a former used computer salesman who somehow became one of the most powerful people in America in elections, but his correspondence is somewhat less than impressive. He complains to secretaries of state about his back pain, and panics about upcoming NY Times articles, and behaves as if he is under siege.

At the Oct. NIST conference, I was amazed to see him respond to the security analyses by stepping up to the microphone and saying "I feel like hanging myself." I have no idea what he meant.

R. Doug (Lewis?) and The Election Center have played a heavy role in the selection of and propagandizing of the federal certifiers who are now under fire.

Bev

# 24 and #25

I read the "transcript" of the phone conference and it is rather bone chilling. It is amazing what 30 years of neo-con planning can accomplish.

I can't imagine the voting public blindly being led into e-voting after the electronic voting machine debacle. It would be trading the black box with interpretable code for the black hole of cyberspace. I think not. And how many taxpayer billions will these "deliverables" be seeking for this latest rip-the-taxpayer-off-one-more-time scheme?

I'm with that Massachusetts city ... keep paper ballots that humans can touch and count at the precinct level. Even though Oregon is all mail-in ballots, machines count the ballots at the county level and could be subject to shenanigans. But at least you can rely on the backup of a hand count for a recount.

Good god.....

Well, you know what they say Bev.... Ariel Sharon's famous for election fraud!

Err...no, really they say all's well that "ends well". But the Sharon family is neck deep in that business of course.....

Anyway, hopefully we can derail whatever this Election Center is up to now, as I heard North Carolina is very concerned about their lying campaign starting up. The financial contributions are too curious.

Why would Diebold be hiding inventory, its like they don't want anyone to have any idea what was going on here...by blacking out amounts in an audit list, that is most troubling. They probably could be smuggling all sorts of things using sham checks or "bounced fraud" which is what happens when you write a zero check that may or may not have a value...

And that's just the type of thing that has to be looked at, definitely by federal authorities. I don't think any of us will know even what we're looking at, and god knows the lobbyists are EXPERTS at laundering money.

One thing that we got to make sure of, is that it gets dealt with by authorities we can trust and also the legal system.

Doug E

A bit more on ElectionCenter.org here from BRAD BLOG circa June '05.

What if the Abramoff thing is a cover-up tactic, a diversion, from a much larger fraud?

Whatif the billions in cash and other taxpayer money "lost" in Iraq, or the trillions not accounted for at the DoD, also find their way to neoCon campaign coffers?

Whatif the money Abramoff used is a small potatoes operation covering up the big one?

Just wondering out loud ...

Thanks for the link, Brad. VoteTrustUSA also has a good article, with a picture of the seedy location in Houston where The Election Center is located.

To Doug E.: The Diebold "$0.00" transactions don't appear suspicious to me. I don't think they indicate hiding inventory. I didn't see anything blacked out.

The suspicious amounts are in the 2003 General Ledger, which has a flat $100,000 "undefined security expense" (that kind of entry would be unusual for installing security, hiring security consultants, but can be consistent with blackmail.) Note the timing on that. The stockholder suit's begin period is Oct 22 2003. The "undefined security expense" is dated Oct. 31, 2003. Other things happening around then included the online publication of the Black Box Voting book (Oct 2003) and the Diebold memos going online all over the planet (Sept 2003, Black Box Voting; site shutdown; memos began circulating at Swarthmore and elsewhere Oct. 2003).

Diebold had a rough month in Oct. 2003, and didn't disclose just how rough to its investors in its Oct 22 8k form. But if you pay a damage control firm, like Public Strategies, you name who the payment goes to. You can see their damage control expenditures in the check register we posted. They specify "Public Strategies" and the amount is not even.

I want to know who got the $100k and what "security" it purchased for Diebold.

With his baseball cap, Abramoff has just won second prize in the first ever "Joe Torre Look-Alike Contest."

Now maybe Jack (Abram) off can convince George Steinbrenner to bail him out and put him in the Yankee dugout in place of the real Joe Torre. Abramoff could be counted on to provide enough cash flow to give all the Yankee superstars new long-term contracts, while Steinbrenner pleads guilty again in exchange for a suspended sentence for everyone.

The Abramoff case has some indicators that it is a cover-up of a much larger criminal endeavor.

The prosecutor at the DoJ is a Bush crony (link here).

It could turn out that political foes of the president are targeted more, and that the funneling of billions of dollars thru Iraq "lost" cash and "unaccounted for" funds from the DoD to neoCon campaign coffers is what is being covered up.

Re: ElectionCenter

Thanks Doug, Florida, Bev and Brad for your information.

All is not as it seems!

Actually Bev I'm talking about the fact they show no amounts, and come one after the other in a list. What I mean by blacked out is there IS no entry besides a zero amount. They don't specify where any of it goes..

I think what was most suspicious is the fact they wrote these "checks" to their parent company Diebold Inc. and they all came out in May-July 2004.....that was more than 5 months before the general election

Doug E

Doug: We haven't reconstructed the shredded documents, so don't know what else we have. I don't think we have the same pre-check register form for other months. For all we know, they did this every month.

There should be more specificity, but this may be a routine transaction. Notice the other transactions, and you'll see that the fact they came one after another is not unusual. Their payments to Fed Ex, for example, come one after the next and are all then totalled up. What their accounting report is doing is categorizing the expenditures by the number of the account set up for each expense.

Still don't see anything to write home about with those transactions. Others --- Juan Andrade in particular, are more obviously inappropriate. Funds to him and to ACG Group were used for "persuasion" in Ohio and Illinios.

With all the election threads now days on this blog it would be nice if the other threads were not OT'd with the same things.

The old timers are leaving.

We have Velvet R, BBV, and now is this blog going exclusively voting machine subjects too?

That will be costly. Just thinking out loud.

Could it be that Abramoff was caught by the NSA spy manifesto?

Or by the IRS spying on American political views (link here)?

Note that some of the charges he pled guilty to had to do with tax evasion.

NO, One hat for this shitbag the GOP HAT jack abramoff

Abramoff is using hints. Gangster hat first, a shout to the mob to control things for him. Journalist in DC gets beat to death(NYT DC boss).

Baseball hats. That's dubya and other MLB siphons/fronts.

He used the mob to steal FLA in 2000. The Sun Cruz lines hosted Atta and other 9-11 pilots. The half-owner of said boat was Sicilian who was arrested in italy for weapons sales and laundering.

The deal goes down in NYC, PNAC plans full steam ahead. Boulis offed.

Laundered funds from gambling and christan coalition develop campaign stratagy, mobilize voter blocks, and play a shell game of competing Indian tribes and states one against another with the Ralph Reed help as the differentiator.

Religious initiatives and pork contracts come back out, the best place to launder is overseas where the continued outsourcing is aimed.

All that was needed was a big event to make people forget about enron, the longest ever vacation for a POTUS, and the vote theft in over 6 states.

Establishing a revolving door and making it interactive by pasrallel transfer of people in staff.

Hill&Knowlton was a big PR firm and has employed people at key points in the Abramoff machine.

"His favor to the Martinos set up the Niger document along their M/O. The Italians hold the enabler to bail their ass out of involvement with the SISMI/Hill&Knowlton/Ledeens. Meanwhile the witness protection end run and martial law in Florida let them cover tracks in 9/11 and Bush smothered the aftermath. There's a Florida memo somewhere that probably got burned with the Embry Riddle documents.

Something like the Phoenix memo.

The other possibility was that Ghorbanifar/Curveball was a composite person.

Curveball's testimony was composite. Combos of distinct seperate programs. So they go the extra mile,t he German burn source stories get dumped in with the Niger forgeries.

Aluminum tubes after the fact(Mijbel proved them wrong).
Yellowcake(Ghorbanifar).
Atta/Prague by the same PR contacts who lied desert storm one.

Fool me one, shame on me...

Hill&Knowlton- the DSM/Atta Prague claims, along with Rome office Niger forgeries. They maintained old letterhead from UK service contracts.

Mob elements in FLA support 9-11 cell. Also used as middle men for the Niger delivery."

Hill& Knowlton is headquartered in the UK(DSM). Shaping the evidence is something PR firms do, it is a PR term. They have office in Rome(Niger forgery) and in Africa. Jerusalem as well.

They run the BBC Prague office. The fake Atta story is theirs. The Niger forgeries.

The same firm did the baby incubator fraud for desert storm one. They did not change names, methods, or targets.

Stay the course.

Isn't it obvious? Kevlar lined, bullet resistant, hats. He was wearing very bulky clothing in the DC picture (body armor?) . He's taking every precaution to prevent from being assasinated.