What happens if we start with known public corruption cases and work backwards to the intersection with elections?
What you will find is kickbacks and bid-rigging schemes; at least two of these, in New Orleans and in Pennsylvania, connect back to Ciber, the Independent Testing Authority (ITA) that supposedly tested and then signed off on most of the U.S. voting machines currently in use in all fifty states, on behalf of the federal government.
You will learn of a now-admittedly corrupt government technology official who benefited from rigged bids, (courtesy of Ciber) who had placed, as one of his first priorities, setting up his very own Internet Voting system.
And when you look into money-laundering, the mechanism providing the juice for corruption, you’ll find out about a strikingly odious situation: a New York City Democrat who bribed New York City Republicans to help him run for Mayor (as a Republican). The case has recently made news as at least 5 high-ranking elected and party officials were rounded up this week as part of a sweeping FBI sting in the Empire State.
“Trust” will never suffice when it comes to conducting elections. There can never be a place where counting votes in secret, or governmental snooping on how we voted, or hidden money behind campaigns, or hiding records on elections, can be accepted by the public, yet that is happening right now. In all fifty states.
Vendors who do business with the government do participate in bid-rigging and kickback schemes, and both politicians and government employees sometimes deprive the public of honest services, as we find in the New Orleans case involving Ciber, the company which signed off on almost every electronic voting system in use across the country today.
Political corruption spreads like cancer. It creates a neural system of one politician beholden to another. The public always needs to retain its right to know, to examine documents, and to see what’s going on. Otherwise, who’s gonna notice? Who’s gonna tell?
I write about it all in great, and sordid, detail today at BlackBoxVoting.org, where, as I note, the moral of the story is this…
Before we agree to some pie-in-the-sky idea that secret vote counting processes are safe because some company tested them…
Before we accept the idea that some legislators can pass a law telling us we have to cede over our right to know…
We need to understand that when it comes to elections, trust is childlike. It’s wishful thinking. It’s immature.
It’s not how the world works, and we owe it to our children to remember that.
See Black Box Voting for the full story…
Bev Harris is the founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, a non-partisan elections watchdog organization. Her work and investigations at BBV have been featured by dozens of national media outlets, and she is featured prominently in HBO’s 2006 Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy. Follow her on Twitter: @BlackBoxVoting
Bev: Just a suggestion, but perhaps the word “Independent” in the officially recognized category of “Independent” Testing Authority should be in quotes.