Team Bush paid MILLIONS to Nathan Sproul
-and tried to hide it!

Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas
June 30, 2005

In the months before the presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group-run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party-had been hired by the Republican National Committee.

Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states--and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."

It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?

If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.

In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.

[...] Sproul is currently under investigation by the Oregon Attorney General's office, for altering the voter registration forms of several thousand students in that state. Whether the new numbers are in part mistaken, they represent a huge expense for the Republicans. Given Sproul's history of serious electoral mischief, affecting countless Democratic voters in the last election, it is important that we ask some sober questions: Where did all that money come from? Why did the RNC suppress their real expenditures? And what exactly did Sproul do for all that pay? If we're going to get some reasonable answers, the FEC must understake a very thorough audit of the books.

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Election officials examine blogs' role in campaigns

Eric Black, Star Tribune - June 30, 2005

Is the Internet breathing new life into democracy by empowering citizens to air political opinions, or will it morph into a zillion-gigabyte loophole that unravels campaign finance reform?

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) confronted those questions at hearings that concluded Wednesday. A judge has ordered the FEC to consider how the Internet should be treated under the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Bloggers and their readers are worried that the FEC's final answers, in the form of new regulations, will chill the free-wheeling atmosphere of the blogosphere.

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Nader Campaign Coordinator Pleads Guilty to Election Fraud

28 Jun 2005

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) - The coordinator for Ralph Nader's 2004 presidential campaign in Virginia pleaded guilty Tuesday to election fraud.

James P. Polk, 47, will serve 30 days of home detention and was fined $2,500.

Polk was accused of illegally certifying petitions to get Nader, an independent candidate, on the ballot. He was indicted on 10 counts of election fraud in October, but prosecutors withdrew nine of those counts.

Nader's name was not placed on the ballot in Virginia. His campaign needed to collect 10,000 signatures of registered voters, but fell well short.

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2 counties risk lawsuits for spurning touch-screen voting machines

George Bennett - June 27, 2005

At least two Florida counties are balking at paperless touch-screen voting machines — and risking lawsuits — as state and federal deadlines loom for buying equipment that allows disabled voters to cast ballots without assistance.

The Volusia County Council rejected a contract this month to buy touch screens to supplement the county's optical-scan ballots. And Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho says he'd rather wait for a not-yet-approved voting device than buy any paperless machines.

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2004 Vote Fraud Facts Surface

Reporter Who Told Story of 2004 Vote Thievery Hushed by Mainstream Media Mogul

Greg Szymanski

Some people say Chicago Tribune columnist Robert Koehler works inside the belly of the beast, reporting for a corporate medium that is hungry for money but short on truth telling. Able to spit out a few morsels of truth every now and again, Koehler describes his unique position a little differently, suggesting it’s more like floating helplessly on top of a gigantic whale’s back instead of rumbling around inside its belly.

Wherever he sits, one of his recent columns, indicating that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, caused the ugly beast to let out a fierce roar, leading to a heated controversy inside the Tribune newsroom.

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Corporate control of the election process

John Gideon - June 22, 2005

Those who hold the sacred trust of overseeing the election procedures and voting systems in this country are an alphabet-soup of organizations. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS); the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED), the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC); the Election Center. What do these groups have in common? They either receive their funding from the vendors or are greatly influenced by those who do receive funding from the vendors. We can only hope that the EAC can resist the influence. The others haven't.

Who are these "vendors"? The vendors are the corporate face on our elections systems ­ the for-profit companies that develop and sell the equipment used to run our elections. They are those who have the most to gain from the influence they buy through their donations and dues to the alphabet soup, and that influence is considerable. They include names like Diebold, Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, Accenture, UniSys, Accupoll, and more. In fact they are all proudly named on the list of corporate affiliates of NASS.

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Gov.'s Donor Under Fire From State

Dan Morain - June 20, 2005

SACRAMENTO — A week after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned $10,000 to an Ohio contributor under federal fraud investigation, campaign finance reports show that the governor has accepted $67,300 from a La Cañada Flintridge nursing home operator whose company faces criminal elder-neglect charges.

Emmanuel I. Bernabe, who owns or has interests in 35 California nursing homes, was listed as one of 14 dinner chairmen at a Schwarzenegger fundraiser at the Century Plaza Hotel on March 16.

One day later, Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer filed a 13-count complaint against Bernabe's Pleasant Care Corp., alleging that the company and its Napa facility neglected residents, imperiling their health. The company has pleaded not guilty; the facility has been closed.

Although some of Bernabe's homes have been relatively problem-free, the Department of Health Services has cited several of the facilities for such problems as bad recordkeeping and patient neglect leading to bedsores, falls and, in a few instances, death.

State nursing home regulators, citing problems at homes that Bernabe and his partners own, have blocked him from buying more nursing homes in a series of actions dating to 1999.

[...] Since the start of Schwarzenegger's administration, state regulators have cited 11 of Bernabe's homes at least 51 times and levied $285,000 in fines against his nursing homes, according to records provided by the Department of Health Services and a watchdog group, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

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Guess Who's Going to Hollywood?

John Gideon, VotersUnite! and VoteTrustUSA

June 18, 2005

[...] This summer county, state, and national elections officials will be heading to Hollywood and Beverly Hills to enjoy four days of fun and sun sponsored, in part, by their friends at Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S. Yes, that's right. Diebold is co-sponsoring the "Welcome Reception"; ES&S is co-sponsoring the "Graduation Luncheon and Awards Ceremony" and Sequoia is co-sponsoring a Thursday evening dinner and dance.

This gathering is NOT a weekend or even a long weekend. This gathering is done during the work week while those officials are being paid by their counties or states, that is, the tax payer. So while they are on the clock, being paid by us, they will be enjoying the hospitality of the voting machine vendors who will be plying them with misinformation and free meals, snacks, and drink.

The list of speakers at this event is stunning in its absurdity. There is no one to speak the truth about voter verified paper ballots. Instead our elections officials who attend will get to hear from ousted Palm Beach Director of Elections Theresa LePore. Attendees will get to hear about "Challenged Elections and Recounts" from the King County, Washington Auditor whose county's elections were woefully mismanaged in November.

Many states have made it illegal for any elected official or employee to receive ANY gifts from vendors. Are any employees of your county elections office, or your county elections director, going to attend this corporate sponsored gathering? If you think they might, send them an email asking. Let them know you think it's a conflict of interest. Include their bosses, county commissioners, and/or state elections directors, in the email so everyone knows what will be going on. Let the media know that this event is a potential ethics problem.

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Business group must reveal data

Court ruling requires disclosure about funding in Texas House races

June 11, 2005

AUSTIN - A long-awaited ruling from the Texas Supreme Court on Friday requires the Texas Association of Business to answer questions about how it raised $2 million spent in targeted Texas House races in 2002.

[...] The TAB targeted 22 Texas House races, with its endorsed candidates winning 18 of those contests. The wins were key to the Republican takeover of the House.

Last month, a district judge in Travis County ruled that the treasurer of a political action committee founded by U.S. House Majority Tom DeLay violated state campaign-finance laws by not reporting more than $500,000 in corporate money used to influence Texas House elections. That ruling came in a lawsuit brought by five losing Democratic candidates against the treasurer of Texans for a Republican Majority, or TRMPAC.

TRMPAC and TAB also are under investigation by Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle. A Travis County grand jury has indicted three of DeLay's political associates and several major corporations on charges related to how money was raised or transferred to candidates.

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Schwarzenegger to return $10,000 after all

June 11, 2005

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided it's better, on second thought, not to keep $10,000 donated to his campaign by Maumee rare-coin dealer Tom Noe.

Last week, Mr. Schwarzenegger's chief fund-raiser said the governor planned to keep the donation but yesterday, a campaign adviser to the governor reversed course, saying he has ordered the money be returned.

The actor-turned-governor joins President Bush, the Republican National Committee, and at least 17 Ohio officials returning contributions, including U.S. Sens. George Voinovich and Mike DeWine as well as all three GOP candidates for governor: Attorney General Jim Petro, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and Auditor Betty Montgomery, who have given back a total of $17,100.

Gov. Bob Taft has returned the most, $22,190, while Mr. Bush returned $4,000 and the RNC $2,000. Five GOP justices on the Ohio Supreme Court said they, too, will identify and set aside campaign contributions from the Noes.

Mr. Noe and his wife, Bernadette, have contributed more than $200,000 to candidates, political parties, and political action committees in the past 15 years.

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State likely to overlook Diebold flaws

Officials expected to OK voting system despite problems on tests

June 10, 2005

In less than a week, state officials are poised to approve a new Diebold electronic-voting system that several large counties, including Alameda, want to use.

But the system showed problems in security, protection of voter privacy and printing of a paper trail during testing this spring.

State elections authorities have obscured the full nature of those problems by blacking out parts of test reports that have been released under the state Public Records Act and declaring other documents too full of Diebold "trade secrets" for public release.

During tests in late April and early May, a chief feature of Diebold's new computerized voting machine — the ability to print out voters' electronic choices so they could be verified and, if needed, recounted — performed so poorly that the state's testing consultant concluded "this version is not ready for use in an election."

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Something Rotten in Ohio

Gore Vidal - June 9, 2005

[...] I urge would-be reformers of our politics as well as of such anachronisms as the Electoral College to read Conyers’s valuable guide on how to steal an election once you have in place the supervisor of the state’s electoral process: In this case, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who orchestrated a famous victory for those who hate democracy (a permanent but passionate minority). The Conyers Report states categorically, “With regard to our factual findings, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.” In other words, the Florida 2000 scenario redux, when the chair for Bush/Cheney was also the Secretary of State. Lesson? Always plan ahead for at least four more years.

It is well-known in the United States of Amnesia that not only did Ohio have a considerable number of first-time voters but that Blackwell and his gang, through “the misallocation of voting machines, led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters.”

For the past few years many of us have been warning about the electronic voting machines, first publicized on the Internet by investigator Bev Harris, for which she was much reviled by the officers of such companies as Diebold, Sequoia, Es & S, Triad; this last voting computer company “has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide ‘cheat sheets’ to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand count mandated by state law.”

Yet despite all this manpower and money power, exit polls showed that Kerry would win Ohio. So, what happened?

I have told more than enough of this mystery story so thoroughly investigated by Conyers and his Congressional colleagues and their staffers. Not only were the crimes against democracy investigated, but the report on What Went Wrong in Ohio comes up with quite a number of ways to set things right.

Needless to say, this report was ignored when the Electoral College produced its unexamined tally of the votes state by state. Needless to say, no joint committee of the two houses of Congress was convened to consider the various crimes committed and to find ways and means to avoid their repetition in 2008, should we be allowed to hold an election once we have unilaterally, yet again, engaged in a war—this time with Iran. Anyway, thanks to Conyers, the writing is now high up there on the wall for us all to see clearly: “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.” Students of the Good Book will know what these words of God meant to Belshazzar and his cronies in old Babylon.

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Kaptur alerts colleagues of unfolding scandal

Brown says illegalities put presidential election in question

June 9, 2005

WASHINGTON - As the word spread Tuesday night that the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation had lost $215 million in a high-risk investment, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur alerted her colleagues to the mounting concerns in her home state.

Miss Kaptur, during a statement on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday night, said "there is a major political scandal that is unfolding in the state of Ohio."

"The governor of our state has permitted millions and millions of dollars of workers' money from the Ohio Worker's Compensation Fund to be invested in high-risk investments," Miss Kaptur said in a statement that was placed on the congressional record.

[...] Democrats such as Miss Kaptur and U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown of Lorain say the latest scandals mirror problems in Washington and even call into question the results of the 2004 presidential election.

[...] Mr. Brown said state government leaders have been "inept" and "incompetent" for a decade and the "depth of corruption in Ohio might set national records."

Mr. Brown called out Governor Taft, as well as GOP gubernatorial candidates Attorney General Jim Petro, State Auditor Betty Montgomery, and Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

[...] "I've watched up close the arrogance of [Republican House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay," he said, "and I see the way Taft, and Blackwell, and Petro … and those folks run the state government."

[...] Democrats say there is still more ground to be covered in investigating problems in Ohio, including a look at the 2004 presidential campaign.

Mr. Noe, whose attorneys told authorities two weeks ago that $10 million to $12 million of the state's assets were missing from the coin fund, is facing multiple investigations, including a federal probe into whether he laundered money into President Bush's re-election campaign. The Republican contributor was considered a Bush "pioneer" because he raised at least $100,000 for Mr. Bush's campaign.

"I think the George Bush campaign raised a lot of illegal money in Ohio," Mr. Brown said. "That puts the election in some question. I know these people stop at nothing and I know their incompetence kept a significant number of people from getting to vote."

President Bush has returned $4,000 in campaign contributions from Mr. Noe, joining Mr. Taft and a host of Ohio Republicans who have returned Noe campaign cash.

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Diebold calls for investigation of Leon County voting machines

June 09, 2005

Accusing Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho of "gross negligence" for allowing an outsider to test the county's voting equipment, Diebold Election Systems Inc. has called for an investigation to make sure the machines haven't been compromised.

Sancho recently allowed a team from Black Box Voting to see if it could crack the security systems of the electronic-scanning machines. The visitors were unable to get in from outside the courthouse, but when they sat down at the computer itself, they managed to pierce software security and change vote totals in the experiment.

Michael Lindroos, senior corporate counsel for Diebold, wrote to Sancho and said the company can't guarantee the security of the county system now that outsiders have been able to experiment with it. Lindroos sent copies of his letter to county commissioners and the state Division of Elections, urging them to troubleshoot the system before any elections are conducted on it.

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Test shows voter fraud is possible

Machines are vulnerable to manipulation

Tony Bridges - Jun. 04, 2005

All it takes is the right access.

Get that, and an election worker could manipulate voting results in the computers that read paper ballots - without leaving any digital fingerprints.

That was the verdict after Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho invited a team of researchers to look for holes in election software.

The group wasn't able to crack the Diebold system from outside the office. But, at the computer itself, they changed vote tallies, completely unrecorded.

Sancho said it illustrates the need for tight physical security, as well as a paper trail that can verify results, which the Legislature has rejected.

Black Box Voting, the non-profit that ran the test and published a report on the Internet, pointed to the findings as proof of an elections system clearly vulnerable to corruption.

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Gambling, GOP politics intertwine

Casino payments seen as influential

June 3, 2005

WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush gave the nation's gambling industry plenty of reason to fear his presidency.

He moved to shut down an Indian-run casino while governor of Texas. He declared in a widely circulated state report that ''Casino gambling is not OK. It has ruined the lives of too many adults, and it can do the same thing to our children." He wooed religious conservatives by boasting in a presidential debate about his ''strong antigambling record."

But as president, Bush has not spoken out against gambling. After promising not to take money from gambling interests, Bush's campaign fund accepted large contributions from gambling-related sources. His 2001 inaugural committee raised at least $300,000 from gambling interests, including gifts from MGM/Mirage, Sands, and a leading slot-machine maker. Bush later appeared at a Las Vegas casino for a fund-raiser for his reelection campaign.

Bush's retreat from his antigambling rhetoric came as Republican lobbyists and activist groups collected tens of millions of dollars from Indian tribes seeking to preserve their casinos. Now those payments are the focus of Senate and Justice Department investigations.

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Governors' ex-aide linked to campaign probe

June 03, 2005

H. Douglas Talbott, a former top aide to two Ohio governors, told federal authorities that Republican coin dealer Tom Noe persuaded him to contribute $2,000 to President Bush's re-election campaign - then reimbursed him for the donation, The Plain Dealer has learned.

Talbott appeared Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Toledo that is investigating whether Noe illegally reimbursed as many as two dozen contributors to a Bush fund-raiser in October 2003. The grand jury is looking into whether Noe made the reimbursements to circumvent campaign finance laws, which limit individual contributions to $2,000.

Repeated attempts to reach Talbott were unsuccessful.

His appearance before the grand jury marked the first time a former top aide to Gov. Bob Taft and former Gov. George Voinovich has been linked to the federal investigation of possible laundering of Bush campaign money.

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Optical scan system hacked

Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand-counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds. [via WhatReallyHappened.com]

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State Auditor Returns Campaign Money

June 1, 2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- State Auditor Betty Montgomery said she is giving back thousands of dollars in campaign contributions she received from a coin dealer under state and federal investigation.

Montgomery said Thomas Noe and his wife gave her campaign $8,100 dating back to 1993. Noe is under investigation for his handling of $50 million in workers' compensation money he invested in rare coins.

Federal authorities also want to know more about contributions Noe gave to President George W. Bush for his re-election campaign.

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