Friday 31 January 2003
Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections.
Maybe it's true that the
citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max
Cleland, a wildly popular war
veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican
challenger suggested in his
campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W.
Bush, Alabama's new Republican
governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of
other long-shot Republican
candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw
polls
showed them losing in the last few election cycles.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science
that it's now sometimes used to verify
how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly
become inaccurate in the United States
in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just
a coincidence that the sudden rise of
inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed,
computer-controlled,
modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.
But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.
You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all
its citizens rather than a handful of
corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control
the voting machines. You'd think the
computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software
and programming available for
public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote,
which could be followed and audited if a
there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized
vote counts.
You'd be wrong.
The respected Washington, DC publication The
Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio
talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head
of, and continues to
own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed,
programmed, and
largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens
of Nebraska.
Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's
computer-controlled voting
machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the
general election. The Washington
Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic
governor was the major
Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of
www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel
won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities
that had never before
voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate
seat in Nebraska.
Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka
in 2002, and won in a landslide. As
his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second
term in the United States Senate on
November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political
victory in the history of
Nebraska."
What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those
votes were counted by
computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated
with Hagel. Built by that company.
Programmed by that company.
"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic
opponent in the 2002 Senate
race, Charlie Matulka (www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). "They
say Hagel shocked the world,
but he didn't shock me."
Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's
proverbial canary in the
mineshaft?
In Georgia, Democratic incumbent and war-hero Max Cleland was defeated
by Saxby Chambliss, who'd
avoided service in Vietnam with a "medical deferment" but ran his campaign
on the theme that he was
more patriotic than Cleland. While many in Georgia expected a big win by
Cleland, the computerized
voting machines said that Chambliss had won.
The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction in a 6 November 2002 headline:
"GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS." The BBC echoed the confusion of many
Georgia voters when they wrote, "Mr. Cleland - an army veteran who lost
three limbs in a grenade
explosion during the Vietnam War - had long been considered 'untouchable'
on questions of defense
and national security."
Between them, Hagel and Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control
of the Senate. Odds are both won fair
and square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate money to carpet-bomb
voters with television
advertising. But either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety
in an election casts a shadow over
American democracy.
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which
all other rights are protected," wrote
Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce
a man to slavery.."
That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.
"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just
by taking over our election
systems."
Taking over our election systems? Is that really possible in the USA?
Bev Harris of www.talion.com and www.blackboxvoting.com has looked into
the situation in depth and thinks
Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened
her with legal action when she
went public about his company having built the machines that counted his
landslide votes. (Her response was
to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release
to 4000 editors, inviting them to check
it out. www.blackboxvoting.com/election-systems-software.html)
"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states,"
Matulka said in a January 30, 2003
interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country,"
he added, "because they leave
no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just
about have control of our voting
machines."
In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of business,
and the news arms of the huge
multinational corporations that own our networks are suggesting the days
of exit polls are over. Virtually none
were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that caused
unease for the many American voters
who had come to view exit polls as proof of the integrity of their election
systems.
As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are
wondering if it's a good idea for
corporations to be so involved in the guts of our voting systems. The whole
idea of a democratic republic was
to create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its citizens,
answerable to its citizens, and
authorized to exist and continue existing solely "by the consent of the
governed."
Prior to 1886 - when, law schools incorrectly tell law students, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that corporations
are "persons" with equal protection and other "human rights" - it was illegal
in most states for corporations to
involve themselves in politics at all, much less to service the core mechanism
of politics. And during the era of
Teddy Roosevelt, who said, "There can be no effective control of corporations
while their political
activity remains," numerous additional laws were passed to restrain corporations
from involvement in politics.
Wisconsin, for example, had a law that explicitly stated:
"No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or
offer consent or agree to pay or
contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of
its officers or employees or thing of value
to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political
purpose whatsoever, or for the
purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat
the candidacy of any person for
nomination, appointment or election to any political office."
The penalty for violating that law was dissolution of the corporation,
and "any officer, employee, agent or
attorney or other representative of any
corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation" would be subject
to "imprisonment in the state
prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years" and
a substantial fine.
However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite direction,
with governments answerable to
"We, The People" turning over administration of our commons to corporations
answerable only to CEOs,
boards, and stockholders. The result is the enrichment of corporations
and the appearance that democracy in
America has started to resemble its parody in banana republics.
But if America still is a democratic republic, then We, The People still
own our government. And the way our
ownership and management of our common government (and its assets) is asserted
is through the vote.
On most levels, privatization is only a "small sin" against democracy.
Turning a nation's or community's water,
septic, roadway, prisons, airwaves, or health care commons over to private
corporations has so far
demonstrably degraded the quality of life for average citizens and enriched
a few of the most powerful
campaign contributors. But it hasn't been the end of democracy (although
some wonder about what the FCC is
preparing to do - but that's a separate story).
Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance
of voting over to private,
for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and
stockholders, puts democracy itself at
peril.
And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations
to then place himself into an
election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to
create a parody of democracy.
Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts. Or maybe
he's on to something. We won't
know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.
When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel
and Director of the Senate Ethics
Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete,
asking him why he'd not
questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details
of his ownership in the company that
owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director
reportedly met with Hagel's office
on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second
meeting, on the afternoon of
January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his
job.
Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count
of the vote in the election he lost to
Hagel. He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska
has a just-passed law that prohibits
government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even
in a recount. The only machines
permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed
by the corporation formerly
run by Hagel.
Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone,
as if he were watching his
children's future evaporate.
"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."
Thom Hartmann is the author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate
Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights." www.unequalprotection.com This
article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for
reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this credit is attached.