Ballot Tampering, Diebold and its GOP connections (long)

[Hamel]

By Roger Croteau
San Antonio Express-News
http://www.mysanantonio.com/specials/el ... xlc=860675

Web Posted : 11/08/2002 12:00 AM

NEW BRAUNFELS — What are the odds?
Let's just say it's the proverbial "astronomical."

Comal County elections officials noticed an extreme oddity after the final votes were tallied in Tuesday's general election.

County Judge Danny Scheel received 18,181 votes in his victory over Lois Duggan.

Republican state Sen. Jeff Wentworth also got 18,181 votes in Comal County in his win over Democrat Joseph Sullivan and Libertarian Rex Black.

To make matters even stranger, Comal County also gave Republican Carter Casteel exactly 18,181 votes in her victory over Democrat Virgil Yanta in the race for District 73 state representative.

"Isn't that the weirdest thing?" County Clerk Joy Streater asked. "We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence. I checked the precincts and the numbers are all different in every precinct for each of them. They just coincidentally all add up to 18,181."

Scheel hadn't noticed the anomaly.

"I'll be darned," he said when it was pointed out to him. "Look at that. That's weird."

Maybe it's not as weird as the daily Pick 3 lottery drawing in New York coming up 911 on the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001.

And it's not as odd as 202 people showing up to vote in alphabetical order at Box 13 in Jim Wells County in 1948, and all voting for Lyndon Baines Johnson, giving him an 89-vote margin of victory in the U.S. Senate race against Coke Stephenson.

But since some of those "voters" were dead or later testified at hearings that they did not, in fact, vote, some people don't consider that incident a coincidence as much as a fraud.

In Comal County, it's just the weirdest thing.

Board of Directors
Louis V. Bockius III (2,4,5)
6/28/00 $15,000.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
11/3/00 $10,000.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
10/9/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
10/9/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE

Christopher M. Connor
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The
Sherwin-Williams Company
5/22/00 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
3/30/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE


Gale S. Fitzgerald (2, 6)
President and Chief Executive Officer , QP Group, Inc.
7/12/00 $500.00
NEW YORK REPUBLICAN FEDERAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
10/12/98 $200.00
FRIENDS OF JOHN LAFALCE
10/18/99 $1,000.00
BUSH FOR PRESIDENT INC


Donald R. Gant (1,3,5)
Senior Director, The Goldman Sachs Group, L.P.


L. Lindsey Halstead (2,3,6)
Retired Chairman of the Board, Ford of Europe
12/22/98 $500.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
1/23/97 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
5/27/97 $200.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
10/31/97 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
12/28/99 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
3/7/01 $300.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
6/12/01 $200.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
11/27/01 $200.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
1/24/02 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE


Phillip B. Lassiter (1,3,6)
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Ambac Financial Group, Inc.
4/16/98 $250.00
NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE
CONTRIBUTIONS
9/21/98 $250.00
NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE
CONTRIBUTIONS

John N. Lauer (1,4,5)
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Oglebay Norton Co.
10/10/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE
8/23/00 $250.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
3/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE

Walden W. O'Dell
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, Diebold
2/14/01 $2,015.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
1/30/01 $3,950.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
8/16/01 $500.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
6/30/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE


Eric J. Roorda
Former Chairman, Procomp Amazonia Industria Eletronica, S.A.
W.R. Timken Jr. (2,3,4)
Chairman , The Timken Company
6/23/00 $50,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
6/8/01 $100,000.00
2001 PRESIDENT'S DINNER - NON-FEDERAL TRUST
3/14/01 $10,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
8/19/99 $15,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
11/3/00 $15,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
2/22/02 $1,000.00
RELY ON YOUR BELIEFS FUND
6/12/02 $1,000.00
OHIO'S REPUBLICAN SALUTE

Corporate Officers

Walden W. O'Dell
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer, Diebold (See above)

Wesley B. Vance
Chief Operating Officer
8/16/01 $500.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE

Michael J. Hillock
President, Diebold International
11/18/97 $500.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

David Bucci
Senior Vice President, Customer Solutions Group
11/18/97 $500.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

James L.M. Chen
Vice President and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific

Warren W. Dettinger
Vice President, General Counsel and Assistant
Secretary
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
1/30/97 $250.00
DEWINE FOR U S SENATE (2000)

Donald E. Eagon, Jr.
Vice President, Global Communications & Investor
Relations
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

Charee Francis-Vogelsang
Vice President and Secretary

Larry D. Ingram
Vice President, Procurement and Services
1/30/97 $250.00
DEWINE FOR U S SENATE (2000)
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

Dennis M. Moriarty
Vice President, Customer Business Solutions
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

Anthony J. Rusciano
Vice President, National Accounts
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
--- Hey Tony! Listing yourself as “retired” and using
your vacation home address to avoid campaign donation
limits is a tad naughty don’t you think?

Charles B. Scheurer
Vice President, Corporate Human Resources
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

Ernesto R. Unanue
Vice President and Managing Director, Latin America

Robert J. Warren
Vice President and Treasurer
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998

Evidence Of Opportunity ,

Republican connected control over the major election systems companies in the United States has been thoroughly researched.

Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems is also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company. Together these two companies are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast in the United States. Also significant, from what we can determine about the architecture of the software, is that its basic structure was specifically a creation of Mr Urosevich's company I-Mark.

For more background on Diebold Systems connections to the Republican Party see:

Diebold - The Face Of Modern Ballot Tampering
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0211/S00081.htm

Meanwhile Presidential wannabee and Republican Party United States Senator Chuck Hagel has been directly connected to ES&S via his campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, who has admitted that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group.

Senate Ethics Director Resigns; Senator Hagel Admits Owning Voting Machine Company
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0301/S00166.htm

Evidence Of Method

The evidence of method has been detailed in a companion article by Bev Harris, author of the soon to be published block-buster Black Box Voting.

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

In this article – which contains screenshots from the software and detailed instructions on how one might rig an election - Bev Harris explains security flaws thus:


The GEMS election file contains more than one "set of books." They are hidden from the person running the GEMS program, but you can see them if you go into Microsoft Access.
You might look at it like this: Suppose you have votes on paper ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. Then, you make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.

You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.

You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt not to.

Now, suppose you want to count the votes. Should you count them from room 1 (original votes)? Or should you count them from room 2, where they may or may not be the same as room 1? What Diebold chose to do in the files we examined was to count the votes from "room2."

Consistent Unexplained Circumstantial Evidence

During the 2002 Mid-term there were numerous reports of unusual happenings in counties throughout the United States.

Among the phenomena reported were voting numbers suddenly fluctuating in the middle of the counting process, something you might expect to see if the backdoor identified above were used clumsily.

An organisation called Votewatch was set up during the 2002 elections to record unusual happenings and its archives can be viewed here.

http://pub103.ezboard.com/bsoldiervoice

It will suffice here to cite a couple of specific examples – these are excerpts from the soon to be published " Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century". These examples of actual events are consistent with the existence and use of an electronic vote counting hack described above.

November 1990, Seattle, Washington - Worse than the butterfly ballot, some Democratic candidates watched votes alight, then flutter away. Democrat Al Williams saw 90 votes wander off his tally between election night and the following day, though no new counting had been done. At the same time, his opponent, Republican Tom Tangen, gained 32 votes. At one point several hundred ballots added to returns didn’t result in any increase in the number of votes. But elsewhere, the number of votes added exceeded the number of additional ballots counted. A Republican candidate achieved an amazing surge in his absentee percentage for no apparent reason. And no one seemed to notice (until a determined Democratic candidate started demanding an answer) that the machines simply forgot to count 14,000 votes.

November 1996, Bergen County, New Jersey - Democrats told Bergen County Clerk Kathleen Donovan to come up with a better explanation for mysterious swings in vote totals. Donovan blamed voting computers for conflicting tallies that rose and fell by 8,000 or 9,000 votes. The swings perplexed candidates of both parties. For example, the Republican incumbent, Anthony Cassano, had won by about 7,000 votes as of the day after the election but his lead evaporated later. One candidate actually lost 1,600 votes during the counting. “How could something like that possibly happen?” asked Michael Guarino, Cassano’s Democratic challenger. “Something is screwed up here.”

November 1999, Onondaga County, New York - Computers gave the election to the wrong candidate, then gave it back. Bob Faulkner, a political newcomer, went to bed on Election Night confident he had helped complete a Republican sweep of three open council seats. But after Onondaga County Board of Elections staffers rechecked the totals, Faulkner had lost to Democratic incumbent Elaine Lytel.

April 2002, Johnson County, Kansas - Johnson County’s new Diebold touch screen machines, proclaimed a success on election night, did not work as well as originally believed. Incorrect vote totals were discovered in six races, three of them contested, leaving county election officials scrambling to make sure the unofficial results were accurate. Johnson County Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt checked the machines and found that the computers had under- and over-reported hundreds of votes. “The machines performed terrifically,” said Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems. “The anomaly showed up on the reporting part.”

The problem, however, was so perplexing that Schmidt asked the Board of Canvassers to order a hand re-count to make sure the results were accurate. Unfortunately, the touch screen machines did away with the ballots, so the only way to do a hand recount is to have the machine print its internal data page by page. Diebold tried to re-create the error in hopes of correcting it. “I wish I had an answer,” Urosevich said. In some cases, vote totals changed dramatically.

November 2002, Comal County, Texas - A Texas-sized lack of curiosity about discrepancies: The uncanny coincidence of three winning Republican candidates in a row tallying up exactly 18,181 votes each was called weird, but apparently no one thought it was weird enough to audit. Conversion to alphabet: 18181 18181 18181 ahaha ahaha ahaha

November 2002, Baldwin County, Alabama - No one at the voting machine company can explain the mystery votes that changed after polling places had closed, flipping the election from the Democratic winner to a Republican in the Alabama governor’s race. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S. Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman earned enough votes to win the state of Alabama. All the observers went home. The next morning, however, 6,300 of Siegelman’s votes inexplicably had disappeared, and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested, but denied.

November 2002, New York - Voting machine tallies impounded in New York: Software programming errors hampered and confused the vote tally on election night and most of the next day, causing elections officials to pull the plug on the vote-reporting Web site. Commissioners ordered that the voting machine tallies be impounded, and they were guarded overnight by a Monroe County deputy sheriff.

November 2002, Georgia - Election officials lost their memory: Fulton County election officials said that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. No hand count can shine any light on this; the entire state of Georgia went to touch-screen machines with no physical record of the vote. Fifty-six cards, containing 2,180 ballots, were located, but 11 memory cards still were missing two days after the election: Bibb County and Glynn County each had one card missing after the initial vote count. When DeKalb County election officials went home early Wednesday morning, they were missing 10 cards.

2002 Elections: Republican Voting Machines, Election Irregularities, and "Way-Off" Polling Results

By Lynn Landes 11/8/02

"The Republicans will never give up their voting machines," said a top Republican party official to Charlie Matulka, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska. This statement was in response to Charlie's very public protest against the conflict-of-interest inherent in the candidacy of Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). Hagel has held top executive positions (and still has investments) in companies that owned the machines that counted the vote in Nebraska this election and last.

Republicans dominate the voting machine business. So, I expected the Republicans to take back the Senate... amid reports of voting machine "irregularities" in several states and polling results that didn't come close to election outcomes. And with billions of dollars at stake, who could resist the temptation to tweak results? It's duck soup.

Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, the nation's leading expert in voting machine technology, says, "Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result." But they do make mistakes as we know from the multitude of reports in this election and past ones. Dr. Mercuri's real fear is that one day the "irregularities" will go away, as programmers learn their clandestine craft all too well.

Then how can we tell if the "fix was in?" An examination of exit polling and pre-election polling versus election results could raise a few red flags.

We can't use Voter News Service (VNS) this year. VNS is a top-secret private consortium (currently) owned by ABC News, The Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News that has "projected" election night winners since 1964. VNS collapsed camp on election day due to technical problems... they said. Or was it the glare of publicity since the 2000 presidential election that brought the charade to an end? Questions have been raised since its inception, that VNS was a cover for election day vote rigging or other shenanigans. And it was strange that when VNS management made its announcement on Tuesday, they didn't make a big deal over how the shutdown affected the 46,000 temporary employees they claim they hired for this election.

Anyway, that leaves us with pre-election polling to ponder. An intensive effort to review and interpret that data is currently underway by Bev Harris and her staff at Talion.com.

Meanwhile, I called John Zogby of the highly respected Zogby International. I asked him if over the years he had noticed increased variation between pre-election predictions and election results. Zogby said that he didn't notice any big problems until this year. Things were very different this time.

"I blew Illinois. I blew Colorado (and Georgia). And never in my life did I get New Hampshire wrong...but I blew that too." Or did he?

This year might instead be a repeat of the 2000 presidential election, when the polls accurately predicted the winner (Gore), but the voting system in Florida collapsed under the weight of voting machine failure, election day chicanery, and outright disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters by Republican state officials.

And for those who believed that the new election reform law does anything to protect the security of your vote...think again. The federal standards to be developed and implemented as a result of the new law will be VOLUNTARY. What Congress really did was to throw $2.65 billion dollars at the states, so that they could lavish it on a handful of private companies that are controlled by ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners, and felons.

Let's take a moment to look back rather than forward. In the last several decades the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. This is not a formula for a conservative groundswell. Yet both conservative Democrats and right wing Republicans have long enjoyed success at the polls. While, most of Europe still uses paper ballots, voting machines have been in America since 1889. The use of computers in voting technology began around 1964. Today, less than 2% of the American electorate use hand-counted paper ballots.

The question is...have elections in America been rigged to slowly, but surely shift power to the right? In the secretive world of voting machine companies, anything is possible.

The sad fact is that the legitimacy of government in the United States will remain in question as long as over 98% of the vote is tabulated by machines that can be easily rigged, impossible to audit, and owned by a handful of private companies. Until we get rid of those voting machines, democracy in America may be a distant memory.

http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm

Republicans, Corporate Players Make the Voting Machines
Appearance of Impropriety — New Questions About the Integrity and Security of USA Elections

From Talion.com
See... http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html

The story is not about allegations of fraud — it's about an appearance of impropriety that is stunning in its magnitude.

Unfettered by any disclosure regulations about ownership or political affiliations, just a few companies create and control almost all the voting machines in the U.S.

Election Systems & Software, the firm whose machines were involved in the 2002 flubbed Florida primary election — and the company that now makes the voting machines for most of America — is a private company that does not like to tell the public who owns it. But at least one major shareholder is Michael R. McCarthy, who runs the McCarthy Group. The McCarthy Group has been a primary owner of Election Systems & Software, including its predecessor, American Information Systems for more than a decade. Michael R. McCarthy is the current campaign Treasurer for Republican senator Chuck Hagel. [See Hagel and McCarthy Documents] Prior to his election, Republican Senator Hagel was president of McCarthy & Company. In fact, he was first elected while his own company was making the vote-counting machines!




* * * * *
Let's have happy thoughts:

Before the 2002 Election, let's get disclosure from the handful of companies who make the voting machines that count our votes. These companies have nothing to hide (right?) so they should do this voluntarily. Then, Senator Hagel will lead the charge (won't he?) and he'll protect us from a situation that is, frankly, dangerous to Democracy, by getting some regulations in place:

(1) Require that any company who makes voting machines publicly disclose identities and political activities. And while we're at it, maybe criminal background checks are a nice idea, because if Republicans can control the big corporations that make the voting machines, just think what would happen if some crooks got into it. But I repeat myself.

(2) Require that all voting machines produce tamper-proof audit trails — and that means retaining a paper trail — using transparent computer code so that independent experts can investigate allegations of election tampering whenever needed.


* * * * *
More info:

Before Repiglicans start the squealing ("How DARE you bring this up so close the the election, you know we have no time to rebut this") — well, you can verify the facts yourself, in most cases using their own documents, if you go to google and run the following search terms:
"Election Systems & Software"
"McCarthy Group"
"Michael R. McCarthy"
"Charles T. Hagel"
— You'll find enough traceable leads to keep you busy for a week, if you run searches on the names and other related companies. And, for good measure, look up articles by Ronnie Dugger, who will show you how easy it is to fudge the vote-counting on these machines, in ways that can never be detected.

Why isn't tampering detectable?
Well, for one thing because Election Systems & Software fought in court to make its computerized code for vote-counting "proprietary." Only their own programmers, it seems, are allowed to look at the innards of the code. Independent computer consultants almost unanimously cite the voting machine's impenetrable code as a security flaw. Difficult to detect tampering, yet not very difficult to implant a Trojan Horse to change counting algorithms.




* * * * *
Who are these people, anyway?

We could go on for a week on this, and probably will. We've collected over 58 pages of information and there's more to come. But we might as well get started:

Election Systems & Software was formed by a merger of American Information Systems (AIS), a huge election company featuring several Republican owners, and Business Records Corp., part of Cronus Industries, in turn partially owned by a member of the Hunt oil family of Texas.

World Companies, Inc.: This is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Omaha World-Herald. It is a holding company with substantial ownership in Election Systems & Software, and it also controls World Marketing Inc., which operates gigantic databases and mammoth direct marketing companies. Election Systems & Software is also involved in voter registration services, and no one has questioned whether there is a conflict of interest with voter registration activity and access to the nation's largest databases containing race, political affiliations and other demographics.

Questionable associations and relationships throughout this conglomerate abound. One person with shares in the World Companies Inc. is Harold W. Andersen, who is on the board of directors for The Williams Companies — yes, that Williams Energy, recently exposed by CBS for creating a sham energy crisis in California. CBS cites tapes, now sealed by the government, that prove Williams Energy turned off the juice, faking an energy shortage.

Thank goodness a thoroughly objective organization like the Omaha World-Herald owns a chunk of Election Systems & Software. "The delays [in the fall 2002 Florida primary voting] were the result of start-up errors by poll workers, not malfunctions by the company's election equipment," the Omaha World-Herald reports.

And, should you have any doubt about the objectivity of the Omaha World-Herald, just look at its archive article publicizing stock picks (01/01/1989): the newspaper cites analyst's recommendations for about 20 stocks, among them: Valmont (whose chairman and CEO, William F. Welsh II, is now chairman and CEO and shareholder of Election Systems & Software, whose part-owner is the Omaha World-Herald); FirsTier Financial, whose CEO, P. E. Esping went down to Texas to become chairman and CEO of Business Records Corp, which later merged into Election Systems & Software. The paper cites another recommendation of FirsTier based on the involvement of Walter Scott, chairman of Peter Kiewit & Sons, but fails to mention that Peter Kiewit was the publisher and major shareholder of the Omaha World-Herald for two decades; the article recommends Val-Com, Inc, owned by Valmont, run by the CEO who is now the Election Systems & Software CEO; it goes on to recommend Cronus Industries (who owned Business Records Corp., which was purchased by the Omaha World-Herald's subsidiary and merged into Election Systems & Software); and for good measure, a plug is thrown in for Parker Drilling, a subsidiary of The Williams Companies that shared directors with the CIA, The George Bush School of Government, and Halliburton. The article cites no good reason to buy Parker Drilling, endorsing it simply as a good "speculative buy."

M. Gene Aldridge, the president and CEO of Omaha World-Herald subsidiary World Marketing, Inc. (the one that runs all those databases — he knows if you've been black or white, he knows if you are poor; he knows if you've been good or bad so behave for goodness sake!) is part of a conservative think tank, the New Mexico Independence Research Institute, and when he's not busy running the jumbo-sized database and direct marketing company, he is writing letters to Congress advocating that we take the huge future tax cuts and give them to the rich right now.


* * * * *
Here's more information on how Election Systems & Software came about, and who owns it:

From a 1996 article in The Omaha World-Herald:

"An Omaha company would become the nation's No. 1 ballot counter in a planned $59.3 million combination with a Dallas-based competitor...

"BRC is headed by a former Omahan, P.E. "Bill" Esping, who was a founder of First Data Resources.

"Under the agreement, American Information Systems would acquire the election division of Business Records. Both companies sell election counting and voter registration equipment and services based on optical scanners and paper ballots marked with pencils.

"Of the purchase price, $35 million would be in cash, $17.5 million in a note and the rest in stock of American Information, giving BRC about 20 percent ownership of the Omaha company. Stock owned by American Information employees would account for an additional 10 percent [OUR NOTE: This would include William L. Welsh II] with the remaining 70 percent owned by a partnership of the Omaha World-Herald Co. and the McCarthy Group, an Omaha investment banking company. American Information's share of the U.S. election automation market would increase to more than 50 percent..."


* * * * *
Ownership of Election Systems & Software, unraveled some more


Now, note that the above article says "the remaining 70 percent is owned by a partnership of the Omaha World-Herald Co. and the McCarthy Group. But who owns the McCarthy Group (besides Republican operative Michael R. McCarthy)? World Investments, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Omaha World-Herald Co., is a primary investor in the McCarthy Group. Round and round we go.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0210/S00044.htm