Reply #1: via e-mail: THE ROAD TO BOONDOGGLE IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS [View All]

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THE ROAD TO BOONDOGGLE IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS:
HELP AMERICA VOTE ACT (HAVA) LOBBYIST LIST

Question: What happens if you lobby a lawmaker for $4 billion in
expenditures for touch-screen voting machines and go back to that same
lawmaker two years later asking to dump DREs?

Answer: You lose credibility. It might be hard to lobby for other
things. It's politically embarrassing. And your members, or funders,
might have a few questions to ask about the prudence of your lobbying
expenditures.

BUT HOW COULD ANYONE HAVE KNOWN?

The road to voting computers was paved with good intentions. No one
knew that some of the programmers for voting computers would turn out
to be convicted embezzlers.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/14318.html

No one realized that the main sponsor of the HAVA bill -- Rep. Bob Ney
-- would end up going to jail on corruption charges.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/46466.html

Few realized that the federal testing labs, Ciber and Wyle, weren't
doing their jobs and their overseers -- NASED and now the EAC --
failed to check their work.
Wyle failures (Bowen Hearing): http://www.blackboxvoting.org/itahearing.pdf
Ciber failures: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/46428.html

HAVA bought a lemon.

WHO BIT INTO IT?

Progressive public interest groups. Labor unions. Civil rights groups.

While many election reform activists are under the impression that
touch-screen (DRE) voting machines were some sort of Republican plot
to take over America, the truth is that lobbying for the DRE-seeking
"Help America Vote Act" came primarily from the foundation of the
Democratic Party itself.

Activists throughout America have expressed surprise at the Democratic
Party's unwillingness to pull DREs off the shelf. One reason is simply
this: To do so would damage the credibility of those who lobbied for
HAVA. And those who lobbied for HAVA just happen to be the biggest
funders and activist workhorses for the Democratic Party itself.

WHO INVESTED THEIR CREDIBILITY (AND MEMBERSHIP FUNDS) TO LOBBY FOR HAVA?

1. Public interest groups - mostly progressive
2. Big labor
3. Minority rights groups
4. Disability rights groups
5. Industry

Of these, the first four tend to favor Democrats but the fifth group
-- industry, the group charged with writing the computer code that
counts America's votes -- is made of vendors that are more often close
to the Republican Party.

Democrats lobbied HAVA in but to a large extent, Republican-affiliated
vendors executed the mechanics of the plan. Some would call this
comical; others, tragic.

PUBLIC INTEREST GROUP HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. People for the American Way
2. Common Cause
3. American Civil Liberties Union
4. League of Women Voters
5. American Jewish Committee
6. Hadassah
7. American Association for Retired Persons
8. Public Citizen
9. American Network of Community Options and Resources
10. Constitution Project (Georgetown University)
11. Open Society Policy Center (Soros)

LABOR UNION HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
2. Laborers International Union of North America
3. International Brotherhood of Teamsters
4. United Auto Workers
5. American Federation of Teachers
6. AFL-CIO
7. UNITE (Industrial & Textile employees)

Of the seven HAVA-lobbying groups above, five are among the Top-20
largest donors of all time to any political party. All five donate
almost exclusively to the Democratic Party and its candidates. None of
the top 20 Republican donors lobbied for HAVA.

According to OpenSecrets.org, the labor unions that lobbied for HAVA
have given nearly $150 million to support Democrats since 1989, and
six were in the Top-20 Democratic PAC funders for 2006-06.

MINORITY RIGHTS HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
2. National Council of La Raza
3. Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF)

DISABILITY RIGHTS HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. American Foundation for the Blind
2. The ARC of the United States
3. National Disability Rights Network
4. Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund
5. United Cerebral Palsy Association

Black Box Voting has been unable to locate the lobbying disclosure
forms for the American Association of Persons with Disabilities (AAPD)
featuring the vocal Jim Dickson, nor did we find any disclosure forms
for the National Federation for the Blind (NFB), the group that took
$1 million from Diebold. Misfiled? Misnamed? Overlooked? Omitted?

Link for NFB $1 million from Diebold:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/73/36492.html

COUNTY GOVERNMENT HAVA LOBBYING
1. Riverside County, Calif.
2. San Diego County, Calif.
3. Ventura County, Calif.
4. Miami-Dade County, FL

INDUSTRY & BUSINESS HAVA LOBBYISTS

1. Accenture
2. VoteHere
3. Election Systems & Software
4. AccuPoll
5. Danaher
6. Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs
7. US Business & Industry Council
8. Assocation of Technology Act Projects

Not found on lobbying forms pushing HAVA: The SAIC, the ITAA, and Diebold.

Diebold Election Systems Inc does not show up on the 2001-02 HAVA
lobbying forms, but did lobby for elections issues in 2004 and 2005.

Also notably missing are the firms referenced by R. Doug Lewis of "The
Election Center" in an August 2003 meeting. In this tape recorded
meeting, he said that HAVA was put into place by an election systems
task force which included Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman, EDS, and
Accenture.

Of these, only Accenture shows up the lobbying forms, and there is no
entity called Election anything, except for Election System & Software
and another company, election.com, which lobbied for Internet voting.
(See Chapter 8 of Black Box Voting for more on the Saudi-owned
election.com, which was later taken over by Accenture -
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf - See Chapter 16 for
more information on the tape recorded meeting:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-16.pdf )

What about Choicepoint? Choicepoint says it didn't lobby for HAVA.
Choicepoint says it hasn't had any involvement in elections.

The lobbying forms don't show lobbying for voting machines, but a
lobbying firm called Fleishman-Hillard Government Relations filed a
registration form in 2002 indicating they planned to lobby for
"Election Reform" on behalf of Choicepoint. Muddying things up, no
2002 lobbying form appeared showing that they did. In 2001, however, a
lobbying form clearly puts Choicepoint in the middle of HAVA lobbying,
showing that Choicepoint was involving itself in lobbying for the
voter registration component of HAVA.

Choicepoint has repeatedly stated that they have "no involvement
whatsoever" in elections, and in rebuttal to a controversial article
that appeared for a short while on OpEd News, Choicepoint came on to
deny that they lobbied for HAVA. More on Choicepoint here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17778.html

Choicepoint, a controversial database broker, clearly cannot state
that it has "no involvement in elections."

Choicepoint stakeholder Donna Curling, wife of Choicepoint chief Doug
Curling, has continued to fund election reform lobbying by providing
funding for some of the activists working on the Holt Bill.

THEY THOUGHT DRE VOTING MACHINES WOULD HELP THEM BUILD THE DEMOCRATIC BASE

Those who lobbied for HAVA were convinced that the DRE machines would
solve problems, helping more people vote.

1. Many of the HAVA reformers believed that with DREs, people with
less education would be more likely to fill out the whole ballot. In
fact, they reasoned, the DRE machines would be easier to use for
educationally disadvantaged populations, minorities,
non-English-speaking voters, and the disabled.

Few studies back these conclusions up, and those that do have
generally not been replicated, or were not peer reviewed, and
sometimes show methodology that is as flawed as the lemons HAVA
bought. The occasional studies that have been done -- even those
prepared by DRE advocates -- sometimes end up with troubling caveats.
A Georgia study purported to show that "most people like voting on the
DREs" (but rarely mentions the small print: The same study showed that
the African-Americans surveyed distrusted the touch-screens).

2. The citizens' right to oversee local elections -- and especially
the citizens' right to even get access to information -- has been all
but eliminated through the implementation of HAVA. The original civil
rights concept was virtuous.

Federal Government is the entity that enacted civil rights, HAVA
reformers reasoned, so therefore let's ask the federal government to
fix our elections process.

Be careful what you ask for. It just might get "fixed."

REAL SOLUTIONS

If federal government is going to correct anything, it should start
with enacting tougher standards to give citizens Freedom of Access to
Elections Information -- mandating that the system actually PRODUCE
the information needed for citizens to make sure the right candidate
was place in office, in a TIMELY manner, that is COST EFFECTIVE and
USABLE, prohibiting removal of the information through proprietary
claims.

And above all, local CITIZEN oversight must be protected. In almost
every case, discoveries of problems with elections and the computers
that count them have been discovered by ordinary citizens, not by
government oversight, auditors, consultants, certifiers, or experts.

And if we are going to rid ourselves of the DREs, we need to get past
the -- er -- little "problem" of the threat to credibility if former
HAVA lobbyists take the courageous step of changing course.

They couldn't have known. Perhaps a set of tough investigative
hearings can provide the evidence to brace those backbones for the
change in direction. Look to Calif. Secretary of State Debra Bowen's
well-prepped, no-nonsense hearings on the certification process for
examples, and start by issuing subpoenas to Diebold's master
programmer, Talbot Iredale, and Ciber's Shawn Southworth (who refused
to show up for Bowen's hearing).

This thing can be done. It doesn't need a bandaid, it needs a disinfectant.

SEE FOR YOURSELF HOW HAVA CAME TO BE:

Photocopies of the lobbying forms are in the process of being uploaded
to the Black Box Voting Document Archive. You will find lobbying forms
for all of the groups listed above as they are uploaded here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/46539.html