Author’s note:
This election is looking like a repeat of 2004. Ohio is once again the key swing state and Romney and his cronies have put together all of the necessary mechanisms to steal the vote in the state.
Excerpt:
No Republican presidential candidate has ever won an election without carrying the state of Ohio. So, it is probably no coincidence that Hart Intercivic, a company with strong ties to the Romney campaign, will be counting (or not counting) the votes in Ohio and in other swing states such as Colorado.
In all 234 counties of Texas, the entire states of Hawaii and Oklahoma, half of Washington and Colorado, and certain counties in swing state Ohio, votes will be cast on eSlate and ePollbook machines made by Hart Intercivic, even though a 2007 study commissioned by the state of Ohio has labeled its voting system a “failure” when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections.
Hart Intercivic, a manufacturer of paperless voting machines, has a key investor known as HIG Capital, seven of whose directors were former employees of Bain & Co., a consulting company of which Mitt Romney was once CEO. HIG Capital announced its investment in Hart on July 6, 2011, just one month after Romney formally announced the launch of his presidential campaign.
According to OpenSecrets.org, HIG Capital has contributed $338,000 to the Romney campaign this year. According to Craig Unger writing for Salon.com, four of the HIG directors, Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman and Brian D. Schwartz, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and HIG manager Brian Shortsleeve.
A report in The Nation tied HIG Capital to the Romney family via Solamere, a private equity firm that has invested in HIG and is run by Tagg Romney, the candidate’s son. Tagg is managing partner of Solamere Capital, which is a subsidiary of financial firms owned by Allen Stanford, a guy doing 110 years behind bars for an $8 billion Ponzi scheme. “Solamere, a firm predicated on its founders’ relationship with Romney, presents a channel for powerful investors to influence the White House if he wins.”
In this presidential election, Ohio is one of the eight closely contested states that could go either way. By most accounts, the others are Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire. In order to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to become president, Republican Mitt Romney probably would have to win the other seven if he loses Ohio.
Ohio typically votes for the eventual presidential winner. It has done so in 25 of the past 27 elections since 1904, missing only in 1944 when it went for Republican Thomas Dewey over Franklin Roosevelt and in 1960 when it went for Republican Richard Nixon over John Kennedy.
Vote flipping through electronic voting is very difficult to prove, since the totals remain the same for each precinct and there is no paper trail. It may have occurred here in Wisconsin this year in the GOP primary. If you look at slide one in the slideshow here, you can see Romney’s percent of the vote takes off and those of the others drop after about 7% of the votes are counted from the smallest to the largest precincts. Romney’s percentage of precinct votes goes up (the upward slope of the green line) while those of the three other candidates decline.
The steady increase in Romney’s percent of the vote and steady decline in Santorum’s represents a statistical anomaly. In this case, the anomaly is amazing according to the researchers. The probability of this happening by chance alone is so small it exceeds the capability of statistical packages to handle. Their software says Romney’s share of the vote, increasing with precinct size has zero probability of occurring by chance alone.
All five companies that provide paperless voting machines in the U.S. have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet their executives (including the candidate’s son Tagg Romney) insist there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially while they are controlling the machines that record and count the votes.
President Obama won by such a huge margin in 2008 that even with this anomaly built into the system, there was no way to steal the election without creating serious doubts about the entire system. This year the election is much closer. More than 100 million Americans will cast their ballots thinking their vote will be fairly counted as they should be, but there are legitimate concerns that all of them will be counted or cast on the correct ballot.
President Obama won by such a huge margin in 2008 that even with this anomaly built into the system, there was no way to steal the election without creating serious doubts about the entire system. This year the election is much closer. More than 100 million Americans will cast their ballots thinking their vote will be fairly counted as they should be, but there are legitimate concerns that all of them will be counted or cast on the correct ballot.
U.S. elections, however, have gotten to the point where U.N. officials have been asked by the ACLU and NAACP to send international monitors to oversee this election and look for fraud and officials in Texas have threatened to arrest them. Yet the real crooks know they can safely flip up to 10% of votes without consequence. Anything more than that is statistically suspect.
To sum it up, the vulture capitalist Republican son of the vulture capitalist Republican running for president is part-owner of voting machines in a state that is a must-win for any Republican seeking the presidency.
Read more, get links, see a slideshow and video here: Madison Independent Examiner – Real voter fraud set occur in Ohio