them think they could start an airline,” said former Director
of Operations Bill Bersch. “I mean, I was on the executive
team, trying to start an airline, and from August 2000 to the
present we had all of four business meetings...”FTR#’s 493 & 494—Two Interviews with Daniel Hopsicker about Electoral Fraud—(Each is two 30-minute segments) (Sources are noted in parentheses.) (Recorded on 1/2/2005 and 1/9/2005.)
Note: FTR#’s 260-316, 317, 324, FTR#325 and succeeding programs are streaming on Real Audio at www.wfmu.org/daveemory. FTR#’s 01-270, 316-324 are available for download only, also on Real Audio, on their Archive Page.)
Listeners are emphatically encouraged to use the internet to disseminate as much of the audio and printed material as possible. Note: all of this material is free.
Note: It is recommended that listeners print the program descriptions for optimum readability. It is emphatically encouraged that listeners use the printed files on the Spitfire web site and the audio files on the WFMU web sites to create their own research/teaching databases.
Summary of FTR#’s 493 & 494—(Note: The massive volume of “For The Record” programs about 9/11 and related topics is summarized and analyzed in the periodically-updated description for FTR#391. FTR#’s 454, 455, 456 are compilations of much of the key documentation culled from Mr. Emory’s investigation into 9/11. Along with FTR#391, they should give listeners/readers a substantive grasp of this momentous event. It is recommended that listeners use this description and e-mail it to others. Also: The book “Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile” is available in PDF at About Paul Manning. The book is also available in HTML at: http://www.animalfarm.org/mb/mb.shtml. In addition, the professional history of the late Paul Manning, the book’s author, is presented in the description About Paul Manning. This enables listeners to acquaint others with Mr. Manning’s journalistic credentials. Key material from the book is synopsized in an extended description for FTR#305. Understanding the Bormann organization is essential to comprehending the concept of “the Underground Reich.” Note also that U.S. Government documents proving Prescott Bush Sr.’s Money-Laundering on behalf of the Third Reich before and after World War II are available at a linked website, along with commentary by John Buchanan, who located the documentation. This material is discussed in FTR#435. The website containing the documents is www.debatecomics.org/BushFamilyFortune/ .) Due to the overlapping nature of FTR#’s 493 and 494, the descriptions for the two programs are merged into a single, longer document. The programs set forth the crooked nature of companies that make the electronic voting machines for US elections, as well as that corruption’s effects on the American political process. One of the most disturbing points of information presented here concerns the apparent use of phony terror alerts to manipulate vote-tabulating computers in two borderline states. In Warren County, Ohio and Tallahassee, Florida, dubious “terror alerts” caused the evacuation of key election facilities and the securing of both by security personnel. Much of the discussion focuses on Sequoia Pacific and its long-standing relationship with both organized crime and the GOP. A supposed competitor of Sequoia Pacific—ES&S—actually works closely with its “opponent.” Daniel Hopsicker investigates various gambling initiatives, and how the organized crime and political elements involved in election tampering skewered the vote tallies on those proposals. Charles Kane is a “former” CIA officer who advised the Ukraine on election matters in 1996, and was involved in the highly suspicious handling of absentee ballots in Martin County, Florida in 2000. The articles by Daniel Hopsicker have been reproduced here, for the convenience of the listener.
Program Highlights Include: The criminal conviction of Lloyd Dixon, head of Sequoia’s predecessor company; Dixon’s successor—Louis Wolfson—tried to bribe Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas; Sequoia’s involvement with a New Orleans gambling initiative; the conviction of SP’s Southeast representative Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci for bribing Jerry Fowler, Louisiana’s elections overseer; the suspicious “suicide” of the New Orleans official in charge of security for the building housing the election machines; Deborah and Richard Clark’s highly questionable involvement with both Sequoia Pacific and SP’s supposed competitor ES&S; the manner in which SP and ES&S swap machines back and forth; the extraordinary maneuvering Kathryn Ferguson used to purchase SP machines for Las Vegas; numerous examples of the strange and anomalous results achieved by some of these electronic voting machines.
1. Before presenting text that illuminates the discussion in FTR#’s 493 and 494, we present (in line-items 1-4) Daniel Hopsicker’s articles upon which the programs are based: “The Big Fix 2004”—How to Fix a Presidential Election”—Pt. 1: Convicted, Felons, ‘Shadowy Financiers’ Own Companies Counting Votes—November 15, 2004; Venice, Fl.; by Daniel Hopsicker (Accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/mc6912004.html.) An investigation into the surprisingly-sordid history of America’s “election services industry” has revealed that executives and owners of the two largest companies, E S & S and Sequoia Pacific, have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states.
And while a felony conviction may be enough to prevent you from voting in Florida, convicted felons can take heart in the fact that the “blemish” on their record in no way disqualifies them from owning companies counting the votes.
In fact, the word ‘coverup’ itself was invented to describe the activities of the original owner of Sequoia Pacific, "shadowy financier" Lewis Wolfson, who got caught bribing no less a personage than a Supreme Court Justice of the United States of America.
While Abe Fortas was forced to resign in disgrace, no such harsh fate befell Wolfson. When you own a company that counts the votes, politicians smile more kindly on you than they might otherwise... and for good reason.
Continuing this dubious 'tradition,' the owner of Sequoia Pacific until recently was also accused of bribing public officials, in this case the Prime Minister of Ireland.
While the name Dr. Michael Smurfit is not well-known to Americans, his company manufactures the software used to compile more than two-thirds of the nation's electronically-counted votes.
Perhaps this may help explain why, for the second Presidential election in a row, a Democratic bandwagon was derailed early on Election Night by an unusual television appearance by the Bush Family, after exit polls showed them losing in key battleground states.
While what transpired remains closely guarded, whatever went on behind the scenes was clearly decisive: Bush took the lead in the election, and John Kerry suffered the same fate as Al Gore had four years earlier...perhaps even in the same way.
Prima facie evidence that this year’s American Presidential Election was fixed can be found in the recent statements by numerous computer security experts that it could have been. And if it could have been, it probably was...
“If you leave the door to the bank vault open, sooner or later you’re going to get robbed,” said one. “Its just human nature. And besides, fixing elections is far more lucrative than robbing banks.”
Analysts describe the software as "spaghetti code," tangled strands of instructions indecipherable to outsiders. Experts say the code can be manipulated without detection. In fact, many believe it may have happened already.
So it may be of interest to learn the Smurfit (the richest man in Ireland, though he’s not Irish) has a penchant for hanging out at Geneva racetracks with international gamblers and Zurich currency speculators. He must have a habit for picking winners, too: his company was successful in suborning the Louisiana Commissioner of Elections for over a decade...
Jerry Fowler had run up some big gambling debts at Harrah's in Atlantic City, we learned. So he found the chance to pay off by making his voting machines "pay off" irresistible. In all, 22 people were indicted, 9 pled guilty, and Fowler went to jail.
But the Sequoia Pacific "Southeast Sales Manager," a man named Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci of Marlton, New Jersey, barely even got a slap on the wrist. For the crime of suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for over a decade, Mr. Ricci was sentenced to just a year...
A year of home detention.
Through multi-billion dollar federal subsidies, electronic voting has been pushed onto the American electorate. And its not hard to see why... the heady prospect of a sure thing.
But America may never again have an honest Presidential election.
Former Manhattan Commissioner of Elections Douglas Kellner told the MadCowMorningNews, “The problem is that, with an electronic voting system, you can never be sure that the vote is being recorded the same way it was cast. Because the only record is done electronically, there is no paper audit trail.
“And any good computer person can alter the electronic record.”
Most Americans, if they think about it at all, expect that the people standing behind the voting machines on which their votes are cast and tallied look like computer experts wearing white lab coats from IBM.
Nothing
could be further from the truth.
Investigating the ownership of
the two companies that together dominate the American elections
industry reveals evidence of routine and systemic bribery of public
officials, not just here but overseas (the recent Prime Minister of
Ireland, to give just one example.)
It is a world filled—not with guys in lab coats and pocket protectors—but with guys with links to the Mob, or international money launderers, Zurich currency manipulators, telecom scandals, off-shore Channel Islands accounts in the names of fictitious people, "untraceable shareholders," Bahamian resort owners, and supra-national financiers.
Tests performed and videotaped by candidate Susan Bernacker in New Orleans in 1994 demonstrated that votes she cast for herself were electronically recorded for her opponent. This test was repeated multiple times with the same result thus confirming that the machine had been fraudulently altered to influence the outcome of the election. In Louisiana there, was an election in 1996 , which was for local
After Susan Bernacker lost a New Orleans City Council race in 1994, she decided to exercise her legal right to inspect the voting machines three days after the election... and she took along a video camera.
(The shocking results can be seen in our documentary "The Big Fix 2000". )
Three times she keyed in her own name on the voting machines. and three times a vote for her opponent was registered. After these proceedings she perhaps justly feared for her life if she kept the secret to herself...She convened a hastily-called press conference, and then retired from public life.
The next president of the United States may not be chosen by the voters of the United States. Instead, he or she may be the choice of whomever controls or manipulates the computer systems that tally the votes," wrote Ronnie Dugger in the New York Times a decade ago.
"With the entire system shrouded in mystery and absent of assurances that the voting process is tamper-proof, voters these days have more reason than ever to ask, "Does my vote count?" "The whole damn thing is mind-boggling," said someone who investigates computerized elections. "They could steal the presidency."
“I don’t believe in counting votes in secret,” Manhattan Commissioner Doug Kellner told us. “I think the public has a right to see what’s happening at every step of the way.”
The problem is so manifestly obvious that even humor columnist Dave Barry was moved to offer a desperate solution, in the Miami Herald: "My suggestion - call me crazy - is that we print the ballot on paper, with a box next to each candidate's name. We instruct a voter to put an X in their candidate's box. Then we have human beings count the Xs."
Sounds easy, practical, and cheap.
In the coming weeks we’ll see why they’ll never let that happen.
2. Election Company Has Long Criminal History—Thugs, Racketeers Counting American Votes—November 24, 2004; Venice, Fl.; By Daniel Hopsicker (Accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/11242004.html.) While Ukrainians poured into the streets of their capital Kiev to protest a presidential election they say was stolen by that country’s current regime, here in the U.S. a little-known election company called Sequoia Pacific, responsible for putting our own ‘current regime’ in powerfour years ago, was at the center of controversy last week... for the second Presidential election in a row.
While U.S. newspapers have been filled with quotes from American officials pontificating about election miscues in the Ukrainian election, doubts have been raised anew about the accuracy of the election results of Sequoia Pacific, fingered for blame four years ago in the Florida Vote Snafu which marred the 2000 election.
Senator Richard Lugar, ‘monitoring’ butterfly ballots in Cyrillic, issued a statement calling the Ukrainian election “unfair.” And a top White House representative said authorities in the Ukraine appeared to have indulged in a "concerted and forceful program" of fraud.
Yet a MadCowMorningNews investigation into the ownership of the companies that count America’s votes has uncovered evidence indicating the crisis of democracy in Kiev is hardly more serious than the one taking place in Washington, D.C.
One of America's two major election companies, Sequoia Pacific, has a felony 'rap sheet' an arm-long. In the endless news coverage of the recent Presidential Election, this news has somehow failed to surface, perhaps because if it had, people might start pouring into the streets here, too.
Yet even as Sen. Lugar and the unnamed White House official were making their righteous statements about the virtues of democracy in foreign countries, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley were announcing their findings of irregularities in three Florida counties using electronic voting machines from Sequoia Pacific and industry giant Election Systems & Software, the U.S.'s two largest election services companies.
The "irregularities" resulted in a so-far inexplicable 260,000 additional votes for President Bush.
A New York Times editorial demanded a “Fair Vote Count.” But the editorial writers were referencing—not embattled citizens in the states of Ohio and Florida—but those of the Ukraine. The Times said, “International observers alleged systemic voting abuses.”
What the Times and almost all of the major media refuse to address is the fact that there has, to date, been no credible counter-argument put forward to counter the loud and vociferous assertions of numerous computer experts who insist that electronic voting machines can be rigged. And that if they can be rigged, they are…because if you leave the bank vault open, sooner or later someone is going to rob it.
The persistent allegation that American elections might not be as open and honest as has thus far been made known has received no serious coverage. Why the official silence?
Let’s take a look.
Two of the three Florida counties cited, Broward and Miami-Dade, used machines made by Election Systems & Software (ES &S). Palm Beach County uses machines from Sequoia Voting Systems. (The company which has so far received the most critical scrutiny, Cleveland-based Diebold Election Systems, has no touch-screen machines in use in Florida.)
In essence, the U.C. researchers said that Bush got more votes than could have expected, and attributed the discrepancy to "irregularities" associated with electronic voting machines.
"The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush," the study said. "Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 (election) and 2004."
“The association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush (in the three Florida counties) is impossible to overlook," the U.C. Berkeley researchers stated
What makes their conclusions difficult to dismiss as “anomalous evidence” is the nature and history of the election companies themselves...
Visible in the public record of Sequoia Pacific, a company counting one in three American votes, is clear and convincing evidence that the company has been run, perhaps for decades, as a Continuing Criminal Enterprise specializing in blatant and widespread bribery of public officials, with numerous felony convictions, Mob ties, and a history replete with stories of threats, coercion, and even murder.
Sequoia Pacific has a more colorfully-criminal corporate history, we learned, than that of any organization this side of the Gambino Family. In fact, the Gambino Family and Sequoia Pacific have had more than a nodding acquaintance, according to newspapers in New York reporting on the intrigue surrounding the awarding of a multi-million dollar contract for election machines in New York City during the mid-90’s, where Sequoia’s representative in the bidding gained notoriety for attempting to grease the skids al little at a marathon luncheon hosted by Salvatore Reale, a Gambino underboss who later pled guilty to racketeering.
Yet Sequoia Pacific is not unique... Instead, it is emblematic of the systemic wrongdoing of all three major election services companies.
Sequoia Pacific’s record is riddled with instances of criminal bribery and political corruption.
It began its modern life as Automatic Voting Machine, spun off to shareholders of Defense contractor Rockwell in the 1960s. The company’s founder, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr. resigned as president and CEO on Jan. 10, 1973, and later went to prison, after being indicted by a New York federal grand jury for bribing Buffalo election officials.
The company was fined nearly $50,000 for bribing Texas and Arkansas officials… not a particularly auspicious beginning.
Then things got worse.
Last week we briefly related the sordid tale of the next owner of Sequoia Pacific, financier and corporate raider Louis Wolfson. Wolfson was convicted of bribing the only Supreme Court Justice ever forced to resign in disgrace, “Dishonest Abe” Fortas.
Fortas got caught palming a lifetime yearly “retainer” from the wily Wolfson’s family foundation... Alas for "Dishonest Abe," as he came to be called, the Law draws no distinction between “accepting a retainer” and “taking a bribe.”
Fortas cut himself a deal. He taped phone calls, at the FBI’s behest, with Wolfson, who was pleading with the Supreme Court Justice to dummy up. In the transcripts of these phone calls the word ‘cover-up’ enters the American lexicon for the first time.
Apparently Fortas coined it at the instant of need, when he said (probably for the tape recorder), “No I can’t do that! That would be a cover-up!”
The Modern Age had begun.
Dixon’s main competitor, Ransom Shoup, also got sent to the Big House, in 1979. The company which became E S & S, barely escaped a Justice Dept. investigation, but only after a change in Administrations in Washington.
“We had to get Ronald Reagan elected President to get this thing (the investigation) killed, “quipped E S & S’s President at the time.
In a November 29, 1985 Chicago Tribune article headlined “VOTE MACHINES CAN BE A DIFFICULT SELL” a company marketing director is quoted as saying that “Whether working in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa or Latin American the first disquieting question of potential customers is always the same. ‘Can the things be rigged?’"
The election company exec, Ron Lawyer, spoke of meeting Shoup for the first time in Managua, Nicaragua, in the palace of then-Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, to whom Shoup was attempting to sell voting machines.
"Tacho (Somoza) had one question," Lawyer told the Tribune. “Can I be guaranteed the election?"'
We first learned of Sequoia Pacific’s penchant for greasing the palms of corrupt public officials from the well-publicized news accounts in the year 2000 about Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler, convicted of taking as much as ten million dollars over a period of a decade from Sequoia’s Southeast Representative, a man named Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci, from Marlton, New Jersey.
Even after pleading guilty to suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for more than a decade, Ricci remained something of a mystery figure, we learned to our surprise.
When L.J. Hymel, the silver-maned and somewhat elaborately-coiffed US Attorney for Louisiana gave a press conference on the steps of the US Courthouse in Baton Rouge after Fowler's sentencing, an out-of-state reported posed a question to him…
"Was Pasquale Rocco Ricci of Marlton New Jersey—the man convicted of bribing Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections for over a decade—a member of Organized Crime?"
"I don't know," replied Hymel. Apparently the question had not crossed his mind, or was of little concern. “I don’t know,” he repeated again, a little more forcefully this time.
The reporter persisted. "You're the US Attorney, and you don't know if the man who bribed the state Commissioner of Elections is a member of Organized Crime?"
From the shocked silence among the assembled members of what passes for a free press in the benighted state of Louisiana, it was clear that the question was akin to asking the U.S. Attorney whether he enjoyed having sex with small furry animals. It was a faux pas.
The reporter had violated a taboo.
Whether the man who fixed elections for Sequoia Pacific in Louisiana for over a decade was a member of organized crime was not considered a fit topic for discussion on the steps of the US District Courthouse.
And, indeed, the closer you look into the election services industry, the more the whole topic appears to have been placed off-limits. Had it not been, we would have already heard a lot more about Sequoia Pacific.
“Long-time Louisiana Governor Earl Long once claimed that with the right elections commissioners he could make the voting machines play “Home Sweet Home.” Commissioner of Elections and former pro football player Jerry Fowler would have been his kind of public official.
Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah's casino in Atlantic City in the mid-'90's, which helped explained his taking bribes. It was at this same time when allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace in Louisiana.
Curiously, gambling was the burning issue on the ballot in state elections at the same exact time.
One proposition concerned Harrah's proposal to build a casino in downtown New Orleans. From one of five losing candidates that alleged vote fraud in a suit at this time, we learned of the strange death of the Supervisor of Elections in New Orleans just two weeks before voters went to the polls.
Tony Giambelluca, who held the keys to the warehouse where the election machines were kept, turned up an apparent suicide. He had chosen to take his life behind a garbage dumpster, which seems an odd decision. Given the choice, we figure most people would choose to end their existence in a slightly more scenic locale.
The discovery that the election scandal had already consumed lives certainly quickened our interest. The sad fact is that nothing becomes a true scandal in America anymore until after the bodies begin to pile up.
Voting machine tests performed and videotaped by a suspicious local candidate immediately after this election demonstrated that votes Susan Barnecker cast for herself during the test were electronically recorded for her opponent.
The test was repeated several times with the same result. (The astonishing video footage is in our documentary The Big Fix, 2000. You can see the trailer here.)
Manhattan Commissioner of Elections Douglas Kellner investigated Barnecker claims, then questioned the reliability of Sequoia Pacific machines. The issue quickly became a focal point among people who distrust electronic voting.
But it was the efforts of another unsuccessful candidate, Woody Jenkins, the Republican Senate candidate in Louisiana in 1996, who lost the contested 1996 US Senate race by a hairsbreadth margin to Democrat Mary Landrieu, that led to prosecutions.
Allegations of voting irregularities by Republican Jenkins led to a year-long investigation. The probe quickly came across evidence of massive bribery, which became the focus of the investigation that followed, leading to charges that Elections Commissioner Fowler had squandered $8.6 million in state money on worthless election equipment, and taken kickbacks from voting machine contractors working for Sequoia Pacific, all in a scheme engineered by that company's executives.
Fowler was eventually sentenced to five years in prison.
But for Jenkins tenacious efforts the world might never have learned of Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci. And although Fowler's conviction was big news in the state's two major newspapers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate, neither mentioned the name of the company on whose behalf he was being bribed… Sequoia Pacific, which was successful at keeping the company's name completely out of local newspaper and television coverage.
So although the defendants signed admissions stating that the entire scheme was carried out on behalf of the Sequoia Pacific Corp., the firm garnered zero negative publicity. No 'bad pub' at all.
That's clout.
Study of this case revealed some interesting details about the way the 'election services' industry works...
First, the scheme showed that there was collusion, rather than competition, between the two major election services firms, Sequoia Pacific and E S & S. Court documents revealed the two sold voting machines back and forth to each other until they had arrived at the figure they wanted the client, the state of Louisiana, to pay.
Nor was this an isolated case. The bribery conviction of Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, for example, revealed that E S &S’s predecessor company, Business Records Corp. of Dallas, arranged for contracts which led to Smurfit Packaging Corp. and its subsidiary, Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment Inc.
More collusion.
Another discovery was that, like the CIA, Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of dummy front companies. For example, two Florida election execs, Glenn Boord and Ralph Escudero, pled guilty to conspiracy to compound a felony (public bribery), who had owned a paper voting-machine company called Uni-lect, which was just a front for Sequoia Pacific.
Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci's company, International Voting Machines, was also really Sequoia Pacific. So too was Harold Webb's Garden State Elections. (And also Herb Webb's Elec-tec.)
Webb, a New Jersey elections equipment executive who participated in the bribery and kickback scheme that resulted in the conviction of Fowler, also played a key role in the infamous Martin County, Florida drama over Republican absentee ballots in the 2000 election.
New Jersey election services companies controlled by Webb were key suppliers to Martin County, Florida, which calls into question the version of events surrounding the tampering with absentee ballot applications testified to by Republican Party operatives in court in 2000.
In counties where their name never surfaced, Sequoia supplied both computer and punch card systems, and used tabulating machines from Sequoia Pacific disguised as being from other vendors, and used the same (doctored) machines as Louisiana, supplied by the same 'shadowy' sources.
When a reporter for the Fresno Bee interviewed Sequoia’s chief executive, the reporter told us later he had been "taken aback by his secretive nature." In truth, Sequoia’s chief executive has a lot to be secretive about…
As we will see next week, the company has decades-long ties to the Rockefeller Family, as well as to a very private organization, the bete noire of “conspiracy theorists” everywhere, the Bilderberger Group. During the endless cable news coverage of the Presidential Election, any of these stories would make an interesting and colorful item.
Funny how no one in the major media let slip a word. But not ‘funny’ ha-ha.
Funny strange.
3. A retired CIA agent, whose illegal and unfettered access to election rolls in Martin County Florida was a major source of legal contention after the 2000 Election, traveled to the Ukraine four years earlier to teach “grass-roots politics” to people there, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.
The news came even as citizens in the Ukraine celebrate their new-found freedom, while in the U.S. suspicion continued to fester that vote fraud may have cost Americans their own right to free and honest elections. (“Back in the USSR: CIA ‘Helpful’ in Florida, Ukraine Elections”; Mad Cow Morning News; 12/8/2004; accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/12092004.html.)
In a bitterly ironic twist, Charles Kane, former Director of Security at the Central Intelligence Agency, and member of the Florida Republican Executive Committee, spent four days in Kiev, the capital of the former Soviet republic, hosting training sessions for Ukrainian political parties in 1996.
Institute officials chose Kane to go to the Ukraine, according to the February 20, 1996, Stuart/Port St. Lucie News, apparently straight-faced, “because of his experience in grass-roots campaigns.”
Four years later, Kane’s credentials as a proponent of democracy were receiving much closer scrutiny...
“Kane's efforts were part of a sinister underground conspiracy to help Bush,” Edward Stafman, attorney for the Martin County challengers told the Associated Press on December 7, 2000.
Like the virtually-unpublicized fact that 9.11 ringleader Mohamed Atta’s sojourn in Hamburg was paid for by U.S. taxpayers (through the joint US-German Congress-Bundestag Program), Charles Kane’s Ukrainian trip was sponsored by the U.S. Government, this time through the International Republican Institute, which reports have accused of being responsible during the current election for “many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars funneled” in support of the U.S.’s preferred candidate.
The career of the much-traveled Kane, it must be stated, resembles nothing so much as a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream... He was also involved, years earlier, in the investigation into the JFK assassination, dispatching a memo to the FBI regarding the whereabouts on the day of the assassination of notorious pipe-smoking Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.
Kane’s strange—and in the case of the 2000 U.S. election crucial—involvement in two separate elections half a world apart came to light during an investigation into election “anomalies” which might explain why the company which predicted the 2000 outcome more accurately than any national pollster, Zogby International, could have been so wrong in 2004 in predicting a 100 electoral-vote triumph for Kerry.
Memories of the Martin County, Florida debacle, over Republican officials allowed illegal access to election rolls in 2000, came to mind after reading Wayne Madsen’s controversial recent reporting of a mysterious $29 million slush fund allegedly behind a conspiracy to steal the 2004 Presidential election by retired CIA and FBI agents.
Charles Kane had been both.
More importantly, he had been shown to have had been given unfettered access to election data, which is at the heart of Madsen’s contention that the election was stolen.
So while most eyes were rightly focused on the increasingly suspect vote count in Ohio, we turned our attention to a place described by an early Spanish explorer as being “filled with bogs and poisonous fruits, barren, and the very worst country that is warmed by the sun.”
Like a hurricane slicing through a trailer park, Florida cut a swath of destruction through Democratic hopes in each of the past two Presidential elections.
We wanted to know if that outcome had been, somehow, “seeded” or “engineered.”
Charlie Kane’s presence in both the Ukraine and the 2000 election debacle prompted us to take a quick backward glance at the controversy which became familiar during the weeks following the infamous Florida Vote Snafu of 2000.
Two heavily Republican counties in Florida had allowed party officials access which they said was to fix hundreds of flawed absentee ballot applications that had been submitted by voters but rejected by the elections office.
The Martin County supervisor of elections, a Republican, let Republican Party workers take away the ballot requests on a daily basis, add missing voter identification numbers and resubmit them, a deputy elections supervisor said.
Just days before the Nov. 7 election, Charles Kane and his buddy Thomas Hauck were laboring in front of a computer at the local Republican headquarters in Stuart, supposedly as part of their party's sophisticated but botched statewide effort to get out the absentee vote.
A printing company had failed to put the required voter identification numbers on thousands of absentee ballot request forms that were mailed to voters. So Hauck and Kane got busy in Martin County, aided by a Republican supervisor of elections who let them remove forms from her office.
Kane, who chaired the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign in Martin County, supposedly read the numbers from the party's database. Hauck, the local GOP treasurer and a 20-year veteran of local campaigns, supposedly filled in the blanks on the request forms.
But the printing company’s forms were used state-wide. Had this perhaps "convenient" fact been used as an excuse to allow illegal access in other places in Florida as well?
The question was never answered.
Moreover, while Gov. George W. Bush edged Vice President Al Gore by 56 percent to 44 percent in Martin County, the absentee votes—control of which violated the rules of chain of custody—broke nearly 2 to 1 for Bush. This strange disparity had an echo in the 2004 election in Florida, which we will soon take up.
Other tantalizing clues have emerged, like the recent statements made by Jeff Fisher, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, which, curiously, encompasses both Martin as well as Palm Beach County, where the vote count has been disputed in an analysis by UC Berkeley researchers.
Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how.
Perhaps the proof of vote tampering, if proof is ever found, will be found by piercing through the implausible explanation offered for Charlie Kane’s illegal access to election records, and then collating it with whatever the truth turns out to be about the 'goings-on' in Tallahassee, home of the heart of Florida’s election machine, the central tabulating computer, on the day before the 2004 election.
Authorities there evacuated the headquarters of state election officials over a suspicious ticking package which turned out to be just “papers flapping in an air vent.”
Similarly, citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County Ohio officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns.
This is odd. If you wanted to rig an election, the easiest path would seem to involve the fewest people.
Creating some "crisis" which takes people away from the crime scene would be key.
Only two states would need to be controlled illegally: Ohio and Florida. Curiously, in both there occurred still-unexplained events which may have impacted the result of the election.
In Ohio there was the famous "Warren County Lockdown" because of "terror" threats, and in Florida, a "bomb threat" at the State Elections Office in Tallahassee
The State Elections Office in Tallahassee holds, of course, that state’s main tabulating computers.
Numerous election experts have testified to the ease with which unsupervised access to the main tabulating computers before the actual election could be used to “hack the vote.” In an environment with no meaningful oversight and no paper trail, vote tampering, they state, can occur virtually undetected.
One expert on the technical aspects of electronic voting stated a typical concern...“There are virtually no limits to the way votes can be distributed... Programmers can write code that is self-erasing and redistributes votes to conform to whatever outside interests are operative, and without any kind of traceability."
And a Johns Hopkins University study researchers noted: "Software flaws in a leading US electronic voting system could be used to subvert the outcome of an election."
With this in mind compare two typical quotes from mainstream stories:
“The Republican-dominated (Warren Ohio) County threw out all the media and independent vote watchers when votes were being counted at the end of Election Day, claiming ‘homeland security’ issues.”
“State elections workers got off to a slow start this morning after Tallahassee police evacuated their building. Investigators called in the bomb squad after finding a suspicious package.”
The events seem strangely similar. Moreover, the explanation given in Florida lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, we discovered, after reading all the news clips…
“As if Florida's election system weren't already stretched enough, employees in Florida's main elections office in Tallahassee arrived at work Monday morning to find their building surrounded by police and a bomb squad truck parked out front. A security guard had reported a suspicious package that appeared to vibrate in a storage room for the state's archives, which share the… building.
“The package was discovered in an area that stores quilts and other artwork that is part of the department's historic archive.”
The package turned out to be a bundle of documents, supposedly being blown by an air vent.
The mysterious rattling noise was caused by an air vent that was blocked by the box of papers?
Had the box changed position on the morning before the election? Had the air vent?
“Calling out the troops” to protect Florida’s collection of quilts seems a dubious excuse… made far more suspicious by the unfortunate box’s proximity to the state’s central tabulating computer on the eve of the election.
They must be some really important quilts.
4. A “mistake” made in the office of a seriously-compromised Supervisor of Election in Pinellas County whose husband is a top executive of the country’s largest election services company has almost unnoticed spiked the best hope for a election recount in Florida that might have thrown a spotlight on the dark corners of the Florida election process concealing widespread systemic and system-wide vote fraud. (“Fraud by Computer in Florida: Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote Totals” by Daniel Hopsicker; Mad Cow Morning News; 12/14/2004; available at: http://www.madcowprod.com/12142004.html.)
The office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County, Deborah Clark, provided inflated totals on the YES side of the gambling initiative which were then used by state officials in the official state tally of the hotly-contested gambling initiative known as Amendment 4.
The initiative would allow casino slot machine gambling in South Florida, an outcome devoutly to be wished by owners of the spanking new $700 million Hard Rock Café Casino in Hollywood, Florida, a facility all dressed up but with currently nowhere to go.
Pinellas County voters defeated the gambling initiative by more than 17,000 votes. But the official state record says the exact opposite, the result of a “mistake” by the office of Pinellas Elections Supervisor which would have gone unnoticed, said local reports, had it not been caught by outside observers.
A recount of Florida’s votes on the state gambling initiative offered an opportunity to correlate what was found with what are so far just “theories” of how the Presidential election in Florida might have been stolen.
Deborah Clark provided an extra 34,000 votes on the YES side of the gambling initiative, sufficient to legally preclude what would have otherwise been a mandated recount.
Ms. Clark’s performance had been questioned in press accounts before, most recently after the 2002 primary contest, when newspaper headlines read “Clark's election flubs draw fire.”
Strangely, no one can said to have benefited more from the inadvertent mistake than Clark’s own husband. As a longtime top executive with E S & S, the company which counts more than half the U.S. vote, Richard Clark probably had more to lose from a recount than almost anyone alive…
Should rumored anomalies surface in the recount, the fortunes of any elections firms involved would no doubt suffer.
A recount of the gambling initiative, known as Amendment 4, election experts said, would have offered clues as to how and why 90,000 extra YES votes for gambling were recorded in Broward County, for example.
This number is almost equal to the “extra” votes for President Bush cast in Broward County which researchers say were inexplicable except through manipulated electronic vote tabulation—which were counted in the same county’s tally.
Recording phony vote totals seemed a system wide and systemic problem, and only AFTER being discovered by an outside observer were the wrong totals corrected. For example, Vincent Profaci, an attorney near Orlando went to bed with Kerry way ahead in his home county of Orange.
When he woke up he discovered to his horror that Kerry had fallen inexplicably behind.
Officials excused the 34,000-vote mistake as a computer glitch.
In fact, almost every time vote fraud was discovered by election observers, it was blandly explained away as nothing but a “computer or software glitch.”
Newsflash: “COMPUTER GLITCHES” beat John Kerrey in Florida.
Let’s take a closer look at things like this can happen. Lets take a look at what happened in Pinellas County.
Gov. Jeb Bush appointed Deborah Clark election supervisor in Pinellas County, Florida, in May of 2000.
Trouble began almost immediately. Some of it was even funny…
For example, in the Aug. 31 2002 primary, the population of an entire small town— 12,498 voters— appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney.
The town cast votes in all the other contests, but not in the race for state attorney. Had there been a town-wide secret pact?
To this day no one is sure why those voters didn't vote, or if they did, what might have happened to their votes. They are “ghost votes,” floating in the ether. The local papers labeled it “A Voting Mystery.”
More seriously, while Deborah Clark had worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband Richard Clark’s employer Elections Systems & Software, was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office, and was up for a lucrative contract worth as much as $15-million to sell new voting machines to Pinellas County.
Clark, who hadn’t disclosed the connection, hotly denied a conflict of interest. “Neither my husband nor I would ever do anything that would compromise the integrity of the elections office, or our own personal integrity," she said.
Clark's failure to disclose that her husband was working for a voting machine company bidding for Pinellas' business, coupled with the last-minute revelation that the executive who would have managed Pinellas' elections for Sequoia Voting Systems, the company the county chose, was under indictment in Louisiana, left a bit of a sour taste.
Elections in Pinellas County have been occasions for holding your breath for several election cycles.
So when, on the day of the 2004 Presidential election, numerous anecdotes from voters in Pinellas County reported problems like voting for Kerry and having the vote register for Bush, (see “pressing Bernacker and getting Giambelluca” described in a previous story) it did not come as a tremendous shock.
Roberta Harvey, 57, of Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church, said an Associated Press report .
“After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end instead of her finger. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection,” said the account.
“Election officials in several Florida counties where voters complained about such problems did not return calls Tuesday night,” reported the Associated Press on Nov. 4. And things haven’t changed since.
A spokeswoman for the company that makes the touch-screen machines used in Pinellas, Palm Beach and two other Florida counties, Alfie Charles of Sequoia Voting Systems, said the machines' monitors may need to be recalibrated periodically.
Sequoia is the second-largest election services company, with roughly one-third of the voting machine market. In 1999, the Justice Department filed federal charges against Sequoia alleging that employees paid out more than $ 8 million in bribes.
Pinellas County purchased voting equipment from Sequoia worth $14 million, even after discovering that Phil Foster, a Sequoia executive, faced indictment in Louisiana for money laundering and corruption.
The Tampa Tribune stated “Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark's high praise of Sequoia Voting Systems was instrumental in the company's landing a $14 million contract with the county in 2001.”
Fifteen Florida counties now use touch-screen machines, including Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade. They had scurried to buy the voting machines after the Legislature outlawed punch-card balloting in the wake of the hanging chad controversy of the 2000 presidential election.
In December 2001, Broward County chose a $17.2 million touch-screen system over a pencil-and-paper system priced at no more than $5 million. Earlier that year, in May, Palm Beach County agreed to pay $14 million for touch-screens, compared with $3 million for the simpler system.
Why use electronic machines at all? Blame the Federal Government’s Help America Vote Act, which authorized $3.9 billion in federal spending to help states replace punch-card and lever voting machines.
With a war and a soaring deficit, why would they want to do that?
"I have always been concerned about the undervote on electronic machines," said Rebecca Mercuri, a computer expert at Harvard University who has written extensively about voting issues. "We don't know what happens with the votes because there is no real audit of the machines."
Ah. There’s the rub.
Not surprisingly, Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark wants to keep it that way…
Although she hadn’t shown much concern over spending $14 million on the machines, she said that the $2 million expense of retrofitting Pinellas County's new touch screen voting machines to generate a receipt for voters which would verify how their ballots were cast was unnecessary.
The county's touch screen system, built by Sequoia Voting Systems, was safe from tampering, she stated.
Her assertions should be tempered by the knowledge that while Clark worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband's employer was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office.
Her husband, Richard Clark, isn't involved in sales,” reported a sympathetic article in the St. Petersburg Times. “He installs and fixes elections machines and says he has steered clear of business in Florida.”
But it is exactly these people, the ones who install and fix election machines, the so-called mechanics, who have the opportunity and expertise to rig the vote. When an election gets fixed, its almost always because mechanics got “to” the machines.
Yet the development, coming after Clark's controversial handling of the presidential election in Pinellas, raised some eyebrows this week. Some county commissioners say they weren't told about her husband's connection to the company.
It wasn’t like bribing election officials was something that never happened in Tampa…
Officers of Shoup Voting Machine Co., a Sequoia predecessor, were indicted for allegedly bribing politicians in Tampa, Florida back in 1971, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
It’s a job with a little bit of history… Even Clark's deputy administrator, Karen Butler, is a sister of Sandra Mortham, Florida's former secretary of state and a lobbyist for ES&S before the state Legislature.
Butler told reporters that family ties won't matter.
Clark's husband, Richard Clark, 59, is a nationally known expert in installing new voting systems.
He worked as a project manager for ES&S for about five years, having joined the firm when it acquired the company that previously employed him, Business Records Corp.
But Clark said he quit ES&S just before his wife was named elections supervisor because he was worried that his employment with the firm could appear as a conflict. But so far, Clark's new company, Richard A. Clark Enterprises, works for just one company: ES&S.
The selection process in Pinellas County became mired in ethical conflicts after county commissioners learned in July 2001 that ES&S had “very” close ties to Deborah Clark.
Clark had been working in Birmingham, Ala. as an independent contractor, after resigning from the company "I have nothing whatsoever to do with that decision in Pinellas County. We don't talk about anything like that," Clark told the St Pete Times. "We've been married 17 years. I love her too much to put her in any position like that.”
The paper also quoted a sales executive from Sequoia Pacific, John Krizka, who said he did not think ES&S got any unfair advantage in Pinellas County.
Coming from a salesman for a competitor, this seems convincing, except that the two companies have a documented and tangled history of collusion between the two supposedly competing firms.
Then too, consider that Sequoia had paid $441,000 in a single year to Krizka, just for selling voting machines to four Florida counties. Although this might be viewed as a bit excessive, it wasn’t enough for Krizka, who sued, claiming Sequoia had stiffed him on another $1.8 million.
And here’s where our story begins to come full circle…
Apparently no one noticed that when Richard Clark went to Birmingham, another Birmingham election exec, Phil Foster, was being indicted on felony bribery charges.
Phil Foster, a regional sales vice president, was allegedly involved in a conspiracy and money-laundering scheme that involved the sale of machine parts at inflated prices and kickbacks of nearly $600,000.
Pinellas commissioners were surprised when the St. Pete Times reported that Foster, a key employee for front-runner Sequoia Voting Systems, had been indicted for the elections kickback scheme in Louisiana.
“Sequoia was not involved, nor was the company charged,” said the St Pete Times.
This isn’t strictly true. In fact, it isn’t true at all…
Testimony in Federal Court in Baton Rouge revealed that, in fact, Sequoia had engineered the complex scheme, an action which provides yet another election irony.
Pinellas Commission Chairman Calvin Harris told the Times he assumed the state had checked out the competing companies while their machines were being certified.
Not so, said Clay Roberts, director of the state's Division of Elections, who maintained that background checks were a job for counties.
So while the state of Florida was death on voting by convicted felons, there were no safeguards in place to prevent the votes from being counted by felons.
The last time a big gambling initiative was on the ballot in a Southern state, the election, in Louisiana, produced visible evidence of state-wide vote fraud.
Gambling was the burning issue on the ballot. Allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace.
We saw the invisible hand of one of the second largest elections services company, Sequoia Pacific, in action. Commissioner of Elections and former pro football player Jerry Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah's and paid off like a jimmied slot machine for over a decade.
When big money’s at stake, we learned, people looking to fix elections take off the velvet gloves.
So we paid close attention to Amendment 4, the gambling initiative on the Florida ballot. And what we found revealed that Pinellas County isn’t an isolated case..
Sequoia Voting Systems also sold neighboring Hillsborough its $12-million package of touch screen voting machines, had “a computer indexing system malfunction” in the Aug. 31 primary.
That’s a serious computer glitch, apparently.
Sequoia had never experienced this particular glitch., which was a doozy. A total of 118,699 people turned out to vote countywide. But somehow 125,891 voted in the race for state attorney.
That's 7,192 more votes than voters.
For why this happens there’s no better example than… where else? Las Vegas…
Back in 1993-94, many observers wondered why new Clark County elections chief Kathryn Ferguson would commit to what turned out to be tens of millions of dollars in expenditures to adopt Sequoia Pacific’s electronic voting machines.
So determined was Ms. Ferguson to buy the Sequoia machines for Las Vegas that a former member of her elections department team stated Ferguson resorted to the simple exigency of having Sequoia Pacific’s representative send a list of bid specifications designed so that Sequoia's machines were the only ones that could meet them.
This hardly seems sporting. And its definitely illegal. Asked at the time, Ferguson said she had no concern that her acceptance of a job at Sequoia Pacific might appear to be a payoff for favors rendered.
Today Kathryn Ferguson is E S & S’s chief spokesman. She’s good to go.
So the real question isn’t “Did vote fraud affect the Presidential race?”
The real question is, “How could it not?”
Although many profess [to be] amazed and seem confused about why Democrats have been such weenies about vote fraud, this is a bipartisan scandal. And both parties know it.
When several dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the “Election Protection Coalition” called the problem "troubling but anecdotal."
Why are they excusing felony fraud?
State Election Commissioner Jerry Fowler, sentenced to five years in prison for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from voting machine contractors, could tell you…
Revelations of his bribe-taking might never have emerged except for complaints from, of all things, a Republican candidate, Woody Jenkins, narrowly beaten by Democratic Senate candidate Mary Landrieu, in an especially bad-tempered campaign.
A year-long investigation into the voting process ensued, which uncovered certain financial irregularities.
Today Woody Jenkins is out of politics.
The system rolls on…
5. While both of the terrorist pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center were students at Venice Florida’s Huffman Aviation, the flight school's owner Wallace J. Hilliard, 72, of Naples, FL., was simultaneously pursuing his own diplomatic opening to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. (“Rogue State: The Covert Op that Ate the World” by Daniel Hopsicker; Mad Cow Morning News; 1/4/2005; accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/01042004.html.)
A photograph (left) recently made available to the MadCowMorningNews shows a smiling Hilliard strapping a Rolex with the must-have diamond beveled-face onto the presumably grateful wrist of one of Fidel Castro’s top aides, Guillermo Garcia Frias, known in Cuba as "the Commandante of the Revolution."
For Hilliard, portrayed as a retired-to-Florida Midwestern insurance executive-turned-befuddled investor after the 9.11 attack, the new evidence confirms he had been doing considerably more ''moving and shaking' than is customary for seniors in the Sunshine State.
Former employees confirmed Hilliard's curious Cuban venture. All expressed puzzlement, even after working with him closely, about who Hilliard really worked for and what he had been up to while Mohamed Atta frolicked on the tarmac at the Venice Airport in front of his hanger.
I
used to look at Wally and Rudi and wonder what made
them think they could start an airline,” said former Director
of Operations Bill Bersch. “I mean, I was on the executive
team, trying to start an airline, and from August 2000 to the
present we had all of four business meetings...”
“Even when you could get a meeting scheduled, somebody would tell you that it had been canceled... because Wally is in Havana.”
Hilliard was looking to cut a deal with Castro, said Rob Tiller, who provided the photograph, to buy a 10,000 acre cattle ranch on the island for the Mormon Church in Utah, reportedly in anticipation of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.
Tiller, a colorful Florida entrepreneur who felt unfairly cut out of the deal, responded like untold colorful Florida entrepreneurs before him.
He's not getting mad. He's getting even, providing still-more evidence that when the terrorists roamed Florida things were not at all as they have been described to be by the FBI.
While most retirees move to Florida to play golf, when Hilliard alighted in Naples, Florida from Green Bay, Wisconsin, he almost immediately purchased between 30 and 40 jets... and then began courting Communist dictators reshaping the Caribbean Basin. This colors our understanding of the nature of the 9.11 attack just a bit...
Still, we don’t imagine there was much testimony before the 9.11 Commission along these lines at all.
News of Hilliard’s highly-curious mission again raises the question of whether he was an innocent flight school owner victimized by wily terrorists, or James Bond with an AARP card, an international operative flitting around the globe at whim.
And the answer is important… For two crucial years Mohamed Atta’s Hamburg cadre frolicked on the tarmac at the Venice Airport… right in front of his hangers.
When we first saw the incriminating new photo of Hilliard, we wondered what had possessed him to be indiscreet enough to allow himself to be caught on camera strapping diamond-beveled Rolexes onto the wrists of Fidel Castro’s top aides in Havana Cuba…
Hilliard had a bag-full of them, we heard from one of his ex-employees. He was passing them out in Havana as tokens of his and his client’s esteem.
One again we asked a crucial question: Who is Wally Hilliard?
“Wally was manipulated by somebody with a lot of power,” international jack-of-all-trades Mark Shubin had said to us, in an interview at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport.
“He was blackmailed. Rudi was the one person who knew what was going on.”
Was that true? And if it wasn't... what was?
Like a 'bandit cab' in the air, Hilliard's Lear jet was flying without any apparent official sanction. Though the FAA license under which it operated has been suspended, (that of Air Florida, belonging to Pakistani Perez Khan) the plane was making regular runs to the Bahamas.
We received a photo taken in Rum Cay attesting to its presence bolstering one side in a struggle for control of the isolated island and its coveted runway, which had recently been upgraded for jets.
Located 375 miles to the southeast of Ft. Lauderdale in the remote southeastern Bahamas, Rum Cay, we soon learned, is the very definition of 'secluded.'
In fact, that’s its charm.
The island once served as a refuge for pirates, and had been a center of gun-running during the American Civil War before growing to true prominence during Prohibition as a port used for boot-legging.
What was going on Rum Cay was that there was a new runway, which now allowed private jets like Hilliard's Lear to land on the island. Local newspapers were running regular items with headlines like "COPS SEIZE $50 MILLION IN DRUGS."
The reputed head of one group vying for control was a South African named Lesley Greyling, reportedly fronting for Khashoggi. News accounts about Mr. Greyling relied rather heavily on the "M" word… Mobster.
But not a mobster of the 'dese dem & dose' variety…
Greyling helmed a Palm Beach company, Members Service Corp., whose chairman was former Republican Governor of Florida Claude Kirk, and included noted attorney F. Lee Bailey, and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Greyling was said to be also considering helping the Saudi arms merchant and Iran-Contra middleman build a casino on the Gaza Strip.
Saudis and the Mob and terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard all bumping chests together in the world's Bermuda Triangle of narcotics trafficking. It’s a Strange Brew.
None of this has anything to do with 9/11.
The troubling and sometimes criminal associations revealed in recent weeks about the shady pasts of the big election companies counting America’s vote can be seen to overlap with the cast of characters in the saga of the 9.11 terrorist hijackers associates while in America.
But what makes the Hilliard revelation particularly interesting are his associations with figures involved, not in 9.11, but in the current election intrigue.
Hilliard is in business, to cite one example, with Saudi billionaire arms dealer and international fugitive Adnan Khashoggi, whose name has now surfaced in connection with at least one, and possibly two, American election companies mired in controversy.
The story which follows is of vital current interest only for what it reveals about the milieu in which the 2004 election was fixed.
But first a word about methodology…
When the Cleveland Plain Dealer reluctantly concluded “System to Blame for Ballot Debacle” in a recent headline, the ‘system’ they chose to ‘blame’ was one which mis-handled provisional ballots.
Nothing about allegations that one of the major election companies responsible for Ohio’s ballot debacle, Diebold, was being run by a handful of convicted felons!
Similarly, when Democratic Party leaders recently announced the launching of an investigation into the 2004 elections in OHIO, they referenced faulty machines, ballot shortages, polling place changes, understaffed polling places, untrained personnel, voter intimidation, misinformation and other anomalies.
At the MadCowMorningNews, we’ve been all over the “other anomalies.”
The idea of widespread vote fraud in the U.S. presidential election became vastly more plausible when one considers how easily the ‘macro’ mechanisms of vote fraud were put in place before the election.
What would those “macro mechanisms” have been? If you were going to fix an election, what would you do? From this simple query we have been able to identify two “macro” mechanisms: First, go right to the source…
1. Buy up the companies which count the votes.
Its simple. Its clean. Its neat. And it works. And the second macro mechanism we will be examining works hand-in-velvet glove with the first…
2. Bribe Anything That Moves.
Bribery is a time-honored technique: a simple but trusty old standby. Its a universal language… If we found wholesale bribery of public election officials it would be a big clue that something really was wrong in the state of Denmark.
Three words: Spooks,Saudis,Florida
If you were to tell a friend that the same network doing business with the terrorists in Florida before the 9.11 attack three years ago was helping to count American votes three years later, they’d look at you like you were crazy.
So we strongly suggest you keep it to yourself.
Still, anyone interested in who attacked us on Sept 11 must feel curious just a little to learn of Hilliard’s association with Khashoggi... Is this the connection which led to the federal complaint accusing him (and Rudi Dekkers) of numerous "unauthorized and unsupervised flights" during 1999?
“They were flying for the Saudis,” said an aviation executive familiar with the operation. "They were ferrying Saudi princes all over the U.S."
“You can go to jail for the kind of things they’re charged with," said the aviation executive. "But all they're getting is a slap on the wrist. What they were doing is blatantly illegal. Without a Federal Aviation Administration air carrier operating certificate, the Government has no idea where those planes went, or even who was on board. Whoever they were flying for didn’t want anyone to know.”
Of course, any move by the FAA to curb the suspicious aviation activities of Hilliard and Dekkers must answer the obvious question.
“Why start now?”
So just why is it that that everything about Khashoggi seems to reek, even if unintentionally, of intrigue?
Even a recent (Nov 20, 2004) trashy British tabloid story headlined “ERIC CLAPTON: Our stormy affair and the day I saw our son plunge to his death,” where Clapton’s girlfriend and the mother of the dead baby was identified, when she met Clapton, as “a 26-year- old model and TV presenter - and former girlfriend of Adnan Khashoggi.”
According to a recent story in the Dec 10, 2004 London Evening Standard, he still owns a home in glitzy Aspen, where Khashoggi joined Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas, Hunter S Thompson, and the Donald, who has a personal history worth noting there.
“On New Year's Eve 1989, Ivana Trump confronted Marla Maples at Bonnie's restaurant. In front of Donald, she demanded, 'Are you the witch who's been screwing my husband?' That night Trump took Marla, not Ivana, to a house party of a billionaire friend. The Trumps divorced shortly afterwards.”
Adnan moves in some interesting circles…
When a huge ranch in Kenya which used to be owned by Khashoggi changed hands recently, purchased by a British NGO whose patron is Queen Elizabeth II of England, an article about the sale noted “When Khashoggi owned the property, he would fly in his private jet directly to the airstrip, and the customs officials would drive there from Nairobi to clear him and his entourage.”
Cloak & Dagger in Green Bay
A world away in Packer Country, the story of Hilliard’s involvement with Khashoggi remains to be written.
But when Hilliard's home-town Green-Bay Press Gazette did a front page review of "Welcome to TerrorLand" they had noticed the same thing we did:
"Terrorists, drug runners, cover-ups, CIA, KGB and shady characters are the cloak-and-dagger kinds of elements that make for a riveting spy novel or action thriller. It's hardly the place you'd expect to find retired Green Bay businessman Wally J. Hilliard."
Was Adnan Khashoggi a principal in a company which has been counting the votes of American servicemen overseas? Answer: highly likely.
Both Election.com, and Triad, the election company cited for causing most of the problems in Ohio, should receive close scrutiny for evidence of Khashoggi involvement.
While there has been no suggestion of it anywhere in the media, the name “Triad” was used extensively by Khashoggi at exactly the same time (the early 80’s) and in exactly the same place (Palm Beach, Florida) as the “Triad Governmental Systems” involved in Ohio’s current election “difficulties.”
Khashoggi owned a number of companies named “Triad.”
Khashoggi owned “Triad International Marketing.”
“Northrop, the Los Angeles-based aircraft and electronics manufacturer, owes Triad International Marketing, S.A., a Liechtenstein corporation controlled by Khashoggi, $31 million in commissions on sales to the Saudi air force,” reported the L.A. Times on August 29, 1987.
Khashoggi owned “Triad America.”
“Creditors claim they are owed more than $100 million by Triad America and its subsidiaries… in Salt Lake City. Leonard Gumport, the court-appointed examiner, also is recommending that Triad America seek repayment of the $189.2 million loaned to companies controlled by the Khashoggis,” reported the Salt Lake Tribune.
From the company’s literature: “TRIAD Governmental Systems, Inc., is a nationally recognized corporation that is committed to providing quality, computer based systems for governmental voting units. Incorporated in 1982, TRIAD GSI was founded to provided quality support and services for Rapp Systems' Election products, with election experience that spans a quarter of a century.”
In 1982, Khashoggi owned Triad Farms in Kentucky.
In "The Blue Grass Conspiracy” by Sally Denton, she revealed that the large drug smuggling operation called “The Company,” headquarters were near Lexington, Kentucky, at Triad Farms, owned by Khashoggi.
That’s just about the same time (1983) that TRIAD Governmental Systems was founded…
“Lightning Strike, Computer Glitch... Whatever.”
We also discovered that a strikingly similar allegation of Triad employee tampering was lodged against the company all the way back in 1988…
According to Jackie Beville, a former employee of the Supervisor of Elections in Hillsborough County, Triad workers adjusted the software to clear up a ballot-counting problem shortly before the election, and the machinery should then have been recertified following the work.
When questioned, she was told that Triad workers were just fixing problems caused by a lightning strike.
Beville disputes that the weather had anything to do with the repair work.
But even it if did, "My question is, why was it a secret? The party chairmen were not called in. The canvassing board was not notified. The Division of Elections was not notified.
"Why was I forbidden to mention it? If the party chairmen and division had been notified, it may not have been a big deal. But it should have been made public. Everyone has a right to know."
Triad manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November. The company is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has donated money to the Republican Party as well as the election campaign of George W. Bush.
Given the broad distribution of Triad voting systems in Ohio, the allegations that have been leveled against this company strike to the heart of the assumed result of the 2004 election.
And not just Triad…
Election.com should be examined for the invisible hand of the Saudi financier and CIA “fixer.”
News reports stated Election.com was owned by an offshore Saudi front company in Bermuda consisting of five unnamed Saudi billionaires, until scrutiny forced a sale to Accenture, the remnants of the disgraced and disbanded Arthur Anderson, the accounting firm which made Enron possible.
From a recent Federal lawsuit involving Khashoggi: “Ultimate Holdings Ltd., a Bermuda investment company owned by Adnan Khashoggi, the company's largest shareholder.”
Election.com was also involved in the U.S.’s big democracy push into Eastern Europe…in Estonia, just a stolen vote’s throw away from the Ukraine.
NOSTALGIC LONGING FOR LAND OF THE BABUSHKAS
Implausibly, Americans have began to have longing thoughts they never thought they’d have…
“If only we could be as free as the Ukraine!”
For one thing, in the Ukraine soldiers don’t have to rely, like our overseas military has had to, on election companies like election.com, an offshore shell company owned by a group of anonymous Saudi billionaires suspected of including arms merchant and international fugitive Adnan Khashoggi.
We feel sure that there really shouldn’t be any dummy front companies counting the vote.
The Ukrainians also voted using a new medium which is suspiciously unavailable to American voters… a new miracle invention which allows for accurate counts and recounts done in plain sight for all to see…
They call it paper.
Those innovative Ukrainians!
Who knew? There’s a lot we can learn from studying the glorious democratic traditions of the Ukraine…
If our own country ever decides to turn democratic, maybe they’ll offer to help.
5. One of the central themes in Daniel Hopsicker’s articles on electronic vote fraud concerns the pervasiveness of organized crime in the milieu of the crooked voting machines. In addition, gambling—one of the principal sources of income for organized crime syndicates—also figures in this concatenation. It is important to note, however, that organized crime is but one of the elements in the crooked voting machine phalanx. One of the companies that has both Republican right-wing AND organized crime influences is Sequoia Pacific. A Gambino crime family operative was involved with the company’s operations in New York. “ . . . In fact, the Gambino family and Sequoia Pacific have had more than a nodding acquaintance, according to newspapers in New York reporting on the intrigue surrounding the awarding of a multi-million dollar contract for election machines in New York City during the mid-90’s, where Sequoia’s representative in the bidding gained notoriety for attempting to grease the skids a little at a marathon luncheon hosted by Salvatore Reale, a Gambino underboss who later pled guilty to racketeering. . . .” (“Election Company Has Long Criminal History” by Daniel Hopsicker; Mad Cow Morning News; 11/24/2004; p. 3; accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/11242004.html.)
6. From its inception, Sequoia has been inextricably linked with criminal activities. Begun as American Voting Machine, the company was under the control of stockholders in [North American] Rockwell, a major defense contractor. President and CEO Lloyd Dixon was convicted of bribing an official and sentenced to prison. “ . . . It [Sequoia Pacific] began its modern life as Automatic Voting Machine, spun off to shareholders of Defense contractor Rockwell in the 1960’s. The company’s founder, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr. resigned as president and CEO on Jan. 10, 1973, and later went to prison, after being indicted by a New York federal grand jury for bribing Buffalo election officials. The company was fined nearly $50,000 for bribing Texas and Arkansas officials. . .” (Idem.)
7. Things didn’t get any better after Dixon’s departure and imprisonment: “ Last week, we briefly related the sordid tale of the next owner of Sequoia Pacific, financier and corporate raider Louis Wolfson. Wolfson was convicted of bribing the only Supreme Court Justice ever forced to resign in disgrace, ‘Dishonest Abe’ Fortas. Fortas got caught palming a lifetime yearly ‘retainer’ from the wily Wolfson’s family foundation. Alas for ‘Dishonest Abe,’ as he came to be called, the law draws no distinction between ‘accepting a retainer’ and ‘taking a bribe.’ Fortas cut himself a deal. He taped phone calls, at the FBI’s behest, with Wolfson, who was pleading with the Supreme Court Justice to dummy up. In the transcripts of these phone calls the word ‘cover-up’ enters the American lexicon for the first time. Apparently, Fortas coined it at the instant of need, when he said (probably for the tape recorder), ‘No I can’t do that! That be a cover-up!’” (Ibid.; pp. 3-4.)
8. Gambling was at the epicenter of a scandal concerning the apparent bribery of Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler. “ . . . Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City in the mid-‘90’s, which helped explained his taking bribes. It was at this same time when allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace in Louisiana. Curiously, gambling was the burning issue on the ballot in state elections at the same exact time. One proposition concerned Harrah’s proposal to build a casino in downtown New Orleans. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 5.)
9. Fowler was convicted of taking bribes from Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci, the Southeastern representative of Sequoia Pacific. “ . . . We first learned of Sequoia Pacific’s penchant for greasing the palms of corrupt public officials from the well-publicized news accounts in the year 2000 about Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler, convicted of taking as much as ten million dollars over a period of a decade from Sequoia’s Southeast Representative, a man named Pasquale ‘Rocco’ Ricci, from Marlton, New Jersey. Even after pleading guilty to suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for more than a decade, Ricci remained something of a mystery figure, we learned to our surprise. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 4.)
10. The Ricci/Fowler liaison was brought to light when Susan Bernacker, a losing candidate tested the voting machines. When she voted for herself, the Sequoia Pacific machines registered a vote for her opponent—Nick Giambelluca. “ . . .Voting machine tests performed and videotaped by a suspicious local candidate immediately after this election demonstrated that votes Susan Bernacker cast for herself during the test were electronically recorded for her opponent. (The test was repeated several times with the same result. (The astonishing video footage is in our documentary ‘The Big Fix, 2000’ . . .” (Ibid.; p. 4.)
11. It is interesting to note that the Supervisor of Elections in New Orleans—Tony Giambelluca—allegedly committed suicide behind a dumpster two weeks before the election. It is unclear whether Tony was related to Nick Giambelluca. “ . . . Tony Giambelluca, who held the keys to the warehouse where the election machines were kept, turned up an apparent suicide. He had chosen to take his life behind a garbage dumpster, which seems an odd decision. Given the choice, we figure most people would choose to end their existence in a slightly more scenic locale. . .” (Idem.)
12. Sequoia Pacific and another electronic voting company—E S & S—operated in conjunction with one another, rather than in competition. The collusion between E S & S and Sequoia will be highlighted again later on in this description. (For more about E S & S, see FTR#’s 470, 487.) “ . . . Study of this case revealed some interesting details about the way the ‘election services’ industry works. . . First, the scheme showed that there was collusion, rather than competition between the two major election services firms, Sequoia Pacific and E S & S. Court documents revealed the two sold voting machines back and forth to each other until they had arrived at the figure they wanted the client, the state of Louisiana, to pay. Nor was this an isolated case. The bribery conviction of Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, for example, revealed that E S & S’s predecessor company. Business Records Corp. of Dallas, arranged for contracts which led to Smurfit Packaging Corp. and its subsidiary, Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment Inc. More collusion. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 6.)
13. Sequoia operates through dummy front companies: “ . . . Another discovery was that, like the CIA, Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of dummy front companies. For example, two Florida election execs, Glenn Boord and Ralph Escudero, pled guilty to conspiracy to compound a felony (public bribery), who had owned a paper voting-machine company called Uni-lect, which was just a front for Sequoia Pacific. Pasquale ‘Rocco’ Ricci’s company, International Voting Machines, was also really Sequoia Pacific. So, too, was Harold Webb’s Garden State Elections. (And also Herb Webb’s Elec-tec.) Webb, a New Jersey elections equipment executive who participated in the bribery and kickback scheme that resulted in the conviction of Fowler also played a key role in the infamous Martin County, Florida drama over Republican absentee ballots in the 2000 election.” (Idem.)
14. “New Jersey election services companies controlled by Webb were key suppliers to Martin County, Florida, which calls into question the version of events surrounding the tampering with absentee ballot applications testified to by Republican Party operatives in court in 2000. In counties where their name never surfaced, Sequoia supplied both computer and punch card systems, and used tabulating machines from Sequoia Pacific disguised as being from other vendors, and used the same (doctored) machines as Louisiana, supplied by the same ‘shadowy’ sources. When a reporter for the Fresno Bee interviewed Sequoia’s chief executive, the reporter told us later he had been ‘taken aback by his secretive nature.’ In truth, Sequoia’s chief executive has a lot to be secretive about. . . .” (Idem.)
15. Next, the discussion turns to the issue of the vote tampering in Martin County, Florida. (Subsequent discussion of the Florida election scams will return to the apparent role of gambling in these machinations.) A profound irony concerning electoral fraud in the U.S. concerns the difference between the reaction of the U.S. media and electorate to the American and Ukrainian elections. The exit polls in both the U.S. and Ukraine were fundamentally different from the election results. However, the Ukrainian people were vocal and visible in their reaction to the apparent fraud. The American people, on the other hand, were altogether passive. It is particularly noteworthy that The Washington Post and The New York Times were vehement in their condemnation of the election results in the Ukraine, while dismissing U.S. critics of the elections as “conspiracy theorists.” (For more about this, see FTR#485.) DANIEL HOPSICKER NOTES THAT THERE IS A LINK BETWEEN UKRAINIAN ELECTIONS AND THE FRAUDULENT BALLOT TALLIES IN FLORIDA—“FORMER” CIA OFFICER CHARLES KANE. “A retired CIA agent, whose illegal and unfettered access to election rolls in Martin County Florida was a major source of legal contention after the 2000 Election, traveled to the Ukraine four years earlier to teach ‘grass-roots politics’ to people there, the MadCowMorningNews has learned. The news came even as citizens in the Ukraine celebrate their new-found freedom, while in the U.S. suspicion continued to fester that vote fraud may have cost Americans their own right to free and honest elections.” (“Back in the U.S.S.R.: CIA ‘Helpful’ in Florida, Ukraine Elections” by Daniel Hopsicker; MadCowMorningNews; 12/8/2004; p. 1; accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/12092004.html.)
16. “In a bitterly ironic twist, Charles Kane, former Director of Security at the Central Intelligence Agency, and member of the Florida Republican Executive Committee, spent four days in Kiev, the capital of the former Soviet republic, hosting training sessions for Ukrainian political parties in 1996. Institute officials chose Kane to go to the Ukraine, according to the February 20, 1996, Stuart/Port St. Lucie News, apparently straight-faced, ‘because of his experience in grass-roots campaigns.’” (Idem.)
17. Kane later participated in the Martin County (Florida) electoral shenanigans: “Four years later, Kane’s credentials as a proponent of democracy were receiving much closer scrutiny. . . . ‘Kane’s efforts were part of a sinister underground conspiracy to help Bush,’ Edward Stafman, attorney for the Martin County challengers told the associated Press on December 7, 2000. . .” (Ibid.; pp. 1-2.)
18. “ . . . The career of the much-traveled Kane, it must be stated, resembles nothing so much as a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. . . He was also involved, years earlier, in the investigation into the JFK assassination, dispatching a memo to the FBI regarding the whereabouts on the day of the assassination of notorious pipe-smoking Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.” (Ibid.; p. 2.)
19. As Daniel notes, Kane’s presence in the Ukraine and Florida (as well as his intelligence background), raises questions about his activities in Martin County. (For more about Kane, see FTR#268. An excellent web site featuring information about the apparent fixing of the 2004 election is: http://www.campaignwatch.org. Information about Charles Kane can be found at: http://www.campaignwatch.org/notes2000.htm#fraud.) Daniel relates Kane’s role in the Martin County vote snafu: “Charlie Kane’s presence in both the Ukraine and the 2000 election debacle prompted us to take a quick backward glance at the controversy which became familiar during the weeks following the infamous Florida Vote Snafu of 2000. Two heavily Republican counties in Florida had allowed party officials access which they said was to fix hundreds of flawed absentee ballot applications that had been submitted by voters but rejected by the elections office. The Martin County supervisor of elections, a Republican, let Republican Party workers take away the ballot requests on a daily basis, add missing voter identification numbers and resubmit them, a deputy elections supervisor said.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)
20. “Just days before the Nov. 7 election, Charles Kane and his buddy Thomas Hauck were laboring in front of a computer at the local Republican headquarters in Stuart, supposedly as part of their party’s sophisticated but botched statewide effort to get out the absentee vote. A printing company had failed to put the required voter identification numbers on thousands of absentee ballot request forms that were mailed to voters. So Hauck and Kane got busy in Martin County, aided by a Republican supervisor of elections who let them remove forms from her office.” (Idem.)
21. Daniel notes that Kane’s access to the printing company forms may have led to fraud in other parts of Florida, since the same forms were used all over the state. “Kane, who chaired the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign in Martin County, supposedly read the numbers from the party’s database. Hauck, the local GOP treasurer and a 20-year veteran of local campaigns, supposedly filled in the blanks on the request forms. But the printing company’s forms were used state-wide. Had this perhaps ‘convenient’ fact been used as an excuse to allow illegal access in other places in Florida as well? The question was never answered.” (Idem.)
22. Still more about the absentee ballots and the role they may have played in both the Martin County voting results and in the results of Florida as a whole: “Moreover, while Gov. George W. Bush edged Vice President Al Gore by 56 percent to 44 percent in Martin County, the absentee votes—control of which violated the rules of chain of custody—broke nearly 2 to 1 for Bush. . . . Other tantalizing clues have emerged, like the recent statements made by Jeff Fisher, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida’s 16th District, which, curiously, encompasses both Martin as well as Palm Beach County, where the vote count has been disputed in an analysis by UC Berkeley researchers. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. Perhaps the proof of vote tampering, if proof is ever found, will be found by piercing through the implausible explanation offered for Charlie Kane’s illegal access to election records . . .” (Idem.)
23. In another of Daniel’s articles on voter fraud, he returns to the subject of Sequoia Pacific, its relationship to ES&S and evidence of electoral fraud in Florida. Exemplifying the shady oversight of the electoral process in Florida is Deborah Clark, appointed by Jeb Bush to the office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County. And once again, we see gambling initiatives figuring in the scenario. “I’m shocked—shocked—to learn that there’s gambling going on in this establishment!” “ . . . The office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County, Deborah Clark, provided inflated totals on the YES side of the gambling initiative which were then used by state officials in the official state tally of the hotly-contested gambling initiative known as Amendment 4. The initiative would allow casino slot machine gambling in South Florida, an outcome devoutly to be wished by owners of the spanking new $700 million Hard Rock Café Casino in Hollywood, Florida, a facility all dressed up but with currently nowhere to go.” (“ ‘Fraud by Computer’ in Florida: Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote Totals” by Daniel Hopsicker; MadCowMorningNews; 12/14/2004; p. 1.; accessed at: http://www.madcowprod.com/12142004.html.)
24. Daniel relates Deborah Clark’s curious behavior with regard to the gambling initiative: “Pinellas County voters defeated the gambling initiative by more than 17,000 votes. But the official state record says the exact opposite, the result of a ‘mistake’ by the office of Pinellas Elections Supervisor which would have gone unnoticed, said local reports, had it not been caught by outside observers. A recount of Florida’s votes on the state gambling initiative offered an opportunity to correlate what was found with what are so far just ‘theories’ of how the Presidential election in Florida might have been stolen. Deborah Clark provided an extra 34,000 votes on the YES side of the initiative, sufficient to legally preclude what would have otherwise been a mandated recount.” (Ibid.; pp. 1-2.)
25. Returning to the incestuous relationship between Sequoia Pacific and ES&S, the discussion highlights Deborah Clark’s husband Richard, after noting that a recount of votes on the gambling initiative might very well have shed light on how the vote was manipulated for the presidential race. “As a longtime top executive with ES&S, the company which counts more than half the U.S. vote, Richard Clark probably had more to lose from a recount than almost anyone alive. . . . Should rumored anomalies surface in the recount, the fortunes of any elections firms involved would no doubt suffer. A recount of the gambling initiative, known as Amendment 4, election experts said, would have offered clues as to how and why 90,000 extra YES votes for gambling were recorded in Broward County, for example. This number is