Connecting the Dots in Ohio

Lambert at Corrente is doing a good job lately at connecting the dots between the Ohio retirement fund scandal and the voting machine massage that occurred in the 2004 re-$election.

What we knew:

Dot 1: Precious metals are good for money laundering.

Dot 2: Tom Noe "lost" $10-14 million dollars in rare coins, good, like precious metals, for money laundering.

Dot 3: Diebold says they want to help Bush win, and Diebold programmers are known to have been convicted of fraud. (All from "Coin dealers, money laundering, and connecting the dots in Ohio".)

Now add this:

Dot 4: Tom Noe's wife got Diebold machines that don't leave a paper trail installed in Lucas County.

Dot 5: Lucas County was a statistical anomaly, Bush's way, on [cough] election Day.

Dot 6: Diebold programmers did something to the machines in Lucas County after the [cough] election, but they wouldn't show anybody what. I wonder why?

When is a reporter going to take Deep Throat's advice, and follow the money?

I'm still betting some of the laundered money ended up in the pockets of a rogue Diebold systems programmer, hacking the mother machine.

It's easier to hack if you're a Team player.

"Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States," Teresa Heinz Kerry told a group of Seattle guests at a March 7, 2005 lunch for Representative Adam Smith, according to reporter Joel Connelly in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly noted Heinz Kerry added that it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

The two brothers Mrs. Kerry is referencing are, according to voting machine expert (and founder of www.BanVotingMachines.org) Lynn Landes, in an article for the Online Journal, Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, and Todd Urosevich, who was vice president for customer support of Chuck Hagel's old company, now known as ES&S.

As Thom Hartmann says, "Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots."