the ne swamp

owh doesn't want truth brought to light

Dear Friends,

Sorry. My weekly Friday conference call with Juan and Co. lasted over five hours yesterday, plus other things came up.

Let me pick up where I left off on Thursday. I said:

In the next issue, we’ll talk about the huge conflicts of interest in Nebraska over election integrity. They involve Senator Hagel, the Omaha World Herald and, I recently discovered, Senator Linehan. If you want to read ahead, read this excellent WIRED article. It indicts all three.

Working from the WIRED article, Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, decided on a whim one day back in 2002 to type "stock ownership Election Systems & Software” into a search engine. She uncovered what she described as “some startling facts.”

Quoting WIRED:

Up until 1995, Sen. Chuck Hagel had been chairman of ES&S (then called American Information Systems) before quitting the company in March of that year two weeks before launching his Senate bid. ES&S, based in Omaha, Nebraska, manufactured the only voting machines used in the state in his election the following year. According to Neil Erickson, Nebraska's deputy secretary of state for elections, the machines counted 85 percent of votes in Hagel's race; the remaining votes were counted by hand.

Hagel, a first-time candidate who had lived out of the state for 20 years, came from behind to win two major upsets in that election: first in the primary race against a fellow Republican, then in the general race against Democrat Ben Nelson, the state's popular former governor. Nelson began the race with a 65 percent to 18 percent lead in the polls, but Hagel won with 56 percent of the vote, becoming the state's first Republican senator since 1972.

Now it was October 2002. Hagel was up for re-election, and Harris discovered that the senator still owned a financial stake in his former firm. Hagel held investments worth between $1 million and $5 million in the McCarthy Group. (Hagel won't reveal the exact size of his investment in the asset-management firm.) The McCarthy Group owns about 25 percent of ES&S, according to Hagel's chief of staff, Lou Ann Linehan. She estimated that Hagel's stake in ES&S amounts to about 1.5 percent.

Hagel disclosed the McCarthy investment in his campaign filings, but he neglected to mention that McCarthy owned part of the company counting his votes. His campaign treasurer, Michael R. McCarthy, was also chairman of the McCarthy Group and a member of ES&S's board of directors.

"That's about all it took," Harris said, expressing surprise that no reporters had bothered to uncover data that took only a few Internet searches to find.

In addition to raising concerns about the integrity of Hagel's election, the information raised concerns for Harris about Hagel's vote in Congress on HAVA [Help America Vote Act]. As he prepared for re-election that year, Hagel, along with hundreds of other legislators, passed the bill, which devoted billions of federal dollars to purchasing new voting machines like the ones ES&S made.

Harris thought someone in Nebraska should know about this. So, a month before the November election, she faxed a five-page press release, including supporting documents, to 3,000 journalists around the country, among them editors for Nebraska newspapers and broadcast stations, she said. No one responded.

She wasn't surprised that the Omaha World-Herald, the state's largest newspaper, didn't jump on the story. The Omaha World-Herald Co., the paper's parent company, owns part of ES&S (the newspaper declined to say how much). But the silence from other editors stunned her.

"I thought, 'That's strange, it's right there.' I even circled it (on the documents) for them," she said, noting that as a book publicist she generally had no trouble getting editors to jump at cookbooks about beans.

The Omaha World-Herald wouldn't discuss the paper's coverage of Hagel. But Hagel's staff faxed Wired News a 2,600-word profile of Hagel published in the World-Herald in October 1996 that briefly mentioned in three paragraphs the senator's chairmanship of the voting company. It also noted that World-Herald publisher John Gottschalk was the person who recruited Hagel to the voting company in 1992. The article, however, didn't address the potential conflict-of-interest issue.

"We haven't covered it too much. This is kind of a tricky area," said World-Herald reporter David Kotok, who declined to say more before hanging up.

When Wired News asked World-Herald executive editor Larry King about his paper's coverage of Hagel, he said, "You're hitting me cold with questions about something that happened in 1996. I would never have one of my reporters do that. I'm not going to respond to this." Wired News later e-mailed questions to King but he didn't respond.

Harris posted the information about Hagel to her publicity website, and ES&S sent her a cease-and-desist letter, the first of three that she would receive from voting companies over the next year. The letter, hand-delivered by a courier, warned Harris to retract statements on her website that implicated Hagel in wrongdoing or face a lawsuit.

"That was very frightening," she said. "Especially because it came with a knock on the door. I knew we stood a very good chance of losing everything. (My husband and I) have five college-age kids ... and we had no money for an attorney."

So what do we have?

We have a man, Chuck Hagel, who ran for U.S. Senator and hid his ownership in the company (ES&S) that “counted” his votes.

Bev Harris brings this conflict of interest to the attention of the local Press (Omaha World Herald) and gets no traction.

Why did she get no traction??

Because the Press (OWH) and its CEO/Publisher (Gottschalk) ALSO have ownership in ES&S.

In other words, they are ALL bought off.

And throw Senator Lou Ann Linehan in the mix. You did notice above that she was Hagel’s chief of staff, right?

How many other people are bought off?

Everyone who isn’t calling for transparent and verifiable elections, that’s who.

None of these people have any loyalty to We the People.

They are all in bed with ES&S.

It’s a pretty sad state of affairs here in Nebraska.

(Dare I say that the Omaha World Herald turns a blind eye to human trafficking as well? Think Franklin Scandal.)

Nebraska media is no better than national media. Think Communist Nebraska News. The Editor is Jim Piglen.

I’ll leave you with my two cents on LB77:

LB77 was no victory. The right to bear arms is a constitutional matter. It's an inherent rights matter. If a majority vote can confer a right, a majority vote can take it away. We’re not a democracy. We’re a constitutional republic. Majority rule is tyranny, without constitutional oversight—and it doesn’t appear anyone in our current government wants to make reference to our Constitution.

By the way, the right to Life is a constitutional matter as well. It’s not up for a majority vote, unless someone is violating their oath.

We’ll get back to Bob Urosevich next time.

God bless,

Robert J. Borer

P.S. I hope you didn’t miss the part above about Tom Eschberger, one of ES&S’s vice presidents, being involved in a bribery and kickback scheme. Not the first. Lots of money is thrown around. Because a huge pricetag is placed on these garbage machines. There is no competitive bidding, not in NE. The people paying the money don’t care. It’s not their money.

Is it time to alter or to abolish yet??