More North Carolina info!

[milkyway]

I have some info to add to supplement ignatzmouse' exceptional DU study of North Carolina. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=45003&mesg_id=45003&page=

North Carolina is where 4,500 votes were lost in Carteret County--the votes are gone for good, never to be tabulated. They may need to hold another election.
http://newsobserver.com/news/nc/ncwire_news/story/1796348p-8095674c.html
http://www.jdnews.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=27168&Section=News

Both Diebold and ES&S (both suspicious) are in various North Carolina counties. But Carteret County uses neither of them--instead, it uses Unilect Corporation (of California).

Unilect was founded in 1989 by Jack Gerbel, its' current President. His career in elections began as a founder of Computer Election Systems. This company was charged with fixing elections in 1984.

In 1984, a court did allow plaintiffs in a disputed election to examine the source code. That year, when Ronald Reagan was re-elected president, lawsuits in Florida, Indiana and West Virginia charged fraud and vote manipulation in local races. Fingers pointed to the company that made the machines used in the election -- Votomatic punch-card machines, made by Computer Election Systems, or CES, of Berkeley, California, which used computer software to tally the votes. Experts said the company designed the machines and software so that vote totals could easily be altered without leaving a trace.
 
Losing candidates in one race charged that when the computer acted up on election night, a CES employee inserted control cards into the machine. The plaintiffs sued to retrieve the source code, and the court, for once, consented. When computer experts examined the software, they determined that CES had changed the computer's instructions for tallying votes on election night. But because the program lacked adequate auditing mechanisms to track the nature of those changes, no one could determine if the company had rigged the election. The plaintiffs lost the case because the court ruled that their claims were mere conjecture.
http://www.rense.com/general59/dontcountonrecounts.htm

Here's more:

During the summer and fall of 1985, New York Times reporter David Burnham wrote a series of lengthy articles contending that Votomatic punch-card machines, at the time made and distributed by Computer Election Systems of Berkeley, were vulnerable to tampering. These articles spawned a federal inquiry and an August 1988 report concluding that standards and controls for computer vote-tallying were worse than those employed in other computing sectors, that hanging-chad-prone technology made verifying voting results difficult, that the lack of computer controls facilitated "undiscoverable frauds," and that poll workers were ill-equipped to run the machines.

The report called for stiffened federal standards on poll technology. In November 1988, The New Yorker published a 21,000-word exposé of Votomatic's deficiencies, focusing on a battle between plaintiffs in voter-fraud lawsuits and Computer Election Systems executives about the necessity of keeping the company's vote-counting software secret. Reformers, including computer scientists interviewed by New Yorker writer Ronnie Dugger, said it was necessary to examine the code to expose and correct security deficiencies. CES executives scoffed at the potential for fraud, said the software was a trade secret, and prevailed in keeping the code hidden.
http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2003-09-24/news/smith.html

And here's a link to court testimony in Cincinnati regarding CES's software.
http://www.votefraud.org/Archive/Write/expert.htm

I have not yet been able to find when Jack Gerbel left CES. I don't know if he was with the company when these allegations about them were made. After leaving CES, Jack Gerbel moved on to VP for Business Records Corporation--which later became ES&S! http://www.fec.gov/pages/vendors.htm

Also, see this:

ES&S, the largest voting machine company in America, claims to have counted 56% of the vote in the last four presidential elections. Again, it's owned by the ultra-conservative Omaha World-Herald Company, the McCarthy Group, and former owners of Business Records Corporation. ES&S was created from a merger between American Information Systems (AIS) and Business Records Corporation. Bob and Todd Urosevich founded AIS in the 1980's. Bob is now president of Diebold-Global, while brother Todd is a vice president at ES&S. Business Records Corp. was partially owned by Cronus, a company that seems to have a lot of connections to the notorious Hunt brothers from Texas, as well as other individuals and entities, including  Rothschild, Inc.. Right wing Republicans Howard Ahmanson (who financed AIS) and Nelson Bunker Hunt have both heavily contributed to The Chalcedon Institute, an organization that mandates Christian "dominion" over the world. http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Landes_Ambush.htm

And then there is this prescient article from 1989 regarding fixing elections:

But who on Earth would do such a thing? In Chicago in 1982, 58 Democratic party bosses were convicted of fraud after they were caught stuffing not the ballot box, but the computer. They had punched out fraudulent cards for falsely registered and nonexistent voters, then run them through the card-reader.

There have been numerous other ambiguous cases. Many of them have involved Berkeley's Computer Election Service (CES)-which recently changed its name to Business Records Corporation Election Service. The company is the dominant force In the American election industry; an estimated 33 to 40 percent of all American votes are cast on and counted by CES systems. CES uses aversion of the punch-card voting system prevalent in California.

In 1985, the National Security Agency (NSA)-the government's most expansive and most secretive intelligence service-took an interest in CES. According to the New York Times, NSA was following a directive from then-President Reagan to improve the security of major non-military computer systems. 

Government officials were queasy at the prospect of a top-secret military spy agency-particularly NSA, whose domain is high-tech intelligence gathering-delving into the nation's electoral process. According to the Times, an official of the government's General Accounting Office told a Senate committee that NSA's involvement with CES "raises basic questions concerning the extent to which the defense establishment should be involved in policy formulation within the government's civilian agencies."

The voting machine business seems to have been dominated by a handful of people for several decades, with strong ties to hard right wingers, fundamentalists, and the republican party.

And now the lost 4500 North Carolina votes come from the seemingly innocent sounding Unilect Corporation--but headed by a guy who's been in the middle of this stuff for decades.

Is this part of a vast rightwing conspiracy? How ironic it would be if the Internets invented by Al Gore helped expose this stuff.

BTW, somebody needs to wake up ignatzmouse and have him continue his North Carolina study on a county level. North Carolina uses several different kinds of voting machines, and we need to see if all counties have this deviation from the absentee voting, or it varies depending on which voting machine is used.

Here's a link for the voting equipment used in each county.
http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/map.php?topic_string=5std&state=north%20carolina