Should The Romneys Own Ohio's E-Voting Machines
Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.
Make no mistake, this election, Obama has to overcome some pretty fair (and unfair) sized obstacles. Thanks to the Conservative Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling giving corporations (or more specifically corporate CEOs) permission to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns, superpacks led by conservative corporate billionaires gave an estimated $577 million (69%) compared with $237 (28%) million spent by liberal groups. If that's not bad enough, Republican officials in key battleground states have defied court orders and continued practicing voter suppression against democratic voters. But by far the most outrageous and extreme obstacle of the President getting a fair shot at re-election is the fact that Governor Romney, along with his family and close associates basically own the e-voting machines in Ohio and other states. These are machines designed not to leave a paper trail. If you think I'm being paranoid, remember that in 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term. A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus% shift occurred between 12:20 and 2:00 am election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In defiance of a federal injunction, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed all election records, making a recount impossible.
In a close election like this whoever wins more votes in Ohio wins the election … that is unless the other candidate happens to own the voting machines.
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