The Kudzu Effect is named after a parasitic, rapidly growing vine that engulfs and suffocates the life beneath it. The life of a democracy is embodied by free, honest and verifiable elections.

Computerized voting, promoted by an interlocking cabal of politicaloperatives and vendors is strangling American democracy. According to Election Data Services,almost 80% of all voters in 2006 voted on electronic voting machines oroptically-scanned ballots nationwide. Less than 1% of voters in theU.S. used traditional hand-counted paper ballots.

What has caused this meteoric rise in computerized voting and votecounting where proprietary secrets destroy the transparency of theelection process? A massive public relations campaign by a handful ofstrategically placed individuals has peddled computer voting as thehigh-tech wave of the future.

Tom Wilkey, the Executive Director of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent bipartisan commission created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, is a leading advocate for electronic voting. He told the Los Angeles Timesfollowing the 2006 Congressional elections, that “When you look at asituation [2006 election] where we have 183,000 precincts in thiscountry, there have been very, very few problems proportionately.”Wilkey also administered the testing and certifying of voting machinesthrough NASED, the National Association of State Election Directors.

Another key proponent is Doug Lewis, the director of the Houston-based Election Center, whom David Broder of the Washington Post describes as, “the man who knows more about the conduct of elections than anyone else in the country.” Lewis gushed in USA Today:“It looks like it [2006 election] actually went better than everybodyexpected. My God, it’s a big country, and you’d expect some glitches.”

In reality, there were significant electronic voting problems in the2006 election all over the country. As Ellen Theisen, founder of Voters Unite!,points out “What if voting machines failed at thousands of pollingplaces in over half the states, and the problems caused such severedelays in eight states that voting hours were extended? Is that ‘just afew glitches?’”

Here in Ohio and across thenation, the electronic voting machines recorded statistically unlikelyundervotes. In a hotly contested Congressional electionin Sarasota, Florida, the machines recorded that 13%, or 18,000 of thevotes, failed to register in a race decided by 368 votes. In Montgomery County, Ohio, some 30,000 votes failed to record in the U.S. Senate race because of improper touchscreen machine “calibration.” In Franklin County, Ohio,a Domestic Relations judicial race produced more than 22,000 unexpectedundervotes. A recount and court hearing proved that it was impossibleto audit the electronic machines that “glitched.”

Ohio machines deemed vulnerable

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s much-anticipated studyfound Ohio’s election system riddled with “critical security failures.”Released in December 2007, after attempts by the Republican-dominatedlegislature to block the funding, the review showed massive problemsinvolved with electronic voting systems. The corporate vendor-connectedMicrosolved,Inc. concluded as part of the study that Ohio’s computer voting machinevendors have “failed to adopt, implement and follow industry-standardbest practices in the development of the system.” Among them, accordingto the independent academics who wrote a different section of thereport, was the “pervasive misapplication of security technology.”
They specifically cited the lack of “standard and well-known practicesfor the use of cryptology, key and password management and securityhardware.” The academics went on to describe computer voting softwarepractices as “deeply flawed.” The result leads to “fragile software inwhich exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normaluse.”

Paperless voting machines to be replaced

Earlier in 2007, Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist and the State legislature agreed to ban direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. After extensive testing in California, Secretary of State (SoS) Debra Bowen,announced that DRE voting systems made by Sequoia and Diebold would bebanned from use. Bowen’s testing prompted her Colorado counterpart, Mike Coffman,to decertify many of his state’s e-voting systems. Rather than installcomputerized vote counting machines with known system failures andsecurity inadequacies, New York State has refused to “improve” its lever-based voting machinery by going electronic and as a result faces a federal lawsuit.

Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Votingasserts, “State after state which adopted electronic touch screen DREsare now abandoning them for paper ballots and ballot scanners. DREscannot and do not protect our right to vote.”

It is becoming clear that the “Help America Vote Act of 2002″ (HAVA),the broadest voting reform effort of the past generation, created inthe response to the “hanging chads” of the 2000 election, is a $4billion boondoggle. The legislation, is called the “Hack America VoteAct” by election integrity activists, or the “Help America’s VendorsAct.” And vendor-abetting is what Lewis’ Election Center is all about.
Who are Wilkey & Lewis?

A look at the top two entries on the Kudzu Chart(pp. 20-21 of this issue) documents that Wilkey and Lewis have beeninstrumental in the extremely successful, well-coordinated plan to handU.S. elections, the voters, and the future of this nation over to whatcan only be described as a voting industrial complex: a privatized,for-profit system controlled by the voting machine equipment vendors inalliance with their key allies – neo-con ideologues and the military-and security-industrial elite.

An investigation headed by Sheri Myers and the Free Pressof Wilkey and Lewis, documents that they have used the cover of the“nonprofit, nonpartisan” Election Center to: create a nexus forelection officials and the vendors to conspire to push electronicvoting, take over the testing and certifying of the voting machines onbehalf of the vendors, and assume control of U.S. elections through theElection Assistance Commission.
Another look at the Kudzu Chart, comparing the involvement in columns 2and 22, reveals that a core group of electronic voting advocates cameout of the Election Center and now essentially run the EAC. (For biosof the players, go to: www/freepress.org) The EAC was charged by HAVAto distribute billions of dollars around the country to purchase votingmachines and voter registration database systems. The EAC also has taken over the testing and certifying of America’s voting machinesfrom the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). ButNASED itself, another self-described “nonpartisan nonprofit” group,basically grew out of the Election Center.

Wilkey and Lewis helped to create a self-enclosed system that appointsitself, funds itself, and tests itself, all the while actively ignoringthe realities – the damage – the system is creating.

The Kudzu Effect: How it all began

Think of the Election Center as an incubator for the intertwining ofvendor and voting official, a parasitic vine, like the Japanese kudzu,that destroys democracy as it crosses precinct, county, state, andnational election jurisdictions. This intensely corrupt and eminentlysuccessful integrated effort to privatize voting is spreading worldwidethrough the apparatus of the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES).

It took a well-placed and well-connected operative like Gary Greenhalgh to plant the Kudzu seeds. Greenhalghserved with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) from 1975-1985. Heleft with his FEC co-worker Gwenn Hofmann to create the InternationalCenter on Election Law and Administration (ICELA). Thomas Wilkey’s bioon the EAC site also credits him as a founder, “During 1983 . . . [he]pushed for the creation of the (ICELA).” During the Reagan-Bushadministration, ties were established between the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) and the ICELA. The BSSR provided initial funding to the ICELA.

The Bureau was founded in 1950 as a division of the school of socialsciences and public affairs at American University. It became anonprofit in 1956 and was used as a propaganda tool of the CIA.Its major areas of study included “. . . communication research;international program evaluation; educational research; urban renewaland community relations; military sociology; and the sociology ofoccupations,” according to the Yale University Library. (RoperCollection)

Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion(Oxford University Press) documents that “. . . the CIA clandestinelyunderwrote the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) studies oftorture. . . .” CIA expert Alfred McCoy, in his A Question of Torture, notes that the CIA used the BSSR as “One of the main conduits” for torture experiments.

By 1985, the BSSR was faltering financially. Greenhalgh’s communications with Vermont’s Secretary of State Jim Douglasat that time show that Greenhalgh was looking for a new home andfunding for his Center, and would approach George Mason University,(Karl Rove’s alma mater, where Republican strategist Morton Blackwellhosts his infamous Leadership Institute).In 1979, Rove trained at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Itsslogan: “For conservatives who want to win.” Blackwell helped co-foundthe influential Christian Right Moral Majority as well as the highly secretive and far-right Council for National Policy.

By 1986, Greenhalgh received funding from the Hewlett, Ford, and JoyceFoundations and established ICELA as the nonprofit “Election Center” aspart of the Academy for State and Local Government.By 1987, the Election Center vendor membership listed Arthur Young,BRC, MicroVote, Douglas Manufacturing, Triad, R. F. Shoup, Sperry Corp,Hart Graphics, and Office Technology Corporation – the major votingmachine vendors of the day.

Certainly Greenhalgh was aware of the potential for fraud and voterigging with the voting machines. An internet search for the ICELAreveals the following 1985 quote posted on the Blackboxvoting site:“‘There is a massive potential for problems,’ said Gary L. Greenhalgh,director of the International Center on Election Law andAdministration, a consulting group in Washington. He added that theproblem with computer-assisted voting systems was that they‘centralized the opportunity for fraud.’”

Roy Saltman, in his 1988 report,“Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying,”recommended that the fledging Election Center be the “go-to” group forall information on elections and vendors. Saltman’s report offers anearly history of the Election Center: “The Election Center, affiliatedwith the Academy for State and Local Government, was established in1984. The Center is an independent non-profit resource center servingregistration and election officials.”

The initial efforts by the Election Center to network with state andlocal election officials and propagandize for the introduction ofelectronic voting systems in the United States are referenced inSaltman’s report: “The Center has recently distributed the report of aworkshop held on Captiva Island, Florida, in February, 1987. Theworkshop concerned computerized vote-tallying and included, asparticipants, election officials, vendors, computer scientists, andothers interested in the election process.”

Saltman offers this pitch in his report: “Election officials require asource of neutral expertise for the receipt of new technical andadministrative information. The establishment of the Election Center inthe Academy for State and Local Government clearly fulfills a need. Itsefforts should be expanded.”

Ironically, like Greenhalgh, Saltman warned early on about the perils of electronic voting. In his 1975 report, Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote Tallying,he wrote: “Increasing computerization of election-related functions mayresult in the loss of effective control over these functions byresponsible authorities and that this loss of control may increase thepossibility of vote fraud.”

Saltman, a computer scientist then working with the National Bureau ofStandards, also wrote in his August 1988 report that, “Thepossibilities that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverablefrauds” was a problem with electronic voting systems.

Ronnie Dugger, in his seminal 1988 New Yorker article,summarized Saltman’s warnings of election tampering such as “. . .altering the computer program or the control punch cards thatmanipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an honestcounting program and replacing it with a fraudulent one, counting fakeballots, altering the vote recorder that voters use at the polls, orchanging either the logic that controls precinct-located vote-countingdevices or the voting summaries in these units’ removable data-storageunits. The problem in this segment of the computer business, as in thefield at large, is not only invisibility but also information aselectricity.”

Greenhalghresigned in 1987 as Director of The Election Center to become the VicePresident of Operations for the R.F. Shoup Companylocated in Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr. Ransom Shoup, thecompany’s namesake, had been convicted in 1979 for conspiring todefraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt toobtain voting machine business, according to the Commercial Appealof Memphis. With the Shoup Company under investigation in Tennessee andNew York, in 1989 Greenhalgh left to become president of Shoup’selection machine competitor, MicroVote.

In September 2000, just prior to the contentious presidential election, Greenhalgh emerged as Vice President of Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), one of the big Two, along with Diebold,that electronically counted or calculated most of the votes in the U.S.A recurring theme in Greenhalgh’s writing from the 1980s was how tomake voting accessible for the handicapped. Essentially, the HelpAmerica Vote Act enacted after the Florida 2000election punch card debacle, was sold as a disability rights issue. TheNational Federation for the Blind and other groups, backed by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, lobbied heavily for touchscreen voting machines in order to ensure access for disabled voters before the 2004 election. The National Federation for the Blind was also backed by Diebold, who donated $1,000,000 for a new facility for the NFB.

Carol Garner took over as the Election Center’s second director in1987. She had previously worked in the office of Bill Clements, Governor of Texas. Future George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove had worked for Clementsin his 1978 gubernatorial campaign and again served as his keypolitical operative in his successful 1986 re-election campaign.

Carol Garner’s Election Center successor, current long-time DirectorDoug Lewis, was also an important figure in the Texas Republican partyin the late 1970s. It was a period of historic growth for the party,which Dick Cheney has referred to as a “new era in Texas politics,” and Lewis served as a fundraiser, campaign manager, and the state Republican party Executive Director. Clements’ predecessor John Connally (seen here at Clements’ inauguration), hired Lewis in 1977 to run his PAC, the John Connally Citizen’s Forum,and later to manage his 1980 presidential bid. All the while Karl Rovewas beginning his meteoric rise as the campaign manager for Republicanswho would win long-held Democratic seats.
Of course, it is Rove’s campaign tactics that “won” George Bush both his presidencies.

The Bush campaigns as covert operations

Take the following quote from the Manchester Union Leaderregarding the 1980 Iowa caucus: “The Bush operation has all the smellof a CIA covert operation . . . strange aspects of the Iowa operation[include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at avery convenient point, with Bush having a six percent bulge overReagan.”

In 1984, President Reagan signed National Security Directive Decision NSDD245. A year later, the New York Timesexplained the details of Reagan’s secret directive: “A branch of theNational Security Agency is investigating whether a computer programthat counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the UnitedStates in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.”

It goes on to say: “Mike Levin, a public information official for theagency’s National Computer Security Center, said the investigation wasinitiated under the authority of a recent presidential directiveordering the center to improve the security of major computer systemsused by the nonmilitary agencies . . . .”

The article goes on to note that: “In 1984, the company’s program[Computer Election System of Berkeley, Calif.] and related equipmentwas used in more than 1,000 county and local jurisdictions to collectand count 34.4 million of the 93.7 million votes cast in the UnitedStates.”

Central tabulating computers were used in an attempt to steal the 1986 electionfor Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a favorite of the Reagan-Bushadministration. This is captured in Hendrick Smith’s book “The Power Game” as well as the video “The Power Game: The Presidency.”

Thus, even prior to the touchscreen computer voting machines, there wasa tradition of suspected election rigging with computer software andcentral tabulators. The actual computer voting machines were introducedon a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The results werepredictable – former CIA director George H. W. Bush won a huge upset over Dole, but the mainstream for-profit corporate media refused to consider election rigging. Here’s the Washington Post’saccount of the bizarre and unexplainable election results whentouchscreens were first used: In 1988, George H.W. Bush was trailingDole by eight points in the last Gallup poll before the New Hampshireprimary. Bush won by nine points. The Washington Post covered the Bush upset with the following headline: “Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements.”

International intrigue and the IFES

In addition to noting the congruence between the Election Center, FEC and EAC personnel, the Free PressKudzu chart (pgs. 20-21) also notes the CIA-connected IFES“democracy-building” efforts and its intersection with the so-calledElection Center. Under the guise of democratization, these twoorganizations have been the propaganda arm for electronic voting, notonly in the United States, but throughout the world.
TheInternational Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) promotes itself as“the world’s premiere election assistance organization.” The IFES webpage lists more than one hundred countries that it has worked in from Afghanistan to Yemen.

The IFES, founded in 1987, was forged in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal from funds provided by a CIA-connected organization. Documents show it received $125,000 from the scandal-ridden National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in June 1989 to assist the Nicaraguan political opposition to the Sandinistas. William Blum in Killing Hope, quotes NED co-founder Allen Weinstein saying, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Working under the auspices of the Nicaragua Election Monitoring Project of the New York-based Institute for Media Analysis,Inc. ex-contra leader Edgar Chomorro and former CIA analyst DavidMacMichael, echoed Weinsten’s analysis: “NED now carries out overtlythe majority of the CIA’s formerly covert political activities.”
The IFES’s current website states under “Current Projects”that it is “Building Pakistan’s electoral infrastructure inanticipation of elections in late 2007 or early 2008, IFES is workingto strengthen the capacity of the Electoral Commission of Pakistan(ECP) to establish and maintain a credible computerized voter registry. . . .” They will also be offering “technical assistance to theelection commission.”

Accordingto McClatchy newspapers, on December 27, 2007, the day she wasassassinated, “Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidencealleging the involvement of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in riggingthe country’s upcoming elections . . . .” McClatchy reports that,“Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep.Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that themilitary Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency was planning to fixthe polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.”
“Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday.She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early thatevening. Pakistan’s government claims instead that she was thrownagainst the lever of her car’s sunroof, fracturing her skull,”according to McClatchy.

McClatchy also reported that Bhutto’s report was “report was ‘verysensitive’ and that the party wanted to initially share it with trustedAmerican politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seenhere as strongly backing Musharraf.”

F. Clifton White,an obscure, highly-connected conservative political operative, was akey force in the development of the IFES. The F. Clifton White Applied Research Center for Democracy and Elections (ARC) is central to the IFES. White died in 1993with a long list of accomplishments. He ran Volunteers for Nixon Lodgein 1960, and created the movement to draft Barry Goldwater forPresident in 1964. He managed Ronald Reagan’s first campaign forPresident in 1968 and in 1980, Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Caseyand soon-to-be CIA director, “summoned White to his side at theirArlington headquarter as one of the two ‘senior advisors’ (the otherwas James Baker),” according to the National Review.

“During the 1980’s White divided his time between his home inGreenwich, Connecticut, an office in Washington from which he directedthe International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an organizationthat explains the techniques of democratic politics to nation’sbelatedly becoming interested in the subject, and the Ashbrook Centerfor Public Affairs at Ashland University in Ohio,” wrote the National Review.

White served on the board of the National Republic Institute for International Affairs,a Republican Party conduit for NED funding and was involved inPresident George H.W. Bush’s efforts to subvert and purchase the 1990Nicaraguan election.

The big electronic push

But the big push for electronic voting came in the wake of thedisastrous 2000 election. Dan Rather’s HDNet investigative report “The Trouble with Touchscreens”suggests that Sequoia Pacific may have been aware of the hanging chadproblem in advance. As one Sequoia employee tells Rather, “My ownpersonal opinion was the touch screen voting system wasn’t getting offthe ground . . . like they would hope. And because they weren’t havingany problems with paper ballots. So, I feel like they – deliberatelydid all this to have problems with the paper ballots so theelectronically voting systems would get off the ground – and which itdid in a big way.”

During the 2000Florida election fiasco, Morton Blackwell described what he saw as thelikely tactics of the Democrats: “These people are basically Leninists.They will stop at nothing to win.” In his assessment, “It could getbloody – figuratively and, I fear, literally.”

Leading the charge for touchscreens was Doug Lewis of the ElectionCenter, who was appointed in December 2000 to the National Elections Standards Task Forceby the National Association of Secretaries of State. As the Kudzu chartindicates, Lewis testified as an “expert” on every single “electionreform” commission or task force post-2000. In 2001, Ohio Secretary ofState and key Bush operative in Florida’s 2000 election J. Kenneth Blackwell, was serving on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) advisory panel where he also pushed electronic voting.

This two-decade-long effort by a small group of conservative Republicanoperatives culminated in the passage of the Help America Vote Act(HAVA) of 2002. HAVA created, among other things, the ElectionAssistance Commission (EAC) where many members of the Kudzu chart cancurrently be found. HAVA also required states to use federal funding toreplace punchcard and levervoting systems with new systems in acc