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..."Gov. Jeb Bush appointed Deborah Clark election supervisor in Pinellas County, Florida, in May of 2000.
Trouble began almost immediately. Some of it was even funny…
For example, in the Aug. 31 2002 primary, the population of an entire small town— 12,498 voters— appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney.
The town cast votes in all the other contests, but not in the race for state attorney. Had there been a town-wide secret pact?
To this day no one is sure why those voters didn't vote, or if they did, what might have happened to their votes. They are “ghost votes,” floating in the ether. The local papers labeled it “A Voting Mystery.”
More seriously, while Deborah Clark had worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband Richard Clark’s employer Elections Systems & Software, was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office, and was up for a lucrative contract worth as much as $15-million to sell new voting machines to Pinellas County.
Clark, who hadn’t disclosed the connection, hotly denied a conflict of interest. “Neither my husband nor I would ever do anything that would compromise the integrity of the elections office, or our own personal integrity," she said.
Clark's failure to disclose that her husband was working for a voting machine company bidding for Pinellas' business, coupled with the last-minute revelation that the executive who would have managed Pinellas' elections for Sequoia Voting Systems, the company the county chose, was under indictment in Louisiana, left a bit of a sour taste.
Elections in Pinellas County have been occasions for holding your breath for several election cycles...."
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Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote Totals In the Middle Ages it was “God’s Will.” Today it's "a computer glitch.”
Even as testimony indicated a Florida computer firm was asked to create a program to 'hack the vote' at the request of a top Florida Republican, a “mistake” in the office of the seriously-compromised Supervisor of Election in Pinellas County spiked hopes for a recount. A recount that would have thrown a spotlight on dark corners of the election process in the Sunshine State...which critics say hide widespread and even systemic vote fraud.
http://www.madcowprod.com /
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"THE BIG FIX 2004"
How to Fix a Presidential ElectionAn investigation into the surprisingly-sordid history of America’s “election services industry” has revealed that executives and owners of the two largest companies, E S & S and Sequoia Pacific, have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states.
http://www.madcowprod.com/mc6912004.html