Tangled web

Holy crap.

...In addition to the "Dear Colleague" letter that Ney wrote (signed by him and his co-sponsors of the HAVA legislation) in 2004, asking members of congress not to amend the act to require paper trails, Ney has made every effort to ensure that the myriad reports of massive voter disenfranchisment and electoral irregularities that occurred in Ohio remain little more than "conspiracy theory" as far as both the Mainstream Media and the majority of the American electorate perceive the matters. He, and others who have lobbied hard on behalf of Diebold have continued to misleadingly forward the idea that what occurred in 2004, and subsequently in 2005, where some 44 out of 88 counties in Ohio went electronic for the first time, is nothing to be alarmed about. It's all little more than the imaginery ruminations of Democratic-party John Kerry supporters, according to such folks. That, despite the fact that it has been the Green and Liberterian parties who have, by-and-large, waged the most aggressive attempt to have votes in Ohio counted, along with the extraordinarily well-documented reports of chicanery exposed nationally throughout various local media. More information in that regard will likely surface via the still-pending lawsuit on all of this brought by the League of Women Voters in Ohio.

Add that to the "staggeringly impossible" results of the 2005 Election results there which were stunning, to say the least, and the shamefully under-reported story of the non-partisan Governmental Accountability Office's (GAO) damning report on HAVA and its gross failures released last September. All told, it would seem that Ney and the Voting Machine Companyies like Diebold have had every reason to squash whatever reporting they could on these matters, and so far, they've gotten the job largely done. At least in the mainstream outlets.

And finally then, it has recently been revealed that Diebold itself was also paying Abramoff's firm Greenberg Traurig directly for work in June of 2004 which has yet to be fully detailed or explained in any way.

A payment stub [PDF] and pre-check-register [PDF] revealing a $12,500 payment for the month, made from Diebold to Greenberg Traurig was discovered in a dumpster at Diebold's McKinney, TX facility in July of that year by electronic voting watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org...