ELRON - VOXEO: The Israeli Defense Firm That Tallies the Iowa Caucus
By Christopher Bollyn
31 December 2007
The Iowa caucus is only a few days away and the nation's attention will be directed to the results, which signify the beginning of the U.S. presidential race. But does anyone watch who tallies the results of the Iowa caucus?
The Iowa caucus results were tallied in 2004 by a company that is headed by a man whose company was bought by Elron Electronics, the Israeli defense firm. I suspect that it will be the same this year. Don't expect to see any grassroots political activists doing the tally in Iowa. The Israeli defense establishment takes care of that part of the American "democratic" election process.
VOXEO
In the summer of 2004, I first learned that a foreign and out-of-state company using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology tallied the Iowa caucus results.
The system used to tally the 2004 Iowa caucus results was provided by a company called Voxeo, which was apparently based in Orlando, Florida. (Yellow flag goes up in the mind of those familiar with Orlando and electronic vote fraud history. See Bollyn article on Yang below.)
The calls from the nearly 2,000 caucus centers in Iowa went to a Voxeo call center in Atlanta, Georgia.
On January 31, 2005, I wrote to Michelle Bauer, Iowa's Secretary of State with some questions about the use of Voxeo, a foreign company located in Florida, to tally the results of the Iowa caucus:
Subject: How was the Iowa Caucus Tallied?
Dear Sirs,
When I visited the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Des Moines last summer, I learned that the tally of the Iowa caucus had been "out-sourced" to a company in Atlanta, Georgia.
What this means is that the tallying of the Iowa caucus results was done over the telephone, using the touch-tone buttons, to enter the results from each caucus location…
I am interested in how this was done, and why. Why did the Democratic Party allow the crucial tally of the caucus results to be done by a company in Atlanta? Don't they trust their own math skills?
Can any of you provide any information about this matter?
Kind regards,
Christopher Bollyn
A person named Mike Milligan wrote back on behalf of Secretary of State Bauer:
Mike Milligan <milliganconsulting@mchsi.com> wrote:
Dear Christopher:
The Secretary of State forwarded me the email you sent to then on Monday, January 31, 2004 [sic] regarding the Iowa Caucuses.
Unfortunately you either received some incorrect information in your travels or are confused. The Iowa Democratic Party completed all of the caucus night tabulations in Iowa, in the Des Moines/Polk County Convention Center, which was the Caucus night HQ. In fact, our tech staff wrote the software that tabulated the results.
To answer your second to last question, we feel we have a comfortable grasp of mathematics.
Sincerely,
MWM
Mike Milligan, Executive Director
Iowa Democratic Party
(515) 244-7292 ex. 676
I wrote this note back to Mr. Milligan:
Dear Mr. Milligan,
I am responding to you about how the caucus results for the Iowa Democratic Party were tallied on the night of the nation's first caucus. After checking my sources, I can assure you that it is correct that an out-of-state telephone/computer system tallied the Iowa precinct results.
The system used was provided by Voxeo Corporation based in Orlando, Florida. The calls went from Iowa to a call center in Atlanta, Georgia.
See: http://www.voxeo.com/
This information was first provided to me last August by John McCormally, Communications Director for the Iowa Democratic Party in Des Moines, Iowa.
Today I called Voxeo (800) 305-5771 in Orlando and although I didn't go into detail, the receptionist confirmed that Voxeo had conducted the telephone tally of the Iowa Democratic Caucus results.
How is it that you don't know that?
McCormally told me that chairmen were selected in all 1,993 precincts and these chairmen called in on touch-tone phones and after giving their PIN number, were able to enter the results from their precinct using the touch-tone number pad.
I'm not going to go into great detail at this point, but this procedure of using an out-of-state computer company to tally the precinct results for the Iowa Democratic Caucus lacks the transparency and openness that one might expect in this exercise in grass-roots poll.
Clearly, if someone wanted to adjust the results, it would be the easiest thing to do to do it through this computer system in Orlando, Florida. The Democrats in Iowa would never be aware of it, regardless of their math skills, unless the paper results were carefully audited in an open and honest manner.
Christopher Bollyn
THE ISRAELIS & VOXEO
Now, who really is Voxeo, and why are the Iowa caucus results tallied by them? I don't know if the 2008 Iowa results will be tallied in the same way, but I wouldn't doubt it.
Voxeo is headed by Jonathan Taylor, who is the company's President and CEO. This is what his Voxeo webpage says about him:
Jonathan combined his experience in both business operations and technology innovation to found Voxeo in 1999. Under his guidance, Voxeo has seen triple-digit revenue growth for four consecutive years and has been profitable since January, 2004. Prior to Voxeo, Jonathan founded and helped bring three additional software and infrastructure service companies to profitability.
From 1995 to 1997, Jonathan was the founder and President of InterResearch and Development Group (IRdg), Inc. IRdg created and licensed iPost - the first internet powered OEM unified messaging solution - to leading telecommunications providers including Ericsson, Motorola and Unisys. IRdg was acquired by Elron Electronic Industries (Nasdq: ELRN) subsidiary MediaGate in 1997.
There you have it. Jonathan Taylor's company, which he founded, was taken over by Elron Electronic Industries, the Israeli defense high tech company:
In its early days, Elron focused on defense, particularly electronics and avionics, as well as the emerging medical and technology sectors. In 1966, Elron founded Elbit, which combined the expertise of the Ministry of Defense-Research Institute in special computer design with Elron's experience in electronic product design, manufacture and management.
Source: http://www.elron.net/default.asp?PageID=203
This is important information that Americans need to know and which they will not find in the Zionist-controlled media in the United States. It needs to be understood that the entire election process in the United States is a fraud. More than that, it is a fraud that is being perpetrated by the Israeli defense establishment on the naïve and gullible American public.
The sine qua non of an honest and transparent election process is the open counting of the votes by the voters themselves in each polling station in front of the open eyes of other citizens and members of the media. Any compromise in this most fundamental and essential process which acts to remove the citizenry from the vote-counting process simply cannot be accepted.
This is what Americans MUST get back to, in every polling station in the nation: paper ballots that are hand counted in front of the public.
Nothing else will do to protect their democratic franchise in the United States - NOTHING.
Chicago Ballot Chaos
<SPAN .."FONT-SIZE: 11pt; COLOR: #666666; FONT-FAMILY: 'Lucida Sans Unicode'">New Computer Vote Machines Malfunction, Unverifiable</SPAN>
By Christopher Bollyn
5 April 2006
COOK COUNTY, Illinois—Chicago’s use of a flawed computerized voting system operated by a privately held foreign company reveals how meaningless and absurd the “democratic” process in America has become. Having observed voting systems across Europe, from Serbia, Germany and Estonia to Holland and France, this reporter has noted that the most honest and transparent elections are also the most simple.
The more complicated methods of voting, such as the unverifiable computerized voting systems widely used across the United States, lack the most essential element of democratic elections—transparency.
The $50 million touch-screen and optical-scan voting system provided by Sequoia Voting Systems failed across Chicago and suburban Cook County during the March 21 Illinois primary. However, the leading corporate-controlled newspapers merely lamented the failures of the system without addressing its fundamental flaws or even reporting that the company running the election is foreign-owned.
The “high-tech” computerized voting system was “cumbersome” and “slow,” one mainstream Chicago newspaper reported. The machines failed across the county causing “plenty of frustration and confusion for voters,” the paper reported. The ballots and votes from more than 400 precincts were still uncounted two days after the election due to machine malfunctions and lost memory cartridges which contain the results.
Reports from other dailies noted that as of noon Wednesday, Chicago was missing memory cartridges from 252 polling stations while Cook County officials “couldn’t find” the results from 162 suburban precincts.
Election officials tried to assure the public that although nobody knew where all the ballots and computerized memory cartridges were, they were “most assuredly not lost.”
“I don’t trust that,” U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) said. “This is Chicago. This is Cook County. We created vote fraud, vote scandal and stealing votes. We created that mechanism. It became an art form.”
“Ballot chaos” is how another large Chicago newspaper described the situation in which the votes from hundreds of precincts could not be found or counted on Election Night.
“We have accounted for the votes,” Langdon Neal, city election chairman told the publication. “What we haven’t been able to do is count them.”
In one precinct on the Near South Side, for example, the Sequoia optical scanner failed to register anything but Republican ballots. Although “election officials” tried to repair the machine four times, by the end of the day it had failed to register a single Democratic ballot in a precinct in which some 86 percent of the voters are Democrats.
When this reporter went to vote, the touch-screen machine went completely dead as the voter in front of me pressed the button to print. When the poll workers were asked if other voters had had similar problems with the equipment they said it had happened all day and showed me an unplugged machine that had broken down earlier.
When the polls closed at 7 p.m., I was at the Cook County Clerk’s office to see how the votes were tallied.
Citizens in Chicago, as in most American cities, are, however, forbidden from viewing or participating in the any aspect of the vote-counting process.
The so-called counting of the votes is managed by some two dozen employees of Sequoia Voting Systems, a privately held foreign company. These employees, many of whom are not even U.S. citizens, have “full access” to the “back room area,” a sealed-off section of the 5th floor of the county clerk’s office which is called the “tally area.”
In Chicago, the person in charge of the tallying of the votes was a British employee of Sequoia named David Allen from London. Allen, who ran the “Sequoia War Room” in an office next to that of Cook County Clerk David Orr, oversaw the “tally room” team, which included a dozen Venezuelan employees, who operated the hidden computer equipment that counts the votes.
As I have reported before, there are wire services such as the Associated Press, who could be seen having direct connections leading from their computers to the hidden mainframe computer of the Sequoia tallying system located behind the wall on the 5th floor of the clerk’s office.
Senior executives from Sequoia Voting Systems and from its partner company, Smartmatic, such as company president Jack A. Blaine and Roger Alejandro Piñate Martinez, vice president of special operations, also had “full access” to the tally area.
Sequoia, which was previously held by the British-based firm De La Rue PLC, a company, which produces bank notes, travelers checks and cash handling equipment, was merged or combined with Smartmatic in March 2005.
Smartmatic, which has a U.S.-based office in Boca Raton, Fla., is headed by three young Venezuelans along with Blaine, a former vice president with Unisys. A dozen Venezuelans could be seen managing the most sensitive aspects of the recent election in Chicago.
Smartmatic, the parent company of Sequoia Voting Systems, obtained the company for a “ridiculously low amount of money,” Charles D. Brady, an analyst with Hibernia Southcoast Capital Inc., said at the time of the merger.
While De La Rue purchased 85 percent of Sequoia in 2002 for $35 million, it reportedly sold the growing global company for only $16 million in 2005. Tracey Graham, then president of Sequoia, said more than 30 organizations had expressed interest in buying her company, yet no names of other bidders were given citing “confidentiality agreements.”
The chief officers of Sequoia-Smartmatic are two 32-year old Venezuelans from Caracas, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. Anzola also works as a Venezuela-based lawyer brokering international oil deals with the Cleveland law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey.
“With the combination of Sequoia and Smartmatic, both proven innovators with accomplished track records in either the U.S. or abroad, we are creating the first truly global leader in providing voter-verified electronic voting systems,” Blaine said in March 2005 when the merger was announced.
There is, however, nothing verifiable about the Sequoia voting system used in Cook County. The voter has no way of knowing if his vote has been counted or how it was counted.
The absolute lack of transparency in U.S. voting systems yields unverifiable election results, which can only be accepted on faith. In Chicago voters are asked to trust the results produced by malfunctioning machines operated by a privately owned foreign company.
Asked about the nature of the foreign company that runs elections in Cook County, Scott Burnham, spokesman for Cook County Clerk Orr simply said, “Ask Sequoia” and hung up the phone. Asked about the ownership of the privately held company, Allen, who supervised the tally, refused to answer and handed the phone to Michelle Shafer, the company’s vice president and spokesperson.
Pressed about Allen’s citizenship, Shafer finally admitted that the Sequoia employee who oversaw the tally was, indeed, a British citizen who had been assisted by a team of Venezuelans.
Dimas Ulacio, one of the Venezuelan technicians who worked in the tally area spoke with me. “Who really owns Sequoia?” I aksed Ulacio. “Is Sequoia-Smartmatic truly a Venezuelan company or is it a British-owned company masquerading as a Venezuelan company?”
Ulacio laughed but refused to answer.
While a high percentage of the precinct results—about 90 percent—are usually reported within one hour of the polls closing, the Sequoia system failed to produce any results for nearly two hours. Only 44 percent of the precinct results had been reported four hours after the polls closed.
The widespread failures of the Sequoia voting system in the Cook County election, Shafer said, made for a “very typical Election Day in a jurisdiction where they are changing voting technology.” Rather than blame the machines, Shafer blamed human error.
See also:
<LI>Florida Election Stolen
<LI>WHO IS BEHIND FLORIDA VOTE FRAUD AND SPYING ON NASA?
</LI>
Florida Election Stolen
<DIV class=Section1>
Computer Programmer Reveals Scheme to Steal 2000 Vote
By Christopher Bollyn
21 December 2004
TITUSVILLE, Florida—While the mainstream media has focused on a sensational murder trial in California and the political crisis that followed the flawed elections in Ukraine, it has ignored a huge domestic story about the computer programmer who has come forward and explained how he had written computer code to steal elections in Florida.
An affidavit signed by the programmer, Clinton Curtis, in Prince George’s County, Md., on Dec. 6, 2004, names the individuals involved in a computer vote fraud scheme that he worked with in “the early fall of 2000” as “lead programmer” for a company called Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), based in Oviedo, Fla.
The 4-page Curtis document contains 15 points that he swears are both true and correct.
“I declare under penalty of perjury,” Curtis signed on the affidavit, “that the above is true and correct.”
By the fall of 2000 Curtis had worked as a programmer for two years with YEI, a listed “small, minority, woman-owned business” that does extensive business with NASA and Florida. The CEO of YEI is a Chinese immigrant named Mrs. Li Woan Yang.
On its web site, YEI says it has 250 employees working at its Oviedo headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Patrick Air Force Base and Tallahassee, Fla.
According to published company documents, the contact person for YEI is Mike Cohen, Yang’s “executive secretary.” Cohen, named by Curtis as being one of the three key persons at YEI involved in creating the program in 2000, has not answered telephone calls.
To read the whole article, click here:
</DIV>
<DIV class=Section1>http://www.bollyn.com/index/?id=10548</DIV>
<DIV class=Section1></DIV>
See also:
<LI>WHO IS BEHIND FLORIDA VOTE FRAUD AND SPYING ON NASA?
</LI>
Death of Democracy – Or – May the Best Hacker Win
by Christopher Bollyn
27 October 2000
What is particularly troubling about these machines is the fact that they contain an internal two-way modem, which enables anyone with a modem-equipped computer, from hackers and vendors to telephone company personnel and politicians, to potentially access and alter the computer’s tally of the votes.
---
Cook County, IL – Across the United States, in precincts from coast to coast, ballot-counting computers equipped with cellular telephony and two-way modems have counted the votes of the American people. These ballot-counting machines, designed and operated by private companies, and the laws that ushered in their use have essentially disenfranchised citizen election judges from the vote-counting process and relegated them to insignificant roles as public servants working for private business on election night.
Computer programmers leave no fingerprints inside a computer, what happens inside it cannot be seen, and its records, and printouts can be fixed to conceal whatever an operator wants to keep secret. However, here and in other key jurisdictions around the nation, election judges have signed off on tally tapes of computer-generated vote counts without any actual verification on their part that the tally is correct.
OFFICIAL INDIFFERENCE
Some officials concerned with elections have pondered the unthinkable; namely, the stealing of a presidential election by computer fraud in the metropolitan areas of key states. Steve White, former assistant attorney general of California, said, “ Given the importance of the national election, sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a real reluctance to concede the gravity of the problem.”
Officials at the Illinois State Board of Elections, the agency that approves the voting machines used in the state was contacted and asked about how the integrity of the elections could be safeguarded; each and every official interviewed was indifferent to the threat of computer vote fraud. Rick Fulle, Assistant Director of voting systems and 25-year veteran of the board said, “You can’t secure any computer system.”
When asked if election judges were permitted by law to do a manual recount of the votes – to verify the accuracy of the computer tally – the officials invariably replied, “You do not do a hand count,” although Fuller added, “nothing would stop them.”
A hand count of the votes by the election judges at the precinct level, before posting the results, is the only way to ensure that the machine tally is correct and that no computer fraud has been perpetrated. However, election officials discourage any manual audit saying that there are too many choices on the ballot and that a manual count would take too long.
In Switzerland, arguably the most democratic nation, all major political decisions are put before the people as referenda and polling with hand-counted paper ballots is conducted at least four times a year. Switzerland is not a member of the United Nations due simply to the fact that the Swiss people have rejected UN membership at the polls.
NOBODY CARES
Tests of computer vote-counting systems used in Illinois from 1983-1987, which tested tens of thousands of ballots, revealed significant errors in the computer counting in more than twenty percent of the tests. Fulle said that in Illinois today there is “a 16 percent error rate” with ballot-counting machines. He expected numerous problems on election night saying “equipment will fail across the state.”
“I don’t understand why nobody cares,” Michael L. Harty, former Illinois director of voting systems and standards said, “At one point, we had tabulation errors in twenty-eight percent of the systems tested, and nobody cared.”
The indifference of election officials, the people ultimately responsible for the integrity of the elections, proves a point made by a former president of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, who said, “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
Officials from the Illinois Board of Elections said that election judges are only required to verify that the number of ballots tabulated by the machine matches the number of ballots counted by the judges – as if voters are only voting for one candidate. Fulle added, “Nothing in the law [Illinois] requires that the count be accurate.” In this way the basic role of election judges -- to count and verify the accuracy of the vote -- has been usurped and compromised by election machines operated by private companies.
PUBLIC ELECTIONS ARE PRIVATE BUSINESS
Whether it was the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100 (PBC), the Optech Eagle III, the Model 100 Optic Mark Reader (OMR), or the Votronic touch-screen system that counted your vote, these machines have something in common:
they are all designed and operated by Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) - and they each contain a two-way modem, allowing them to communicate - and be communicated with - while they are in operation.
What is particularly troubling about these machines is the fact that they contain an internal modem, which enables anyone with a modem-equipped computer, from hackers and vendors to telephone company personnel and politicians, to potentially access and alter the computer’s tally of the votes.
ES&S is “the largest company in the world focusing solely on automating the election process.” The company “provides specialized systems and software to automate the entire election process for local, state, and national governments worldwide.” ES&S is a reorganized company that was given a new name in November 1997 after combining two of the largest election machine companies: Business Records Corp. (BRC, formerly part of Cronus Industries) and American Information Systems, Inc. (AIS).
ES&S is a privately held company owned by unknown investors and headed by Aldo Tesi, who refers to the democratic franchise as “the election industry.” The company is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska and supplies “thousands and thousands of machines being used across the country” to more than 2,200 U.S. jurisdictions in 49 states.
Cook County bought nearly 5,000 PBC machines from ES&S at a cost of $25 million for the suburbs and the city of Chicago in what a company spokesman called a “huge contract.”
ES&S FIASCO IN VENEZUELA
ES&S supplied Model 100 ballot-counting machines (through a Madrid-based company called Indra – Note the use of pagan deity names) for the elections in Venezuela.
It was reported (in the Omaha World Herald, whose publisher, John Gottschalk is one of the directors of ES&S) that the head of Venezuela’s National Elections Council, Etanislao Gonzalez, placed the blame for the technical difficulties during the election on the Nebraska-based ES&S. Gonzalez said, “the firm flagrantly failed to meet its commitments and the failure had destabilized the country’s electoral process.”
A Venezuelan air force jet flew to Omaha to fetch experts to “salvage” the election. It was reported that more than 6 percent of the 7,000 voting machines broke down during the Venezuelan election and that there were major “technical glitches”. ES&S said that the rate of failure in the Venezuela election was "slightly higher than we would expect."
EASY ACCESS ANYTIME
The PBC machines contain an internal Expedite modem made by Novatel Wireless, an international company based in San Diego, a “spin-off” of two Canadian companies: NovAtel, Inc. of Calgary, a company specializing in satellite communications and global positioning systems, and an internationally owned oil company in Alberta.
“You certainly run the risk of somebody hacking into these [vote-counting] machines,” a spokesman for Novatel Wireless said, “The machine can be accessed anytime it is plugged in,” – if one knows the computer’s IP (Internet Protocol) address. “Internet voting scares me,” he added, “it puts us in the same situation as a third-world country.” When asked about the ownership of Novatel Wireless, he said, “I’ve no idea who owns the company.”
Roy Saltman, a computer consultant at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Computer Systems Laboratory wrote a report for the U.S. Commerce Dept. in 1988 entitled, “Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying”, in which he documented many instances of vote mistabulation and the inherent vulnerability of U.S. voting systems to error and fraud. Among the possible methods he listed by which “unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverable frauds” were “fraudulent alterations in the computer program or in control cards that manipulate the program” and “introduction of false voting summaries through changes in data stored in removable data storage units of precinct-located, vote-counting devices.”
Herb Deutsch, who works in the technical department of ES&S in Rockford, IL, where the PBC was designed has worked with election software and hardware for 25 years having formerly worked for BRC. Deutsch defended the PBC saying that its ballot tabulation program is “generic” and that its computer code has been “certified.”
CONTROL CARDS
However, each PBC machine is programmed and run by a pre-programmed 512-K memory card. According to Deutsch, “the memory card can be used for lots of purposes” and contains the coded instructions that “essentially tell the machine what to do” when it is turned on. These cards are programmed at the company offices of ES&S in Chicago. The card is removed by the election judges and turned in to headquarters when the polls close.
Vikant Corp., a Chicago area company owned by Alex Kantarovich of Minsk, Belorussia, supplied the control cards to ES&S. When asked where Vikant cards are produced, Kantarovich said, “I cannot disclose where the cards are made,” but admitted that they are not made in America.
Mr. Kantarovich said that he has been in America for 11 years but declined to discuss his employment prior to running Vikant Corp., saying, “I don’t want to disclose that information.”
Kantarovich said he had obtained his degree in the Soviet Union and initially refused to answer questions about how his product was chosen for the ES&S voting equipment saying that it was “inside information that I cannot disclose.” Kantarovich said later that his firm was chosen over larger firms like IBM and Panasonic because Vikant was uniquely able to meet the specific requirements of ES&S and provide the cards on short notice. He added, however, that there had been “some problems” with the cards from other suppliers.
Kantarovich said, “To tell you the truth, I have no idea how these vote counting machines work. We are just the supplier of one particular product.”
“NO ONE IS SAFE”
Deutsch said that he trusted that the election computers were safe from hackers on the very day that it was reported that Microsoft’s computers and source code had been “hacked” for a week. Teenagers have demonstrated that breaking into the most secure computer networks in the world is “child’s play,” but serious questions about the security of the national election computer network are dismissed as preposterous.
Security experts say the attack on Microsoft shows that no one is safe - it was reported that the information stolen from Microsoft was sent to Russia, although this could be a front for people anywhere on the net.
Source:
NA (Network America) e-wire
http://www.votefraud.org/News/2000/10/102700.html
See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.votefraud.org/how_a_private_company_counts_our_votes.htm