Friday, May 9, 2008
Harris first became interested in elections last fall, when she read an article that detailed some problems with electronic voting systems -- specifically that the machines store their data in a way that isn't readily "auditable" and that they are made by companies that tend to be secretive about their processes and investors.
"Something just clicked," Harris says of reading that article, "and in this climate of a year of corporate shenanigans, I said, 'I'll just do a quick search to see who controls some of these companies.'"
Harris, who runs a P.R. firm in Seattle that does work for "unknown authors that need some publicity," had always hankered to do investigative journalism. She once publicized a book for Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, and his stories of investigative reporting had intrigued her.
She began by looking into Election Systems & Software, the world's largest election supply company, based in Omaha, Neb. Harris quickly found that ES&S was owned, in part, by a merchant banking holding company called the McCarthy Group and that the firm's chairman, Michael McCarthy, was Chuck Hagel's campaign treasurer. After searching news archives, Harris found that during Hagel's first campaign, in 1996, the Nebraska media reported that he had been president of ES&S -- which at the time was called American Information Systems -- between 1992 and 1995. But the articles suggested that Hagel was no longer affiliated with the voting equipment company. Harris saw election records that showed Hagel still holding between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in McCarthy, which owned about 25 percent of ES&S.
Harris had stumbled on what seemed to be a striking conflict of interest -- a U.S. senator owned a share in a company that built all the vote-counting machines in his state. She put up the relevant documents on her site, "and immediately I knew I'd hit a sore spot," she says, "because right away I got a threat letter from ES&S."
The letter from ES&S's attorneys demanded that Harris take down her article. "While you claim that your article is all based upon verifiable facts, even if true, which ES&S disputes, you should be aware that such 'facts,' or the implications therefrom, when presented in a false fashion, constitute defamation or defamation by implication as well as the privacy tort of false light," the attorneys said.
It's not clear what ES&S meant to convey by such a letter, but Harris didn't take down her article. "What I would certainly do if they launched a lawsuit is, we'd have a field day with discovery," she jokes now. ES&S did not return Salon's phone calls for comment.
Harris thought it odd that McCarthy's underlying assets, including the voting company, were not disclosed in Hagel's election filings, and she tipped off the Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress. Late in January, the paper reported that Hagel's omission might have constituted a Senate ethics "disclosure issue."
Did Nebraskans know of Hagel's affiliation with the voting company? Lou Ann Linehan, Hagel's chief of staff, says that the senator has been upfront with all of his business dealings. Although he owns a share in McCarthy, and McCarthy owns a share in ES&S, Linehan says there is "absolutely no affiliation" between the senator and the voting company. Hagel's indirect ownership of ES&S is tiny, his staff points out -- he owns "less than 2 percent" of McCarthy, and McCarthy owns only about a quarter of ES&S. Linehan denied there was any ethical problem with the way Hagel disclosed his McCarthy holdings. Members of Hagel's staff pointed to a letter to the Hill by William Canfield, a Senate ethics expert, that said that "Sen. Hagel has fully met his obligation, under the statute and the committee's guidance, in publicly disclosing this particular investment."
Linehan said there's nothing irregular about a person who used to run a voting-machine firm running for office. "Maybe if you're not from Nebraska and you're not familiar with the whole situation" you would have questions, she says. "But does it look questionable if there's a senator who is a farmer and now he votes on ag issues? Everybody comes from somewhere."
Nebraska was considered a "safe state" for Republicans in 2002. Most political commentators believed Hagel's opponents -- Phil Chase, an independent, John Graziano, a Libertarian, and Charlie Matulka, the Democratic candidate -- did not stand a chance. And according to the official count, Hagel trounced the opposition. He won about 400,000 votes -- Matulka, in second place, won just over 70,000.
Matulka believes that Hagel's landslide doesn't indicate a victory but something underhanded with the vote. "Why in the world would anybody with the election company want to run for office? It's like the fox in the henhouse -- they said they didn't do it, but they got feathers in the mouth." Matulka can't show any feathers, however: There appears to be not a shred of evidence to suggest that Hagel didn't honestly win his landslide, and the only thing Matulka has going for him is his hunch.
Then again, there's nothing to disprove what Matulka says, either. And that's the problem.
Many of the counties in Nebraska in 2002 used optical-scan ballots, in which votes cast on a paper ballot are counted in a machine; but several big counties, constituting a large part of the Nebraska electorate, used touch-screen machines. Matulka says that the lack of paper ballots that can be counted manually makes him suspicious. "What's so wrong with manually counting the votes?" he asks. "They've done away with the damn paper trail."
Linehan sees nothing wrong with the way the vote was conducted. "Nebraska is a very special place," she says, "and when you go to vote in Nebraska, the people at the polls know who you are. Sen. Hagel won by 83 percent of the vote, and there's no doubt he won by an overwhelming majority. And you get poll workers there who would -- if something was wrong, people would know what's going on."
Get Salon in your mailbox!
