By Cliff Montgomery – Nov. 5th, 2012
“Could a voting machine company with deep financial ties to the Romney family help Republicans steal the presidential election in Ohio?” That’s the question now being asked by Credo Action, a web-based publication of the citizen-action group Working Assests.
Why is this such an issue? It turns out that any possible deciding votes in Ohio “could be cast on electronic voting machines manufactured by Hart Intercivic.” That’s an important matter, as “the Romney family [is] part owner of the voting machine company,” via its capital interests.
Here’s how it breaks down: “Reports of Hart Intercivic’s ties to Romney first surfaced in late September, in a blog post…in The Free Press, an Ohio [based] website,” according to a Salon article published in late October.
The Free Press “reported that a key investor in Hart was HIG Capital, seven of whose directors were former employees of Bain & Co.,” Salon also stated.
If the last corporation sounds familiar, Bain & Co. is “a consulting company of which Mitt Romney was once CEO,” though “Romney left the company in 1984 to co-found a spinoff company, Bain Capital,” states Salon.
“HIG Capital announced its investment in Hart on July 6, 2011, just one month after Romney formally announced the launch of his presidential campaign,” added Salon.
A few other connections between Mitt Romney and Hart, for your information:
- “Hart Intercivic is majority owned by HIG Capital, which controls two of the five seats on the Hart Intercivic board,” states Credo Action.
- Four HIG directors – John Bolduc, Douglas Berman, Brian Schwartz and Tony Tamer – are Romney bundlers. So is Brian Shortsleeve, a former manager of both Bain and HIG.
- HIG has contributed $382,904 to the Romney presidential campaign in 2012, according to OpenSecrets, a website published by political watchdog The Center for Responsive Politics. Bain Capital has contributed $288,470.
- Private equity firm Solamere has investments in HIG Capital, according to The Nation. Thus the equity firm is one of the owners of the voting machine company. Solamere is run by Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg. In short, “the Romney family [is] part owner of the voting machine company, through its interest in HIG Capital,” according to Credo Action.
And it’s not just left-wing journalistic entities pointing out the apparent conflict of interest.
“The company whose voting machines will be tabulating votes in the swing states of Ohio and Colorado has links to Mitt Romney,” recently declared United Press International.
But the voting machine company has denied any colliding of interests. Peter Lichtenheld, a Hart Intercivic spokesman, admitted to Salon that HIG is a top investor, but claimed “it has nothing to do with management at Hart,” thus in essence denying the Credo Action report which stated that “Hart Intercivic is majority owned by HIG Capital [and] controls two of the five seats on the Hart Intercivic board.”
And Lichtenheld said more.
“We don’t want the perception that we have some political agenda,” the Hart Intercivic spokesman told reporters. “We are in the election business and integrity is paramount.”
But a 2007 investigation of Hart Intercivic conducted by Ohio’s Secretary of State revealed that the company’s voting machines may be easily manipulated. As The New York Times pointed out:
At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.
These weaknesses allow unauthorized individuals to “easily tamper” with essential voting data, according to the study.
The report concluded:
The vulnerabilities and features of the system work in concert to provide “numerous opportunities to manipulate election outcomes or cast doubt on legitimate election activities … virtually every ballot, vote, election result and audit log is forge-able or otherwise manipulatable by an attacker with even brief access to the voting systems.”
Lichtenheld admitted to reporters that the company has not upgraded its voting machines to address these concerns. But the Hart Intercivic spokesman claimed that matter was no cause for concern, declaring that evaluators “were given unfettered access” and thus “they had all the time in the world and didn’t have to worry about security breaches.”
Which of course appears to be little more than the most simple-minded spin. But it’s no big deal. All that may hang in the balance is the U.S. Presidential Election of 2012.
