Mitch McConnell Received Donations from Voting Machine Lobbyists Before Blocking Election Security Bills

Authored by newsweek.com and submitted by emitremmus27
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squashed two bills intended to ensure voting security on Thursday, just one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russians were attempting to sabotage the 2020 presidential elections "as we sit here."

McConnell said he wouldn't allow a vote on the bills because they were "so partisan," but, as previously reported, earlier this year McConnell received a slew of donations from four of the top voting machine lobbyists in the country.

"Clearly this request is not a serious effort to make a law. Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent," said McConnell on the Senate floor.

The plans would likely burden the two largest electronic voting machine vendors in the United States, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, with new regulations and financial burdens. Together, the companies make up about 80 percent of all voting machines used in the country and both have far-reaching lobbying arms in Washington D.C. Many of those lobbyists have contributed to the McConnell campaign, reported Sludge last month, an investigative outlet that focuses on money in politics.

Sludge found that Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck lobbyist David Cohen, who has worked on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems this year, donated $2,000 to McConnell during this time. Brian Wild, who works with Cohen and has also lobbied Dominion, gave McConnell $1,000.

Around the same time, on February 19 and March 4 Emily Kirlin and Jen Olson, who have lobbied on behalf of Election Systems & Software over the last year donated $1,000 to McConnell each.

Thursday's first bill, presented by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would authorize $775 million to bolster election security and require states to keep paper trails of all votes cast. The second, presented by Senator Richard Blumenthal, would require political candidates and their staff and family members to notify the FBI about any offers of assistance from foreign governments.

Election Systems & Software's CEO Tom Burt did speak in favor of creating paper trails for digital election systems and urged Congress to pass legislation requiring states to do so. Election Systems & Software has said it no longer sells machines without paperless ballots, so a rule change would benefit them.

"It's not surprising to me that Mitch McConnell is receiving these campaign contributions," the Brennan Center for Justice's Lawrence Norden told Sludge last month. "He seems single-handedly to be standing in the way of anything passing in Congress around election security, and that includes things that the vendors might want, like money for the states to replace antiquated equipment."

McConnell's actions seemed even more out of balance with his party, as the Senate Intelligence Committee⁠—led by Republicans⁠—released a report later on Thursday claiming Russians have targeted voting systems in all 50 states in 2016. Though there was no evidence votes were changed, in Illinois "Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data."

In 2018, there were 14 states that used electronic voting systems in 2018 with no paper trail, that means that if votes were inaccurately tallied or machines malfunctioned, there would be no way to investigate or recover those votes. Voting machine companies are not currently subject to any federally-mandated security standards.

Morning Joe's Joe Scarborough slammed McConnell for blocking the votes Friday morning.

"He is aiding and abetting [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's ongoing attempts to subvert American democracy, according to the Republican FBI, CIA, DNI, intel committee," he said. "All Republicans are all saying Russia is subverting American democracy and Moscow Mitch won't even let the Senate take a vote on it. That is un-American."

athomps121 on July 26th, 2019 at 22:19 UTC »

see the thread here on voting machine corruption by the republican party where a programmer was hired to, according to his affidavit, "hide the manipulation [of vote flips] in the source code"

SOURCE is from @jennycohn1 twitter thread with sources included: Washington Post, NY Times, Wired, affidavits...

In a fall 2003 fundraising letter sent to Republicans, from Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell:

"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

TLDR:

Russian made memory cards? sketchy Global Election Systems, the precursor of voting machine titan Diebold Election Systems (later renamed Premier), was founded by felons in 1991. John Elder (who met Dean in prison), to oversee punch card printing in several states. (aka hanging chads in florida) Paul Krugman (NYT) was one of the only people in the mainstream media to notice (albeit not until 04) that Global’s “senior vice president” was a “programmer” who “served time for stealing money & tampering with computer files.” during election 2000, a machine from Global subtracted 16,000 Gore votes in Volusia County, Florida. The Volusia error was caught only “because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore’s vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible.” to which Diebold said in an internal memo that it could have been from an "unauthorized memory card." Ney and a Diebold lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, would later go to prison for bribery-related charges involving non-election related amendments to HAVA. 

Juicier part in TLDR

a man named Clint Curtis swore under oath that Rep. Feeney of Florida had asked him to design a vote flipping program for the 2000 election. Curtis said that Mrs. Yang later told him that they needed to “hide the manipulation in the source code” and that the program was “needed to control the vote in South Florida.” (Affidavit, Para. 9.)  Curtis said he was “shocked” to learn they were planning to steal the election and told her that he couldn’t produce such a program. Mrs. Yang told Curtis she would give Feeney what he had already produced. (Affidavit, Para. 9.)  Feeney said that Lemme told him he had __tracked the corruption “all the way to the top,”__ that Feeney would be pleased with the result, and that the story would break in a few weeks. (Affidavit, Para. 12.) Lemme found dead in hotel room ruled suicide Abramoff also had ties to __Karl Rove.__ “Rove tried to avoid any record of meetings … and [thus]…used Abramoff to deliver messages to the House leadership…” (The Architect, p. 8.) To avoid detection, Abramoff would meet Rove on street corners. Before going to prison, Abramoff’s pal, Ohio Rep. Ney defeated a bipartisan bill that would have mandated a paper trail for all voting machines

zehalper on July 26th, 2019 at 21:07 UTC »

Must be infuriating to have corruption so blatant out in the open and nothing come of it.

TBK-0 on July 26th, 2019 at 20:58 UTC »

"Voting machine companies are not currently subject to any federally-mandated security standards."

Found the problem.