Crashing The Party?
Mystery Surrounds ?American Center
For Voting Rights? Group

Lonestar Iconoclast    29 March 2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio ? A new voting rights group appeared last week, just in time to testify at U.S. Congressman Bob Ney?s (R-Ohio) House Administrative Committee hearings on the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. That state was fraught with voting inconsistencies, as documented by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in reports to Congress earlier this year.
Investigator Brad Friedman, who sponsors a website at BradBlog.com, last week interviewed Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II, who provided testimony at the Ohio hearings from the upstart American Center For Voting Rights when it was learned that the speaker had been the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney ?04 Inc. and that hundreds of other, more well established, voting rights groups were not invited to testify.
Friedman, who is propelling an initiative known as the Velvet Revolution, Divestiture for Democracy (VelvetRevolution.us), noted on his website that during the hearings, Hearne failed to mention his ?high-level connections to Bush/Cheney and his long history of working with other powerful Republican officials all the way back to his time working for the Reagan Administration.?
Friedman says that the ACVR group claims on its website to champion ?voter education and outreach? programs as one of its activities, but when he asked Hearne specifics about the programs, the response was ?We certainly anticipate those.?
Later, when Friedman interviewed Jim Dyke (Communications Director for the Republican National Committee), who was listed as the ?contact? person in a press release issued by AVCR, Friedman says that Dyke reported that his group had testified on a compendium of facts from police reports in an effort to put things forward to give people greater confidence in the country?s voting system.
Friedman claims that when he asked the name and location of the company that designed AVCR?s website, he was told it was done by a company in Dallas, but Dyke couldn?t remember the name of the company. Friedman published the Internic record of AVCR, whose domain name is ac4vr.com, where he says that Dyke is listed as both the administrative and technical contact for the domain and the address is listed as 8409 Pickwick Lane 299, Dallas, which Friedman says is a post office box at the UPS Store located there.
Said Friedman, ?They claim to be a not-for-profit, non-partisan, tax exempt 501(c)3 organization, but have neither produced the paperwork for it as required by law, nor do they seek donations from the public on their website.?
The Velvet Revolution group in February sent letters to each of the nine major American voting machine companies, asking them to:
? Voluntarily open their hardware and software for independent public inspection and analysis.
? Provide auditable, voter-verified paper ballots for all votes cast.
? Assure that there can be no form of networking on their machines.
? Allow for non-partisan, independent monitors of the vote tabulation process.
? Institute a corporate policy prohibiting the company and all of its executives from supporting candidates for public office or political action groups.
? Disclose all data, codes and records from the last three national elections, if requested.
? Adopt all feasible best practices suggested by a national committee of experts.
? Do all of the above at no extra cost to their governmental clients with which they work.
The movement is giving the voting machines companies a choice:
? Either comit to all of these requests within 60 days and be recognized broadly for their efforts, or
? By not committing, the movement will encourage all Americans to divest from these companies and those with which they are affiliated, and will participate in a massive national boycott targeting them, their affiliates, and their clients, and will launch an extensive education campaign for the American public explaining the ways in which these companies are secretly doing the public?s business of handling elections, says the VR website.
According to Friedman, VR has the support of more than 80 affiliate organizations in this endeavor, representing millions of Americans.