Today is the day that I am an officially published author. Please find below the text of the article that appears today on the FRONT PAGE of the May Issue of The Northeast Texan.
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I remember that night that we learned that our “votes” would be taken from the machine and counted by the people who were working in the polling location. The girls in my troop and I were told that the votes were then taken to the people in our county who would add them to the votes from everyone else in our area and after that they would be sent to the state capital where all the votes from everyone in the state were added together. Then those state votes were added together with everyone else in the country and then we would find out who had won the election. It seemed so simple to me at seven.
For many years after that, and in my teens, I watched my
grandfather as a precinct captain spend hours at his polling location
collecting votes and making sure that everything was accurate. He had to verify the totals and send them to
the state to be tabulated. I always
thought that he had the coolest job to be able to count all those votes. I asked him once, “What happens if there are
too many votes for the guy you don’t like?” He looked at me with a bemused
smile and replied. “If that is the way the count comes out, then that’s the way
it is. I just count the votes, I don’t
control them.” It seemed so simple to me
as a teenager.
SOE has recently been acquired in total by a Barcelona based
company, SCYTL, a “worldwide leader in the development of secure solutions for electoral
modernization”. SCYTL, according to
their company profile, has been and is currently funded by Nauta Capital,
Balderton Capital, Spinnaker SCR and the Spanish government. Many of the key personnel within these
capital groups (and especially within Balderton) have strong ties to both
Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital.
SCYTL has been integral in Governmental
elections in Spain, the United Kingdom and France as well as in the private
sector in union voting. SCYTL is also
the company that was charged with the facilitation and counting of the military
and overseas online voting for the 2008 Presidential election and will be again
for the 2012 election. And while the
company assures that the voting process is secure and not subject to tampering,
in 2010, a prototype voting system for Washington DC (which currently uses SOE
exclusively) was hacked and with every vote cast, the voter was greeted with
the University of Michigan fight song.
The Presidential race in North Carolina (a historically very
red state) was decided by about 10,000 votes in favor of Obama. In Hillsborough County, Florida, Obama
flipped the previous Republican leaning vote results and won by a margin of
10,077. Maybe it is just a coincidence
that both are SOE customers?
But as with most things that we are faced with in the new
world order of Obamacare, we should pay no attention to the software behind the
curtain. There is nothing to see. According to Janelle Bolton with the Kaufman
County Voter Registration office, use of the SOE software was discontinued
prior to 2006 and now an election software from Hart Intercivics is used. A brief sigh of relief? Unfortunately, simple research on the Hart website
clearly shows a solid partnership with SCYTL.
With the acquisition of SOE, SCTYL will
route all of the controlled votes (including the online military votes) to a
server in Spain to be counted.
Technology has come so far that in the thirty-two years since I cast
that first “vote”, the poll workers and precinct captains have been made
obsolete with use of automated software solutions and all of our “votes” don’t
even need to be counted on American soil.
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This is the full text of an article printed in The NorthEast Texan on April 27, 2012
