|
group of fund-raisers for the president -- for the fun of it.
"I thought, I know how to do this. I'll just go find this stuff out. I literally viewed it as a 20-minute (project)," she said.
So one day on a whim, after completing her publicity calls, Harris typed the words "stock ownership" and the name Election Systems & Software into a search engine and pulled up a slew of articles. Reading the oldest ones first because that's where companies "give information that they haven't yet thought to hide," she uncovered some startling facts.
Up until 1995, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel had been chairman of ES&S (then called American Information Systems) before quitting the company in March of that year two weeks before launching his Senate bid. ES&S, based in Omaha, Nebraska, manufactured the only voting machines used in the state in his election the following year. According to Neil Erickson, Nebraska's deputy secretary of state for elections, the machines counted 85 percent of votes in Hagel's race; the remaining votes were counted by hand.
Hagel, a first-time candidate who had lived out of the state for 20 years, came from behind to win two major upsets in that election: first in the primary race against a fellow Republican, then in the general race against Democrat Ben Nelson, the state's popular former governor. Nelson began the race with a 65 percent to 18 percent lead in the polls, but Hagel won with 56 percent of the vote, becoming the state's first Republican senator since 1972.
Now it was October 2002. Hagel was up for re-election, and Harris discovered that the senator still owned a financial stake in his former firm. Hagel held investments worth between $1 million and $5 million in the McCarthy Group. (Hagel won't reveal the exact size of his investment in the asset-management firm.) The McCarthy Group owns about 25 percent of ES&S, according to Hagel's chief of staff, Lou Ann Linehan. She estimated that Hagel's stake in ES&S amounts to about 1.5 percent.
Hagel disclosed the McCarthy investment in his campaign filings, but he neglected to mention that McCarthy owned part of the company counting his votes. His campaign treasurer, Michael R. McCarthy, was also chairman of the McCarthy Group and a member of ES&S's board of directors.
"That's about all it took," Harris said, expressing surprise that no reporters had bothered to uncover data that took only a few Internet searches to find.
In addition to raising concerns about the integrity of Hagel's election, the information raised concerns for Harris about Hagel's vote in Congress on HAVA. As he prepared for re-election that year, Hagel, along with hundreds of other legislators, passed the bill, which devoted billions of federal dollars to purchasing new voting machines like the ones ES&S made.
Harris thought someone in Nebraska should know about this. So, a month before the November election, she faxed a five-page press release, including supporting documents, to 3,000 journalists around the country, among them editors for Nebraska newspapers and broadcast stations, she said. No one responded.
She wasn't surprised that the Omaha World-Herald, the state's largest newspaper, didn't jump on the story. The Omaha World-Herald Co., the paper's parent company, owns part of ES&S (the newspaper declined to say how much). But the silence from other editors stunned her.
"I thought, 'That's strange, it's right there.' I even circled it (on the documents) for them," she said, noting that as a book publicist she generally had no trouble getting editors to jump at cookbooks
|
|
