Largest Investors in Electronic Voting Companies are 

Defense Contractors

Democracy Fails: Corporations Win 

Democracy in the United States is only a shadow in a corporate media 

cave of deceit, lies and incomplete information. We stand ignorant of 

what the powerful are doing in our name and how the corporate media 

ignores key issues affecting us all. 

A young professional couple from San Diego stated the weekend before 

the election, "we don’t think voting will make any difference so why 

bother?" Over 80 million eligible voters joined them by refusing to 

participate in the most recent election. While having been a voter for 35 

years, I can’t fault them for their logic. November 2 gave us a choice 

between war and more war, corporate globalization and more corporate 

globalization, the continuation of gifting billions of dollars to Israel

, the Patriot Act and an expanded Patriot Act, a police state and an 

seriously growing police state, media monopoly and even bigger media 

monopolies, and wealth inequality or an even greater wealth divide. With the only 

alternative to these issues being minor candidates without a snowball’s 

chance, for many voting seemed meaningless. 

The issues where a choice was offered, abortion, Social Security, and 

medical care, were so under-covered by the corporate media that most 

voters still don’t understand the differences. Voting ended up being a 

faith-based decision embedded on visceral reactions to individuals instead 

of key societal issues. 

The real winners November 2 are the military industrial complex, who 

will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar military trough and the 

corporate media, whose coffers were filled with billions of dollars for 

campaign ads. 

And can we be sure we actually had a fair election among those who did 

vote? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia are the 

companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations 

throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush 

Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold are 

government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic 

Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications 

International Corporation (SAIC) of  San Diegoto develop the software 

security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC’s board 

are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including: 

Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council 

Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director Retired Adm. William Owens, former 

vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA. 

So we have a CIA/military private firm that programmed the security in 

the voting machines for companies owned by some of the largest military 

contracts in the country. No wonder the Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance

 for Secure Elections, Susan Truitt said November 3: "Seven counties in 

Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper 

trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we 

can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; 

you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to 

get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The 

exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote 

without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker 

told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on 

some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which 

obviously shouldn’t be the case." 

Our level of non-participation really means democracy has failed in the 

US. Democracy is the people making decisions about the important issues 

in their lives. Freedom is the ability to act on these decisions. 

Without an electoral choice democracy is non-existent and freedom only means 

the right to choose your own brand of toothpaste. Without an active 

independent media informing on the powerful we lack both freedom and 

democracy. 

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University

and Director of Project Censored. For a listing of current censored news 

stories see http://www.projectcensored.org/

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5517