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Owners Of Electronic Voting Machine Company Are Romney Super-Fans
Photo: Roger Barone/flickr
We’re not really into conspiracy theories here, so let us just say this upfront: We are not presenting the following article as any kind of conspiracy theory. We will say, though, that the people who own voting machines in some pretty important swing states have a pretty remarkable bias toward Mitt Romney and, you know, someone should probably keep an eye on this, no?
Okay, so here’s what we know:
Hart InterCivic is a national provider of election voting systems that are used in swing-states Ohio and Colorado, as well as in states we don’t really care about so much because we already know how they’ll turn out (e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii). Private equity firm H.I.G. Capital, LLC bought out a “significant” portion of Hart in July of 2011, and now the majority of Hart’s board directors are employees of H.I.G. (It’s not entirely clear how much of the voting machine company H.I.G. owns, but the financial advisors responsible for the transaction state that “Hart Intercivic was acquired by HIG Capital.”)
H.I.G., in turn, has ties to Bain & Co. and Mitt Romney directly:
H.I.G. was founded by Tony Tamer, a former Bain employee and bundler for Mitt Romney’s campaign.
Of H.I.G.’s 22 American directors, 21 donated to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. One person made no political donations at all; one person donated to both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama; the remaining 20 directors donated exclusively to Mitt Romney in 2012. (See below for links to donations.)
Of these 22 American directors, seven of them (nearly one-third) are former Bain employees. Now, we should note (as a reader helpfully pointed out), this is Bain & Co., which Mitt Romney left in order to start the affiliated Bain Capital. The connection is therefore a little more tenuous, but we still find H.I.G.’s overwhelming allegiance and financial support of the Romney campaign surprising (not that it’s surprising that a private equity company would lean Republican, but this level of support is pretty unusual).
- Four of H.I.G.’s directors, Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman, and Brian D. Schwartz, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.
- Two of H.I.G.’s managing directors, Douglas F. Berman and Brian D. Schwartz, were present at the $50,000 per plate fundraiser where Mitt Romney made his notorious ”47%” comments.
- H.I.G. is the 11th largest donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign. H.I.G. employees have given $338,000 to the Romney campaign, outpacing even Bain Capital itself, which gave $268,000.
- (Sidenote: Are we the only ones to notice that every single one of H.I.G.’s 22 American directors is white and male? Not related to the Mitt Romney issue, but sheesh.)
Now, to be fair, besides the fact that H.I.G. employees make up the majority of Hart’s board of directors, we don’t know exactly how much control H.I.G. is able to exert over the voting machine company’s day-to-day operations. Plus, it seems like it would be pretty difficult to mess with the software without anyone finding out about it. Moreover, just from a cost-benefit standpoint, it doesn’t really make sense that these H.I.G. directors would commit a felony and risk their super-lucrative careers just to get their Bain bro elected.
But that said, this still makes us a little… uncomfortable. For instance, what if irregularities or honest mistakes are suspected (and this is a real possibility: Hart InterCivic has previously had some pretty major malfunctions in its voting systems)? The documentation will then be in the hands of Hart/H.I.G.
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Links to H.I.G.’s American directors:
Tony Tamer – Bain alum; Romney bundler; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Sami Mnaymneh – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign as well as Barack Obama’s campaign
Douglas Berman – Bain alum; Romney bundler; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
John Bolduc – Bain alum; Romney bundler; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Rick Rosen – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Brian Schwartz – bundler for the Romney campaign; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Timothy Armstrong – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
John Black – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Dave Blechman – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Peter Cornetta – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Marc Kramer – No known donations to presidential campaigns
Chris Laitala – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Elliot Maluth – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
William Nolan – Bain alum; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Michael Phillips – Bain alum; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Matt Sanford – Bain alum; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Lewis Schoenwetter – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Richard Stokes – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Neil Tuch – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Rob Wolfson – donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Jeff Zanarini – Bain alum; donated to Mitt Romney’s campaign
Replies
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CORRUPTION? LET'S TALK ABOUT VOTER FRAUD ON OBAMA'S ELECTION AND Obama gets money from overseas socialists like Chavez. Obama is corrupt......AND A SOCIALIST.......
Just for you... President Obama has emulated Lenin in striving to increase state control over such “commanding heights” of our economy as energy,health care, finance,and education,with smaller forays into food,transportation and undoubtedly some areas I am overlooking.
Besides mimicking some of Lenin’s policy strategies, Obama also has adopted Karl Marx’s strategies for gradually socializing an economy. Before I spell out the Marxian nature of many of Obama’s policies, let me emphasize that I am not calling Obama a “Marxist-Leninist, period.” “Marxist-Leninist” connotes the brutal totalitarian police state of the late, unlamented Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There is no comparison between Barack Obama’s statism and the genocidal, gulag-riddled regime of the Soviet Communists. That being said, Obama’s economic program is taken directly, if not deliberately, from the Marxist-Leninist playbook, and on that basis one may say that Obama tends toward Marxist-Leninist economics. Besides adopting the Leninist strategy of seeking greater control over the commanding heights of the economy, if one reviews Marx’s 10-point platform for how to socialize a country’s economy in stages (“The Communist Manifesto,” chapter two), one finds that Team Obama and his congressional progressive allies have taken actions to further the goals laid out in all 10 of the planks in the Marx platform.
CITED - MARK HENDRICKSON, Published 7/26/2012, President Obama's Marxist-Leninist Economics: Fact And Fiction, FORBES.COM, Retrieved 10/12/2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/07/26/president-obamas-marxist-leninist-economics-fact-and-fiction/