Romney is determined to win this election, one way or another, and he is using his family and big donors to buy up voting machines that will be used in key battleground states, including the all-important swing state: Ohio.
No Republican has ever become president without carrying the state of Ohio.
Tagg Romney, the son of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, has purchased electronic voting machines that will be used in the 2012 elections in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Colorado, reports allvoices.com.
“Late last month, Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis at FreePress.org broke the story of the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital investment team involved in H.I.G. Capital which, in July of 2011, completed a “strategic investment” to take over a fair share of the Austin-based e-voting machine company Hart Intercivic,” according to independent journalist Brad Friedman.
“In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall’s election,” allvoices.com reports through Truth Out.
Critics of the partisan firm H.I.G. Capital are skeptical about its recent purchase of Hart Intercivic, an equipment company that manufactures the voting machines for 370 jurisdictions and 17.7 million voters around the country.
“This is just not passing the smell test at all,” said Bev Harris, founder of the nonprofit election watchdog, BlackBoxVoting.org. “They’re Romney guys.”
The HuffPost reports that Romney’s sixthbiggest contributor, H.I.G. Capital, has close ties to Romney, being that the company co-founder Anthony Tamer previously worked at Bain & Company, the private equity firm where Mitt reigned as CEO for 10 years. In addition, eight of the company’s managing directors also worked for Bain and H.I.G. Capital is the sixth biggest Romney campaign donor.
She said Hart Intercivic machines are considered among the more hackable — but that’s not really the point here. “There is no way to secure a system from its administrator,” she said.
“There are thousands of venture capital and private equity firms,” Harris said. Why then, she asked, would one of the very few major voting companies in the country fall into the hands of a firm that happens to be associated with a presidential candidate?”
“I think it looks bad,” said Larry Norden, an election expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Actually trying to steal the election “would be pretty risky,” he said. “That’s not to say it couldn’t be done.”
More critically, he said, “it points to some of the problems with having private companies essentially running our elections.”
