Who is really interested in our Countries to spend Billion dollars on e-vote? Hardware and Software vendors lobbies, of course! They are infact the greatest supporters of e-vote!

As an example of what happened in US here it follows an excertp from the February 20,2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. Article by Art Ticknor. For non US citizen: Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is a Federal law encouraging, and even subsidizing, the use of electronic voting systems by the states.

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Who duped Congress into supporting HAVA? Although a lot of the public-relations window-dressing was pitched in terms of enabling disabled persons to vote (a rather dubious claim), the heavy lifting was done by a consortium of defense contractors and voting-machine companies, which same group has now launched a public relations campaign touting computer voting.

The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a lobbying firm for technology firms, set up the "Election Systems Task Force" (composed of defense contractors and procurement agencies) to push the legislation through Congress. The major companies involved in the task force were: Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Accenture, and EDS.

During a conference call meeting on Aug. 22, 2002, it was stated that the Task Force's top agenda item was simply: "How do we get Congress to fund a move to electronic voting?" The discussion was about the importance of getting the HAVA legislation enacted as a means of creating more business opportunities for the companies involved [Bev Harris, Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century (Renton, Wa.: Talion Publishing, 2004)].

On Sept. 6, 2002, ITAA demanded that House and Senate conferees resolve their differences over their respective versions, and pass HAVA. Just over a month later, they did. HAVA was signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 12, 2002.

More recently, amid Congressional moves to amend HAVA, ITAA escalated and established a group (made up of electronic voting machine companies) to "raise the profile" of electronic voting, and peddle its "benefits" to the American public. Members of the Election Technology Council (ETC), formed on Dec. 9, 2003, are Advanced Voting Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Unilect.

ITAA says the ETC builds on the work of its Voting Reform Task Group, the which lobbies for HAVA funding.
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