Secretary of State

GSS&S or ES&S. It’s all Greek to me.

l3wis August 22, 2012 7Comments

Guest Poster contributed

No bid contracts? No contracts? Request for Quotes? How does ES&S get paid to run our elections with their equipment?  Where is the trail of usual (even unusual) payments we should be able to follow? Or is it a trail of tears? Whatever it is, it’s messy.  Let us know if this helps you understand who is controlling our voting.

Remember when we went started looking into Jason Gant’s special PAC financiers and found GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS, SOFTWARE AND SERVICES INC. (we’ll call it GSS&S for short) Well, we finally located data with the ES&S connection as in GSS&S is a Nebraska corporate shell.

You will notice the only difference between the two companies is their ‘Nature of Business’. It seems GSS&S is setup to do the sales and marketing for ES&S. But other then that, they reside in the same office and have the same corporate officers (you will see them listed on the PDFs below).

GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS, SOFTWARE AND SERVICES INC – Nebraska Secretary of State – John A..pdf – Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended

ES&S – Nebraska Secretary of State – John A

• Without much notice even by Google, we have GSS&S appearing. Was it setup just to sell to ES&S products undercover to South Dakota or just give campaign donations to Gant’s PAC?

• Why can’t we find any contracts for the services of GSS&S or ES&S? (go for it, do a search)

The only thing we find is the contribution.  By the way, view this corporationWIKI page and the read the WIKI for a summary of ES&S and their past(?) ownership of Diebold / Premiere.  According to California and Florida SOS as of 6/15/2012, ES&S still owns or controls most voting systems in the world despite a ‘sale’ of certain intellectual properties in 2010 to Dominion Voting Systems. What does this little information do to election results of 2012 for everyone?

Pretty scary, Huh?

UPDATED: Why are two of the largest SOS’s office contractors donating thousands to Jason Gant’s PAC?

l3wis August 22, 2012 10Comments

Looks like someone is getting a pretty good return on their money: COMMITTED TO VICTORY PAC 2012 Campaign Finance Feb 1, 2012

Guest Poster contributed;

The Atlas Shrugged opening “Who is John Galt?” brings to mind our SOS office.  Why?  A few things. The expression of helplessness and despair of the novel’s fictionalized world? Well partly, how about seeing the address of one Jason Gant’s major benefactors is at 11208 John Galt Blvd, Omaha, NE 68137?  This Randian address is home to a company,”GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS, SOFTWARE AND SERVICES INC”., not even in the Omaha telephone book, how’s that for openness? Do you know who is actually at this address, Election Systems & Software., ES&S.

Why would ES&S have to buy into the South Dakota SOS office through an unknown or fictitious name?  They are already our major supplier of  voting systems to the state of South Dakota, just search the internet see what kind of reputation they have. Remember the PACs we discussed yesterday here on SouthDacola.com to funnel money around? Jason setup a PAC called Committed to Victory PAC (document above) where ES&S deposited $10,000.00 and BPRO deposited $7,000.00 for distribution as he saw fit. They are also the two biggest contracts out of the SOS’s office. Both companies are making thousands of dollars from the taxpayers.

If you go here and type in BPRO you will be able to view their contracts.

An interesting side note to ES&S is their allegiance to corporatist GOP causes.  In 1992 a wealthy ambitious Nebraska businessman bought a smallish software company with possibilities, American Information Services (AIS), later known as Election Systems & Software (ES&S).  By 1996, Chuck Hagel ran for senate in Nebraska, votes counted by ES&S. Hmm? In 2004, it was reported now Senator Hagel promised President Bush Tom Daschle would be defeated in South Dakota. ES&S, Like Diebold, Premier Election Solutions and others have interesting histories of unusual vote counting practices.

So back to the original question, why does ES&S have to hide their ‘donation’ through an entity not even listed in the phone book or even Google?  Well we have more amazing examples of brashness we are researching and will be back soon with more.

It appears Government Systems is a real company (within the ES&S offices) but what is their purpose? GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS, SOFTWARE AND SERVICES INC – Nebraska Secretary of State – John A..pdf – Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended

Is Gant our SOS or the Flying Spaghetti Monster of PAC money?

l3wis August 19, 2012 1Comments

‘Guest Poster’ contributed;

Mama Mia our intrepid SOS Gant is busy guy. When does he have time to actually be a Secretary of State? The guy is like a big bowl of spaghetti with him the big meatball. How many Political Action Committees does one candidate need, to funnel money into his own campaign and a few special friends? As we discussed yesterday, Dusty Johnson appears to have only his campaign committee but Jason has had so many. It can be confusing. Jason, has it been your intention to keep everyone from knowing what you were up to all along?

A Note from our search committee: Everyone should understand a few details when you are curious about who is who, in South Dakota money games. The SOS website is a fountain of information if you really want to find something.  It was poorly built from the beginning to confuse. With the assistance of his past web guru PP, it is still a mess, but of a different order.  It appears to have been intentionally setup to keep the loose ends from ever coming together. SD campaign finance and reporting laws appear to be almost nonexistent and also what there is, are easily manipulated.

But back to our story… Let’s see, since 2004 Jason has had his original Gant for Senate campaign. Then to funnel more money, he set up the SD Senate Republican Campaign Committee to help out of state ALEC donors. Now we find the during first month in the SOSoffice in 2011, he setup the Committed to Victory PAC to receive money from organizations like ES&S (Vote tabulation machine company) and a Pierre based SOS / GOP website developer operator, BPRO, Inc. (scroll down to State/City/government)

ENTIRE DOCUMENTS OF GANT’S VARIOUS COMMITTEES; GANT-Committees

Another interesting part of this we are looking into, are the ways money flows back and forth between certain campaigns.  What are they doing? The links between Gant’s PAC activity and so much more is taking us deeper into the Spaghetti Monster’s kitchen.

Stay tuned, this is just the tip of the iceberg ….

OTHER GOODIES, Here is a proposal BPRO prepared for the state.

UPDATED: We need your help!

l3wis August 17, 2012 4Comments

South DaCola is researching ALEC past and present members in our state’s political and non-political offices. It has been interesting dig so far but I could use your help (I have already gathered several financial reports, post update coming soon).  It would make the job easier if we could secure any lists of past membership, let’s say from 2000 to now.  So if you are in possession of any old lists I sure would like to have a copy. You can send it anonymously to me, if you choose to.

It would be appreciated.

UPDATE: What year did SOS campaign reports start?  We can only find some campaign reports for 2002 and before, for example Kristi Fiegen’s 1995-2001 are not to be found.