by David Pepper
Kelly’s election isn’t the only one under scrutiny. Across the country, surprising upsets also led to questions from many insiders. And now, an in-depth investigation by the Youngstown Vindicator has found that the same voting equipment company was involved in virtually every district where the races were closely contested.
And on it went. It was my longest story in years, guiding the reader through the irregular results in the “Abacus districts.”
“Jack, we can’t print this!” barked Andres, my editor, ten minutes after reading the draft.
Of course she would respond this way. But at least getting Andres a draft would get her off my back. Without admitting it, she’d be intrigued. And more importantly, someone else now knew all that I knew.
“People will think we’ve lost our minds,” she shouted. “And we’ll lose our shirt in the lawsuits.”
“Everything I’ve written is an absolute fact. Double- and triple-checked.”
“I believe you, but you still leave far too much unanswered. You can’t make allegations as enormous as these without locking down everything. Where are comments from Abacus? What do members of Congress say? And how exactly do you think this Abacus outfit changed the results of the election? Hell, what is Abacus in the first place?”
Valid questions. Harder to answer than she was suggesting, but definitely legit ones to ask.
The easiest one might be answering how, technically, Abacus pulled it off.
For that, I called the best political mind I knew.
* * *
COLUMBUS
“Thanks for meeting on such short notice. I need your help on a project.”
At a packed coffee shop on the Ohio State campus, we old-timers stuck out in a sea of scarlet and gray Buckeye sweatshirts, jackets, and hats. A late winter storm had swept through Central Ohio the day before.
Renee Jones smiled up at me from beneath her glasses and wispy brown hair. She had a way of distracting me.
“What is it?”
“You’re going to think I’m nuts. I honestly believe I’ve stumbled across a vote-stealing scheme that might have changed the outcome in numerous congressional districts last November. Might have even flipped the majority.”
If anyone could help figure out how Abacus stole an election, Jones could. She had worked her data-crunching magic on campaigns ever since earning her doctorate in statistics from MIT. While she had helped many candidates over the years, her finest hour had been outsmarting Karl Rove to guide Barack Obama to his wins in 2008 and 2012. After she hit that peak, Jones had retired from politics. She’d joined the political science department at Ohio State and now spent her time teaching the tricks of the trade to others.
“I would say you’re nuts,” she replied, “but I’ve always thought it wouldn’t be that hard to do. A bunch of us eggheads have published articles for years arguing that there are real security weaknesses with these new electronic voting machines. I even testified at the statehouse on it. Only paper ballots that the voter herself fills out are safe these days, whether they’re done in person or mailed in.”
“What about the new electronic machines that provide the visible paper trail of the ballot selections? The machines here had those.”
“Definitely better than no paper trails at all, but still a host of problems. The right engineer could figure out how to manipulate them. And most states don’t audit those paper results anyway.”
“Good! I mean that’s all bad, but I was worried you were going to laugh me out of here. I could use your help.”
I walked through the basics, starting with Monroe County. No one knew better than Jones the particulars of each county.
“That’s correct. That was a stunner that Monroe County didn’t vote for Kelly.”
“What I need to find are any telltales, from the data, of exactly how Abacus might have pulled it off. My editors think the story is still too speculative.”
I handed her the list of all the counties and districts where Abacus located machines, talking her through many of them. She would do the rest.
“The data won’t lie. If somehow these counties experienced altered results, and all other counties and districts didn’t, there will be some statistical evidence that shows it in some way.”
“Exactly what I hoped you’d say. Keep me posted.”
Chapter 18
LONDON: 30 months before the election
“Who pays a toll when the gate is already up?” Kazarov fumed.
Ariens, eating breakfast in Kazarov’s London office, looked up from his salmon, dumbstruck.
“Excuse me?”
“Why must I give money to those who already agree with us? Who are not standing in the way?”
“That is what they expect. Not doing so would be viewed as an insult, and we would risk losing their support.”
Kazarov found it even more unacceptable that some politicians accepted his dollars and still did not approve of his project.
“In Russia and other countries, when you pay to remove a roadblock, the roadblock goes away. The politician keeps his promise. Breaking that promise would be viewed as deeply dishonorable. Stealing. A politician or bureaucrat who does so risks his reputation—even his safety. But in America, the politicians happily take our cash yet still stand in the way. This is deeply dishonest.”
“The dollars help, but they’re not a guarantee,” Ariens agreed.
“So I pay those politicians who already agree with me. And then I pay those who stand in the way, but they remain in the way. Your American system has no honor.”
Ariens sat silently in response to this accusation.
“So let me pay them directly. Surely that will get us what we want.”
“Bribing American officials is not only illegal, it is aggressively enforced. It’s not acceptable in the culture of Washington, nor is it necessary. Campaign contributions have the same effect.”
Unlike legislators in other countries, members of Congress made enough money for themselves, he explained. “Campaign funds are the currency that matters to them. Large campaign war chests are the measure of power, of potential, in Washington. If you shower campaign cash on the Washington politicians, you will get your way. Most of the time.”
“Not in this case.”
“Let’s be patient. As spring rolls into summer and fall, the political pressure should allow us to gain votes on our side or to defeat those who stand in the way. And President Johnson is campaigning hard on the issue.”
Chapter 19
COLUMBUS: 132 days after the election
“I’m stumped.”
A week after our first meeting, Renee Jones’ update was not reassuring.
She had looked at all 435 House district results from the prior election, comparing them to one another and to prior years. Trying to show that somehow, the results in Abacus districts differed from the rest in a statistically significant way.
But she was turning up nothing.
“Comparing districts, apples to apples, is proving next to impossible,” she explained over the phone.
“So many factors differ across districts—the overall competitiveness of each race, the individual contours of each race, who else and what else appeared on the ballot in that district. All those factors impact the turnout and vote totals of each district in different ways. Trying to account for all of them statistically and then to make a meaningful comparison is leading me nowhere.”
Not good. I needed her to find something.
Second, she explained, it wasn’t a statistical shock that many Democratic incumbents lost that year, even if they had fared well in prior years.
“Yes, one would have expected Democrats to actually do better in this cycle, two years after a Republican president. But a popular president sat atop Washington, and Minority Whip Stanton effectively framed
the Democrats in the House as obstructionists. Maybe the spirited effort overcame the usual disadvantage?”
The third problem: In the closest thirty-five districts, it didn’t take much to change the outcome of the election.
“This makes it far harder to prove that something was amiss.”
Finally, Jones found that the Abacus districts themselves experienced a variety of results. While Democrats lost in most, they held on to win in others. So across all thirty-five Abacus districts, it was hard to draw any firm conclusions about how Abacus affected the outcome.
“I hate to say it, I’m not getting anywhere at this point.”
“Sorry to hear it, and thanks for working so hard at it. Keep me posted if anything changes.”
We hung up. If she couldn’t figure it out, no one could. And without that proof, the story would die.
Chapter 20
LONDON—WASHINGTON DC: 24 months before the election
“You were wrong, but I don’t blame you,” Kazarov said over the phone to Ariens, two days after the president’s re-election. “It is your dishonorable politicians and your broken political system that are to blame.”
While the president won handily, the makeup of the gerrymandered House had hardly changed. Two retirements and a scandal had cost Democrats three seats. A scandal on the other side had led to a Republican loss. And that was it. Stalemate.
“It seems that your House of Representatives is almost perfectly designed never to change,” Kazarov said. “Despite Americans’ endless lectures to the world about democracy, America’s politicians have sealed themselves off from the people. They know they will never lose, so they feel no need to make progress.”
But his thinking went beyond complaining. He went looking for a solution. And found one.
To affirm his hunch, in early December, Kazarov brought Ariens to his estate an hour outside London. Kazarov sat on a dark leather chair as the butler ushered a disheveled Ariens into his library. Kazarov did not stand to greet him but motioned for Ariens to sit. The billionaire did not waste a word on small talk.
“I’m fascinated by the corrupt House districts drawn in your country. It’s an incredible system your politicians have designed for themselves,” he said in his nearly flawless English.
“I can’t say I’m proud of it.”
“How could you be?” Kazarov asked. “Imagine what the United States would say if another country, and Russia in particular, devised a system that locked one group into power no matter how the voters voted? America’s democracy does exactly that, in the wide open.”
Kazarov pointed his lit cigarette directly at Ariens to emphasize each point.
Ariens simply nodded back.
The Russian leaned toward Ariens.
“What is the best way to see which districts have a guaranteed result, and which ones have real elections?”
“Everyone in Washington examines that all the time,” Ariens responded. “The most accurate measure is called the Partisan Performance Index, which measures the partisan breakdown of voters in each district. A score of 50 is a dead-even district. The closer to 50, the more real the election, as you say.”
“I would like to see that list.”
“I can get you the exact breakdown. But I can tell you that about twenty-eight districts score close to 50. Then there are others that are fairly close as well.”
“I would like to see the whole list, with those numbers,” Kazarov repeated, impatiently.
Although he liked Ariens, Kazarov did not share his plan. Attacking the heart of American democracy would trouble even the most jaded American lobbyist. Kazarov would get all the information he could, then shield his plans in a tight, non-American circle.
But the next set of questions hinted at his plot.
“In America, who runs elections? Who oversees them?”
“They’re actually run by local officials, a system going all the way back to the U.S. Constitution.”
“Is that true even for national elections? Congress? The President?”
“Sure is. Every state in the country oversees its own elections. While there are certain federal laws that must be followed, the real work is done at the local level. The county level.”
Russia had a similar level of government, referred to as oblasts.
“And who pays for the election process?”
“Those same local governments. The counties.”
“Even for the Presidential and Congressional elections?”
“That’s correct.”
“What if a county is so small it cannot afford the cost?”
“There are some programs that help poor counties pay, but in the end, every county must oversee its own elections. Some do struggle.”
“So the quality and security of an election for the President of the United States come down to the judgment, and budgets, of thousands of local officials spread across the country?” he asked.
“Doesn’t sound too smart when you put it that way,” Ariens responded, “but that’s how it works. Local control is an American tradition, from elections to policing to education. We’ve done pretty well this way.”
The last sentence was the closest Ariens had ever come to arguing with his client, but Kazarov didn’t mind. It was the explanation he was hoping to hear. With so much at stake, with all the riches of Washington, America left the most fundamental act of its proud democracy in the hands of the most local of officials, and likely the most underfunded.
Such a sloppy approach opened opportunities.
* * *
“A fascinating map,” Kazarov said to Liam Andersson three days later, as they examined the data Ariens had sent them. “Together these districts determine the leadership of the United States, but they have little in common.”
The thirty-five highlighted districts were concentrated in the middle of the country. Maryland, Kentucky, and Virginia had one each; New York, Florida and Pennsylvania each had two, and Ohio had three. Further west, there was one seat each in Illinois, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona and two in both Missouri and Minnesota. California had three seats. A few other western states had one each.
Several of the districts were entirely rural, such as the one in Pennsylvania. But most of the districts contained both urban areas and rural areas. Districts in eastern and northwest Ohio were like this, along with ones in Peoria, Tucson, and Boulder.
“Changing the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world cannot be accomplished by military assault or through a powerful political leader, or even with millions of dollars,” he said. “But these scattered, little districts provide the back door.”
Kazarov had asked his London team to research every aspect of how America tallied votes. Andersson reported their findings.
“As Mr. Ariens explained, each county makes every decision—what equipment to use, who to hire as workers and volunteers, how to train them, and how to execute the election process itself.”
“Such a deeply flawed structure,” Kazarov concluded. “As a matter of management and security, such decentralization invites many problems.”
“That was our conclusion as well. And very few national standards they are required to follow.”
Kazarov shook his head. He would never run his business this way. But given his aim, he was pleased America ran its elections this way.
Andersson also reported that while the basic structure of overseeing elections hadn’t changed, the technology of voting and vote-counting had modernized rapidly.
“Another opportunity,” Kazarov concluded. Rapidly evolving technology places the buyers of that technology at the mercy of the sellers and designers—on price, on expertise, and on control.
“More than that,” Andersson added, “much of the country now uses electronic voting systems that have major security weaknesses.
Experts have warned the politicians for years that these machines can be manipulated, but they have not listened.”
Andersson explained that two major companies now dominated the voting equipment market: Diebold and Seiko.
Kazarov shook his head.
“Those will not do.” Both were billion-dollar corporations that were well run, diversified, and in strong positions. Impenetrable.
“There is a third company that is more interesting,” Andersson said. “A privately held enterprise based in Philadelphia. The name is Abacus. It is struggling.”
Andersson explained that Abacus had been in the vote-counting business for a century, and its old punch-card methodology had dominated the industry before the modernization surge. But as counties across the country demanded more cutting-edge technology, Abacus lost business quickly. Diebold and Seiko swooped in to grab major accounts across the country, including Cook County in Illinois, L.A. County, Cuyahoga in Ohio, and all of Abacus’ large New York and New Jersey accounts.
“The most humiliating blow was losing its own hometown,” Andersson explained. “Even Philadelphia elections officials could not justify remaining in the Dark Ages.
“While it has kept many rural locations, the company now faces a more immediate threat,” Andersson concluded. “Even its most up-to-date machinery does not comply with a new round of regulations taking effect mid-year. They are desperately trying to fix this.”
“So Abacus is a dinosaur, and the meteor is poised to strike,” Kazarov summarized.
“That’s exactly right. They are in deep trouble.”
“Good. This company is perfect.”
Chapter 21
WASHINGTON, DC: 19 months before the election
Ariens threw the journal down on his desk. He knew as soon as he saw the headline: “Mystery Buyer Pulls Abacus from the Ashes.”
He had represented Diebold, itself a center of controversy, for years. So the small trade journal article about the buyout of a Diebold competitor several months ago caught his eye. It made little sense as a business matter. Abacus was a dog of a company.