Mitt Romney

Does the Romney family now own your e-vote? by Gerry Bello & Bob Fitrakis OCTOBER 18, 2012 by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman “Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 6. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

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. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who “owns” the White House.

They are especially crucial in Ohio, without which no Republican candidate has ever won the White House. In 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term. A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus% shift occurred between 12:20 and 2am election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

Romney family and friends will help tabulate the vote count in Cincinnati: Hart Intercivic holds maintenance contracts on their own machines by Gerry Bello & Bob Fitrakis OCTOBER 24, 2012 Free Press “Election officials lie to cover the facts
Since the Columbus Free Press broke the story of Tagg, Mitt, HIG Capital and your e-vote, there has been a bi-partisan effort on the internet to restore faith in the system. There are Democrats who wish the Free Press would remain silent, fearing that exposure of these facts will demoralize their base and lead to low voter turnout. Pundits like Chuck Todd have used the phrase “conspiracy theory” and even gone so far as to say “The voting machine conspiracies belong in same category as the Trump birther garbage.” An industry shill, Michelle Shafer, who currently works as media director for Scytl, a Spanish-based vote-counting company, and has worked for all but one of the major voting machine manufacturers, has replied via comment to our articles with additional falsehoods and misrepresentations.”

Romney Family Investment Ties To Voting Machine Company That Could Decide The Election Causing Concern Forbes Rick Ungar “A test conducted in 2007 by the Ohio Secretary of State revealed that five of the electronic voting systems the state was looking to use in the upcoming 2008 presidential election had failed badly, each easily susceptible to chicanery that could alter the results of an election.

Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis of The Free Press, recently exposed the Romney family’s questionable ownership stake in a voting machine company, Hart Intercivic. This story has even been picked up by numerous media outlets, including the right-leaning Forbes magazine.

As reported in the New York Times, ‘At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.’

We learn that one of the companies whose machines had failed was none other than Hart Intercivic.

With television time to fill and no ability to declare a winner so that the long night’s broadcast can be brought to a close, the staffs keep digging for relevant information to keep the attention of their viewers—and that is when it gets very real.

It turns out that Hart Intercivic is owned, in large part, by H.I.G. Capital—a large investment fund with billions of dollars under management—that was founded by a fellow named Tony Tamer. While is is unclear just how much H.I.G. owns of Hart Intercivic, we do learn that H.I.G. employees hold at least two of the five Hart Intercivic board seats.

A little more digging turns up a few tidbits of data than soon become ‘the story’.

Tony Tamer, H.I.G.’s founder, turns out to be a major bundler for the Mitt Romney campaign,  along with three other directors of H.I.G. who are also big-time money raisers for Romney. Indeed, as fate would have it, two of those directors—Douglas Berman and Brian Schwartz— were actually in attendance at the now infamous “47 percent” fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. With that news, voters everywhere start to get this queasy feeling in the pits of their stomach. But wait—if you’re feeling a bit ill now, you’ll want to get the anti-acids ready to go because it’s about get really strange. To everyone’s amazement, we learn that two members of the Hart Intercivic board of directors, Neil Tuch and Jeff Bohl, have made direct contributions to the Romney campaign. 

And finally, we learn that H.I.G. is the 11th largest of all the contributors to the Romney effort.

Numerous media sources, including Truthout, are reporting that Solamere Capital—the investment firm run by Mitt Romney’s son, Tagg, and the home of money put into the closely held firm by Tagg’s uncle Scott, mother Anne and, of course, the dad who might just be the next President of the United States—depending upon how the vote count turns out, in our little tale, in the State of Ohio—have shared business interests with H.I.G. either directly or via Solamere Advisors which is owned, in part, by Solamere Capital, including a reported investment in H.I.G. by either Solamere Capital or Solamere Advisors.

Lee Fang, in his piece for The Nation exploring the government related activities of various companies in which Solamere has an interest writes-

“Meanwhile, HIG Capital—one of the largest Solamere partners, with nearly $10 billion of equity capital—owns a number of other firms that are closely monitoring the federal government. ”

While the Cincinnati scenario is —at this point—fiction, the rest of this story is all too true, including the part where the voting machines to be used in Hamilton County will be those provided by Hart Intercivic.”Forbes

Here’s The Truth About The Story About The Romneys Investing In The Company That Makes The Voting Machines Business Insider Henry Blodget October 23, 2012 “The story is based on an article reported by Gerry Bello, Bob Fitrakis, and Harvey Wasserman of The Free Press that was published on October 18th….

A private-equity firm that is run and controlled largely by the Romney family, Solamere, sometimes co-invests with a “partner” private-equity firm, H.I.G., run by former colleagues of Mitt Romney and key fund-raisers for the Romney campaign. The Romney’s private-equity firm, Solamere, says it has not invested in the H.I.G. fund or entity that made the investment in the voting machine company. But Solamere has invested in other H.I.G. funds that are run by the same H.I.G. partners who manage the H.I.G. entity that invested in the voting-machine company, many of whom are former Romney colleagues and current Romney fundraisers.

So Solamere may not have a direct or indirect investment in the voting machine company. But its partner H.I.G. does. And the partner, H.I.G., is run by executives who actively support the Romney campaign.”