Those of you following election integrity may know about the suspicious 1996 Nebraska Senate election. Chuck Hagel, a businessman completely new to politics, managed to beat popular Democratic governor Ben Nelson in a landslide. Hagel was trailing in the polls nearly the whole time, yet he won a 14% victory.

It turned out he was heavily tied to AIS, the elections vendor whose machines counted the votes to put him in office. He served as chairman and CEO of AIS, as well as president of the McCarthy Group, the Omaha investment bank that owned AIS. Hagel resigned before running for Senate, but he unethically failed to disclose that he had worked for a voting machine company. And Mike McCarthy, founder of the McCarthy Group, became his campaign treasurer.

AIS is now known as ES&S , the largest voting system vendor in the US. This article provides a good summary (with sources) of the Chuck Hagel election suspicions.

Hagel's anomalous performance, and his conflicts of interest regarding vote counting, make it look like his election was stolen. But why? He didn't need the money or elite connections from being a Senator; he already had those. Senator would probably be a step down from a millionaire corporate executive.

After learning about the disturbing extent of pedophilia in elite circles, I started to wonder if there was some connection to the Franklin scandal . For those who don't know, the Franklin scandal involved a child sex ring run by Larry King, owner of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha. He threw child sex parties at his home for top Nebraska businessmen and politicians, and flew children to DC as well.

It seems that many of the people and groups involved in Hagel's stolen election were also connected to the Franklin scandal:

• Chuck Hagel was a businessman in DC and Virginia at the time of the scandal, and had connections to Reagan/Bush, considered to be implicated in it.

• Ben Nelson, the Democratic governor whom Hagel defeated, was likely involved in covering up the Franklin scandal when Ted Gunderson set out to investigate it in the early 1990s.

• Mike McCarthy was a prominent Omaha businessman, so it's quite possible that he attended Larry King's child sex parties. He also ended up on the executive boards of several Omaha corporations that advised the Franklin Credit Union : both Union Pacific and Peter Kiewit Sons'.

• ES&S's other owner, aside from the McCarthy Group, was the Omaha World-Herald newspaper, whose executives either partook in or covered up the pedophile ring.

And the McCarthy Group is a Clinton Foundation donor , tying it more closely to Pizzagate.

I'm not entirely sure what these connections all mean. In particular, the motivation behind stealing an election for Hagel escapes me. But these connections seem important to raise, especially since it looks like this pedophile network is in direct control of vote counting. What do people here think?