Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel (born October 4, 1946) is the senior United States Senator from Nebraska. A member of the Republican Party, he was first elected in 1996 and was reelected in 2002.

Born in North Platte, Nebraska, he graduated from the Brown Institute for Radio and Television in 1966 and from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 1971. He served in the U.S. Army infantry, attaining the rank of Sergeant (E-5) from 1967-68, serving during the Vietnam War in 1968.

In August 2004, Hagel acknowledged that he is pondering a presidential campaign in 2008. He spoke to the Iowa delegation at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Hagel would probably run an anti-establishment, insurgent campaign similar to that of his closest friend in the Senate, John McCain.

Voting Machines' Controversy

Hagel is the former head of American Information Systems Inc. (AIS), which changed its name to Electronic Systems & Software (ES&S) in 1997. ES&S currently provides a very large percentage of inauditable "black box" voting machines. These machines have been the focus of intense scrutiny since the 2000 Presidential election due to their susceptibility to fraud and tampering.

In 1996, Chuck Hagel ran for the US Senate against Ben Nelson, who was the governor of Nebraska at the time (Ben Nelson was later elected to the US Senate in 2000.) Although many people believed he had no chance of winning at all, he won a stunning upset in the election. However, around 80% of the votes in the election were counted by the company ES&S, which he formerly owned.

Hagel has been widely accused of covering up his continued involvement in the management of ES&S after he became a Senator. After joining the Senate, he failed to inform the Senate Ethics Committee that he still ran ES&S. After stepping down as the CEO of ES&S he moved his financial holdings in ES&S to its parent company, the McCarthy Group Inc. He classified his McCarthy Group holdings as an "exempted investment fund," an exception intended for widely held publicly available mutual funds. On May 23, 1997, Victor Baird, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee for 20 years was forced to resign due to investing this scandal. After Baird's resignation, the mainstream media no longer discussed Hagel's ethics issues.

External links

• Official website.
• Congressional biography.
• Chuck Hagel profile, NNDB.