I DON’T LIKE THIS STORY ONE BIT:

Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel in the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company correspondence.

In a letter sent to a select group of well-heeled Election.com investors Jan. 21, the online voting and voter registration company disclosed that the investment group Osan Ltd. paid $1.2 million to acquire 20 million preferred shares to control 51.6 percent of the voting power.

In a Newsday interview in October, Charles Smith, a representative of Osan who sits on Election.com’s board, declined to name the Saudi Arabian investors with a stake in the company, other than to say they were “passive” and part of a larger group that included Americans and Europeans. Smith didn’t return phone calls Wednesday.

There could be less to this than meets the eye, I suppose, but as I believe I mentioned, I don’t like it one bit. (Via Welch, who got it from Kleiman, who got it from Yglesias who — or is that backwards? Oh, hell, I’m stopping here.)

UPDATE: Okay, one more thought. Bush’s Achilles’ heel is his close relationship to the Saudis. Democrats haven’t done much with this, and I don’t understand why.

To be clear, I don’t have any particular reason to think that there’s a Bush connection here. I just wonder why the Democrats aren’t doing more with this issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here are the results of some research into Election.com.