The GOP’s Cyber Election Hit Squad

[JamBoi]

 GOP computer network aided 2004 vote theft in Ohio (Steven Rosenfeld &
Bob Fitrakis, Free Press)
Date:	Tue, 24 Apr 2007 06:18:27 -0700 (PDT)

The GOP’s Cyber Election Hit Squad

By Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
The Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), April 23, 2007
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2553
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/23/705/


Did the most powerful Republicans in America have
the computer capacity, software skills and
electronic infrastructure in place on Election
Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to
ensure George W. Bush’s re-election?The answer
appears to be yes. There is more than ample
documentation to show that on Election Night
2004, Ohio’s “official” Secretary of State
website - which gave the world the presidential
election results - was redirected from an Ohio
government server to a group of servers that
contain scores of Republican web sites, including
the secret White House e-mail accounts that have
emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight
federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the
Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret
White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and
dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech
system used to count and report the 2004
presidential vote- from server-hosting contracts,
to software-writing services, to remote-access
capability, to the actual server usage logs
themselves - must be added to the growing
congressional investigations.

Numerous tech-savvy bloggers, starting with the
online investigative consortium
epluribusmedia.org and their November 2006
article cross-posted by contributor luaptifer to
Dailykos, and Joseph Cannon’s blog at
Cannonfire.blogspot.com, outed the RNC tech
network. That web-hosting firm is SMARTech Corp.
of Chattanooga, TN, operating out of the basement
in the old Pioneer Bank building. The firm hosts
scores of Republican websites, including
georgewbush.com, gop.com and rnc.org.

The software created for the Ohio secretary of
state’s Election Night 2004 website was created
by GovTech Solutions, a firm co-founded by
longtime GOP computing guru Mike Connell. He also
redesigned the Bush campaign’s website in 2000
and told “Inside Business” magazine in 1999, “I
wouldn’t be where I am today without the Bush
campaign and the Bush family because the Bushes
truly are about family and I’m loyal to my
network.”

Ohio’s Cedarville University, a Christian school
with 3,100 students, issued a press release on
January 13, 2005 describing how faculty member
Dr. Alan Dillman’s computing company Government
Consulting Resources, Ltd, worked with these
Republican-connected companies to tally the vote
on Election Night 2004.

“Dillman personally led the effort from the GCR
side, teaming with key members of Blackwell’s
staff,” the release said. “GCR teamed with
several other firms - including key players such
as GovTech Solutions, which performed the
software development - to deliver the end result.
SMARTech provided the backup and additional
system capacity, and Mercury Interactive
performed the stress testing.”

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not
only controlled the vote-counting process in
Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through
a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the
Bush campaign, but it also controlled the
technology that allowed the tally of the vote in
Ohio’s 88 counties to be reported to the media
and voters.

Privatizing elections and allowing known
partisans to run a key presidential vote count is
troubling enough. But the reason Congress must
investigate these high-tech ties is there is
abundant evidence that Republicans could have
used this computing network to delay announcing
the winner of Ohio’s 2004 election while
tinkering with the results.

Did Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell or other GOP operatives inflate the
president’s vote totals to secure George W.
Bush’s margin of victory? On Election Night 2004,
many of the totals reported by the Secretary of
State were based on local precinct results that
were impossible. In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican
haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter
turnout. In Republican Perry County, two
precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent
respectively. In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush
received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only
638 people voted for president. In Concord
Southwest in Miami County, the certified election
results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689
registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent
turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547
voters had signed in.

These strange election results were routed by
county election officials through Ohio’s
Secretary of State’s office, through partisan IT
providers and software, and the final results
were hosted out of a computer based in Tennessee
announcing the winner. The Cedarville University
releases boasted the system “was running like a
champ.” It said, “The system kept running through
the early morning hours as users from around the
world looked to Ohio for their election results.”

All the facts are not in, but enough is known to
warrant a serious congressional inquiry.
Beginning with a timeline on Election Night after
a national media consortium exit poll predicted
Democrat John Kerry would win Ohio, the first
Ohio returns were from the state’s Democratic
urban strongholds, showing Kerry in the lead.

This was the case until shortly after midnight on
Wednesday, Nov. 5, when for roughly 90 minutes
the Ohio election results reported on the
Secretary of State’s website were frozen. Shortly
before 2am EST election returns came in from a
handful of the state’s rural Republican enclaves,
bumping Bush’s numbers over the top.

It was known Bush would carry rural Ohio. But the
vote totals from these last-to-report counties,
where Karl Rove said there was an unprecedented
late-hour evangelical vote giving the White House
a moral mandate, were highly improbable and
suggested vote count fraud to pad Bush’s numbers.
Just how flimsy the reported GOP totals were was
not known on Election Night and has not been
examined by the national media. But an
investigation by the House Judiciary Committee
Democratic staff begun after Election Day 2004
and completed before the Electoral College met on
Jan. 6, 2005, was first to publicly point to vote
count fraud in rural Ohio.

That report, “Preserving Democracy: What Went
Wrong in Ohio,” cited near-impossible vote
totals, including 19,000 votes that were
mysteriously added at the close of tallying the
vote in Miami County. The report cited more than
3,000 apparently fraudulent voter registrations -
all dating back to the same day in 1977 in Perry
County. The report noted a homeland security
emergency was declared in Warren County,
prompting its ballots to be taken to a
police-guarded unauthorized warehouse and counted
away from public scrutiny, despite local media
protests.

In our book, “What Happened in Ohio: A
Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004
Election” (The New Press, 2006), we go beyond the
House Judiciary Democratic report to analyze
precinct-by-precinct returns and we print copies
of the documents upon which we base our findings.
We found many vote-count irregularities based on
examining the certified results, precinct-level
records and the actual ballots.

The most eyebrow-raising example to emerge from
parsing precinct results was finding 10,500
people in three Ohio’s ‘Bible Belt’ counties who
voted to re-elect Bush and voted in favor of gay
marriage, if the official results are true. That
was in Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties. The
most plausible explanation for this anomaly,
which defies logic and was not seen anywhere else
in the country, was Kerry votes were flipped to
Bush while the rest of the ballot was left alone.
While we have some theories about how that might
have been done by hand in a police-guarded
warehouse, could full Republican control of the
vote-counting software and servers also have
played a role?

The early returns on the Secretary of State’s
website suggest Blackwell’s vote-tallying and
reporting system could manipulate large blocks of
votes. Screenshots taken during the early returns
in Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located,
gave Green Party presidential candidate David
Cobb 39,541 votes, which was clearly incorrect.
Similarly, early return screenshots in Lucas
County, where Toledo is located, gave Cobb 4,685
votes, another clear error. (The screenshots are
in our book). Were these innocent computer
glitches or was a GOP vote-counting and reporting
system moving and dumping Kerry votes?

There’s more evidence the late returns from
Ohio’s Republican-majority countryside were not
accurate. During the spring and summer of 2006,
several teams of investigators associated with
Freepress.org, notably one team led by Ron
Baiman, a Ph.D. statistician and researcher at
Chicago’s Loyola University, examined the actual
election records from precincts in Miami and
Clermont Counties. These records - from poll
books where voters sign in, to examining the
actual ballots themselves - were not publicly
accessible until last year, under orders from
Ohio’s former Republican Secretary of State.
Baiman compared the number of voters who signed
in with the total number of votes attributed to
precincts. He found hundreds of “phantom” votes,
where the number of voter signatures was less
than the reported vote total. That discrepancy
also suggests vote count fraud.

There was other evidence in the observable paper
trail of padding the vote, including instances in
Delaware County where in one precinct, 359 of the
final punch-card ballots cast on Election Day
contained no Kerry votes, which means the day’s
last voters all were Bush supporters, which also
is improbable. In another Delaware County
precinct, Bush allegedly received the last 210
votes of the day. Were partisan local election
workers trying to mask what was happening
electronically to tilt the vote count?

Ohio’s 2004 ballots were to be destroyed last
September. However that fate was blocked by a
federal judge, who ruled in the early phase of
trying a Voting Rights Act lawsuit that accused
Ohio officials of suppressing the minority vote
in Ohio’s cities. The state’s new Secretary of
State and Attorney General, both Democrats, are
now holding settlement talks for that suit,
suggesting its claims have merit. However, unlike
Florida after the 2000 election, there still has
yet to be a full accounting of Ohio’s
presidential vote.

What’s clear, however, is the highest ranks of
the Republican Party’s political wing, including
White House counselor Karl Rove, a handful of the
party’s most tech-savvy computer gurus and the
former Republican Ohio Secretary of State,
created, owned and operated the vote-counting
system that reported George W. Bush’s re-election
to the presidency. Moreover, it appears the votes
that gave Bush his 118,775-vote margin of victory
- the boost from Ohio’s countryside - have yet to
be confirmed as accurate. Instead, the reporting
to date suggests that what happened on the ground
and across Ohio’s rural precincts is at odds with
the vote tally released on Election Night.

As numerous congressional committees attempt to
retrieve and examine the secret White House
e-mails surrounding Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales’ firing of eight federal prosecutors,
those panels must also probe the privatization
and partisan manipulation of the 2004
presidential vote count in Ohio. The lessons from
2004 have yet to be fully understood or learned.

Similarly, the House Administration Committee,
which is expected to soon mark up H.R. 811, a
bill by Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, to regulate
electronic voting technology, also must take
heed. The vote count and outcome of American
elections cannot be left in the hands of known
partisans, who can control and manipulate how the
votes are counted and what is reported to the
media and American people.

Public vote counts on private, partisan servers
and secret proprietary software have no place in
a democracy.

Bob Fitrakis is a political science professor and
attorney in the King Lincoln Bronzeville civil
rights lawsuit against Ken Blackwell. Fitrakis,
Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are authors of
“What Happened in Ohio? A documentary record of
theft and fraud in the 2004 election,” (New
Press, 2006).

KEY LINKS: To trace the site-hosting history of
election.sos.state.oh.us, go to:
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://election.sos.state.oh.us
(You will note on Nov. 3, 2004, the Ohio
Secretary of State’s website was moved from a
Columbus-based company, OARnet, to SMARTECH
CORPORATION.)

Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to
GOP Internet Operatives, Again
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/11/7/115314/922
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/7/144314/082

Who is Michael L. Connell? Part II: Behind the
firewall
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/2/6328/14926

The White House, vote theft, and the email trail
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2007/03/
gwb43-white-house-vote-theft-and-email.html

Cedarville University A Major Player in Ohio’s
Election Tallying Efforts
http://www.cedarville.edu/departments/
marketing/publicrelations/newsarticle.cfm?
ID=2132271177

“What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of
Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election,” by Robert
Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld, Harvey Wasserman.
http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task
=view_title&metaproductid=1597

Rove-ing emails: what else could go missing? by
Todd Johnston
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/22/
33926/1773

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/11/9/61233/1283
This shows a screen capture of the TN server
64.203.98.137 which in 2004 was where
election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted from, and in
2006 it was still getting live data from Ohio,
even though election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted
on OARnet servers in Ohio.

___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

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"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)

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