[Texgreen] Election Night 2004: The GOP's cyber election hit squad

[Margaret]

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2553

The GOP's cyber election hit squad
by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
April 22, 2007

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. 3,
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.