Evidence of GOP stealing 2004 election, redux

[J.A. Terranson]

[Note: I've *never* heard of the source before, so read with salt at the 
ready.]


//Alif

-- 
I hate Missouri.  Land of the free, home of the perjuriously deranged.

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http://www.benzinga.com/news/11/07/1789905/forget-anonymous-evidence-suggests-gop-hacked-stole-2004-election

Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election
By John Thorpe
Benzinga Staff Writer
July 21, 2011 1:07 PM

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting 
barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned 
from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they 
will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been 
harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in 
office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax 
regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in 
deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But 
they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get 
President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a 
copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system 
configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when 
there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," 
according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and 
co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush 
with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry 
won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives . including 
the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data . 
were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this 
matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, 
exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked 
Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and 
thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill 
up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have 
been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," 
Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for 
you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the 
ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone 
knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design 
structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the 
next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was 
SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the 
architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, 
"SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as 
a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. 
It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, 
literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and 
(when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe 
your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a 
backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are 
a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 
election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system 
was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, 
Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King 
Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card 
processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and 
Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech 
computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its 
control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this 
election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct 
placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the 
election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech 
computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the 
elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. 
The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have 
extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious 
conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social 
agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT 
brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, 
who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow 
the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on 
the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing 
perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed 
an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa 
Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He 
wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," 
said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from 
the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told 
close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the 
Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the 
scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's 
missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained 
that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the 
discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) 
and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans 
stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 
6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so 
finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was 
true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was 
flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, 
and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to 
say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election 
period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was 
also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself 
mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to 
cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the 
usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of 
using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to 
disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working 
voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student 
towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some 
of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good 
voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are 
many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called 
Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting 
tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically 
going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, 
which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans 
will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' 
That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a 
recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.

You can reach the author by email john at benzinga.com or on twitter 
@johndthorpe.