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Topic: Was 2004 Election Stolen?
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| Iron Eagle | Posted – 4/23/2007 9:52:48 PM | show profile Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results By Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis, Free Press. Posted April 23, 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. |
| harryfred | Posted – 4/24/2007 6:55:52 AM | show profile If you read Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) report "What Went Wrong in Ohio" (available online as a PDF), you also will see that the Ohio Secretary of State 1) allocated more machines to rural districts and Christian schools, and less to urban districts and liberal arts schools. 2) One machine recorded 16,000+ extra votes to George Bush, until the error was caught and corrected. It begs the question if other errors were not caught. 3) In a number of areas, state-level legislative candidates garnered more votes than John Kerry, an inversion that rarely occurs in politics, as national candidates are more well-known and popular among voters than judges and other small-fry. 4) Some Ohio voting machines recorded more votes than registered voters in their districts. Conyer's report is heavily footnoted. In fact if one rereads the New York Times for the first five days after the 2004 presidential election, one will see that many of these stories also were reported in the national press. So once again we see the idea "Bush is President" is more hypothesis than statement of fact. |
| harryfred | Posted – 4/24/2007 6:57:21 AM | show profile "What Went Wrong in Ohio" summary with link to the PDF: http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010605Y.shtml |
| mailbag | Posted – 4/24/2007 7:23:01 AM | show profile | email poster I just wonder how many voters would actually believe vote fixing was not only possible, but practiced in this country. This nation is an optimistic bunch (some could say naive) despite evidence showing cause for concern. There is no statistical doubt who won 2000. Kerry lost majority in '04, I would think the 'fixers' would have gone fix'in more than just Ohio's results.... and yup, totally possible imo. Unless this is explained though, and supported with some hard evidence, I fear the naive would simply pass this off as 'liberal rants against the administration.' Maybe in '08 we should get the UN to monitor our elections since we have turned into a third world nation. I do believe the ultimate goal though of our two-party-forever system is to create zero confidence in the voting process, therefore fewer will vote. The feds lift their skirt when it comes to filing taxes (and unemployment) online with SS#... if tech is so secure as to trust us using that number for those processes there is no doubt in my mind that trust cannot be transcended for voting too. But that is too easy. They do want to make voting as difficult as possible to maintain the status quo. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 4/24/2007 10:14:05 AM | show profile I completely believe that if some faction of the GOP could steal the election they would. And I do think they could easily have the capability of doing so. |
| harryfred | Posted – 4/24/2007 1:50:02 PM | show profile In terms of what is possible, the Pultizer Prize-winning biographies of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro were eye-opening to me. Caro convincing documents how Johnson stole his Texas Senate election (Vol. 2), and how elections were purchased with cash back then in Texas, Chicago, and other places. The best we can do is get paper receipts on these electronic voting machines. In terms of nationwide election theft in 2004, researchers would have to start with how the exit polls of major news organizations indicated Kerry would win not just Ohio, but New Mexico and a few other states, only to see them all go to Bush. At this point, Conyer's research "What Went Wrong in Ohio" is the best It's all collaborated by multiple news sources. This attorney general scandal involving replacing attorneys not aggressive enough about 'voting fraud' (as defined by the Bush White House) points to 2008 election strategies. |
