GOP's Cyber Election Hit Squad Exposed

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2562
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Are Rove's missing e-mails the smoking guns of the stolen 2004 election?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
April 25, 2007

E-mails
being sought from Karl Rove's computers, and recent revelations about
critical electronic conflicts of interest, may be the smoking guns of
Ohio's stolen 2004 election. A thorough recount of ballots and
electronic files. preserved by a federal lawsuit, could tell the tale.

The
major media has come to focus on a large batch of electronic
communications which have disappeared from the server of the Republican
National Committee, and from White House advisor Rove's computers. The
attention stems from the controversial firing of eight federal
prosecutors by Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales.

But the time
frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a critical
late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these
crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move
the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the
presidency.

Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into
Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of
State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance
was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County
(Columbus) Board of Elections.

These four men, along with Ohio
GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy
that gave Bush Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the
presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election
boards in the state's two most populous counties, with the biggest
inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.

There were four key phases to the GOP's election theft strategy:

1.
Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter
disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in
urban Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and
contradictory edicts on voter eligibility, registration requirements,
and provisional ballots; on shifting precinct locations; on denial and
misprinting of absentee ballots, and more. Among other things, election
officials, including Bennett, stripped nearly 300,000 voters from
registration rolls in heavily Democratic areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati
and Toledo.

2. On election day, the GOP focussed on voter
intimidation, denial of voting rights to legally eligible ex-felons,
denial of voting machines to inner city precincts, malfunctioning of
those machines, destruction of provisional ballots and more.

In
Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly
African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A
Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote
due to these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city
precincts (but not Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The
survey shows another 50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the
polling stations. In addition, to this day, more than 100,000
machine-rejected and provisional ballots remain uncounted. The official
Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.

3. After
the final tabulation of the votes, and the announcement that Bush had
won, the GOP strategy focussed on subverting a statewide recount. A
filing by the Green and Libertarian Parties required Ohio's 88 county
boards of election to conduct random precinct samplings, to be followed
by recounts where necessary.

A lawsuit was filed to delay the
seating of Ohio's Electoral College delegation until after the recount
was completed. Among other things, the plaintiffs sued to get access to
Rove's laptop. But Blackwell rushed to certify the delegation before a
recount could be completed. The issue became moot, and the suit was
dropped. In retaliation, Blackwell tried to impose legal sanctions on
the attorneys who filed it.

But two felony convictions have
thus far resulted from what prosecutors have called the "rigging" of
the recount in Cuyahoga County (where Bennett has been forced to resign
his chairmanship of the board of elections). More are likely to follow.


The practices that led to these convictions were apparently
repeated in many of Ohio's 88 counties. The order to violate the
law---or at least tacit approval to do so---is almost certain to have
come from Blackwell.

4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's
computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. And
here is where Rove's e-mails, and the wee hours of the morning after
the election, are crucial.

Despite the massive
disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John
Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am
gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These
"purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against
virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.

Along
the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258
ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting
machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name
was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100%
turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren
County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count
from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.

These
and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at
www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John
Conyers and others who researched the election.

But the most
critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite
massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote
count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in
excess of 200,000 votes.

The key to that reversal may be
electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting
firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the
Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that
Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.

This astonishing
conflict of interest has been reported at the epluribusmedia.org
on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come from luaptifer
at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon's Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They
all confirm that the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com,
based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com,
mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank
basement.

Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled
redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White
House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the
Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were
themselves involved in vote fraud investigations.

Conflicts of
interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear
throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House
e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal
his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.

One
factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which
were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about
one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have
been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the
Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by
Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.

But
overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to
the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in
Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White
House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same
computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added
dimension.

Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped
create the software for both Ohio's official 2004 election web site,
and for the Bush campaign's partisan web site during the 2000 election.
The success of Connell's GovTech Solutions has been attributed by
Connell to his being "loyal to my network," including the Bush family.

Blackwell
shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the Bush-Cheney
campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control of the
vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell
helped design.

It was in a crucial period after midnight on
election night 2004 that these paired conflicts of interest may have
decided the election. As exit polls showed a decisive Kerry victory,
there was an unexplained 90-minute void in official reporting of
results. By this time, most of the vote counts were coming in from
rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which, ironically,
usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban areas.

In
this time span, Kerry's lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain
this "miraculous" shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest
last-second voting surge in US history, allegedly coming from
late-voting fundamentalist Republicans. No significant evidence exists
to substantiate this claim. In fact, local news reports indicate the
heaviest turnouts in most rural areas came early on election day,
rather than later.

According to a January 13, 2005, release
from Cedarville University, a small Ohio-based Christian academy,
Connell's GovTech Solutions helped make the shared server system run
"like a champ…through the early morning hours as users from around the
world looked to Ohio for their election results."

After 2am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those results put Bush back in the White House.

In
January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a
state's Electoral College delegation in our nation's history. At the
time, the compromised security of the official Ohio electronic
reporting systems was not public knowledge. But the first attempt to
subpoena Karl Rove's computer files had already failed.

Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales scandal deepens.

Congressman
Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised "particular concerns about Karl Rove"
and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.

Rove
claims both his own computer records and the RNC's servers have been
purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed.
Rove's attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that
Rove mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC "were being archived"
there.

But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove
before 2005. Rob Kelner, an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the
lost records have had some success. But it's not yet known whether
communications from the 2004 election can be retrieved.

Nor is
it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove
and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put
Bush back in the White House.

But there remains another avenue
by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004 could be discovered.
Longstanding federal law protected Ohio's ballots and other election
documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave clear orders
that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.

Prior
to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights
lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley,
asking that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted
in what has become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit
(co-author Bob Fitrakis is an attorney in the case, and Harvey
Wasserman is a plaintiff).

Thus, by federal law, the actual
ballots and electronic records should be available for the kind of
exhaustive recount that was illegally denied---or "rigged," as
prosecutors in Cleveland have put it---by Blackwell, Bennett and their
cohorts the first time around.

Ohio's newly-elected Secretary
of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to take custody of these
materials, and to bring them to a central repository, probably in
Columbus.

This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the presidential election of 2004.

It
may also be possible to learn what roles---electronic or otherwise---
Karl Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial
90 minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from
John Kerry to George W. Bush.

--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey
Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION
& IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org and, with Steve
Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, from the New Press. Fitrakis is
publisher, and Wasserman is senior editor, of www.freepress.org.