OpEd News
Joan Brunwasser
The electronic vote count apparatus that was put together to steal the 2004 election is still with us today. We still allow private partisan for-profit companies to control our software and hardware in the election process.
In the new court filing in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, instead of us and others being dismissed as "conspiracy theorists," people can make up their own minds. They can look at the architectural map showing how J. Kenneth Blackwell, then-Ohio Secretary of State, allowed private contractors to outsource the Ohio 2004 presidential vote count on election night to a private company, SmarTech, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The court case was stalled after the tragic of Bush IT guru Michael Connell in December 2008, one month after we took his deposition about the outsourcing of the vote count in 2004. People have a chance to look at our brief and Connell's under oath deposition with this new filing.
Also, the contracts signed by Connell's company and SmarTech can be read in the filing for the first time. This isn't ancient history. It is state of the art vote theft. It is tied directly to Karl Rove and partisan Republican IT operatives. It could happen in Ohio again, it could happen anywhere in the country. It appears to have just happened in Wisconsin.
Back up a bit please, Bob. The average reader doesn't understand anything about architectural maps or private contractors or even about the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case. How can we give them the basic information they need to evaluate the evidence?
The King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case is a civil rights case filed in 2006 against Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. It was based on evidence showing that during Ohio's 2004 presidential election, black voters were disproportionately purged from the voting rolls, voting machines were deliberately withheld from primarily urban polling sites, and many ballots from minority/young/poor/elderly voters in major urban areas (read: Democratic) were never counted.
The results of the 2004 election have always been at odds with the exit polls. After the election ended, the exit polls showed John Kerry won by three points instead of losing by three points and thus should have won Ohio and become the president.
While investigating the civil rights complaint, evidence emerged that Blackwell (who also served as co-chair of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign) had hired private contractors to oversee the election. One of the contractors was a long-established Bush IT operative, Mike Connell. Connell originally worked for the former CIA Director George H. W. Bush when he ran for president in 1988.
For some unexplained reason, Connell set up a computer system, which was supposed to be a "back-up" system for reporting the final vote count in Ohio. The system was actually more of a "man-in-the-middle" computer sitting in between Ohio's 88 county central tabulators and the Ohio secretary of state's voting site with the capability to alter the vote count. Within a recent court filing in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, there is an architectural map depicting this computer system.
The computer system resided in Chattanooga, Tennesseee, run by a company called SmarTech under Jeff Averbeck. Averbeck is another highly-partisan operative who formerly worked for Richard DeVoss of Amway. Averbeck was a Bush-Rove loyalist. On those same stack of servers in Chattanooga was a website directly linked to the White House - gwb3.com .
Part of this information came from a deposition of Mike Connell and information from other IT experts assisting in the lawsuit. All of this evidence is contained in the new court filings. People should read the brief as well as the Connell deposition, the contracts with these Republican companies and then consider the computer set up.
The system is literally designed to hack the vote.
The reader can find the information here:
"New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked" article on freepress.org
I sn't this just a case of Democratic sour grapes? Why are we just discovering all this now? And where is the corporate press? Isn't this a rather huge, and historic story with huge ramifications? They should be all over this!
Regarding Democratic sour grapes - you'd have to ask the Democrats about that. I'm a Green, co-chair of the Ohio Green Party and former Green candidate for Governor. It was the Green and Libertarian Parties in Ohio who called for recount in Ohio of the 2004 election.
Democrats are equally to blame for allowing private computer companies to corrupt our voting system.
The case was stayed in the court for a period while we tried to work out a consent decree to clean up the election process in Ohio with former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (2006-2010). We lifted the stay prior to the 2008 election to take Connell's deposition because of our fear that the private companies may be operating again in Ohio. The death of Connell, who we had planned to depose again, forced us to look in different directions.
Joan Brunwasser
In the new court filing in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, instead of us and others being dismissed as "conspiracy theorists," people can make up their own minds. They can look at the architectural map showing how J. Kenneth Blackwell, then-Ohio Secretary of State, allowed private contractors to outsource the Ohio 2004 presidential vote count on election night to a private company, SmarTech, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The court case was stalled after the tragic of Bush IT guru Michael Connell in December 2008, one month after we took his deposition about the outsourcing of the vote count in 2004. People have a chance to look at our brief and Connell's under oath deposition with this new filing.
Also, the contracts signed by Connell's company and SmarTech can be read in the filing for the first time. This isn't ancient history. It is state of the art vote theft. It is tied directly to Karl Rove and partisan Republican IT operatives. It could happen in Ohio again, it could happen anywhere in the country. It appears to have just happened in Wisconsin.
Back up a bit please, Bob. The average reader doesn't understand anything about architectural maps or private contractors or even about the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case. How can we give them the basic information they need to evaluate the evidence?
The King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case is a civil rights case filed in 2006 against Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. It was based on evidence showing that during Ohio's 2004 presidential election, black voters were disproportionately purged from the voting rolls, voting machines were deliberately withheld from primarily urban polling sites, and many ballots from minority/young/poor/elderly voters in major urban areas (read: Democratic) were never counted.
The results of the 2004 election have always been at odds with the exit polls. After the election ended, the exit polls showed John Kerry won by three points instead of losing by three points and thus should have won Ohio and become the president.
While investigating the civil rights complaint, evidence emerged that Blackwell (who also served as co-chair of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign) had hired private contractors to oversee the election. One of the contractors was a long-established Bush IT operative, Mike Connell. Connell originally worked for the former CIA Director George H. W. Bush when he ran for president in 1988.
For some unexplained reason, Connell set up a computer system, which was supposed to be a "back-up" system for reporting the final vote count in Ohio. The system was actually more of a "man-in-the-middle" computer sitting in between Ohio's 88 county central tabulators and the Ohio secretary of state's voting site with the capability to alter the vote count. Within a recent court filing in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, there is an architectural map depicting this computer system.
The computer system resided in Chattanooga, Tennesseee, run by a company called SmarTech under Jeff Averbeck. Averbeck is another highly-partisan operative who formerly worked for Richard DeVoss of Amway. Averbeck was a Bush-Rove loyalist. On those same stack of servers in Chattanooga was a website directly linked to the White House - gwb3.com .
Part of this information came from a deposition of Mike Connell and information from other IT experts assisting in the lawsuit. All of this evidence is contained in the new court filings. People should read the brief as well as the Connell deposition, the contracts with these Republican companies and then consider the computer set up.
The system is literally designed to hack the vote.
The reader can find the information here:
"New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked" article on freepress.org
I sn't this just a case of Democratic sour grapes? Why are we just discovering all this now? And where is the corporate press? Isn't this a rather huge, and historic story with huge ramifications? They should be all over this!
Regarding Democratic sour grapes - you'd have to ask the Democrats about that. I'm a Green, co-chair of the Ohio Green Party and former Green candidate for Governor. It was the Green and Libertarian Parties in Ohio who called for recount in Ohio of the 2004 election.
Democrats are equally to blame for allowing private computer companies to corrupt our voting system.
The case was stayed in the court for a period while we tried to work out a consent decree to clean up the election process in Ohio with former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (2006-2010). We lifted the stay prior to the 2008 election to take Connell's deposition because of our fear that the private companies may be operating again in Ohio. The death of Connell, who we had planned to depose again, forced us to look in different directions.
Posts
