Unfinished Business: Did the GOP hack the 2004 Ohio Vote?

Posted by Steven Rosenfeld at 7:40 AM on November 2, 2008.

As the 2008 presidential election heads to Tuesday's vote, there is some unfinished business concerning 2004 presidential election -- and whether the Republican Party had the means to electronically alter the vote count -- that will come before a federal court in Ohio on Monday.

At issue is whether Republican computer consultants, working for then Secretary of State and Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, J. Kenneth Blackwell, had the technical capacity to collect the electronic vote totals that were being reported on Election night by Ohio's 88 county boards of elections -- and delay publishing them on the state of Ohio's election results website until the numbers ensured a George W. Bush victory.

In the spring of 2007, AlterNet was first to publish a report -- written by me, Bob Fitrakis of Columbus, Ohio, and anonymous citizen journalists from E Pluribus Media -- that documented how the official Ohio Election Night results website was hosted on servers in Tennessee that also were home to hundreds of other GOP websites. The speculation then, and now, was whether the GOP had the means -- just as anyone who has access to a website's content management system does -- to review what is being published, and edit it if necessary, before making it live online.

In other words, we believed that events on the ground on Election Night 2004, such as a declaration of a homeland security alert in Warren County, where all the ballots were taken by local law enforcement to a locked warehouse, and wildly high voter turnout figures from several of the state's southwestern Bible Belt counties that were the last in the state to report, when there was no video tape of polling places from those counties jammed with people, all covered up an intentional GOP data diversion scheme to alter the results. Subsequent analysis of precinct-by-precinct results found, for example, more than 10,000 people in these same evangelical-rich counties who voted for Bush and in favor of gay marriage, a highly implausible claim, if the official results were true. All these factors have led a small team of lawyers in Columbus to methodically use a federal voting rights lawsuit to do discovery into what happened on Election Day in 2004, including looking at the Ohio's computer infrastructure that collated the vote count and reported it to the world.

Already, this litigation has revealed that nearly two-thirds of Ohio counties defied a federal court order and destroyed the 2004 ballots. meaning an accounting by academics or a 'recount' well after the fact would be impossible. But on Monday, in federal court in Cleveland, Ohio, the GOP's computer IT guru, Mike Connell, is scheduled to be deposed. As a very good report in EPluribusMedia.net sums up, the lead attorney in this case, Cliff Arnebeck of Columbus, believes that his questioning will reveal much about the GOP's capacity in 2004 -- and today -- to intercept and potentially alter electronic vote counts.

As Arnebeck told EPluribusMedia:

Gleaned from privileged sources, Arnebeck thinks Connell will "not lie" if he's asked pointed questions on what he knows about the work he and his company did for Blackwell then, and whether any vestiges of that work, such as secret cyber back-doors or other computer architecture work, still exist and whether they are in place to again flip votes from Obama to McCain for this election like some believe happened four years ago.

Many election integrity activists have followed this slow but dogged litigation because they feel it eventually will implicate Karl Rove, the president's longtime campaign consultant. But there is much more to this case than satisfying political vendettas years after the fact. The central question, which remains very much relevant on Tuesday's 2008 presidential election, is whether partisan contractors or 'volunteers' had the electronic means to access to the innermost vote counting apparatus, just as Lyndon Baines Johnson apparently did when a Texas sheriff stuffed a ballot and as a result elected him to the U.S. Senate.

Delaying and altering the vote count, whether electronically or by cutting telegraph wires in the 19th century and discovering additional ballot boxes, is nothing new. Only the technology has changed. On Election Night 2004, the Ohio Secretary of State brought students from a nearby evangelical college into the Secretary of State's office to assist with the Election Night workload. Now the question that Arnebeck hopes the Monday deposition of Mike Connell answers is whether -- and how -- Blackwell may have had the electronic means or assistance to tabulate and alter countywide vote totals before they were presented to the press and public.

That insight, while often dismissed as a quixotic quest, has everything to do with restoring transparency to our increasingly digitized and privatized voting systems -- an issue that you can bet will be at the center of the nation's attention on Tuesday night.

Tagged as: bob fitrakis, cliff arnebeck, vote count theft, ken blackwell, ohio 2004 presidential el, ohio 2004 vote count, mike connell