Partisan Contractors to Count Votes in Illinois, Colorado and Kentucky

By Bev Harris, BlackBoxVoting.org. Posted September 30, 2008.

A recent article details information about the pending subpeona of (GOP computer technician) Mike Connell in connection with a transfer of the Ohio election results server to a partisan server in 2004.

Black Box Voting has learned that similar results middlemen are already set up in 2008 for Illinois, Colorado and Kentucky. At this point citizens need to get on a search mission for every state to learn the routing of election results production and publication.

CORROBORATION OF THE INAPPROPRIATE OHIO CONNECTION

To learn more about the new discovery of results middlemen in Colorado, Illinois and Kentucky, scroll down.

First: more on the Ohio subpeona that is the subject of the article linked above. That article deals with allegations of an inappropriate middleman presence in the routing of 2004 Ohio election results. It does not provide evidence of tampering. The critical kernel in these stories is that Ohio election results in 2004 appear to have been routed to a partisan middleman operation before publication.

A screen shot on ePluribusMedia shows that the Ohio election site was -- oddly -- transferred to Smartech hosting shortly before the Nov. 2004 election, then transferred back to the state of Ohio. Even more damning, the election results were again temporarily transferred to the Smartech server shortly before the 2006 primary, then transferred back again afterwards. I have not been able to corroborate the source data for the screen grab at ePluribusMedia. The screen grab looks authentic. If authentic, grab your britches for the wild ride, because that subpoena will be fascinating.

The extreme partisanship and inappropriatness of Smartech as a server for anything to do with government elections is easy to corroborate. By paying a couple hundred bucks at WhoIs, you'll see that the Smartech site hosts dozens of sites that could not be more partisan: numerous sites for the Republican National Committee, many anti-Obama propaganda sites (but no anti-McCain sites and no Democratic sites); Republican candidate domains; over a dozen sites from various domains owned by "Prosperity for America", a partisan think tank that traces back to principals from an enormous privately held oil company Koch Industries.

Perhaps most concerning, Smartech also hosts the Voter Vault sites. Voter Vault is the powerful data mining Republican database which can tell you what kind of syrup you like on your french toast, who you vote for, every address you've ever lived, and which magazines are your favorite. Black Box Voting has obtained corporate documents showing that Voter Vault was set up by Bruce Boram, a political operative who got into hot water in Washington State for deceptive political activities.

MAN IN THE MIDDLE RESULTS CONTAMINATION

The Spoonamore affidavit referenced in the Ohio lawsuit deals only with theoretical issues. It should not be characterized as evidence that anything in particular occurred. It describes one man's concept of what could potentially occur, based on a set of assumptions that are not necessarily accurate.

This could steer away from what the results middleman may actually have been doing, which could be as simple as waylaying results for "first look". Private, secret "first looks" are exceptionally dangerous because it is common for subsets of results to be delayed for various reasons. Gaining "first look" enables operatives to contact those with custody of the delayed returns to relay details for precisely how much is needed to alter the outcome.

As Spoon postulates, electronic man in the middle attacks are possible under certain scenarios. He describes an attack which travels backwards down the pipeline to alter contents inside the voting system; a simpler method may be to just change the published report, letting locals with inside access make the necessary adjustments on their end.

RESULTS MIDDLEMEN IN COLORADO, KENTUCKY AND ILLINOIS

The Illinois middleman is connected with a partisan evangelical Baptist named David Davoust, who owns Robis, Inc. -- a firm that sells an electronic handheld device for pollworkers called "Ask Ed". Davoust controls the Internet domain names for a variety of churches, for DuPage County Elections chief Robert Saar's personal Web site, for the DuPage County Results site, and for the DuPage County Elections Board. But it doesn't stop there:

See more stories tagged with: conflict of interest, colorado, electronic voting, kentucky, illinois, vote count fraud, blackboxvoting.org, privatizing elections

Bev Harris is the founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, one of the country's first public interest groups focused on the electronic vote count fraud and reform of the voting process.

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