Mon
Jul 25 2011
01:30 pm
How President Kerry was "assassinated" in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga
By: EricLykins

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud...

The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee remains a mystery. This would have only happened if there was a complete failure of the Ohio computer election system. Connell swore under oath that, "To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation."

Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for the secretary of state during the 2004 election, agreed that there was no failover scenario. Magnan said he was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night and private contractors ran the system for Blackwell.
Stick's picture

I read this yesterday and do

Submitted by Stick on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 2:27pm.

I read this yesterday and do not know what to make of it. With so little information to work with, I'm really just left with one question: Could we really be that far down the rabbit-hole?

Rachel's picture

Could we really be that far

Submitted by Rachel on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 2:52pm.

Could we really be that far down the rabbit-hole?

Farther.

R. Neal's picture

Did you mean Kerry? Or is it

Submitted by R. Neal on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 2:56pm.

Did you mean Kerry? Or is it one of those meta things I frequently don't get?

adanovi's picture

Kerry or Gore?

Submitted by adanovi on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 3:16pm.

I was wondering the same thing.

EricLykins's picture

Oops. I forgot there was a

Submitted by EricLykins on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 3:43pm.

Oops. I forgot there was a guy from Massachusetts on that ticket also. Corrected.

R. Neal's picture

No one could have anticipated

Submitted by R. Neal on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 3:44pm.

Diebold pledges to deliver:

The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election. Blackwell's announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.

EricLykins's picture

I'm not a lawyer or IT

Submitted by EricLykins on Mon, 2011/07/25 - 4:56pm.

I'm not a lawyer or IT security person, but I don't know if Fitrakis has the smoking gun he seems to be claiming. He talks a lot about how his expert witness says SmartTech could have done this and that and couples it with how Conell's newly released deposition says there was no fail-over case scenario (reason for the data to go through Chattanooga in the first place).

But reading further along in the Plaintiff's Brief on Jurisdiction, Discovery, and Evidence Issues Identified by the Court filed 7/15/11:
BY MR. ARNEBECK:
Q. This goes to this man in the middle concern. It is the understanding of our expert that the SmarTech computer shown in this configuration would be capable of sending instructions, receiving instructions and receiving information from both the county level tabulators and the computers at the Secretary of State's office. Is that your understanding of this system as well?

A. No. Again, so you guys are clear, this is not connected to the tabulators in any way.

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