Bob Fitrakis
December 11, 2013

Michael Connell, the Bush family and Karl Rove’s IT guru, was heading home from Washington D.C. to attend his company’s Christmas party on Friday, December 19th in 2008. An accomplished pilot, he was flying from the College Park, Maryland airport to the Akron-Canton airport in Ohio under unremarkable weather conditions. Yet his Piper Saratoga plane suddenly dove to the ground between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, when he was just 2.5 miles from the airport. The site was roped off, cleaned up within two hours at night against protocol, and the next day his wife found his omniscient Blackberry missing from his still intact knapsack.

The Free Press has uncovered crucial documents that shed light on Connell’s mysterious death as the fifth anniversary of his tragic accident approaches. The document reveals that then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell had signed a legal Statement of Work (SOW) contract with Connell for IT work on the infamous Election Night 2004, when Kerry unexpectedly lost when exit polls showed him winning. Connell and Blackwell agreed fourteen months prior to the 2004 election that that Connell would have “remote monitoring capabilities” to the computer counting Ohio’s presidential vote. That means Blackwell planned more than a year in advance for Connell’s private partisan external third party company and a subcontractor to have unfettered secret access to Ohio’s 2004 vote tally.

The newly discovered contract contains an “Exhibit B” which called for a “mirror” website to handle Ohio’s 2004 actual vote count on Election Night provided by Connell’s company, GovTech. The document stated: “GovTech shall install and host (as set forth in Exhibit B) a Mirror site of the Application to provide a fail over solution in the event of failure of the primary installation on Election Day.”

This “hot rollover configuration,” as the document explained, “can completely re-point the site if the primary site should fail by using some remote monitoring capabilities.” And that’s exactly what happened at 11:13pm when Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was up three points over Republican incumbent George W. Bush.

Ohio’s 2004 votes were outsourced to Smartech in Chattanooga, Tennessee, owned by right-wing evangelical publisher Jeff Averbeck, subcontracted by Connell. The vote count inexplicably flipped at 12:21am changing from Kerry winning by over 3 percentage points to Bush winning by over 3 percentage points. Overall, there was an unexplainable rapid 6.7% shift in the vote count.

Smartech was also, curiously, the company that handled Karl Rove’s private email accounts from the White House. Millions of Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared – including those related to the Valerie Plame scandal and the firing of seven United States attorneys – despite repeated congressional and court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

The timing of Connell’s accident was very suspicious. The prior month, on the day before the 2008 November election, Ohio attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and this author took Connell’s under oath deposition. The purpose was to inquire about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s email files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

In his 2008 deposition Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key pieces of information that may have proved damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Why the vote count was transferred from Ohio 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 on Election Night. However, Connell swore under oath that, “To the best of my knowledge, it was not a failover case scenario – or it was not a failover situation.”

Bob Magnan, an IT election 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 2004 and that private contractors ran the system for Blackwell.

Who was Michael Connell?

A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign and may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various statements Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party.

In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

Blackwell hired Connell’s company GovTech on July 1, 2003 for seemingly nonpartisan election administration work. But Connell’s other company New Media Communications was working closely at the same time with SmartTech, a company owned and operated by former evangelical Christian publisher Jeff Averbeck. GovTech and Smartech together built Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among their clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com – yes, that’s George W. Bush, 43rd President.com.

In fact, the other two subcontractors working with Connell on Election Night, Averbeck and the Rapp family which owned the company Triad were all ardent right-to-life activists.

The King Pin strikes

Connell’s death came at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. On the night of the 2004 election, exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

Connell was deposed as part of the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case that alleged civil rights violations during the 2004 election. During the case, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office was forced to produce the election computer system configuration chart that was used in Ohio’s 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush. This “architectural map” clearly shows the election night server layout system from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office to servers owned by Smartech at the Old Pioneer Bank in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Expert witness Stephen Spoonamore, renowned bank and computer fraud expert and GOP member, concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that: “Smartech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle.”

A “man in the middle” is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.

In a sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: “The Smartech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running Smartech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control.”

“The King Pin I thought was probably sitting somewhere in the middle on the high speed line. The King Pin is a computer with a person sitting at it that doesn’t just steal the information and then use it later like we saw, it’s a person who has onboard their Kingpin computer the code and instructions for the Secretary of State’s office and the code and the instructions for a county tabulator. Instead of this happening, this happens….So at 9:00 in the evening Kerry’s leading in Ohio and the Kingpin in watching these results go through and this operator is sitting here in a company called Smartech,” Spoonamore told “Free For All” documentary filmmaker John Ennis.

“And remember when I speculated this, everyone said that’s ridiculous, that’s completely impossible. Well, we now found that not only was I right, and we know where it was sent. We didn’t just have it introduced, it was designed in the Secretary of State’s office that they could switch the control from their computer talking to the counties to having Smartech do it. When we found out who owned it and then we found out it was also doing Karl Rove’s email,” Spoonamore said.

Former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Blackwell’s successor, confirmed: “This office had a backup system, election night reporting system, with Smartech.” On December 14, 2007, she released her evaluation and validation of election-related equipment, standards and testing, the Everest study, which found that touchscreen voting machines were vulnerable to hacking with relative ease.

Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not Smartech had the capability to “input data” and thus alter the results of Ohio’s 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: “Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not.” Spoonamore explained that “they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want.”

Arnebeck specifically asked “Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function?” Spoonamore replied “Yes.”

Spoonamore also swore that “…the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers.”

“I do not believe George Bush won, I believe Kerry won and I’m a member of the GOP,” admitted Spoonamore.

Was it really an accident?

Connell’s sister contacted the Free Press to voice doubts that the crash was an accident. She later told a Wisconsin newspaper, The Daily Page: “At first, it was really hard for me to believe Mike was dead because somebody wanted him dead. But as time goes on, it’s hard for me not to believe there was something deliberate about it.” Connell reportedly had canceled two flights because of suspicions that something was wrong with his plane.

Various threats had been reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,…”

Spoonamore stated that in an October 2006 meeting with Connell, Connell asked questions about how to “permanently destroy hard drives.” Spoonamore told Connell, “If this is what I think you’re talking about, this meeting is over.”

Spoonamore urged Connell to testify before Congress and come clean on the 2004 election. Contacts were made first with U.S. Congressman John Conyers’ office and later directly with Representative Dennis Kucinich. Conyers’ office initially agreed to allow Connell’s and other skeptics of the 2004 election results to testify, but suddenly withdrew the offer. Kucinich agreed in principle to set up a hearing, but meanwhile the 2008 election was fast approaching and Connell had decided to lawyer up.

Following the 2008 election, Connell wrote in his New Media Communications newsletter: “In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It’s just that none come to mind right now…This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,…In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal.” He would be dead the next month.

After Connell’s death, a redacted government document arrived by mail at the Free Press office addressed to Arnebeck stating that Connell’s death was authorized since he was a “NST” – National Security Threat.

Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio’s 2004 election votes to Smartech in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a company owned by Republican partisans as one of the most censored stories in the world. On this, the fifth anniversary of his death, the mainstream press continues the cover-up but the Free Press continue the investigation into the Connell’s convenient and mysterious accident and how easy it is to steal U.S. elections.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/freepress-org-2-0-support-the-future-of-independent-media-in-central-ohio

Bob in Wisconsin @Democracy Convention Aug 7-11 Greg Palast sitting in front.

Ohio election officials cover up for illegal voting by police

Bob Fitrakis

8-7-2013

My, my. The coverup begins in the Metro section lead which begins, “County election officials say they think a clerical error is to blame for 19 Columbus police officers having their voting addresses listed as the Downtown police headquarters.”
Now, if a lower-class black male had used his work address as a voting address, and tried to vote in the inner-city Driving Park area, the headline would have read: “Massive voter fraud uncovered in urban inner-city precinct: ACORN is suspected.”
It is a fifth-degree felony to intentionally register to vote at your work address instead of your residence. The police might enforce the laws, but it doesn’t mean they obey them.
As the Dispatch pointed out, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who supervises the vote in Ohio, “…isn’t particularly concerned about police officers registering their work address.”
Say what? The top election official in the state of Ohio doesn’t care if the law is obeyed? I never thought I’d say it, but apologies are in order to the infamous former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who stole the election for George W. Bush in Ohio. At least with Blackwell, he found obscure old laws and re-interpreted existing law.
Husted is either ignoring the law or refusing to obey it.
By the time the article jumps to page five, the Dispatch reports the obvious: “Registering an address other than the residential address where you live is voting fraud and a felony punished by a year in prison.”
Not to worry about the blatant felonies being committed, Ben Piscatelli, spokesperson for the Franklin County Board of Elections — whose Executive Director is former county Democratic Chair Bill Anthony — chimes in to echo Husted. Piscatelli assured the Dispatch that “Columbus police officers don’t have to worry that their names will be forwarded to the county prosecutor’s office for possible investigation.”
Now, had this been an elderly retired black woman in the Mt. Vernon area, a SWAT team would have descended on her house and arrested her for voter fraud. Husted, with Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine and County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien at his side would have gleefully announced her prosecution for voting while black at the wrong address.
Piscatelli told the Dispatch that “It’s just a clerical problem. We’re working through it.” Of course there’s been no criminal investigation and Piscatelli offers no proof that it is a clerical error. But he gets paid well for being a mouthpiece for the Board of Elections, and all public officials love to get the FOP endorsement.
In a predictable twist, seven of the police officers don’t even reside in Franklin County where they were illegally registered to vote. Study after study has indicated that the overwhelmingly white police force is seen as an army of occupation in Columbus’ black neighborhoods.
We’re also told by the Board of Elections that one of the officers registered at work lived in the city and it was the exact same ballot for the illegal police headquarters precinct as where he lived. Again, the Board of Elections doesn’t offer proof in the form of an actual ballot.
Piscatelli goes on to say that “The Board thinks the registrations were honest mistakes,” according to the Dispatch. That makes sense. Columbus’ finest are required to have at least a GED to be on the force, and perhaps they forgot they didn’t live at police headquarters.
On one hand, Piscatelli’s comments may be reasonable, since the Columbus police have no concept of the meaning of the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments. Why should they be expected, as foot soldiers of the Constitution, sworn to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic, be expected to understand something as simple as a voting law.

Dr. BobBob Fitrakis
June 6, 2013

Did a right-wing election observer falsify election forms? The Columbus Free Press has learned that the Franklin County Board of Elections will consider referring an election observer affiliated with the voter suppression organization True the Vote for criminal prosecution. The special meeting is scheduled Thursday, June 6, 2013.

Prior to the 2012 presidential election in Columbus, True the Vote filed an application with the Franklin County Board of Elections to monitor polling places in the inner city. This application required signatures from local candidates on the ballot in the county or county political party officials to be valid.

The Franklin County Board of Elections determined that up to six of the signatures on the True the Vote application were probably forged. This type of political forgery is a fourth degree felony under Ohio law and carrying a penalty of up to 18 months of jail.

True the Vote started as an offshoot of the King Street Patriots, a Tea Party organization primarily active in Texas. True the Vote focuses on so-called “voter fraud” prevention. Their slogan is: “If you see something at the polls that just doesn’t seem right, record it.”

The organization was targeting Columbus inner city precincts with high percentage of African American voters.

The Franklin County Board of Elections learned of the allegations on Election Day 2012 and has delayed their consideration of the matter since that time. The recent resurrection of the case was prompted in part by the referral of 90 cases of alleged “vote fraud” to the office of Republican County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien on Tuesday, June 4.

The Board of Elections split along party lines with both Republican board member Doug Preisse and Brad Sinnott voting for criminal referral while Democratic board members Zach Manifold and Kimberly Marinello abstaining and complaining that they had had no time to investigate the 90 charges.

In an Board of Elections statement following the criminal referral of the 90 cases, it states: “The cases involve individuals who voted absentee both by mail and in-person at the county’s early vote center or at their local polling place on Election Day.”

William A. Anthony, Franklin County Board of Elections Director, told the Free Press that not one of the voters was able to vote twice and that the procedures put in place by the Board of Election are designed to eliminate just such potential double voting. “It’s considered the correct procedure if you think your absentee ballot has been lost or not cast to vote provisionally. It allows the Board of Elections to check for your absentee ballot before counting the provisional ballots.”

Under Ohio law provisional ballots aren’t counted until 10 days after Election Day. The absentee ballots are counted first and compared against provisional ballots to prevent voters from voting twice. Nearly 575,000 voters cast ballots in Franklin County in November 2012.

Republican Deputy Director of the Board of Elections Dana Walsh prepared the report on the so-called voter fraud. The Republican Party has been pressing the issure of “voter fraud” in Ohio since the 2004 election. Election integrity activists, including the Free Press, have stressed that the lack of transparency in the voting process is the real problem in Ohio’s controversial presidential elections. Ohio election officials allows private, partisan for-profit companies to secretly program its central tabulators and e-voting machines.

In 2004, another voter suppression group based in Texas, the Mightly Texas Strike Force, organized by Karl Rove, was accused in a police report of voter intimidation in Columbus, Ohio. No action was taken in that case.

Election rights activists see True the Vote as a historical continuation of massive voter suppression dating back to the Jim Crow era and emanating from former Confederate states like Texas.

Original post @ :
https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2013/1974

PRESS RELEASE
March 27, 2013

Contact: Bob Fitrakis
614-374-2380
fcgreenparty@gmail.com

Green Party endorses public financing and end to the Nationwide Arena tax bailout in Columbus
The Franklin County Green Party officially and unanimously endorsed the Columbus Coalition for Responsive Government’s initiatives to end the tax bailout for the Nationwide Arena and to create public financing for Columbus city elections on March 21, 2013.
Franklin County Green Party Co-Chair Bob Fitrakis stated “It’s about time we end the public subsidies and wealthfare checks to four of the richest families in the Columbus area.” Columbus voters have five times rejected public money bailouts of private sports teams and arenas. “This current scheme to funnel money to the rich happened after only a 15-minute debate at Columbus City Council. The one-party machine that runs Columbus City Hall is fundamentally corrupt and compromised,” said Fitrakis.
The current at-large system requires at least a quarter of a million dollars to run an electoral campaign city-wide. “There is no candidates other than the one-party incumbents, who traffic in political favors, that can raise that kind of money to run in a city-wide election,” explained Fitrakis, “The public campaign financing will take the tainted special interest money out and replace it with public matching funds.”
The Green Party, whose 2012 presidential candidate Jill Stein qualified for federal matching campaign funds, is a long-time supporter of removing private interest money from the campaign process. The Franklin County Green Party calls upon the citizens of Columbus to participate in the petition drive to place the initiatives on the ballot this November.
For more information go to: http://columbuscoalition.info/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Franklin-County-Green-Party/125354700874260?ref=hl

Bob Fitrakis
March 18, 2013

A bipartisan Ohio election panel released its recommendations for “voting reforms.” An early indicator of how bad these “so-called” reforms came when Ohio’s controversial Secretary of State Jon Husted immediately endorsed the panel’s proposals.

“A lot of the reforms that are in there are things that I have long advocated for,” Husted said.

The Ohio Association of Election Officials responsible for the recommendations is comprised of equal totals of Democrats and Republicans, but they are 100% party regulars, causing some activists to refer to them as the Ohio Association of Political Hacks. Under Ohio law, the two major parties get to appoint the top election officials in the state’s 88 counties.

These party regulars agreed to eliminate Ohio’s “Golden Week” of voting. During that week, voters were both allowed to register to vote at the Board of Elections and also cast an early ballot on the same day. Apparently the efficiency of such a system that made it incredibly convenient for voters to participate in the democratic process had to go.

Now, voter registration will close the day before early voting begins. Despite the success of Wisconsin which allows same day registration and voting even on Election Day, Ohio has chosen to separate registration from voting, even though they would have been done at the same building.

The reason cited by the panelists for the ruling is that they wanted to remove all uncertainty from the registration and voting process. They added certainty by making it more difficult for Ohio voters to vote.

As the Ohio Association of Election Officials Executive Director Aaron Ockerman told the Columbus Dispatch, “Uncertainty is really, really, really bad for the elections process.”

In an attempt to squash uncertainty, the panel wants the voting hours to certainly be shorter. Instead of embracing Ohio’s successful 35-day early voting period inaugurated by reform-minded former Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the panel will now restrict early voting to two weeks.

The voting centers which Husted limited to one site per county, as contrasted with the five sites Brunner allowed in 2008, would only remain open on weekdays and only the two Saturdays before the election from 8am-2pm. In the 2012 presidential election, up to 5-hour lines existed at the sole early voting sites in Cleveland and Cincinnati.

The panel failed to grasp that far more people, many without transportation, live in cities as opposed to rural areas. So whether you’re Holmes County, Ohio with 11,000 voters or Cuyahoga County, Ohio with 1.3 million voters, the panel embraced the concept of equality – one early voting site per county.

Also, voting hours are limited on the two Sundays before the election, from 1-5pm. This was predictable since the black churches have been running massive and successful “souls to the polls” campaigns on the Sunday prior to Election Day. These large numbers of people voting while black have caused concern among the overwhelmingly white Ohio Republican Party, but white Democratic politicians in counties like Cuyahoga, Columbus, and Cincinnati. There has been a growing tendency, particularly in Cleveland, for black candidates who challenge the white Democrat-controlled counties to do well due to high black voter turnouts.

Another interesting reform requires that all voters will be mailed an absentee ballot and that voters will be responsible, as they always have been, for postage. What the panel failed to recommend is an ongoing problem with mailed absentee ballots where, for example, in Franklin County (Columbus, Ohio) absentee ballots that required two stamps only had one spot preprinted on the return envelope. In the 2008 election, the Free Press broke the story that there were 10,000 absentee ballots being held up for lack of postage.

An actual reform would have required county election officials to weigh the absentee ballot and envelope and put the proper postage spot preprinted on the envelopes.

The panel managed to ignore the most pressing voting problem in Ohio. In 2012, more than 1.1 million voters were purged from the voting rolls, with the vast majority coming from Ohio’s urban areas. In 2008, the figure was even higher at 1.25 million voters purged. In a computer era, in a state that requires various forms of ID at the polls, it makes no sense to purge voters.

So once again, voter repression masquerades as voting reform in Ohio. The Democrats capitulated to the racist and class-based voter suppression enthusiastically embraced by the Republican Party.

Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is Assistant Professor of economics at Denison University (OH) and Research Associate at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (MA), Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (NY), the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (MO), and the International Economic Policy Institute (Ontario, Canada). He has taught at Drew University (NJ), where he was also co-director of the Wall Street Semester Program; the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC); and Bard College at Simon’s Rock (MA).

from: http://personal.denison.edu/~kaboubf/bio/index.htm

FightBack-20121006-1edit

Bob Fitrakis

“Voting Rights Act is Challenged as Cure the South Has Outgrown” cries the New York Times front page headline from February 18, 2013. In my diagnosis, not only does the South remain sick while retaining a race and class based system of voter suppression, the rest of the nation including my home state of Ohio is infected with the same illness.

In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed, the United States for the first time met the bare minimal standard for a democracy. For the first time, we would have two or more parties, the adult population including black Americans would be allowed to vote, and the votes would be fairly counted thanks to federal oversight.

Beginning with George W. Bush’s fraudulent election of 2000, the ugliness known as the Jim Crow South reared its head in the battleground states including Ohio. The blatant purges of poor, black and elderly likely-Democratic voters was well documented by BBC reporter Greg Palast. The Free Press documented the largest disenfranchisement of voters since 1965 by Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell during the 2004 presidential election.

Instead of acting like the South is “cured,” we should admit that our whole political process is contaminated and only the inoculation of a new Voting Rights Act can save the last remnants of U.S. democracy.

See https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2013/1963

The U.S. election system is broken, but you’d never know how bad it really is if you read the Columbus Dispatch. Citing a recent Pew Charitable Trust study, the Republican-owned paper stresses that Ohio ranks 29th out of 50 states in terms of worst voting practices.

A much better perspective of the nearly 6 million lost votes in the country from the 2008 election is offered by BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast. His book “Billionaires and Ballot Bandits” is a must read for those seeking to grapple with the real facts surrounding U.S. democracy. Ohio has a history since the stolen 2004 election of allowing Republican secretaries of state to purge voters in record numbers.

Those that somehow succeed in registering and voting in a state dedicated to the proposition that minorities, the poor, young, and the elderly should face difficult obstacles, often find that their votes were not counted. In the Dispatch’s recent article, they lauded Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted for moving in the right direction.

I guess that means he did OK by doubling the amount of uncounted provisional votes from 17,000 to 34,000. That’s absurd. It is also a travesty that people who haven’t voted in the last two federal elections lose their voter registration.

The only way to protect U.S. voters is through a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. The truth is, our system is beyond flawed. It is one that targets the most vulnerable of our citizens for election purges and vote theft.

See full article https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2013/1961

Find out what happens when Mr. Husted goes to Washington. He mingles
with a coterie of e-voting machine vendors and listens to the words of
NBC’s Chuck Todd who mocks election transparency and embraces
faith-based voting. The amount of uncounted provisional votes in Ohio
has doubled since the 2004 election. The Republican-owned Columbus
Dispatch wrote Sunday, February 3 editorial applauding Husted and
attacking his likely opponent in the next Ohio secretary of state
election, State Senator Nina Turner. I sued Ohio Secretary of State Jon
Husted on Election Day over uncertified and untested software patches he
had installed on at least 35 county tabulators in the Buckeye States.
That lawsuit is still moving forward in the state Common Pleas Court.
Read the full article at https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2013/1960