In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

By Bob Fitrakis

At the time of its announced closure, Antioch College, perhaps America’s most progressive and well-known peace college, had a few visible capitalist hawks on its Board of Trustees.

Bruce P. Bedford, one of only three Trustees not a former alum, had been appointed to the board of Arlington, Virginia company GlobeSecNine in 2005. The company is described by a representative of investment corporation Bear Sterns as having “a unique set of experiences in special forces, classified operations, transportation security and military operations.” One can only speculate why the nation’s longest-standing anti-imperialist education institution would appoint a trustee with extensive ties to the military and security industrial complexes.

Business Wire on May 4, 2005 described GlobeSecNine as follows: “GlobeSecNine invests in companies providing U.S. defense, security, global trade management and supply chain solutions to the public and private sectors, and has a strategic alliance with The Scowcroft Group, a business advisory firm headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.”

Bedford served on the GlobeSecNine board of advisors with Scowcroft and co-founder of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center Fred Turco. Others affiliated with the company are tied directly to the prison industrial complex and the anti-liberal “war on drugs,” for example Jack Lawn, former Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who serves on the board of directors.

On July 3, 2007, Michael Alexander’s name was removed from the list of Antioch trustees. Two days earlier, he had been sworn in as president of Lasell College in Newton Massachusetts. There has been speculation that Antioch’s campus would make a great retirement community, much like the one at Lasell, known as Lasell Village, “a state-of-the-art eldercare community with the first-of-its-kind built in educational component.”

In 1998 Alexander founded AverStar, where he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and did business primarily with NASA and the Defense Department. In 2000, Alexander’s AverStar defense company merged with the Titan corporation.

In March 2005, Titan pled guilty and paid the largest penalty under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in history for bribery and filing false tax returns.

L-3 Communications acquired the Titan Corporation on July 29, 2005. As their corporate website described the company, it “is a leading provider of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems, secure communications systems, aircraft modernization, training and government services. The company is a leading merchant supplier of a broad array of high technology products, including guidance and navigation, sensors, scanners, fuzes, data links, propulsion systems, simulators, avionics, electro optics, satellite communications, electrical power equipment, encryption, signal intelligence, antennas and microwave components. L-3 also supports a variety of Homeland Security initiatives with products and services. Its customers include the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, selected U.S. Government intelligence agencies and aerospace prime contractors.”

The L-3 Communications Titan Group brags that 8000 of its 10,000 employees have “security clearances” and that they are a leading provider of C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – “developing and supporting the systems of today and tomorrow for the United States and Allied Militaries and defense-related agencies in order for them to carry out their assigned missions,” according to their website.

While Antioch board members Bedford and Alexander cozied up with U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security, students at the university sponsored a national teach-in to expose the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay on October 5, 2006.

How a college targeted by the FBI and its notorious COINTELPRO operation during the Cold War as a “vanguard of the New Left” managed to place two “spook”-connected trustees on their board is a mystery worth exploring.

Antioch resides in the shadow of the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and its legendary Foreign Technologies Division that reverse engineers weapons systems from other nations. Its larger neighbor to the west, Ohio State University, has long been tied up with the CIA’s favorite nonprofit institution, Battelle, and was one of the 30 or so universities involved in the MK Ultra mind control LSD experiments in the 1960s.

The Dayton Daily News is reporting that a $5 million accounting error caused the radical college to close. Others have pointed to the long-standing rumors of intelligence ties to the Antioch Europe in Transition study program.

If the CIA or U.S. intelligence services were involved in the subversion of America’s most anti-imperialist and pro-peace college, it wouldn’t be the first time that the progressive college campuses have been infiltrated. The CIA subverted the National Student Association in the late 50s and early 60s. The agency also has been accused of subverting everything from fraternities to Fullbright scholars to Peace Corps workers.

The role of these trustees must be heavily scrutinized. Antioch alumni should be ashamed to allow their college to die until they get to the bottom of this spooky mystery.

Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes, and Nazis, on the role of the CIA in Ohio politics.

When the levee broke 

Monday, August 13, 7pm 
See: When the Levees Broke Part One – An American Tragedy, A Spike Lee Film
As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The result is WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina’s catastrophic passage through New Orleans.
Every second Monday of the month, the Central Ohio Greens show an environmental film with discussion following. 
Location:  Northside Library, 1423 N High St, Columbus, near King and High Streets. dgibson6@columbus.rr.com.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

James Ewinger, Plain Dealer Reporter (Cleveland, OH)

Kent – A soft-spoken teacher posted the words “Impeach Bush” in a public garden, and Kent police cast him as an outlaw.

Today Kevin Egler is fighting that in Kent Municipal Court, and the case is emerging as a free-speech issue of interest well beyond the boundaries of placid Portage County.

Police ticketed Egler for unlawfully advertising in a public place because he put up a free-standing sign near the intersection of Haymarket Parkway and Willow and Main streets.

Egler said the officer who cited him July 25 asked: “Why don’t you put the signs in your own yard?” Egler said his response was that he’s a taxpayer and views the public space very much as his yard.

At 45, Egler is too young to have experienced the heyday of anti-war activity in Kent. He was only 8 when Ohio National Guardsmen shot and killed four Kent State University students during a campus protest on May 4, 1970. He went to the university a decade later, putting out an underground newspaper and acquiring an accounting degree.

Egler and about a dozen friends and associates have placed hundreds of anti-war messages around Ohio and neighboring states over the past 10 months. He said the effort is fueled by the notion that President Bush’s military response after the 9/11 terrorist attacks was both illegal and immoral.

The ticket in Kent represents the first serious legal challenge to the campaign, Egler said. (He said he was ticketed for littering in Columbus after a sign he placed on a bridge blew over.)

Egler said that when he was stopped in Kent, he asked the police officer how his sign differed from Realtors posting signs on public property saying “This way to the house for sale.” He said the officer asked, “You don’t know the difference?” but never explained what it might be.

Columbus attorney Bob Fitrakis, Egler’s lawyer, said there is a difference: The real estate sign is commercial speech, and Egler’s sign is political. Commercial messages do not have anywhere near the legal protections that political speech does, he said.

Fitrakis does extensive legal work on First Amendment issues and is the publisher of the nationally recognized online publication freepress.org. He said this is the first Ohio case of its kind that he has heard of, because most prosecutions for political signs occur when someone defaces a building with paint or graffiti, but not a free-standing, easily removable sign. Until now.

But Ohio politicians – including judges running for re-election – get a great deal of latitude when it comes to posting their campaign signs, and Fitrakis said he is not aware of any instance in which a mainstream politician has been hunted down and prosecuted for the act.

Kent Safety Director William Lillich said similar tickets have been issued there, but he is not sure whether they involved commercial or political messages. He said candidates have been contacted and told to move inappropriately placed campaign signs.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

jewinger@plaind.com, 216-999-3905

 

Original At:

http://tinyurl.com/2nkjoe
 

by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis
July 30, 2007

It is time to think about the “unthinkable.”

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don’t know.

But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006) we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention.

The real question is not how or when they might do it. It’s how, realistically, we can stop them.

In Florida 2000, Team Bush had a game plan involving a handful of tactics. With Jeb Bush in the governor’s mansion, the GOP used a combination of disenfranchisement, intimidation, faulty ballots, electronic voting fraud, a rigged vote count and an aborted recount, courtesy of the US Supreme Court.

A compliant Democrat (Al Gore) allowed the coup to be completed.

In Ohio 2004, the arsenal of dirty tricks exploded. Based in Columbus, we have documented more than a hundred different tactics used to steal the 20 electoral votes that gave Bush a second term. More are still surfacing. As a result of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit (in which we are plaintiff and attorney) we have now been informed that 56 of the 88 counties in Ohio violated federal law by destroying election records, thus preventing a definitive historical recount.

As in 2000, a compliant Democrat (John Kerry) allowed the coup to proceed.

For 2008 we expect the list of vote theft maneuvers to escalate yet again. We are already witnessing a coordinated nationwide drive to destroy voter registration organizations and to disenfranchise millions of minority, poor and young voters.

This carefully choreographed campaign is complemented by the widespread use of electronic voting machines. As reported by the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and others, these machines can be easily used to flip an election. They were integral to stealing both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Efforts to make their source codes transparent, or to require a usable paper trail on a federal level, have thus far failed. A discriminatory Voter ID requirement may also serve as the gateway to a national identification card.

Overall, the GOP will have at its command even more weapons of election theft in 2008 than it did in Ohio 2004, which jumped exponentially from Florida 2000. The Rovian GOP is nothing if not tightly organized to do this with ruthless efficiency. Expect everything that was used these past two presidential elections to surface again in 2008 in far more states, with far more efficiency, and many new dirty tricks added in.

But in Ohio 2006, the GOP learned a hard lesson. Its candidate for governor was J. Kenneth Blackwell. The Secretary of State was the essential on-the-ground operative in the theft of Ohio 2004.

When he announced for governor, many Ohioans joked that “Ken Blackwell will never lose an election where he counts the votes.”

But lose he did….along with the GOP candidates for Secretary of State, Attorney-General and US Senate.

By our calculations, despite massive grassroots scrutiny, the Republicans stole in excess of 6% of the Ohio vote in 2006. But they still lost.

Why? Because they were so massively unpopular that even a 6% bump couldn’t save them. Outgoing Governor Bob Taft, who pled guilty to four misdemeanors while in office, left town with a 7% approval rating (that’s not a typo). Blackwell entered the last week of the campaign down 30% in some polls.

So while the GOP still had control of the electoral machinery here in 2006, the public tide against them was simply too great to hold back, even through the advanced art and science of modern Rovian election theft.

In traditional electoral terms, that may also be the case in 2008. Should things proceed as they are now, it’s hard to imagine any Republican candidate going into the election within striking distance. The potential variations are many, but the graffiti on the wall is clear.

What’s also clear is that this administration has a deep, profound and uncompromised contempt for democracy, for the rule of law, and for the US Constitution. When George W. Bush went on the record (twice) as saying he has nothing against dictatorship, as long as he can be dictator, it was a clear and present policy statement.

Who really believes this crew will walk quietly away from power? They have the motivation, the money and the method for doing away with the electoral process altogether. So why wouldn’t they?

The groundwork for dismissal of both the legislative and judicial branch has been carefully laid. The litany is well-known, but worth a very partial listing:

The continuation of the drug war, and the Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act and other dictatorial laws prompted by the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, have decimated the Bill of Rights, and shredded the traditional American right to due process of law, freedom from official surveillance, arbitrary violence, and far more.

The current Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, has not backed away from his announcement to Congress that the Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus. The administration continues to act on the assumption that it can arrest anyone at any time and hold them without notification or trial for as long as it wants.

The establishment of the Homeland Security Agency has given it additional hardware to decimate the basic human rights of our citizenry. Under the guise of dealing with the “immigration problem,” large concentration camps are under construction around the US.

The administration has endorsed and is exercising its “right” to employ torture, contrary to the Eighth Amendment and to a wide range of international treaties, which Gonzales has labeled “quaint.”

With more than 200 “signing statements” the administration acts on its belief that the “unitary executive” trumps the power of the legislative branch in any instance it chooses. This belief has been further enforced with the administration’s use of a wide range of precedent-setting arguments to keep its functionaries from testifying before Congress.

There is much more. In all instances, the 109th Congress—and the public—have rolled over without significant resistance.

Most crucial now are Presidential Directive #51, Executive Orders #13303, #13315, #13350, #13364, #13422, #13438, and more, by which Bush has granted himself an immense arsenal of powers for which the term “dictatorial” is a modest understatement.

The Founders established our government with checks and balances. But executive orders have accumulated important precedent. The Emancipation Proclamation by which Lincoln declared an end to slavery in the South, was issued under the “military necessity” of adding blacks to the Union Army, a step without which the North might not have won the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order #8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Harry Truman’s Executive Order #9981 desegregated the military.

Most to the point, FDR’s Executive Order #9066 ordered the forcible internment of 100,000 people of Japanese descent into the now infamous concentration camps of World War II.

There is also precedent for a president overriding the Supreme Court. In the 1830s Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the right of the Cherokee Nation to sovereignty over its ancestral land in the Appalachian Mountains. But President Andrew Jackson scorned the decision. Some 14,000 native Americans were moved at gunpoint to Oklahoma. More than 3,000 died along the way.

All this will be relevant should Team Bush envision a defeat in the 2008 election and decide to call it off. It’s well established that Richard Nixon—mentor to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney—commissioned the Huston Plan, which detailed how to cancel the 1972 election.

Today we must ask: who would stop this administration from taking dictatorial power in the instance of a “national emergency” such as a terror attack at a nuclear power plant or something similar?

Nothing in the behavior of this Congress indicates that it is capable of significant resistance. Impeachment seems beyond it. Nor does it seem Congress would actually remove Bush if it did put him on trial.

Short of that, Bush clearly does not view anything Congress might do as a meaningful impediment. After all, how many divisions does the Congress command?

The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would almost certainly rubber stamp a Bush coup. If not, like Jackson, he could ignore it as easily as he would ignore Congress.

What does that leave? There is much idle speculation now about what the armed forces would do. We also hear loose talk about “90 million gun owners.”

From the public side, the only conceivable counter-force might be a national strike or an effective long-term campaign of general non-cooperation.

But we can certainly assume the mainstream media will give lock-step support to whatever the regime says and does. It’s also a given that those likely to lead the resistance will immediately land in those new prisons being built by Halliburton et. al.

So how do we cope with the harsh realities of such a Bush/Cheney/Rove dictatorial coup?

We may have about a year to prepare. Every possible scenario needs to be discussed in excruciating detail.

For only one thing is certain: denial will do nothing.


HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.solartopia.org, along with SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030. The FITRAKIS FILES are at www.freepress.org (where this article was originally published), along with HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, which Bob and Harvey co-wrote.

Saturday, August 11, 2007
Free Press Second Saturday Salon
6pm-midnight. Meet new friends in the progressive community! Have a meeting during the salon with a small group! Give a presentation on a social justice issus. Food, drinks, music, art, political discourse or just socializing time with progressive friends. Music by Marvin the Robot.
Location:Free Press office, 1000 E. Main St., in Columbus Compact building, parking lot in rear, overflow in Salvation Army parking lot next door.
Phone:253-2571, 224-1082
Email:truth@freepress.org

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
August 2, 2007

The illegal destruction of federally protected 2004 election materials by 56 of 88 Ohio counties has become a fraudulent “dog ate my homework” farce of absurd justifications and criminal coverups.  

The mass elimination of the critical evidence that could definitively prove or disprove the presumption that the 2004 election was stolen has all the markings of a Rovian crime perpetrated to hide another one.  Indeed, under Ohio law, that’s precisely what must be presumed here. 

But what makes the situation downright pathetic is that Ohio’s new Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has publicly stated she sees “no evidence” of intentional destruction in the disappearance in more than 60% of the state’s counties of the ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

So once again, as did Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, the Democrats seem poised to cave to the on-going GOP coup that has redefined America, and that now involves the criminal destruction of contested evidence in one of the most controversial vote counts in US history.

Ironically, in Florida, under Jeb Bush, the ballot records from the 2000 election in all but one of the state’s counties were successfully preserved.  They are now stored in a state repository in Tallahassee.  An unofficial recount conducted by the national media concluded that Al Gore rightfully carried Florida, and thus the presidency, in 2000. 

A parallel preservation was ordained by federal and state law for the election records from Ohio 2004, where a similar examination has been viewed as inevitable. 

But a series of excuses that range from the lame to the pathetic to the obviously criminal have left us shocked—shocked!—to learn that despite the protection of established federal law, a federal court order, long-standing Ohio laws, two directives from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office, and legal notification letters from plaintiff’s attorneys to hold the evidence, a precise recount of Ohio’s stolen 2004 election may no longer be possible.

In short, Brunner has informed us that 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties have mostly “inadvertently” destroyed all or some of their records from the 2004 presidential election.

Are we surprised?

Wait ’til you hear how these mostly Republican directors say it happened!

The materials were under legal protection “from birth” on November 4, 2004, shielded by national law, acknowledged by Brunner, by Ohio Revised Coded 3505.31, then by a federal court decision in the now-legendary King-Lincoln-Bronzeville lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff).  

The Ohio Revised Code specifically states that in presidential elections  “the board shall carefully preserve all ballots prepared and provided by it for use in that election, whether used or unused, for twenty-two months after the day of the election.”  In this case, that would have been through September 2, 2006. 

These records were also essential to reconstructing a credible recount that was most pointedly stifled by then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Brunner blamed the destruction of documents on Blackwell, “…for not giving counties clear instructions and for not notifying them quickly enough about U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley’s September 7, 2006 order,” according to the conservative Columbus Dispatch.  

But many of the ballots were destroyed soon after the election in a series of events whose descriptions grow stranger and more implausible by the day.

In October 25, 2004, just prior to the election, Blackwell issued directive 2004-43, reminding all county election officials of the federal 22-month holding period for presidential ballots. That meant all election-related materials would be under federal protection until September 2, 2006.

On August 23, 2006, plaintiff’s attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case hand-delivered a letter to the Secretary of State’s office and faxed notices to all 88 county Board of Elections offices that the ballots were to be evidence in the forthcoming civil rights suit against Blackwell.

On August 31, 2006 that suit was filed in Marbley’s federal court in Columbus. The AP reported that same day that Blackwell “has signaled his willingness to keep ballots from the contentious 2004 election beyond their scheduled September 3 destruction date in response to activists who plan to sue him in federal court today.”

Ohio laws also require that noticed—for election-related materials and other public records—be offered to the Ohio Historical Society and other public repositories before they are destroyed.  Public record forms must be filed and Ohio law requires a Certificate of Destruction. Nonetheless, Blackwell erroneously told the Dispatch the next day that he was “willing to ask the boards not to destroy ballots, but the decision ultimately is a local one.”

But under applicable law, the decision was definitely not “a local one.”  Indeed, Judge Marbley ordered all of Ohio’s 88 counties to “…preserve all ballots from the 2004 presidential election on paper or in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this court.”  Thus anyone destroying such records, from Election Day until the time you read this, may have broken various federal or state laws, and be in contempt of a federal court order. 

King-Lincoln alleges a wide range of civil rights violations perpetrated by Blackwell and many of Ohio’s 88 county boards of elections based on race, economic status, political inclination, wrongful denial of absentee ballots (as in Harvey’s case) and more.

Here are some of the stories the counties are telling about the destruction of their ballots: (View the original state documents in a 19.5MB PDF)

Hancock County says it “received verbal directions” from Secretary of State Blackwell’s office that unused and soiled ballots “did not have to be retained and these items were destroyed.”

But any election audit requires a complete set of used and unused ballots to ensure that the unused ballots weren’t stuffed illegally into the ballot box. The law refers specifically to “all” ballots.

Putnam County apparently understood this all too clearly. That’s why they informed Brunner that “all unused ballots were destroyed for security purposes.”

In Warren County, on Election Day, the board of elections declared a Level 10 Homeland Security alert for which neither the Homeland Security Agency nor the FBI has any documentation or explanation.  The alert served as cover for moving the vote count to an isolated warehouse, away from the media.  Bush emerged from Warren County with a huge majority, far in excess of what he received in 2000. 

Some twenty-two thousand officially unused ballots from Warren County are now mysteriously missing.

Warren County Board of Elections Director Michael E. Moore has written Brunner, stating that, in complete defiance of the law, “They were not accidentally destroyed. They were destroyed pursuant to standard practices that had been used by the Board of Elections for many years in Warren County regarding unused punch card ballots.” Moore notes that “The unused ballots were destroyed 60 days after the 2004 election.”

Warren, along with neighboring Clermont and Butler counties, provided Bush with more than his entire 118,775 winning margin in Ohio 2004.  Thus these three counties were singled out for allegations of fraud in the election contest case Moss v. Bush (though only after surviving the first-ever Congressional challenge to a state’s entire Electoral College delegation). The allegations of fraud on a level that could have decided the presidency were thus never tested in court…and now the evidence has been destroyed.    

Clermont County “could not locate” the unused ballots, according to Mike Keeley, Board of Elections Director.

Butler County cannot provide the “2004 General Election Ballot Pages.”   Director Betty McGary says that “at no time was anyone specifically instructed to discard these items.  Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions.” For complex reasons having to do with Ohio’s precinct ballot rotation law, the ballots from Butler County cannot be recounted with the “Ballot Pages” missing. The pages match the punches to the candidates.

Holmes County BOE Director Lisa Welch wrote Brunner that  “a shelving unit collapsed in the Board of Elections storeroom on the morning of Friday, April 7, 2006. That shelving unit held the voted ballots, stubs, soiled and defaced ballot envelopes, and ballot accounting charts from the 2004 General Election. The shelves and stored items collapsed onto a side table holding a working coffee maker. The carafe on the coffee maker was full at the time of the incident. Many of the stored items had to be destroyed due to the broken glass and hot coffee. The ballot pages and unused ballots were stored on a neighboring shelf and were not damaged.” 

Holmes County was rendered infamous by Karl Rove’s legendary spin claiming there was an unprecedented massive turnout of homophobic old order Amish voted for Bush and against gay marriage.  (It is well-known that the Amish as a community rarely vote). 

Allen County “labeled all voted ballots and placed [them] in our vault for the required 22 months of storage,” according to Keith Cunningham, Director. Cunningham distinguished himself as a pro-Bush and Rove mouthpiece when he testified at then-Congressman (now-felon) Bob Ney’s cursory March 2005 hearing into the 2004 Ohio election.

Cunningham told the Secretary of State that in the “…latter part of 2004 and into 2005… [we] began to experience problems with storm water migrating and subsequently penetrating our primary storage areas including our vault.” He told Free Press reporter Paddy Shaffer that the vault had been flooding for “six years,” and he had to put the 2004 presidential ballots on the floor because he needed the shelf space.

Cunningham added that:  “As a result of these events, much of what was stored in our vault, including the 2004 general election ballots, were compromised by water damage and subsequently destroyed on or about August 20, 2006. Pursuant to the recommendations of the Allen County Health Department the boxes displaying mold or mildew were set aside to be discarded. Unfortunately, the contractor hired to remove the damaged boxes also accidentally removed the undamaged boxes as well,” stated Cunningham, who did manage to save 498 write-in ballots.

The Health Department records recommended destruction or isolation as a solution.

Guernsey County’s ballots suffered a similar twisted fate. According to BOE Director Jacqueline Newhart, “The unused ballots as well as the punch card ballot pages were destroyed in error” because “the county maintenance worker, when collecting trash, picked up the boxes” that contained them.

In allegedly mobbed up Mahoning County, the board of elections has blamed environmentalists for inadvertently destroying the ballots. Apparently the “Mahoning County Green Team picked up all recyclables in the storage room for disposal pursuant to the retention schedule,” according to Director Thomas McCabe. As a result, some 115, 936 ballots “were accidentally disposed of on Friday, March 23 of 2007.”

Down in Hamilton County (Cincinnati), home of the Taft family dynasty, the unvoted and soiled ballots were “inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06.”

Perhaps the most egregious case of ballot destruction, and easiest to criminally prosecute, is Director Steve Harsman’s in Montgomery County.  Researcher Richard Hayes Phillips reported in the Free Press that, “…the Board was eager to destroy them [the ballots]. The employees who handled the ballots for me brought up the subject themselves.”

Harsman conceded that the “Ohio Revised Code” required a 22-month “retention schedule.” Yet, he argues that since the “Certificate of Destruction” had already been “prepared” prior to his receiving the order from Judge Marbley that he had the right to destroy the ballots.

“We literally ran out of space to prepare, stage, and retain material for these elections. It was imperative that we process the 2004 materials for destruction under the guidelines of the 22-month retention. Therefore, all materials were properly destroyed in a timely manner and we were unable to comply due to these circumstances. We did not receive formal notice from the courts prior to preparing the certification of destruction,” Harman wrote.

Thus Harman admits to openly defying a federal court order and destroying evidence because he wasn’t notified “prior to preparing the certification of destruction.”

But Judge Marbley pointed out in his opinion and order of September 11, 2006 in support of his order of September 7, that the Ohio Revised Code 3501.16 makes it a fourth degree felony for, among other things, willfully or negligently violating election laws as a director of a board of elections.

The original story of the ballots being saved for litigation and history made the pages of the New York Times. But the blatant and bizarre destruction of Ohio’s 2004 ballots has been relegated to the back page of the Columbus Dispatch Metro & State section. The brief article by Mark Niquette ran below the fold and the weather map, and above an ad for Window World and the Ohio State Medical Center. 

Matt Damschroder, the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Election Director and former Chair of the Republican Party, assured the Dispatch that the “counties did nothing intentionally wrong.” Damschroder is the President of the Ohio Association of Election Officials and was suspended without pay for a month after he accepted a $10,000 check from a Diebold representative in his office, made out to the GOP on the day the bidding for e-voting machines opened.

His job was in jeopardy until Board of Elections President Bill Anthony, Chair of the Franklin County Democratic Party, intervened to save Damschroder from firing.

King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Attorney Cliff Arnebeck stated that “The nature and scope of the cover-up can tell a lot about the nature and scope of the crime. Destruction of relevant documents can create a presumption that such evidence would have helped the other side in litigation.”

Arnebeck also said White House advisor Karl Rove “has had the keys to the US Justice Department for some time. No wonder FBI investigations requested by US Rep. John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee went nowhere. He also used those keys to scuttle two years of work by the IRS and FBI of financial corruption at the Ohio Statehouse.”

Overall this blatant destruction of evidence only reinforces the widespread belief that the 2004 election was stolen.  The loss of ballot materials in a few isolated counties might be an understandable  random event.  But for more than 60% of the state’s BOEs to have destroyed ballots or ballot materials amidst a series of bizarre, absurd explanations is a joke. 

America has been robbed of its history here.  The public has a right to know the true outcome of the 2004 election, and to have its laws about preservation of critical records honored.  

Under evidence laws, the destruction of material that serves as evidence in a lawsuit is presumed to be fraudulent action by the destroyer. 

But the Bush-Rove-Blackwell regime is about nothing if not contempt for the law.  And its assault on the documents that could show what really happened in Ohio’s contested 2004 election seems yet another obvious confirmation that it was, in fact, stolen. 


Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman’s HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at freepress.org  (where this article first appeared) along with the FITRAKIS FILES.  HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE US is at www.solartopia.org
Original post at:

 

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2730

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
July 30, 2007

Note:  This is the Second in a Two-Part Series

The Free Press recently published an article entitled “Sausage making and electronic voting machines” that revealed shocking facts about e-voting flaws in a 2006 Franklin County, Ohio judicial race.

This extensive investigation into this stolen election is a strong indictment of electronic voting in general.  It  underscores the importance of the national debate on the Holt Bill and other legislation now pending on “reforming” or abolishing the use of these problematic machines altogether.   

Indeed, what was left out of the Magistrate’s report in the Squire case (which is now on appeal) but was well documented in the court’s evidence record, constitutes an even greater indictment of touchscreen voting machines than has generally been known.

To understand the implications of this obscure election, readers should realize that it’s one of the most exhaustively studied e-voting races in U.S. history. Election Day and recount observers, two auditors, joined by one of the country’s leading electronic voting experts and under oath depositions and testimony from Board of Elections officials exposed in detail the unreliability of electronic voting systems.

The Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) appears to have violated the law when it refused to comply with Ohio law. BOE officials must follow election laws. “Strict compliance” is mandated under Ohio law. Failure to comply is a first-degree misdemeanor.

The BOE refused to impound election material as ordered by the Franklin County Court of Appeals. Magistrate Joel Sacco refused to punish the BOE and allowed them to get away with presumed fraudulent activity in their non-compliance with the Appeals Court order. Ohio law assumes fraud has taken place when election officials refuse to comply with court orders.

Moreover, Franklin County BOE Executive Director Matt Damschroder admitted under oath that he did not compare the total votes cast in the recount precincts with the number of voters listed in the pollbook in direct violation of the Secretary of State’s recount requirements. Also, when election officials failed to provide the poll books, poll lists and/or signature poll books for visual inspection as requested, they again violated recount procedures.

The facts the Magistrate ignored in the court record are the most damning toward touchscreen voting machines. Much of this reaches the legal standard for criminal election or vote tampering.

The key issue regards how election officials handled the real time audit log (RTAL) paper rolls that are supposed to ensure a fair recount. Hundreds of RTALs were already sitting out on various tables when Judge Squire’s observers entered the recount site. Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, Squire’s expert witness, noted that the correct procedure is for the “sealed containers holding the RTAL rolls to be opened in the presence of observers.” The premature extraction of the RTALs exposed the audit to the potential of a biased result.

Missing from many of these paper rolls was the additional tamper-proof tape that held the roll together.

The court record indicates that many of the RTAL rolls were incomplete. At the end of many rolls, where the final vote tally is printed for candidates, the figures were missing.

The explanation from election officials was that many of the rolls were incomplete because they had most likely been changed during the election process, the machines had simply run out of paper, or the paper rolls were damaged or ripped.

Mercuri estimated that between 5-10% of the machines either had not printed an ending vote tally or that tally was simply missing. The court record shows that specific machines lacked the end print out tallies. These machines include #5152130, #5157287, #5153310, #5153871, and #5159550, among others.

Another machine, #5151765, had a blank RTAL. Not to be outdone, machine #5155228 printed out all zeros.

A fair and unbiased audit is impossible to conduct under these circumstances.

Karen Cotton, the administrator for the Franklin County BOE, tried to explain away the fact that many RTALs had not been signed by poll workers. Cotton claimed that the “paper may have jammed” making it impossible to sign the vote tally.

Mercuri testified under oath that “I did not observe any [RTALs] that were signed at all.”

So, in the Squire v. Geer race, an uncertified system that was incapable of being audited produced unexpected election results. And the Board of Elections officials responsible for ensuring free, fair and unbiased elections failed to safeguard the people’s votes.

The real RTALs, or voter verified paper trails, prove to be worthless for audit purposes in an election where 90,000 votes were in question, according to the court record.


Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org.

Original at

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2719

by Steven Rosenfeld
July 30, 2007

In 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties, ballots and election records that would reveal whether the 2004 election was stolen have been “accidentally” destroyed.

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio’s 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.

“The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election,” said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. “We’re in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General’s office.”

“On the one hand, people will now say you can’t prove the fraud,” he said, “but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side.”

Brunner’s office confirmed the 2004 ballots were missing, but declined to comment.

“Because this case is still pending, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is unable to comment on this,” said Jeff Ortega, a spokesperson. “Ultimately, whether the boards of elections are in violation of a federal court order is a matter for the court to decide.”

The missing presidential election records were discovered this past spring by Brunner, a Democrat and former judge who was elected Secretary of State in 2006. Her predecessor, Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, was sued in August 2006 by a Columbus community organization that alleged the former Secretary of State and other “unnamed” officials “selectively and discriminatorily designed and implemented procedures for the allocation of voting machines in a manner to create a shortage. for certain urban precincts where large numbers of African-Americans resided,” according to the complaint.

Under federal and Ohio law, all ballots and election records from federal races must be preserved for 22 months after Election Day, which fell on Sept. 2, 2006. While election integrity activists and reporters from a Columbus website, FreePress.org, had sought the ballots and other election records soon after the presidential election, Blackwell would not allow county boards to release the ballots, citing court challenges to the 2004 results and a 2005 suit from the League of Women Voters alleging the state was not following the newest federal election law, the Help America Vote Act. By spring 2006, after the League’s lawyers stipulated they were not challenging the 2004 election results, some counties began to release their 2004 election records. Scrutiny of those records raised questions about the conduct of the election and some county vote totals.

On Aug. 23, 2006, lawyers for the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association notified the Secretary of State’s office of their voter suppression suit. The following day Blackwell’s office sent letters to all 88 of Ohio’s county Boards of Election, notifying them of the suit. It is customary for public officials to preserve potential evidence when notified of pending litigation. Ian Urbina, a New York Times reporter working on the story, reported that Blackwell said he would be creating a process whereby county election records could eventually review and dispose of the 2004 ballots.

On Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election boards “to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this Court.”

Two months after Marbley’s order, Blackwell lost the race for governor to Democrat Ted Strickland and Brunner was elected Secretary of State. During the following winter and spring, Brunner and the state’s attorneys began negotiating a settlement for the voter suppression suit, according to lawyers involved in those talks. Part of that agreement, which has not yet been brought before the federal district court, was the creation of a statewide repository of the 2004 presidential ballots. When conducting an inventory and attempting to collect those records, Brunner’s office learned that seven counties had no ballots to turn over and 56 counties only had partial records from the 2004 vote.

“This is not just a violation of a 22-month ballot retention law. It is a violation of a court order,” Arnebeck said. “Blackwell told the New York Times that he would create a clearance procedure before destroying any ballots. The combination of Blackwell’s directive and my letter should have been enough to give the counties notice.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE 2004 BALLOTS?

The presidential ballots and election records were lost, misplaced, damaged by water, taken to landfills – all apparently by mistake, due to miscommunications, or because the local election administrators were not aware of the state ballot preservation law or the federal court order, according to letters to Brunner’s office from the various county election boards.

“Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner’s) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions,” wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. “Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill.”

“The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots,” wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. “To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of ’06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system.”

“No one could remember the disposition of said ballots,” wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County’s Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the “unvoted” or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

Since the 2004 election, a handful of media organizations, civil rights groups, attorneys, historians and authors have been investigating how the president won in Ohio by 118,775 votes. These inquiries have had two primary focuses: examining Republican-led voter suppression tactics and problems with the vote count, suggesting vote count fraud.

The partisan voter suppression tactics have been easier to document. Before the election, Blackwell, who was co-chair of the state’s Bush-Cheney campaign, issued numerous administrative orders that fueled an extreme partisan climate. One of the most notable came as Ohio was seeing large voter registration drives in mid-2004. Blackwell issued an order, which he later rescinded under pressure, saying only voter registrations on 80-pound paper would be accepted and processed. At the time, Republican Gov. Robert Taft told reporters that directive could disenfranchise 100,000 voters. The state Republican Party also threatened to send thousands of poll challengers to local precincts, to ensure only properly registered voter exercised that right.

On Election Day in many Ohio cities, the turnout – or voter accommodation rate – in these traditional Democratic strongholds was markedly lower than in nearby suburbs, where Republicans have tended to be the majority. In Columbus, the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association sued saying African-American voters in Franklin County were disenfranchised because urban precincts received fewer voting machines per capita than the whiter, wealthier suburbs. They noted urban precincts had many more voting machines during the spring primary.

Ohio’s Secretary of State and Attorney General are engaged in settlement talks in the neighborhood association suit, suggesting the voter suppression claims have merit. In contrast, the case for Republican vote count fraud in the rural areas has been much harder to prove, even as the certified vote count is problematic in some counties.

Compared to Ohio’s Democratic urban core, turnout in the Republican districts was higher than the 2000 election. Moreover, in a handful of counties there were vote count anomalies that made post-election observers question whether Bush’s vote was padded. The most notable example is more than 10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true. In a dozen rural counties, virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes that Kerry, an oddity in a presidential year.

Reporters associated with FreePress.org and Arnebeck’s legal team hoped the court order preserving the 2004 ballots would enable them to investigate how these results occurred. Depending on the ballot type and vote-counting machine used, they have theories about how Bush’s vote could have been inflated. But because many of these rural counties apparently have destroyed the very 2004 election records that would clarify what happened, it is now virtually impossible to determine what happened.

In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert – which they later retracted – ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner’s office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election. In nearby Butler County, unused ballots are also missing, fueling speculation that they might have been used by Republican partisans to pad the president’s totals.

“The missing records reveal where the fraud occurred,” said Arnebeck. “You take as an example, Warren County. It is well documented that there was a phony homeland security alert and that was the excuse for excluding the public and the press from observing what was going on during Election Day. So the missing unused ballots would suggest that ballots were remade to fit the desired result.”

“The same situation occurred in Clermont County,” he said. “We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county,” he said, referring to one way of masking a would-be Kerry vote, because optical-scan machines read ink marks on paper ballots. “So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush.”

Many rural Ohio counties did not have vote count problems, Arnebeck said. But enough did have significant problems that called for further investigation.

“The Attorney General says the rural counties all say human error was to blame (for the missing ballots),” he said. “There are some counties where ballots are missing and we don’t believe anything was wrong with the vote count. But there are others where that human error covers up what we think was vote count fraud.”

Another big category of votes that will never be explained are the nearly 129,000 ballots that were rejected by voting machines and not counted. Many of these 2004 ballots – a mix of computer punch cards, paper ballots to be marked by ink and electronic votes – are among the incomplete 2004 election records. One post-election analysis found 94,000 of these ballots come from Democratic-majority precincts, and estimated these that ballots could have cost Kerry an additional 26,000 votes.

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
July 27, 2007

We’ve been long warned that foreign policy is like making sausage – you don’t want to know the gory details. The same is true of electronic vote counting on the so-called e-voting machines, or DREs.

Earlier this month, the 2006 election challenge court case Squire v. Geer gave us a rare tour inside the scam known as “touchscreen voting.” The “tour” comes with the backdrop of revelations that 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties have “lost” all or some of the election records from the stolen 2004 election. Though the records were protected by federal law, this means it may now be impossible to definitively tabulate who actually won the presidency in 2004. We will write more on this breaking news story in articles to come.

Carol Squire, a Franklin County Domestic Court Judge, refused to stand down after election observers and a post-election computer forensic analysis documented massive electronic voting machine irregularities in her race for re-election. She first paid for a recount of key precincts and used those results to file an election challenge. Squire’s election challenge sought a new election as the remedy.

Prior to last year’s election, the incumbent Democrat—the only African American female in the Domestic Relations Court her—was under fire from the Republican daily monopoly newspaper Columbus Dispatch as well as the Republican-controlled county court. Yet, most political observers expected her to win, particularly if the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland did well in Franklin County.

Strickland won with 58% of the vote in Franklin County. But Squire’s opponent Chris Geer purportedly won by 13,069 votes out of more than 262,000 cast. The outcome, to say the least, is highly implausible.

Magistrate Joel Sacco presided over the Squire v. Geer case, and while he declined to order a new election, his Findings of Fact in his decision of July 2, 2007 serves as a lasting testament to the illegitimacy of e-voting. The Finding of Facts encompassed the recount as well as evidence presented during the election challenge hearing.

Proving that they are either dyslexic or incompetent (or both), Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE) officials proved incapable of calculating 3% of the absentee vote as recount election law requires. The BOE officials “…counted 2072 absentee votes when they should have counted 2702 votes,” according to the Magistrate’s decision.

Compounding their inability to count, “Board of Elections did not check the public counters prior to this recount to verify that the numbers on these counters corresponded to the numbers on the VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail} and the poll books, poll lists or signature book records.”

This is a pattern repeated from the 2004 presidential election recount. Then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell issued a directive that allowed counties to recount, not based on their certified election results, but simply by running a few voted ballots through a counter and then hand-counting them to see if the numbers match. It defies logic that the BOE officials would recount without checking the numbers on the machine counters.

Repeating another tactic made infamous from 2004 presidential election, BOE workers, contrary to Ohio Secretary of State’s directive, violated principles of transparency. The Magistrate wrote that: Franklin County BOE “…did not in the presence of two election officials of different political parties make the poll books, poll lists or signature poll book records available on December 11, 2006 for visual inspection by the recount witnesses.”

Franklin County BOE officials not only refused to provide the books for inspection as required by law, they then proceeded to tamper with evidence in direct violation of election law. The Magistrate found that BOE workers “reviewed the poll books during the period before the official canvas began. Certain corrections were made to correct errors, voter audits were made, and voters were given credit before the official canvas began. Notations were made in precinct workbooks and poll books by Board of Elections staff. No date was placed by the initials of the person making the notation to indicate when the notations were made.”

In any other democracy, this would be called illegal cooking of the books.

After the books were well-done and well-seasoned, the Magistrate found that:

“For the November 7, 2006 general election, in 721 out of 835 Franklin County precincts, the public count on DREs did not equal the number of signatures in the poll books plus provisional votes cast minus the number of cancelled votes.”

Do the math. Of all DRE precincts in Franklin County, 86.3% had vote totals that failed to match signatures in the poll books. This is one of the most stunning indictments of e-voting in United States history.

Even after illegally withholding and anonymously correcting the book, the Franklin County BOE still “…reported 2824 more votes cast than signatures scanned,” according to the Magistrate’s Findings.

What this suggests is that while election officials had time to come close to an overall match by secretly and illegally “correcting” the books, they didn’t have time to match up the precinct-by-precinct tallies.

In an all too familiar scenario with e-voting machines, massive unexplained and improbable undervotes marred the race. The Magistrate noted that “of the voters in the November 7, 2006 election who voted for Governor by paper ballots, 22.15% did not vote in the Squire/Geer contest. Of those who voted for Governor by DRE or electronic ballot, 33.81% did not vote in the Squire/Geer contest. This represents a difference of 11.66%. In the past three elections this ‘voter drop off’ was reversed in the sense that persons voting absentee dropped off at a higher rate than persons utilizing voting machines or voting in the precincts.”

As in U.S. Senate races in 2006 in Montgomery County, Ohio, and in Sarasota, Florida’s House race that year, statistically impossible high rates of undervotes have gone against the Democratic candidates.

A conservative estimate in the Squire race suggests that 30,649 votes went unrecorded due to machine malfunction. The number is no doubt higher, as the Magistrate points out. DRE machines, since they flash when a voter fails to vote, historically have a lower undervote rate than paper ballots.

A staggering 33.81% — more than a third of all voters — allegedly did not cast a vote for Squire or Geer—but only on the DRE machines. Computer scientists have long documented that undervotes can be easily programmed. They can occur either by accident or design.

In Montgomery County’s 2006 Senate race, 30,000 unexplained undervotes occurred in the U.S. Senate race between Sherrod Brown and incumbent Michael Dewine. The county voted Democratic, implying that the Democrat Brown was hurt most by the undervote. In fact, the last major poll before the 2006 election by the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch had Brown winning the state by 24%. That poll was conducted by participants filling out and mailing in an actual paper ballot. A few days later, on Election Day, Brown only received 12% of the vote in the 2006 election conducted almost entirely on DREs.

The reason why the DRE votes are so unreliable may well be explained by the Magistrate’s finding that, “the voting system certified by the Secretary of State and the USEAC and the voting system utilized by Franklin County on November 7, 2006 varied in the following component versions. … Election Data Manager, Hardware Programming Manager and M100 Optical Scanner.”

The use of uncertified hardware and software installed at the last second can create not only massive undervotes but unexplained vote shifts due to recalibration problems, which is a quaint term for vote flipping. The software changes involved, among other things, ballot definitions. And, with rotating candidates’ names by precinct, so that all have equal chance of appearing first, uncertified changes could cause a vote cast for Squire to show up as a vote cast for Geer.

Squire’s expert witness, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, found and the Magistrate accepted as fact that “…The use of components that are mismatched — i.e., components that are configured in a way that was not certified by the USEAC — violates certification requirements and also runs the risk of exposure to programming errors or security vulnerabilities that could compromise the integrity of the election and could result in the loss of mistabulation of votes.”

Dr. Mercuri also testified and it was accepted as fact in the Magistrate’s decision that “…Franklin County had not completed a review of the 1.4 million lines of code contained collectively in the software which comprises the modules. Dr. Mercuri concluded that she had ‘very serious concerns about the security’ during the election.”

Computer election expert David Dill of Stanford publicly stated that, “It is practically impossible for someone to review software of any length at all – even 10,000 or even 1500 – lines of code to make sure that it’s 100% error-free.”

Professor Avi Rubin points out that it is easy to hide undetected codes in large code packages.

In 2004, Diebold, ES&S, and Triad technicians just prior to the election and recount, made numerous software and hardware changes to election voting machines, central tabulators and other computer technology without certification. In 2006, there were even more electronic voting machines in use, and the Squire challenge just happened to catch the use of uncertified software and hardware.

While the Magistrate found by clear and convincing evidence that there were election “irregularities,” he failed to order a new election in part because electronic voting creates a classic Catch-22. Because of the non-transparency of the computer black boxes we vote on, you can never really prove with “clear and convincing evidence” who won.

That now seems to be the case for Carol Squire—and for the majority of counties in Ohio’s stolen 2004 election.


Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at www.freepress.org, where this article was first published.

Original article at,

https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2712

 

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