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Anti-Democratic Fever Sweeps The Nation

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

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Broken Democracy

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

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Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck Discuss Election Integrity Via Chuck Todd, NBC, U.S. Election Integrity

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Election protection, electronic voting & the future of America democracy

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
January 23, 2013

The re-election of Barack Obama was made possible in part by the triumph of a new social movement—a great grassroots upheaval aimed at election protection and meaningful universal suffrage, that must include a transparent and reliable vote count.

The Republican Party’s concerted effort to steal the presidency again failed in 2012, but only because of major breakthroughs that have been forcing their way into the mainstream since Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004.

Throughout these past dozen years, the GOP “suppress and shift” election theft strategy has focused on two main tactics:massive disenfranchisement of citizens (mostly non-white, poor and young) suspected of voting Democratic; and the manipulation of electronic voting machines and tabulating devices with software capable of flipping thousands of votes with a few late night keystrokes.

This year the Republicans’ blatant, barely concealed disenfranchisement efforts evoked a major national outcry, and a significant backlash that carried all the way to the op ed page of the New York Times. Because activists have focused on the issue since Florida 2000, there was in place a fast-growing awareness that millions of legitimate voters were being stripped from the registration rolls, especially in key swing states.

Less widely accepted has been the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. Manipulated tallies were used in Volusia County, Florida in 2000, and throughout Ohio in 2004 to elect and re-elect George W. Bush. In 2008 and 2012, Obama’s popular vote margins were sufficient to overwhelm the potential theft in key swing states. But the possibilities of electronic vote theft are stronger than ever. In the long run, if the US is to ever have a meaningful democracy, electronic voting and tabulating machines must be eliminated in favor of universal hand counted paper ballots.

SYSTEMATIC DISENFRANCHISEMENT:

Preventing unwanted voters from casting their ballots in key elections is a long-standing national tradition. It dates back at least to the Jim Crow days in the post-Civil War south, when the Democratic party and its terrorist wing, the Ku Klux Klan, systematically prevented African-Americans from voting in the eleven states of the former Confederacy , and elsewhere.

In Florida 2000 the Republicans used an old Jim Crow law disenfranchising former felons as a pretext for stripping the voter rolls of at least 90,000 voters. Most were African-American and Hispanic, and the vast majority weren’t ex-felons at all, but people with same or similar names or the same date of birth to other citizens who may or may not have been ex-felons, and may or may not have been residents of Florida.

In Ohio 2004, more than 300,000 voters were stripped from registration rolls in heavily Democratic urban areas throughout state. In the city of Cleveland, nearly 25% of all voters were eliminated from the voting rolls. Also, Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell deployed a wide range of deceptive tactics aimed at misleading voters and suppressing turnout. Democratic areas were shortchanged on voting machines and denied paper ballots. Tens of thousands of voters were forced to use provisional ballots which were then discarded.

Federal Judge Algernon Marbley in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville suit, in which we are attorney and plaintiff, ordered Ohio’s 88 county election boards to preserve their voter records for a statewide recount. But 56 of the counties illegally destroyed all or some of their election records. No prosecutions have resulted and no recount has ever been done.

After losing in 2008, even after purging 1.2 million voters from the rolls, the Republicans came into 2012 with a massively escalated campaign to suppress the vote. The 2012 purge of the registration rolls in Ohio topped 1.1 million voters. Led by Indiana and Georgia, GOP-controlled legislatures began passing laws demanding state-issued photo identification cards. New York University’s Brennan Center estimated such laws could disenfranchise more than ten million voters.

Republican secretaries of state, especially in Ohio and Florida, worked hard to trim early voting opportunities for suspected Democrats. Once again inner city polling places were plagued with long lines and extended waits. But the worst happened during early voting in cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland, where Ohioans—mostly African-Americans—waited up to five hours to vote. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted revived many of the tactics used by Blackwell, which were also adopted by GOP operatives in other states. Among other things, Husted would only allow one early voting center in the major urban areas, predictably creating long lines.

Tens of thousands of voters were also forced to vote with provisional ballots. A disproportionate number were African-American. Many were tripped up by detailed demands imposed by Husted apparently designed to nullify as many votes as possible.

But this year the activist community was prepared. Heavily challenged in court, the photo ID laws were largely overturned. As in 2008, thousands of volunteers worked in key states to make sure people came out to the polls and to protect their rights once they did. Angered by the GOP tactics, thousands of nearly disenfranchised voters made a point of waiting through hours of contrived delays to cast their ballots. Many were still standing in line to vote even as Barack Obama was proclaiming victory.

The Obama campaign and various voting rights groups challenged Husted in court over early voting hours, provisional ballot directives, and voter ID rules.

Overall, the response of the election protection movement was powerful and effective. Obama’s re-election was essentially secured by a movement that prevented the Republicans from disenfranchising enough voters to guarantee their victory.

ELECTRONIC VOTE THEFT

But no turnout for Barack Obama or any other candidate could have withstood a full-scale electronic vote shift. Unlike the widely accepted understanding that massive disenfranchisement can swing an election, assertions focussing on electronic vote theft continue to arouse divisive passion.

Yet there remains a simple bottom line: there is absolutely no secure means of monitoring, confirming, recounting or legally challenging a vote count that has been registered and tabulated electronically. In reality, our entire electoral system is sitting duck, and is far more vulnerable to electronic manipulation that it was in 2000.

Back then, at a critical moment on election night, 16,000 electronic votes from Volusia County, Florida, were deleted from Al Gore and 4,000 added to George W. Bush. Though the count was later reversed, Fox News commentator John Ellis—Bush’s first cousin—used the shift to reverse pronouncements that Gore had won the election.

In Ohio 2004, which would decide the presidency, CNN reported shortly after 11pm that John Kerry had defeated Bush by more than 200,000 votes. But at 11:14 pm the electronic tally was shifted to a computer bank in SChattanooga, Tennessee. Soon thereafter the lead definitively shifted to Bush, who officially won the state–and thus the presidency—by some 118,000 votes. The exit polls clearly showed Kerry winning.

Secretary of State Blackwell’s no-bid contract for the Ohio 2004 electronic vote count had been awarded to the Akron-based GovTech Corporation. Its founder, Michael Connell, was a long-standing associate of the Bush Family. Connell ran the GOP’s lead IT company, New Media. New Media processed Ohio’s votes through a server farm in Chattanooga, which also housed the email of the Republican National Committee, and of Karl Rove. The owner of the server farm was born-again political activist Jeff Averbeck of Smartech.

On November 3, 2008, Connell was deposed in Cleveland by attorneys Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck as part of the King-Lincoln federal lawsuit. Questioning focused on his possible role in electronically flipping the 2004 Ohio vote count. On December 19, while facing a follow-up deposition, Connell died in a mysterious private plane crash.

By then it had become clear that no recount of the Ohio 2004 election would be possible. Judge Marbley had issued a decision requiring that all 88 county election boards preserve all balloting records from Ohio 2004. But when Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner went to collect them, she discovered that 56 of the 88 counties had violated Marbley’s ruling. Accompanied by a series of widely varying excuses, the boards of election had made it impossible to track the true presidential vote count in the deciding state in one of America’s most bitterly contested elections.

In 2012, the GOP was prepared to repeat history. For a decade the Help America Vote Act had been spreading electronic voting machines throughout the US. More than half the nation’s votes were cast and/or counted this year on electronic devices. Yet the courts have ruled that the software on these machines is proprietary, meaning the public has no access to how they are coded, or how the votes are counted.

In Ohio, nearly all 2012 votes were cast and counted electronically. The Free Press reported that in Cincinnati, the notoriously insecure and unreliable Hart InterCivic voting machines were deployed by a company, HIG Capital, controlled by major Romney campaign associates who are investment partners with Romney family members.

The widespread belief that Ohio could decide the presidential outcome helped make that FreePress story go viral.

Just prior to election day, documents leaked to the Free Press from the Ohio Secretary of State’s office confirmed that an uncertified and untested software patch had been appended to ES&S machines on which 80% of the state’s votes would be cast and transmitted. The software had no safeguards to prevent an inside party from altering the vote count.

Further Free Press research uncovered the operations of Scytyl, a Spanish-owned company hired by a number of states to manage the overseas electronic vote count. But Scytyl’s software was also capable of manipulating the vote count in entire states, again without meaningful public access or recourse.

As Election Day approached, Democrats complained that touch screen machines had them pushing the button for Barack Obama while seeing Mitt Romney light up. In Colorado, Republicans claimed they were pushing Mitt Romney’s name while Barack Obama lit up. The complaints resembled those in Youngstown, Ohio 2004, where voters complained they were attempting to vote for John Kerry while George W. Bush’s name lit up. Mahoning County election officials in Youngstown, Ohio explained that the vote flipping was “only” happening on 31 machines.

This year, amidst saturation election night coverage, Karl Rove urged Fox reporters to refrain from calling Ohio for Barack Obama. Rove’s confused, angry outburst mentioned crashing websites run by the Ohio Secretary of State, and seemed to mirror the fateful Foxist backtracking of Bush cousin John Ellis in Florida 2000.

As in 2008, Barack Obama’s wide margin put the 2012 election out of reach of electronic vote theft. He could have lost Florida, Ohio and Virginia and still won in the Electoral College.

But the outcome in a close election might well have been different. Both Ohio and Florida were vulnerable to electronic flipping by the Republican governors and secretaries of state that controlled the electoral apparatus in both states. In a close election, they could easily have put Mitt Romney in the White House.

The electorate and much of the media reacted this year with great anger to the GOP’s national disenfranchisement campaign. Many people who came out to vote and stayed in long lines voiced angry defiance of the Republican attempt to deny them the right to do so.

But the reaction to the possibility of electronic vote theft has been muted and even hostile. The official lie propagated by the Democratic Party and their apologists is that there has not been a single case of vote tampering. In fact there have been hundreds of such cases (once case in point comes in a 17-page Free Press report (at freepress.org) documenting phantom electronic votes in Miami County, Ohio). Some Democrats worried openly that talk of the possibility of electronic vote theft might discourage people from voting at all.

Clearly this didn’t happen in 2008 or 2012. But it’s also clear that the vulnerability of electronic voting continues to put our democracy at profound risk. Until it is done away with altogether, and replaced with universal hand-counted paper balloting, the sanctity and reliability of our vote counts is moot.

The grassroots election protection movement that has arisen to deal with these issues has attained significant nationwide status. Given its popular momentum and gravity of the cause, it seems destined to take a place among the great political campaigns of our time.

It has already won some tangible victories. US Attorney-General Eric Holder has now endorsed automatic universal voter registration. The palpable anger over GOP attempts at mass disenfranchisement will not soon be forgotten. There is much new talk—nowhere near powerful enough—about abolishing the Electoral College. And the potential for electronic vote theft is at least being discussed as never before. Hard hitting reports by Forbes.com among others was accurate and admirable throughout the 2012 election cycle.

But there are also disturbing developments on the horizon. The courts continue to rule that software on electronic voting machines is proprietary, and thus beyond the control of scrutiny of the public. Thus we are still prey to having our public elections controlled by private corporations.

And in response to another round of long lines and voter disenfranchisement, there is talk of “convenience voting” by internet and cellphone. These are terrible ideas, as they can never be secured and are even more vulnerable to hacking than the touchscreen machines now in place.

So the public has no access, no guarantees, no recourse. The veracity of our electoral vote counts remain a blind item. Though Barack Obama won this election, other down-ticket races—past, present and future—may well have been manipulated.

For example, California’s bitterly contested referendum on GMO food labeling is still being subjected to a detailed recount. Mathematicians and social scientists are now reporting unexplained patterns of vote shifting that appear to be based on the size of precincts. The larger the precinct, the more the vote differs from the predicted norm.

Over the coming years, this new grassroots election protection movement will battle it out over the life-and-death issue of the integrity of our voting process. Banning money from politics, abolishing the Electoral College, automatic universal voter registration, universal hand-counted paper ballots, easier access to voting, the removal of partisan private for-profit companies and more will be at its core.

But even at this young age, the movement has played a critical role in electing and re-electing a president, and in preserving the integrity of countless elections, with an eye toward a vastly reformed system.

Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan and Canada all use universal hand-counted paper ballots. Ireland has just pitched its electronic machines to do the same.

That and a few other key democratic reforms would be a dream come true for this new movement. As election protection activists, we will be proud to watch that happen here in the United States as well.

——————–

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored five books on election protection.

original article posted here:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2013/4885

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Podcast: The Ohio Rights Group to legalize cannabis for therapeutic and industrial use

The Other Side of the News – Jan 21, 2013 – The Ohio Rights Group to legalize cannabis for therapeutic and industrial use

Bob Fitrakis and Mary Jane Borden discuss the new initiative to amend the Ohio Constitution so that people may use cannabis for medical illnesses and use hemp for food, fuel, paper, and other uses.

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Call it by its real name “Chemtrails”: Harvard prof calls for spraying to re-freeze the Arctic

Bob Fitrakis
January 3, 2013

It was inevitable. Those of you who have been wondering about so-called “chemtrails” need to read the December 11, 2012 article in Britain’s Daily Mail. The headline screams “Could we re-freeze the Arctic? Scientists suggest radical solution to global warming.”

This miraculous feat of geo-engineering comes to us courtesy of Harvard Professor of Applied Physics David Keith, who has authored papers proposing the massive spraying of reflective particles over the Arctic Circle in the journals Nature Climate Change and Environmental Research Letters.

They call it “spraying,” the street name is “chemtrails.” They have been doing it for years. It is the use of chemicals sprayed from planes to alter the environment, create military antennas in the sky, to build fake clouds and a toxic reflective sunscreen for the planet. You have probably seen it happen with a long-lasting white trail streaking high in the sky behind one or more planes, sometimes making a criss-cross checkerboard design. And when you call your local news station to ask what’s going on, usually they send out the jolly local weatherman to tell you not to believe your lying eyes.

There’s nothing new about the idea of weather modification. It’s been in vogue among certain advocates of “better living through chemistry” and high-ranking militarists since the mid-50s.

In an anthology published by CICJ Books, Star Wars, Weather Mods, and Full Spectrum Dominance, I have documented the long history of weather modification and the corporate and military implications behind it.

Throughout the Cold War, both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union actively investigated military applications of weather modification. In 1958, Captain Howard T. Orville, then serving as the White House’s Chief Advisor on weather modification, publicly announced that the Defense Department was studying “ways to manipulate the charges of the earth and sky and so affect the weather through electronic beams to ionize and de-ionize the atmosphere.”

In the 1990s, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, emerged as a major proponent of weather modification. The April 24, 2001 New York Times reported that Teller “had promoted the idea of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to counteract global warming.” Scientist Ken Calderia from the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory where Teller served as Director Emeritus prior to his death, admitted to the Free Press that they were modeling computer simulations on the use of aluminum oxide to counter global warming.

Calderia told me “We originally did this study to show that this program [massive spraying for weather modification] shouldn’t be done. Calderia felt such large scale weather modification was doomed because of the possibility of negative health effects. The chemicals used for the spraying the atmosphere come to earth as toxic particles that could cause respiratory and other health problems when ingested.

What’s new here is that this is being reported in British tabloids and repeated in the Columbus Dispatch’s EarthWeek section. What did not appear in the Dispatch’s briefer version was the last quote paragraph in the Daily Mail article. “Such drastic geoengineering could have disastrous unintended effects but could be a viable response to a ‘climate emergency’ such as the sudden collapse of ice sheets or a killing drought,” Professor Keith suggested.

The Mail also mentioned Professor Keith’s belief that such “open-air and large-scale geoengineering” violates the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. Also a 1977 United Nations treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of the Environmental Modification Techniques, specifically prohibited “the use of techniques that would have widespread, long-lasting or severe effects through deliberate manipulation of natural processes and cause such phenomena as earthquakes, tidal waves, in climate and weather patterns.”

Just like you can’t separate Teller’s chemical geo-engineering from his nuclear bomb – nor can you separate weather modification from the United States military.

In 2001, U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced the Space Preservation Act of 2001. The bill not only sought a “permanent ban on basing of weapons in space,” but also specifically banned “chemtrails.”

With these recent revelations in the Daily Mail, readers should recall that Dr. Bernard Eastlund who developed HAARP, the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, admitted to Wired magazine that the existing version controlled by the U.S. military in Alaska has weather modification capabilities.

Climate change is real and we need with it through sustainability, not by spewing a toxic band-aid in the sky. All people should demand environmental impact testing before any chemtrail spraying is done and we should demand that the U.S. government open its files on weather modification whether it be for geo-engineering or military purposes.

Remember that back in the 70s, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that “Technology will make available, to the leaders of major nations, techniques for conducting secret warfare of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need to be appraised. . . techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm.” What the world needs now, is full transparency.

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Bob Fitrakis is the author of the anthology Star Wars, Weather Mods, and Full Spectrum Dominance published by CICJ Books and for sale at Free Press.

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Free Press FREE movie at the Drexel

“The Wall Street Conspiracy: Discover the Truth”
Free Press FREE movie at the Drexel
Tuesday, November 27, 2012 – 7:30pm

The collapse of the US banking system in 2008 had been forecasted years before it happened by the people in this film. But no one wanted to listen. Instead our country fell apart in the Fall of 2008, the worst financial collapse in the history of Wall Street.

What is naked short selling? It is selling stock in a public company that you do not own and you never deliver to the buyer. Honest people call this stealing. This is done daily by many big banks for themselves and/or their customers.

How can this happen in today’s environment? 30 years ago stock physically changed hands in person between a buyer and a seller on Wall Street. Today, it is done electronically. In many cases, the stock is sold electronically but never delivered. In essence, our system has trillions of dollars of stock IOU’s that will never be collected.
Sponsored by the Free Press, the Drexel Theater, and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund.
http://thewallstreetconspiracy.com

Drexel Theater, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley.
253-1571, truth@freepress.org

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Dear Free Press Supporter

Dear Free Press supporter:

I am extremely proud of our pre-election activism. Andrew Kreig at Justice Integrity Project (Did Expert Witness, Activists Thwart a Rove Ohio Vote Plot?) speculates that we (freepress.org) may have prevented another stolen election. Art Levin at Huffington Post agrees as does Brad Friedman at Bradblog.

We need your support! The Free Press went into the red in this effort. We do not send emails asking for money before we get started, instead we get to work and ask for help later :). As a result, we need to ask our friends and supporters to contribute what you can to support what has already been done.

If you saw the Karl Rove meltdown on Fox News on election night, you might have been unaware that the Secretary of State AND the Cuyahoga County websites went off-line at approximately the same time as Rove’s meltdown. Deja Vu, election night 2004.

What we sometimes refer to derisively as “establishment” media validated our reporting efforts.

Forbes : The Technological Foundations Of Today’s Election Are Shaky, Especially In Ohio
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/11/06/the-technological-foundations-of-todays-election-are-shaky-especially-in-ohio/

Forbes: Dear President Obama, Glad You Won, But Can We Fix The Voting Machines Before 2016?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/11/09/dear-president-obama-glad-you-won-but-can-we-fix-the-voting-machines-before-2016/

Associated Press: Judge rejects lawsuit’s Ohio voting software claim
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/public/2012/11/ohio-voting-software-court-hearing.html

Business Insider: Here’s The Truth About The Story About The Romneys Investing In The Company That Makes The Voting Machines
http://www.businessinsider.com/romney-investment-in-voting-machines-2012-10

Fox News local Channel 19 in Cincinnati.
http://youtu.be/KofzJYE1i9o

Computerworld: Update: Lawsuit filed in Ohio over software updates to vote tabulation machines
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233274/….

Christian Science Monitor: US judge allows Ohio voting software, alleged to be vulnerable to fraud
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Elections/2012/1106/US-judge-allows-Ohio-voting-software-alleged-to-be-vulnerable-to-fraud

Fight Back (Bob’s radio show), interview with Cliff, Gerry and Harvey. (Podcast)
http://www.talktainmentradio.com/podcasts/110712%20Fight%20Back.mp3

We did not plan it this way, but our reporting turned into a three pronged effort.
• First, we reported on Scytl, and again here. Banking Insider called this the “true” October Surprise.
• Secondly, we reported on ownership of voting machine companies, particularly Romney family and business associates of Hart Inner Civic. Vote counting company tied to Romney
• Former National Security Agency data analyst and election software critic Michael Duniho (37 years, retired) testified in the lawsuit brought by Attorney Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck. Duniho’s expertise is beyond reproach and his testimony was powerful.
• Finally we reported on the illegal software patch that was applied (as experimental). We filed a lawsuit in both State and Federal courts in an effort to have this patch removed. The Free Press confirms installation, secret justification of uncertified last minute election tabulation reporting software in Ohio The contract was leaked to the Free Press. If the Free Press did not exist, to whom would this person leak the contract? Who else could be trusted to report it?
We at the Free Press…Bob Fitrakis, Cliff Arnebeck, Harvey Wasserman, Gerry Bello, Suzanne Patzer, myself, the Board of Directors, and many others…agree with Andrew Kreig. We believe we prevented another stolen Presidential election. But we may never know for sure. In any case, we could not have mounted a more vigorous defense of voting rights and democracy. We need your support so that we remain as THE most important and most effective defender of election integrity.

Please contribute to the Free Press here — https://freepress.org/store.php
or simply send a check to Columbus Institute of Contemporary Journalism (CICJ) at 1021 E Broad St, Columbus, Ohio 43205. You contribution is tax deductible.

Thank you,
Pete Johnson
CICJ Board President

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Bob Bytes Back Archives: 12/25/1996 Nosedive

12/25/1996
Nosedive
by Bob Fitrakis

Looks like Assistant City Attorney Glenn Redick-the man charged with the task of taking on Police Chief James Jackson and ferreting out police corruption-took a dive in the mayor’s prosecution. Either the fix was in, or Redick was sleepwalking during the hearings. As one veteran reporter covering the hearings commented, “The rug is getting thicker and thicker as they sweep the dirt under it.”

A scenario floating from various sources goes like this: about two weeks ago, attitudes began to change in the Jackson probe. As a precursor to this, Columbus City Council members John Kennedy, Les Wright and Michael Coleman had pressured the mayor’s investigation team to wrap up quickly. Rumors abounded that a deal was being struck between the mayor and Council members. The Chief and his backers were battling back with embarrassing information they had in their possession. Did they really want the Chief under oath testifying about everything he knew concerning escort services? The public exposure of the Arthur Shapiro murder file finally cemented the deal. The Chief, who, after all, was protecting some of the most important political and business movers and shakers in Columbus, was to get a slap on the wrist. And it will be business as usual in systematically and institutionally corrupt Cowtown.

This takes us to Arthur Shapiro. Let’s rehash that story. Local attorney and everyone’s favorite creative accountant, Shapiro, was gunned down in what was considered a mob hit the day before he was to testify to federal authorities concerning problems he was having with the IRS in 1985. A partner at Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren, Shapiro’s clients included The Limited, and he was at the time being investigated for his dealings with Berry L. Kessler, an accountant later convicted of helping Shapiro avoid paying income tax. Kessler is serving time in Florida for hiring a hitman to kill a business partner. He also was suspected of having a hand in the Shapiro slaying.

Because Shapiro worked for The Limited, Elizabeth Laupp of the Organized Crime Bureau did linkage analysis that pointed out in a June 6, 1991 memo the obvious connections between The Limited’s Les Wexner, former City Council President Jerry Hammond and current City Councilwoman Les Wright. Wexner helped fund Hammond’s now-defunct Major Chord nightclub in the Short North, and Wright served as vice president of the company that owned it. Shapiro reportedly worked on a land deal that paved the way for Wexner’s vast New Albany Company development, and Hammond’s and later Wright’s votes on Council helped facilitate that development.

Attorney James Balthaser took over some of Shapiro’s most interesting work at Schwartz, Kelm, Warren & Rubenstein. Balthaser is now at Thompson, Hine and Flory, where he is a law partner with the Chief’s lawyer, Bill Wilkinson. Wilkinson and Balthaser both happen to work for the firm that’s the primary legal counsel for the mighty Banks Carbone Construction Company, recently listed in Business First as Greater Columbus’s leading minority-owned firm with sales nearly equal to the second- and third-ranked firms combined. A miraculous success story for high school graduate T.G. Banks, the Chief’s close buddy. They share a lot of things, like an interest in the steel industry. The Chief, we recall, is a steel magnate; he runs Interstate Steel from his home on Bryden Road. We know from the Ohio Department of Taxation that he’s the president, secretary and treasurer of Interstate. But less well known is that Banks was listed as the owner of the company when it was incorporated in 1992. In most cities, a police chief operating a steel business with no steelyard in a residential neighborhood might raise eyebrows. Not here.

Anyway, Wilkinson looked like a heavyweight champ against the lackluster punching-bag Redick. And the Chief can soon go back to protecting and serving. After all, he’s done such a fine job. It was the Chief who insisted that Ted Oshodi be our Civilian Crime Prevention Coordinator although he was rated last among half a dozen candidates and was investigated last year for allegedly repeatedly raping his daughter from 1986-’88. While the charges weren’t brought to a grand jury for criminal prosecution since the daughter reported them years later and only had a polygraph to back her up, they still were open for a police Internal Affairs investigation that doesn’t have to meet “a beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. When Oshodi was ordered to take a polygraph on these charges, an August 11, 1995 memo from Officer Cathy Collins of the polygraph unit complained about an order she received “per chain of command … not to ask any questions of Ted Oshodi … prior to his hire date” of December 6, 1994. Interestingly, the alleged rapes took place prior to his hire date. And, the order reportedly came directly from the top. Eventually, Collins won out and she concluded the following: “that Mr. Oshodi was NOT TRUTHFUL when answering” four questions about sexually abusing his daughter. She also determined that the daughter was “truthful” on all four questions.

Redick forgot to ask the Chief about the bizarre restrictions he supposedly placed on Oshodi’s polygraph test. Also, Redick did not call Sharlynn English, the Chief’s very close friend and admitted former employee of “Dulcet” Escort Services; nor English’s good friend, next-door neighbor and close companion to Commander Walter Burns, Carol Huffman; nor Gail Richey, who observed the Chief’s relationship with English in the late ’80s. English’s sworn deposition reveals that the Chief visited her regularly two to three times a week for six to nine months at 5318 Karl Road for nooners. Right next door, at 5328, Richey was receiving then-Lieutenant Walter Burns, whose alleged involvement with the prostitution ring spurred the Jackson investigation.

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Another Husted Dirty Trick In Ohio: Secretary of State’s Office admits direct reporting function of untested election software

by Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis
November 5, 2012

Citizen concerns about untested software have multiplied since the Columbus Free Press broke the news that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office installed uncertified and untested software on the central vote tabulation machines in up to 39 counties in the state.

Memos circulated amongst senior staff at the Ohio Secretary of States’ indicate that they consider this skirting of Ohio Election Law is justified because the software does not directly tabulate or communicate actual votes. Their statements to the mainstream press reveal a different set of facts about the software and a different justification.

In statements to the theGrio, NBC’s political blog, SOS spokesman Matt McClellan said the software is to “assist counties and to help them simplify the process by which they report the results to our system.” and that it was deemed experimental because “It is a pilot project that we’re doing with about 25 counties or so. So it’s not statewide, but it is a pilot project we’re trying.”

Ohio election law does not allow software or hardware to be used in election until it has been tested or certified by the Ohio Board of Voting Machine Examiners unless it is experimental. The confidential internal memos indicate that this software was never tested because of claims that it is not involved with the tabulation or communication of votes. Reporting election results from county tabulation systems to the secretary of state’s office, which is the purpose of this software as explained by McClellan, is in fact communication of votes.

The potential federal illegality of this software has been hidden from public scrutiny by the Secretary of State’s Election Counsel Brandi Seske. In a September 29 memo, Seske wrote, “Please see the attached letter from Matt Masterson regarding de minimis changes – one submitted by ES&S and one by Dominion Voting Systems. He has reviewed and approved the changes.” “De minimis” is a legal term for minute. Federal election regulations have a very specific definition of de minimis. This definition was clarified to all state level agencies in a federal Elections Assistance Commission memo dated February 8, 2012 entitled “Software and Firmware modifications are not de minimis changes.”

Ohio election law provides for experimental equipment only in a limited number of precincts per county. Installing uncertified and untested software on central tabulation equipment essential affects every single precinct in a given county. Nowhere in the memos circulated by Seske, nor in the contract, is the software called “experimental.”

The Secretary of State’s office has given one questionable justification to its own Board of Voting Machine Examiners and another to the public.

The contract provides for testing, performed jointly by the counties and the vendor within 30 days of the software being installed. This testing was required to be independent and overseen by the Board of Voting Machine Examiners, as required by Ohio law.

McClellan told theGrio “I’m not sure the exact timeline of that [the installation and testing], but I know we’ve been working with the counties for the past couple of months on getting these in place, testing them to make sure they work properly, and working with the vendors as well.”

This uncertified and untested software could easily malfunction and corrupt votes on the central tabulation machines, thus destroying any electronic record of the actual votes by citizens. This “experimental” software, as outlined in the contract, has no security protocols. A “man in the middle” attack, like the one that stole the Ohio election for George W. Bush in 2004, could be directly facilitated by this untested and uncertified software installation.

The Secretary of State’s office has used every legal contortion to avoid the use of science and the possibility of public scrutiny of this possibly illegal software. The Free Press will continue to report on this story as it develops.

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Gerry Bello is the chief researcher at the Columbus Free Press. He holds a degree in computer security from Antioch College. Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press. He holds Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D. from the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

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