OpEdNews - Article: New Details about How Bush Stole Ohio in '04

Ever since Bush/Cheney's re-election in 2004, there's been an ever-growing body of strong evidence that their "victory" was stolen. Before that year was out, there was the Conyers Report--a powerful study that the US press, both corporate and left/liberal, all but totally ignored. Those early findings were confirmed and amplified in many works appearing through the next few years, including Robert Kennedy's landmark article in Rolling Stone, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"; Richard Hayes Phillips' WITNESS TO A CRIME, his massive "audit" of the vote in 18 Ohio counties; the several works, all indispensable, of Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman; Steve Freeman's WAS THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION STOLEN? (co-authored with Joel Bleifuss), a thorough vindication of the exit polls that told of Kerry's VICTORY in Ohio (and ten other states); and my own book FOOLED AGAIN. And there's been further evidence in documentaries like Dorothy Fadiman's STEALING AMERICA: VOTE BY VOTE and Tom O'Brien's COMMANDER 'N THIEF, among others.

All such evidence has been consistently--and, in many cases, inexplicably--dismissed and/or tuned out not only by the GOP and corporate press (not least the New York Times), but by the Democrats and left/liberal press (not least The Nation), as well as many big progressive names, from Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow to Noam Chomsky and Ed Schultz. In THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, Barack Obama voices pride in having NOT joined the Congressional Black Caucus in opposing the electoral vote-count for Ohio, because "my guy had lost," period. "That was the cold, hard political reality. Everything else was just sentiment."

Thus the evidence has, all along, said one thing, while the whole political/media establishment has said the opposite--an easy claim to make, since Bush's real "win" in '04 is common wisdom, and so it's always very easy to repeat it, no matter how preposterous it may be; and it's also been an easy claim because those making it don't ever bother looking at the evidence, but simply blow it off as crazy on its face.

Well, now we have some evidence that's going to be a bit more difficult to wave away, since it appears to be a smoking gun: the contract between Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT guru, and the office of Ken Blackwell, Ohio's notorious Secretary of State from 1998-2006. Specifically, Connell signed the contract on behalf of his company, GovTech Solutions, along with Monty Lobb, Assistant Secretary of State, and also--like Blackwell--a dedicated theocrat intent on turning the United States into a "Christian nation." (Check out his company, Kenosis, and Mount Vernon Nazarene University, where Lobb teaches business courses.)

The Connell/Blackwell contract is for setting up a "new interactive Election Night website" that would not just enable Blackwell to monitor the statewide vote-count in real time, but also feed that data through a separate computer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of yet another private company called SMARTech, owned and run by a GOP operative (and evangelical) named Jeff Averbeck. Such is the computer-system architecture known as "man in the middle," which is often used, by criminals and other shady players, for stealing and/or manipulating data. The architecture map included here lays out the way the GovTech/SMARTech system worked on Election Night, 2004. (There also was a third private company involved in stealing the Ohio vote 6+ years ago: Triad Governmental Systems, located in Xenia, Ohio, and owned by the Rapp family--also Christianists.)

Needless to add, it's way past time for an honest, well-informed discussion of America's preposterous voting system, and the ways in which that system has, throughout the last ten years, been used time after time AGAINST the citizens of the United States--a people who have never shared the "values" of those Christianists OR libertarians who've largely hijacked both our state and federal governments. If those who've kept their eyes shut tight to all of this will open them at last, and take a good look at this latest evidence, it will jump-start that crucial national debate, which might just save America.