[Dialogue] Are Rove's Missing E-mails the Smoking Guns of the Stolen 2004 Election?

Thu Apr 26 16:09:43 EDT 2007

Published on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
<http://www.commondreams.org>  

Are Rove's Missing E-mails the Smoking Guns of the Stolen 2004 Election?

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

E-mails being sought from Karl Rove's computers, and recent revelations
about critical electronic conflicts of interest, may be the smoking guns of
Ohio's stolen 2004 election. A thorough recount of ballots and electronic
files, preserved by a federal lawsuit, could tell the tale. The major media
has come to focus on a large batch of electronic communications which have
disappeared from the server of the Republican National Committee, and from
White House advisor Rove's computers. The attention stems from the
controversial firing of eight federal prosecutors by Attorney-General
Alberto Gonzales.

But the time frame from which these e-mails are missing also includes a
critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these
crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the
Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the
presidency.

Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials
say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus.
Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of
the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.

These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a
multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes,
and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on
election boards in the state's two most populous counties, with the biggest
inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.

There were four key phases to the GOP's election theft strategy:

1. Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter
disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in urban
Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and contradictory edicts
on voter eligibility, registration requirements, and provisional ballots; on
shifting precinct locations; on denial and misprinting of absentee ballots,
and more. Among other things, election officials, including Bennett,
stripped nearly 300,000 voters from registration rolls in heavily Democratic
areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.

2. On election day, the GOP focused on voter intimidation, denial of voting
rights to legally eligible ex-felons, denial of voting machines to inner
city precincts, malfunctioning of those machines, destruction of provisional
ballots and more.

In Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly
African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A
Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote due to
these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city precincts (but not
Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The survey shows another
50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the polling stations. In addition,
to this day, more than 100,000 machine-rejected and provisional ballots
remain uncounted. The official Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000
votes.

3. After the final tabulation of the votes, and the announcement that Bush
had won, the GOP strategy focused on subverting a statewide recount. A
filing by the Green and Libertarian Parties required Ohio's 88 county boards
of election to conduct random precinct samplings, to be followed by recounts
where necessary.

A lawsuit was filed to delay the seating of Ohio's Electoral College
delegation until after the recount was completed. Among other things, the
plaintiffs sued to get access to Rove's laptop. But Blackwell rushed to
certify the delegation before a recount could be completed. The issue became
moot, and the suit was dropped. In retaliation, Blackwell tried to impose
legal sanctions on the attorneys who filed it.

But two felony convictions have thus far resulted from what prosecutors have
called the "rigging" of the recount in Cuyahoga County (where Bennett has
been forced to resign his chairmanship of the board of elections). More are
likely to follow.

The practices that led to these convictions were apparently repeated in many
of Ohio's 88 counties. The order to violate the law-or at least tacit
approval to do so-is almost certain to have come from Blackwell.

4. Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote
count that may have been decisive. And here is where Rove's e-mails, and the
wee hours of the morning after the election, are crucial.

Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every
indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television
at 12:20 am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico.
These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against
virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.

Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258
ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines
in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed.
Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner
city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland
Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then
recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.

These and many more instances of irregularities and theft were reported at
www.freepress.org and then confirmed by U.S. Representative John Conyers and
others who researched the election.

But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that
despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary
vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in
excess of 200,000 votes.

The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known
that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites,
including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the
official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.

This astonishing conflict of interest has been reported at the
epluribusmedia.org on-line investigative service. Cross-postings have come
from luaptifer at Dailykos and blogger Joseph Cannon's
Cannonfire.blogspot.com. They all confirm that the RNC tech network's
hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech
hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web
domains, in a bank basement.

Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from
Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts
that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight
federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud
investigations.

Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability
appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House
e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his
"official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.

One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which
were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about
one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been
confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government
Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton
University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.

But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to
the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga.
Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system
and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked
to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension.

Mike Connell, a Republican computer expert, helped create the software for
both Ohio's official 2004 election web site, and for the Bush campaign's
partisan web site during the 2000 election. The success of Connell's GovTech
Solutions has been attributed by Connell to his being "loyal to my network,"
including the Bush family.

Blackwell shared those loyalties. Like Connell, he worked for the
Bush-Cheney campaign, serving as its Ohio co-chair. He was also in control
of the vote count that was being reported on software Bush loyalist Connell
helped design.

It was in a crucial period after midnight on election night 2004 that these
paired conflicts of interest may have decided the election. As exit polls
showed a decisive Kerry victory, there was an unexplained 90-minute void in
official reporting of results. By this time, most of the vote counts were
coming in from rural areas, which are traditionally Republican, and which,
ironically, usually report their results earlier than the Democratic urban
areas.

In this time span, Kerry's lead morphed into a GOP triumph. To explain this
"miraculous" shift, Rove invented a myth of the greatest last-second voting
surge in US history, allegedly coming from late-voting fundamentalist
Republicans. No significant evidence exists to substantiate this claim. In
fact, local news reports indicate the heaviest turnouts in most rural areas
came early on election day, rather than later.

According to a January 13, 2005, release from Cedarville University, a small
Ohio-based Christian academy, Connell's GovTech Solutions helped make the
shared server system run "like a champ.through the early morning hours as
users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."

After 2 am, despite exit polls showing very much the opposite outcome, those
results put Bush back in the White House.

In January, 2005, the U.S. Congress hosted the first challenge to a state's
Electoral College delegation in our nation's history. At the time, the
compromised security of the official Ohio electronic reporting systems was
not public knowledge. But the first attempt to subpoena Karl Rove's computer
files had already failed.

Now a second attempt to gain such access is being mounted as the Gonzales
scandal deepens.

Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) has raised "particular concerns about
Karl Rove" and his electronic communications about the Gonzales firings.

Rove claims both his own computer records and the RNC's servers have been
purged of e-mails through the time the Ohio vote was being reversed. Rove's
attorney, Robert Kuskin, has told a Congressional inquiry that Rove
mistakenly believed his messages to the RNC "were being archived" there.

But the RNC says it has no e-mail records for Rove before 2005. Rob Kelner,
an RNC lawyer says efforts to recreate the lost records have had some
success. But it's not yet known whether communications from the 2004
election can be retrieved.

Nor is it known whether the joint access allowed to top GOP operatives Rove
and Blackwell was responsible for the election-night reversal that put Bush
back in the White House.

But there remains another avenue by which the real outcome of Ohio 2004
could be discovered. Longstanding federal law protected Ohio's ballots and
other election documentation prior to September 3, 2006. Blackwell gave
clear orders that these crucial records were to be destroyed on that date.

Prior to the expiration of the federal statutory protection, a civil rights
lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Judge Algernon Marbley, asking
that the remaining records be preserved. The request was granted in what has
become known as the King-Lincoln Bronzeville suit (co-author Bob Fitrakis is
an attorney in the case, and Harvey Wasserman is a plaintiff).

Thus, by federal law, the actual ballots and electronic records should be
available for the kind of exhaustive recount that was illegally denied-or
"rigged," as prosecutors in Cleveland have put it-by Blackwell, Bennett and
their cohorts the first time around.

Ohio's newly-elected Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has agreed to
take custody of these materials, and to bring them to a central repository,
probably in Columbus.

This means that an exhaustive recount could show who really did win the
presidential election of 2004.

It may also be possible to learn what roles-electronic or otherwise- Karl
Rove and J. Kenneth Blackwell really did play during those crucial 90
minutes in the deep night, when the presidency somehow slipped from John
Kerry to George W. Bush.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE
AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at
http://www.freepress.org/ and, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN
OHIO?, from the New Press. Fitrakis is publisher, and Wasserman is senior
editor, of http://www.freepress.org/ where this story was first published. 

  _____  

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/25/761/

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