Will Bain-Linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?

[UMOJA]

Will Bain-Linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?

Tuesday, 16 October 2012 09:43 By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press | News Analysis

 

A "mobile ballot box" by Hart InterCivic. Hart's machines are infamous for mechanical failures, "glitches," counting errors and other timely problems. (Photo: Stephen C. Webster)Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney's business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O'Donnell reported for NBC's Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio's Hamilton County is "ground zero" for deciding who holds the White House come January, 2013.

O'Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has EVER won the White House without Ohio's electoral votes.

 

As we document in the e-book WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA'S 2012 ELECTION (www.freepress.org) George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio's then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell's Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio's votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes---and thus the presidency---to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O'Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart's machines are infamous for mechanical failures, "glitches," counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections. As in 2004, Ohio's governor is now a Republican. This time it's the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio's very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the US Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio's electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

US courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio. The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.

So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from "ground zero" in Cincinnati, don't hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive swing state are owned, programmed and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign's closest associates.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

[UMOJA]

Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney's business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

[UMOJA]

Karl Rove-style dirty tricks in Ohio

Voter intimidation, sketchy voting machines, misinformation: Are Karl Rove & Co. up to no good?

By Craig Unger

(Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

Are Karl Rove and his friends up to their old tricks again in Ohio?

As I report in “Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power,”  in 2004 the presidential race ultimately came down to Ohio. Today, with the election neck and neck once again, observers are asking whether the election will rest on a variety of unusual tactics used by the GOP to game the system in favor of the Republicans.

Among the GOP techniques used in 2004, Democrats complained about the unequal distribution of voting machines, which resulted in students at liberal Kenyon College waiting in line for as long as 11 hours while conservative voters at evangelical schools zipped through with no lines at all. There were “caging” tactics to challenge the voter registrations of college students, African-Americans and others who vote heavily Democratic. Republican volunteers known as the Mighty Texas Task Force were widely accused of intimidating would-be Democrat voters.

And there were numerous anomalies that some attributed to a computerized “Man-in-the-Middle” attack made possible by the fact that Secretary of State’s office in Ohio used a firm with strong GOP ties, SmarTech, as the “fail-over” site to handle returns on election night.

The final result? Even though the exit polls had Democrat John Kerry winning Ohio by 4.2 points, in the end George W. Bush emerged victorious.

For the most part, these unusual techniques could be attributed to Kenneth Blackwell, who, as Ohio’s Secretary of State, was charged with overseeing the election in a fair and impartial manner but who also happened to be co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, and, as such, was one of Rove’s chief lieutenants. As a result, many people believe Karl Rove stole Ohio to win the 2004 election.

This time around, Rove is not as close personally to Mitt Romney as he was with George W. Bush. But he is still a party boss of sorts — the king of the super PACs, which are funding the political ads that that are flooding the airwaves in Ohio. The Secretary of State of Ohio is Jon A. Husted, a Republican who was a veteran of Rove’s 2004 campaign in that state. Finally, with the race neck and neck on October 26, pundits at Real Clear Politics and elsewhere are speculating that once again the entire race may come down to Ohio.

Already, a number of interesting developments have begun to take place. This time, SmarTech does not have a clearly defined role as it did four years ago. But three days ago, I reported that votes in several counties in Ohio were being counted by Hart Intercivic, a voting machine company linked to the Romney camp, even though a study by the state of Ohio had labeled its voting system a “failure” when it comes to protecting the integrity of elections.

That is not the only questionable happenstance in Ohio. According to a recent report by Reuters, billboards have begun to appear in low-income neighborhoods in Cleveland and elsewhere in Ohio asserting that “Voter Fraud Is a Felony!” punishable by up to three and a half years in prison and a $10,000 fine. According to a Cleveland city councilor, the purpose of the billboard campaign was likely to confuse and intimidate ex-criminals from voting — even though it is perfectly legal for them to do so once they have served their time. “I’m worried they will actually scare some of the ex-offenders, people with felony records who can vote,” said Phyllis Cleveland, whose district includes several of the billboards. She added that there is confusion about felons voting because it is illegal in some states — but not in Ohio, 12 other states and Washington, D.C. The billboards, which are paid for by an anonymous group, have been put up mostly in black and low-income communities that tend to vote heavily Democratic.

Meanwhile, when it comes to restricting absentee voting, which historically has favored Democrats, Secretary of State Jon Husted has been doing his part for the GOP cause. First, in early October, he issued directive 2012-48, ruling that if voters made errors on their absentee ballots, “Notification may not be made via telephone, email, facsimile or any other means.” In other words, because the error will stand uncorrected, their vote may be disqualified — a ruling that is likely to hurt Democrats since, historically, more absentee voters are Democrats.

Perhaps even more important, Husted, on his own initiative, had absentee ballot applications sent to nearly 7 million registered voters in Ohio, and, as a result, more than 800,000 people have so far requested absentee ballots but not completed and returned them. According to state law, if any of those 800,000 people who have requested absentee ballots show up to the voting booth, they will be required to cast a provisional ballot so that officials can make sure they are not voting twice.

However, state law also says that those ballots may not be counted until November 17, meaning that the outcome of the entire election might be delayed. “That would be called my nightmare scenario,” said Amy Searcy, director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections.

To make matters worse, in the controversial 2004 election, the tabulation of provisional ballots was a bitter point of contention — again, because it hurt Democrats. According to “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio,” a report by the House Judiciary Committee investigating the controversy in Ohio in 2004, then Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s “failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots likely resulted in the loss of several thousand votes in Cuyahoga County alone, and untold more statewide.” With approximately one-third of the ballots ruled invalid, the congressional committee concluded, the procedures constituted “a possible violation of the Voting Rights Act” because “they undoubtedly had a disproportionate impact on minority voters.”

Close

Craig Unger is the author of 'Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove's Secret Kingdom of Power' (Scribner, September 2012). He is also a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, and wrote the New York Times bestseller, 'House of Bush, House of Saud.' For more about Boss Rove, and to buy the book, go to www.bossrove.com. More Craig Unger.

[UMOJA]

The ED Show - Stunning admission shows Ohio voting laws target African-Americans

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hRcbyo-2...!

[UMOJA]

Description
Thom Hartmann talks with Alec MacGillis,Senior Editor-The New Republic Website: www.tnr.com, about Republican shenanigans to steal the election in Ohio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q7GP-bMTqn4

[UMOJA]

The Plan to Steal Ohio This Election

http://youtu.be/XN00NTN5J3s