Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election-- A Guest Post By John Thorpe

John actually wrote this post this summer. In light of all the ALEC-inspired disenfranchisement schemes and fake voter fraud legislation passing Republican legislatures in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Tennessee, Kansas, New Hampshire, et al, we thought it would be timely to remind folks what real election theft looks like-- and it isn't about a 96-year old African-American woman wanting to register to vote. John's report, which first appeared in Benzinga follows:

Three generations from now, when our great-grandchildren are sitting barefoot in their shanties and wondering how in the hell America turned from the high-point of civilization to a third-world banana republic, they will shake their fists and mutter one name: George Effin' Bush.

Ironically, it won't be for any of the things that liberals have been harping on the Bush Administration, either during or after his term in office. Sure, misguided tax cuts that destroyed the surplus, and lax regulations that doomed the economy, and two amazingly awful wars in deserts half a world away are all terrible, empire-sapping events. But they pale in comparison to what it appears the Republican Party did to get President Bush re-elected in 2004.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at Free Press and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

If you recall, Ohio was the battleground state that provided George Bush with the electoral votes needed to win re-election. Had Senator John Kerry won Ohio's electoral votes, he would have been elected instead.

Evidence from the filing suggests that Republican operatives-- including the private computer firms hired to manage the electronic voting data-- were compromised.

Fitrakis isn't the only attorney involved in pursuing the truth in this matter. Cliff Arnebeck, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. He asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. His response sent a chill up my spine.

"Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not," Spoonamore said. In case that seems a bit too technical and "big deal" for you, consider what he was saying. SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.

The filing today shows how, detailing the computer network system's design structure, including a map of how the data moved from one unit to the next. Right smack in the middle of that structure? Inexplicably, it was SmarTech.

Spoonamore (keep in mind, he is the IT expert here) concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."

A "man in the middle" is not just an accidental happenstance of computing. It is a deliberate computer hacking setup, one where the hacker sits, literally, in the middle of the communication stream, intercepting and (when desired, as in this case) altering the data. It's how hackers swipe your credit card number or other banking information. This is bad.

A mirror site, which SmarTech was allegedly supposed to be, is simply a backup site on the chance that the main configuration crashes. Mirrors are a good thing.

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."

Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."

SmarTech was part of three computer companies brought in to manage the elections process for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Republican. The other two were Triad and GovTech Solutions. All three companies have extensive ties to the Republican party and Republican causes.

In fact, GovTech was run by Mike Connell, who was a fiercely religious conservative who got involved in politics to push a right-wing social agenda. He was Karl Rove's IT go-to guy, and was alleged to be the IT brains behind the series of stolen elections between 2000 and 2004.

Connell was outed as the one who stole the 2004 election by Spoonamore, who, despite being a conservative Republican himself, came forward to blow the whistle on the stolen election scandal. Connell gave a deposition on the matter, but stonewalled. After the deposition, and fearing perjury/obstruction charges for withholding information, Connell expressed an interest in testifying further as to the extent of the scandal.

"He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared," said Mark Crispin Miller, who wrote a book on the scandal.

Connell was so scared for his security that he asked for protection from the attorney general, then Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Connell told close friends that he was expecting to get thrown under the bus by the Rove team, because Connell had evidence linking the GOP operative to the scandal and the stolen election, including knowledge of where Rove's missing emails disappeared to.

Before he could testify, Connell died in a plane crash.

Harvey Wasserman, who wrote a book on the stolen 2004 election, explained that the combination of computer hacking, ballot destruction, and the discrepancy between exit polling (which showed a big Kerry win in Ohio) and the "real" vote tabulation, all point to one answer: the Republicans stole the 2004 election.

"The 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed," Wasserman said.

Mark Crispin Miller also wrote a book on the subject of stolen elections, and focused on the 2004 Ohio presidential election. Here is what he had to say about it.

There were three phases of chicanery. First, there was a pre-election period, during which the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell, was also co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio, which is in itself mind-boggling, engaged in all sorts of bureaucratic and legal tricks to cut down on the number of people who could register, to limit the usability of provisional ballots. It was really a kind of classic case of using the letter of the law or the seeming letter of the law just to disenfranchise as many people as possible.

On Election Day, there was clearly a systematic undersupply of working voting machines in Democratic areas, primarily inner city and student towns, you know, college towns. And the Conyers people found that in some of the most undersupplied places, there were scores of perfectly good voting machines held back and kept in warehouses, you know, and there are many similar stories to this. And other things happened that day.

After Election Day, there is explicit evidence that a company called Triad, which manufactures all of the tabulators, the vote-counting tabulators that were used in Ohio in the last election, was systematically going around from county to county in Ohio and subverting the recount, which was court ordered and which never did take place. The Republicans will say to this day, 'There was a recount in Ohio, and we won that.' That's a lie, one of many, many staggering lies. There was never a recount.

And now, it seems, there never will be.