The Truth: It Isn't Just for the Progressive Blogosphere and Brad Friedman Anymore

John Thorpe at the financial information site Benzinga agrees with Brad Friedman, with just about the entire progressive blogosphere, and anyone with a brain, that George W. Bush stole Ohio in 2004:

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 http://www.freepress.org 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.

[snip]


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.

More tinfoily-but-true FACTS here.

Kathy Nickolaus may have been fixing elections for years

Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board is looking into the Katherine Harris of the North (from Bradblog):

As per our story published a few hours ago on the still-unexplained anomalies found in past Waukesha County, WI elections, it looks like the state's Government Accountability Board (the body which oversees elections in the state) can't understand County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' explanations for the anomalous 2006 results either, where some 20,000 more votes were tallied than "ballots cast", according to her own reports.

Just in tonight from the Wisconsin State Journal: "State investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years"

Our report from earlier this evening offers a great deal more detail on the anomalies in question, and includes explanation (of a sort) and comment from Nickolaus who, the Journal reports, "was unavailable for comment Wednesday and Thursday." She did, for whatever reason, manage to offer The BRAD BLOG comment on these concerns both yesterday and today, terse as it was. FWIW.

Well, who ELSE would I go to for more on this?

...other than Brad Friedman?

The lameass explanation:

At a press conference this evening, a tearful Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus accepted blame for the error.

Nickolaus said she forgot to press "save" while entering the numbers into a database and because the turnout was so large, the missing votes didn't get noticed.

Nickolaus said on election night she enters the numbers into a Microsoft Access program and then presents them to the media. Because she didn’t save the numbers, they didn’t get transferred to the unofficial results and not discovered until the canvass took place.

“It’s important to stress this isn’t a case of extra votes or extra ballots being found,” she said. “This is error, which I apologize for, which is common in this process.”

There's just one problem: When you are entering data into an Access database, it is saved when you move to the next row. You don't have to "press 'save'" Now, when you write nn application in Access (which consists of a user interface in front of an auto-saving Access database with some Visual Basic code behind it to handle navigation, saving, and calculations, you can turn autosave off and put a save button on the screen. But it's hard to imagine an actual Access application where each record is a single screen AND has autosave overridden AND allows you to just navigate to the next record without doing something, such as pressing another button called something like "Next Screen". Of course if you wrote an app like that, and there was unsaved data, you would probably display a pop-up window alerting the user that there is unsaved data. And even if it was an application that was sloppily written (which is quite possible, after all, Access is part of Microsoft Office and any monkey with rudimentary programming knowledge can write an application with it. And even if this application DID display one precinct at a time, and even if it did have a save button, it's hard to imagine that she would "forget to press the save button" for EVERY SINGLE RECORD.

How stupid does she think we are? Pretty damn stupid, it seems. And the Democrat who got up with her to vouch for her is also pretty damn stupid. After a decade of screwy vote totals and demonstrations of how easy it is to change vote tallies on electronic voting machines, you'd think that the Democrats would wake the hell up. Of course you'd be assuming a party that isn't completely inept, but that's another story.

Cieran over at GOS notes why the 7500 number additional votes for David Prosser is significant. So does John Washburn, who was on the Mike Malloy show with Brad last night, and who gave more details on how Nickolaus was tallying the votes in a Microsoft Access database on a circa 1995 PC in her office.

Kathy Nickolaus has some history in this area that should also raise eyebrows:

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' response to audit recommendations aimed at improving election security in her office was not a hit with the County Board leaders Monday.

Nickolaus had said she would take the recommendations "into consideration" - sparking concern from members of the Executive Committee and, at one point, a scolding from County Board Chairman Jim Dwyer over what he later categorized as "smirks" during the discussion.

"This is the only audit in my 17 years where there's no compliance before (the audit reaches) the Executive Committee," he said at the start of Monday's audit review.

An audit of last fall's elections prompted Internal Audit Manager Lori Schubert to conclude that while the clerk's system generally complies with state and federal guidelines and accuracy of election totals was not at issue, Nickolaus should improve security and backup procedures.

For example, Schubert recommended that Nickolaus stop using the same ID and password for three employees, assigning individual ones instead, as required by county policy, so that an audit trail of each employee's work exists.

A "worst case scenario" of a disgruntled employee changing the password and locking others out of the system was possible and has occurred elsewhere in the country, Schubert said.

Nickolaus explained her rationale, saying it would take too much time for one employee to sign off so another employee could sign on to the same programming computer when one is interrupted to wait on a customer at the office counter.

Several committee members said they were uncomfortable with Nickolaus' refusal to adopt the recommendations.

During one part of the discussion, Dwyer erupted in exasperation at Nickolaus' facial expressions.

"There really is nothing funny about this, Kathy," he said, raising his voice. "Don't sit there and grin when I'm explaining what this is about.

"Don't sit there and say I will take it into consideration," he said, asking her pointedly whether she would change the passwords.

"I have not made my decision," she answered. After supervisors continued to press the issue, Nickolaus indicated she would create three different passwords.

"This isn't that big of a deal. It isn't worth an argument," she said. "This is ridiculous."

Nickolaus also said she would make her own assessment of when to back up computer programming for election ballots - and store the more frequent backup in another building, as the auditor recommended.

The audit was requested by the Executive Committee after the county's director of administration, Norm Cummings, said Nickolaus had been uncooperative with attempts to have the county's experts review her systems and confirm that backups were in place.

Because some of her equipment is so dated - such as an 11-year-old modem for transmitting data over the telephone and 1995 software no longer supported - and is not routinely getting security updates, her election systems are not connected to the county's system but are on stand-alone equipment.

I realize that I've been to some degree in IT for twenty-three years, and I know there are people who still think that computers are some kind of magic, and who have absolute trust in electronic voting machines. I know because when I ran for county committee a few years ago, and spent a few hours at the polling place as a poll-watcher, I was chatting with some of the over-age-75 election workers and explained to them exactly why you cannot trust the Sequoia Accu-Vote machines that are used in my district. I explained it in language even a monkey could understand, and I think that when I was done, a few of them were at least wondering about it.

But this degree of (at the very least) ineptitude, and at worst outright partisan corruption of the voting process, should not be excused or defended by anyone. And while Republicans and James O'Keefe are frothing at the mouth at the possibility that somewhere in Arizona a guy with a name like Ignacio Lopez might show up at the wrong precinct to vote, there is still, even after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 and thousands of questionable election results since then, absolutely no integrity in the voting systems in many areas nationwide.

I'm not making any accusations here. But there is enough here that's fishy that if the shoe were on the other foot, and this were a Democratic county clerk, Republicans would be screaming for a federal investigation. Unless votes are counted, and counted with some degree of integrity, we have no democracy.

Just sayin', is all.

Nothing to see here, just move on....move along now...

Hell, no.

When an election is ACTUALLY stolen (not the ridiculous claims made by teabaggers that the all-powerful ACORN (which was all too easily toppled by a 25-year-old punk) somehow managed to get enough poor people to vote to give Barack Obama 56% of the vote in 2008), you don't just move on. Because the same people who stole the 2004 election will do it again if they have to in order to regain power.

Brad Jacobson has a devastating series (Parts one and two) about how a FEC commissioner helped the Republican Party hide its role in vote suppression in the 2004 election.

A little taste before you go read it:

Caroline Hunter, a Bush-appointed Federal Election Commissioner who remains in office, provided misleading statements under oath in an effort to conceal Republican National Committee involvement in vote suppression activities during the 2004 presidential election, a Raw Story investigation has found.

Legal experts say Hunter's submission of such statements under oath is a serious ethical and professional breach which could warrant a bar review and potential disbarment. At the time, Hunter was serving as deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee.

In the final days of the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee files an injunction against the Republican National Committee in New Jersey federal court, alleging its involvement in using lists of returned mail to challenge 35,000 newly registered Ohio voters. This tactic, also known as voter caging, is historically employed to suppress votes from minority and low-income citizens who tend to vote Democratic.

Now you know why the Republicans had to destroy ACORN. Yes, a couple of low-level employees at ONE office fucked up and got caught doing it. But the main reason ACORN became such a threat to conservatives was because the organization was trying to overcome the Republican Party tactic, established in the 2000 elections in Florida and used ever since, to drive minority voters away from the polls. Greg Palast has been documenting Republican vote suppression since 2000.. Funny, isn't it, how the media just went ahead and adopted the Republican line on ACORN (including the New York Times -- a travesty to which Brad Friedman has been trying to get the paper to own up), convincing people that a few people who might have gotten through the voting cracks are more of a threat to democracy than the hundreds of thousands of American citizens registered to vote who have not been allowed to because of Republican thuggery over the last decade.

It didn't work in 2008, or perhaps it did and Barack Obama was allowed to win because the Republicans didn't want to clean up the mess they had made. But if you think that just because we have a Democratic president right now, they aren't gearing up to do it again, guess again. And without one of the largest organizations dedicated to ensuring that all American citizens who are registered to vote can do so, their path to a revival of election theft is wide open.