Cutting Through Hype, Hypocrisy In Vote Fraud Claims

Recent events show why election theft deserves much more scrutiny than it receives from either government officials or news reporters. Most dramatically, a federal judge has released the 2008 testimony of GOP IT guru Michael Connell, right. The Ohio resident died in a mysterious plane crash that year after anonymous warnings he would be killed if he testified about his work with Karl Rove and others helping the Bush-Cheney ticket win in 2000 and 2004.

Other recent news includes claims by both major parties of irregularities in last week’s Wisconsin state senate recall elections. In a pattern familiar nationally, Democrats suspect vote hiding by a partisan GOP elections supervisor and Republicans allege illegal inducements by Democrats to encourage voting. Elsewhere, Fox News played up a report about how a county judge in Nevada called the community-organizing group ACORN “reprehensible” on Aug. 10 and ordered a $5,000 fine for the defunct group because it paid a bonus to workers who registered voters.

To cut through the confusion on such disputes, the non-partisan Justice Integrity Project provides below a research guide to important recent allegations and landmark research. It is weighted to materials provided by critics since they face the burden of challenging authority and are typically ignored by corporate-controlled media. But our guide includes also commentaries by Fox News (whose analyst Rove is at left) and author John Fund. They have been leaders in fostering public fears that election fraud largely involves ineligible, poor and largely Democratic voters who may distort results.

In general, the evidence shows that electronic voting fraud, voter suppression and similar dirty tricks by public officials pose a serious threat to the democratic process. But this research is difficult because officials control the information. Also, research into official wrongdoing tends to be sporadic, under-funded and so controversial as to be career-threatening for researchers. Major news organizations are reluctant to report even allegations of official fraud and other wrongdoing, especially in the most important elections. So, reporters and other researchers need courage and skill, as well as management support.

Statistics professor Steven Freeman, right, and In These Times editor Joel Bleifuss devote an entire chapter to journalistic cover-up in their book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? The book argues that exit polls and other clues prove massive election fraud flipping the election -- and that leading news organizations not only downplayed the evidence but suppressed much of it outright or misreported results.The paperback edition of New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller's book, Fooled Again, contains a 100-page Afterword summarizing how the mainstream media avoids the issue.

One prominent national reporter assigned to such matters privately explained to me recently the thinking of his editors: They want rock-solid proof of conspiracy before even mentioning claims of misconduct for fear of ruining public confidence in the campaign and elections process. Yet by that standard, readers would learn little about any public issue. The Washington Post’s 1970s Watergate investigation, for example, was a series of reports that incrementally moved the story forward. Similarly, our Project’s exposé of the Justice Department frame-up of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman had its roots in brief news reports in Alabama newspapers a decade ago that helped show the ethics lapses of the jurist who later became Siegelman's trial judge, helping the Bush DOJ convict the state's most prominent Democrat on corruption charges.

Fortunately, concerned citizens of varied political views have stepped forward to research the problem of electronic election fraud and organize grassroots groups fighting for honest elections. Ohio resident James J. Condit, Jr., for example, pioneered protests decades ago against electronic voting fraud. Condit, a conservative who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2010 as a Constitution Party candidate, illustrates also that popular anger on the issue can be non-partisan. 

Ohio’s 2004 Election
The big case in the field of electronic elections fraud involves Ohio returns in the 2004 Presidential race between incumbent Republican George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democrat.

Connell’s testimony on Nov. 3, 2008 was a pre-trial deposition in a suit by Ohio voters alleging an election fraud conspiracy led by Republicans running the state government and the election. Defendants in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case include then-Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, below right, Rove and other officials and contractors. Defendants deny impropriety in the Ohio voting, where Bush’s reported margin was 118,775 votes. This enabled him to win the state’s 20 electoral votes and the presidency by an electoral vote of 286 to 251.

Connell described a mind-boggling electronic system whereby Blackwell -- who counted the votes as Secretary of State but also chaired the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign -- hired Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. GovTech then linked Ohio’s 2004 Presidential election returns on Election Day to the computers of the partisan GOP contractor called SmarTech in Tennessee. Connell denied any wrongdoing, or any fear of retribution for his testimony. 

But Bob Fitrakis and Clifford Arnebeck, two of the most prominent attorneys for the plaintiffs, held a press conference in July 2008, three months before their deposition, to say that supporters of the suit had received multiple anonymous warnings that Connell would be killed if he proceeded with his deposition. They released a letter to then-Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey, other authorities and the news media asking for protection for Connell. Fitrakis is a political science professor at Columbus State Community College in Columbus, OH, and an editor of The Free Press, a civil rights group. He has co-authored four books and many articles alleging that Connell’s work helped President Bush’s team steal the 2004 Presidential election. Arneback is legal affairs director of Common Cause branch in Ohio and national co-chair of the Alliance for Democracy. 

The attorneys later said Connell’s testimony on Nov. 3, 2008 turned out to be so valuable that he would be their star witness at trial along with Stephen Spoonamore another Republican IT consultant. Spoonamore is a former IT director for GOP senator and 2008 Presidential nominee John McCain. He has said the system Connell set up enabled massive fraud that decided the nation’s 2004 Presidential election. Connell, a longtime Republican activist, was suspected also of helping enable Bush-Cheney malfeasance in Florida in 2000. After elections created a Republican majority in Congress House Republicans awarded Connell contracts to set up the email system serving both Congress and various partisan Republican organizations. SmarTech, whose clients included the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, ran a private system for the Bush White House that enabled its users to bypass a government-run system subject to more rigorous oversight by Congress, the courts or other watchdogs. It has been reported that Rove used the SmarTech system for about 95% of his emails.

Connell’s 2008 testimony has been the subject of much speculation in voting rights circles. An expert pilot, he died at age 45 in a single-plane crash six weeks after his testimony. His Piper Saratoga plane took off from a Maryland airfield for a trip to Ohio. A preliminary federal NTSB investigation failed to determine a cause but found no signs of mischief.

Excerpted below are several of the most prominent commentaries on the likelihood of foul play in his death. One is by investigative reporter Wayne Madsen, who photographed the take-off airfield in College Park to show how easy it could have been for a saboteur to have slipped into the vicinity. Madsen, a former Navy investigator and NSA analyst, has written extensively about on how small planes used by political figures are vulnerable to sabotage, including ground-to-air interference difficult for official investigators later to detect. A similar view was voiced in a 2009 column by Rebecca Abrahams, Mike Connell's Family Copes With His Mysterious Death, Tipsters, Legal Options.

Blackwell has taken a lead in denouncing accusers as sore losers. Like other defendants, he has denied wrongdoing both in court papers and in other public statements. But few reporters dare ever press for details or other comments, and Rove does not even bother mentioning the Ohio claims in his 2010 memoir, Courage and Consequence.

Cyber Trail
Connell was a longtime GOP activist motivated in politics by his strong anti-abortion views. In his testimony, he described how he founded two IT consultancies to provide services to the Bush White House, where he worked closely with Rove. Connell's firms were New Media Communications, Inc. and GovTech. In 2000 and 2004, Connell’s New Media Communications helped on campaign IT strategy for the Bush-Cheney ticket and the Republican National Committee. Connell's other firm worked for a various government clients, including: the U.S. House of Representatives; the House Republican Conference; the House Intelligence Committee; the House Judiciary Committee; the House Ways & Means Committee and the House Financial Services Committee.

Connell said he used GovTech for such official government work, and New Media for his partisan, pro-GOP political work. Also, Connell described in his testimony how SmarTech handled such sensitive matters as White House emails, which are supposed to be preserved as government records. Bush officials later said key emails were inadvertently lost when congressional investigators demanded the emails as part of the House Judiciary Committee 2007 investigation of the notorious Bush DOJ purge of nine prosecutors in 2006.

Several of those fired were Republicans who had resisted political pressure to bring what they regarded as unwarranted voting fraud cases against Democrats. Among them was New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Another was Todd Graves, U.S. attorney for the Kansas City-based western district of Missouri. Iglesias discusses voting fraud extensively in his 2008 memoir, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration. Iglesias, right, had been appointed to his powerful regional post in the first year of the Bush presidency. He recalls in the book how his Bush colleagues at DOJ headquarters transformed DOJ’s Voting Litigation Section:

While the emphasis had formerly been on safeguarding the franchise for disadvantaged citizens of every description, the new emphasis was on using federal power to expunge from the rolls those who, for whatever reason, were judged not to belong there.

Iglesias noted that Graves, another 2001 Bush appointee, was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, “a DOJ attorney who had made a name for himself by digging up convenient voter fraud cases, real or imagined.” Schlozman had led the transformation of DOJ’s Voting Litigation Section. As part of the U.S. attorney purge, he replaced Graves in March 2006, in time to announce voting fraud indictments against ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Five days before the 2006 elections, just in time so that news reports would damage Democrats, Schlozman, below left, announced indictments against four former ACORN workers who earned $8 an hour to sign up voters in poor neighborhoods. The workers had been turned in by ACORN itself, and so it was an easy prosecution.

Congress cut off any federal funding for ACORN’s varied community programsin part because an embezzlement by its founder, and the organization dissolved in 2010. The Obama administration’s view of the U.S. attorney purge and the Schlozman decision-making transforming the DOJ's voting rights section has been, forthe most part, to avoid finger-pointing. Our Project has gone farther and called the DOJ's final report last summer a whitewash. We reported that the investigator was herself compromised by a court-finding of misconduct, and that she focused almost exclusively on the Iglesias firing. She failed to call key witnesses involving the other 92 U.S. attorneys offices, including those that the Bush administration described as "loyal Bushie" prosecutors empowered to remain in cases such as the Siegelman and ACORN prosecutions around the nation. The Obama response of closing ranks with Bush predecessors thus illustrates the president's “look forward not backward” policy he announced in January 2009 regarding suspected Bush administration wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Republicans and their media outlets have muddied the waters on election fraud issues by criticizing the DOJ for not taking stronger actions against two Philadelphia members of the New Black Panther Party (a Nation of Islam offshoot), one of whom is alleged to have menaced voters by carrying a police-type billy club outside a polling site in 2008. A party official says the two overdid their attempt to project an image of community strength in the face of what they regarded as potential official efforts to dampen turnout by black and poor voters.

But Christian Adams, one of Schlozman's subordinates at DOJ's voting rights section, attracted national news coverage by resigning from the Obama DOJ in protest because it dropped the case that holdover Bush employees had filed in January 2009 against the men and their party, whose leaders have made anti-white comments on various occasions. "Some have called the actions in Philadelphia an isolated incident, not worthy of federal attention," the former DOJ attorney wrote in a Washington Times column republished by Newsmax. "To the contrary, the Black Panthers in October 2008 announced a nationwide deployment for the election. We had indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere, not only in November 2008, but also during the Democratic primaries, where they targeted white Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters. In any event, the law clearly prohibits even isolated incidents of voter intimidation."

Looking Ahead

Readers here can judge how that situation compares with the fears of the Republican IT consultant Spoonamore regarding the 2004 elections. and the prospects that the same kind of problems still exist, with scant scrutiny by the news media.

Fitrakis, the plaintiffs co-counsel, summarized in an article July 20 for the Free Press Spoonamore's testimony and significant new evidence, including the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell and Connell's company, plus a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election-night server layout system. In response to a question of whether SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "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."

"Until now," Fitrakis wrote, "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 swore: "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."

"The transfer of the vote count to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee remains a mystery, Fitrakis says. "This would have only happened if there was a complete failure of the Ohio computer election system. Connell swore under oath that, "To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation....Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for the secretary of state during the 2004 election, agreed that there was no failover scenario. Magnan said he was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night and private contractors ran the system for Blackwell."

Craig Unger is the author of the 2004 best-seller House of Bush, House of Saud that provided core research for Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, the world's top-grossing documentary of all-time.  Unger has been working for months on an investigative article about SmarTech and the 2004 election for Vanity Fair. But major publications do not always publish assignments, even by successful authors. Powerful interests made a major and almost-successful effort, for example, to suppress Fahrenheit.

Stay tuned as coverage of 2012 elections heats up. And keep your eye on that election software -- if you can find it.