SmarTech and vote-rigging

In the past, we have focused on SmarTech, the GOP's internet provider which played a still-mysterious role in both computergate (a.k.a. the White House email scandal) and the 2004 election. A growing number of people, including Bob Fitrakis and Steven Rosenfeld, are looking at this company.

Before we get to their latest piece for Tom Paine, we should glance toward Democratic Underground, where a poster named philly_bob has published these words:

Here’s my layman’s account of some significant news about the 2004 Ohio election. It involves the Website Hosting History of . It may be proof that national -- not state -- Republican figures were able to change the election counts.

This data was produced using a NetCraft “toolbar” feature which, given a website’s URL, returns a history of changes in the website hosting service provider. The webpage handled the election results in the 2004 Presidential election.

The data shows ten changes in the Hosting History of the Ohio Secretary of State’s webpage between 2004 and 2007. Eight of the changes are routine changes in the hosting service arrangement with OARnet in Columbus Ohio.

But one of the changes is a Smoking Gun for vote-counting fraud: On November 3, 2004 -- the day before election day -- the Hosting History reports a switch from OARnet to Smartech Corporation of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The hosting switches back to OARnet on November 5, 2004 -- the day after the election.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

Why is this significant?

Because Smartech Corporation has strong ties to the Republican National Committee. For instance, it handled video at the 2004 Republican convention (http://www.smartechcorp.net/index.php?page=news⊂=sto... ) and it was in the news recently for hosting the “gwb43.com” RNC emails that the Judiciary Committee subpoena’d but have been mysteriously “lost” (http://www.robtex.com/dns/gwb43.com.html ).

(There is also a second mystery switch to Smartech on April 22, 2006, with a switch back to OARnet on April 27. I have no explanation for this.)

And now let's take a look at what Fitrakis and Rosenfeld have to say:

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not only controlled the vote-counting process in Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the Bush campaign, but it also controlled the technology that allowed the tally of the vote in Ohio's 88 counties to be reported to the media and voters.

Privatizing elections and allowing known partisans to run a key presidential vote count is troubling enough. But the reason Congress must investigate these high-tech ties is there is abundant evidence that Republicans could have used this computing network to delay announcing the winner of Ohio's 2004 election while tinkering with the results.

Did Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell or other GOP operatives inflate the president's vote totals to secure George W. Bush's margin of victory? On Election Night 2004, many of the totals reported by the secretary of state were based on local precinct results that were impossible. In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter turnout. In Republican Perry County, two precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent respectively. In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only 638 people voted for president. In Concord Southwest in Miami County, the certified election results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689 registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547 voters had signed in.

These strange election results were routed by county election officials through Ohio's Secretary of State's office, through partisan IT providers and software, and the final results were hosted out of a computer based in Tennessee announcing the winner.

And:

What's clear, however, is the highest ranks of the Republican Party's political wing, including White House counselor Karl Rove, a handful of the party's most tech-savvy computer gurus and the former Republican Ohio secretary of state, created, owned and operated the vote-counting system that reported George W. Bush's re-election to the presidency. Moreover, it appears the votes that gave Bush his 118,775-vote margin of victory—the boost from Ohio's countryside—have yet to be confirmed as accurate. Instead, the reporting to date suggests that what happened on the ground and across Ohio's rural precincts is at odds with the vote tally released on election night.

There's much more; read the whole piece at Tom Paine. (An earlier version was posted to the comments section of this very blog.) For my part, I can only repeat something I wrote earlier:

As the controversy over the 2004 elections gathered steam, Karl Rove made a joke about fixing the election returns from a computer in the White House basement. This remark always struck me as the sort of "joke" that the guy in Rope might have uttered: "Yeah, sure, I strangled my friend for no good reason and hid his body in the cupboard! Now seriously, how about that drink...?"