[NYTr] Ohio Sec of State Finds "Critical Security Failures" in 2004 Vote

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Rich Winkel - activ-l

FreePress - Dec 14, 2007
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2920

Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Ohio's Secretary of State announced this morning that a $1.9 million
official study shows that "critical security failures" are embedded
throughout the voting systems in the state that decided the 2004
election. Those failures, she says, "could impact the integrity of
elections in the Buckeye State." They have rendered Ohio's vote
counts "vulnerable" to manipulation and theft by "fairly simple
techniques."

Indeed, she says, "the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote
count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail
connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant."

In other words, Ohio's top election official has finally confirmed
that the 2004 election could have been easily stolen.

Brunner's stunning findings apply to electronic voting machines
used in 58 of Ohio's 88 counties, in addition to scanning devices
and central tabulators used on paper ballots in much of the rest
of the state.

Brunner is calling for widespread changes to the way Ohio casts and
counts its ballots. Her announcement follows moves by California
Secretary of State Deborah Bowen to disqualify electronic voting
machines in the nation's biggest state.

In tandem, these two reports add a critical state-based dimension
to the growing mountain of evidence that the US electoral system
is rife with insecurities. Reports from the Brennan Center, the
Carter-Baker Commission, the Government Accountability Office, the
Conyers Committee Task Force Report, Princeton University and others
have offered differing perspectives that add up to the same conclusion.

Coming in the state that decided the 2004 election for George W.
Bush, Brunner's confirmation of the electoral system's vulnerabilities
adds huge new weight to the charge that the Buckeye State's vote
count was stolen.

In a series of investigative reports dating to well before the 2004
election, the Columbus Free Press and Freepress.org have documented
several dozen different means used by the Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign to steal the official 2004 vote count.

The final official tally for Bush---less than 119,000 votes out of
5.4 million cast---varied by 6.7% from exit poll results, which
showed a Kerry victory. Exit polls in 2004 were designed to have a
margin of error of about 1%.

In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts
in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for
Kerry saw Bush's name light up. A wide range of discrepancies on
both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly
toward the Bush camp. Voting procedures regularly broke down in
inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.

In direct violation of standing federal election law, 56 of Ohio's
88 counties have since destroyed all or part of their 2004 election
data. The materials were additionally protected by a federal court
injunction in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights
lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff). To date, no state
or federal prosecutions have resulted from this wholesale destruction
of presidential election records, including 1.6 million ballots,
cast and uncast, needed for definitive auditing procedures. However,
two Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) election officials have been convicted
of felony manipulation of an official recount. The Cleveland
Plain-Dealer, the state's largest newspaper, recently editorialized
that there is "no evidence" the 2004 election was stolen, but omitted
mention of the destruction of the electoral records by more than
half the counties in the state. The Plain-Dealer and other mainstream
media have consistently ignored findings by the Free Press and
others indicating widespread manipulation and theft of the kind
Brunner has now confirmed was eminently do-able within the Ohio
system.

Brunner says "the results underscore the need for a fundamental
change in the structure of Ohio's election system to ensure ballot
and voting system security while still making voting convenient and
accessible to all Ohio voters." Among other things, she advocates
replacing touch-screen machines with optical-scan units that include
a paper balloting system.

The study was managed by the Battelle Corporation, and conducted
by Columbus-based MicroSolved Inc., SysTest Labs of Denver along
with a consortium of academic subcontractors. It was reviewed by a
dozen county officials, and included scrutiny of voting systems
produced by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Hart Intercivic and
Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold).

Brunner is the Democratic successor to Republican J. Kenneth
Blackwell, who administered the 2004 election as Secretary of State
while also serving as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign.
The report comes as part of her pledge to guarantee a fair and
reliable vote count in the upcoming 2008 presidential election.

Under Blackwell, Ohio spent some $100 million installing electronic
voting machines as part of the Help America Vote Act, passed by
Congress in the wake of the scandals surrounding the 2000 election.
Former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, HAVA's principle author, now resides
in a federal prison, in part for illegalities surrounding his
dealings with voting machine companies.

Blackwell, who was defeated in a 2006 race for the Ohio governorship,
outsourced web hosting responsibilities for the 2004 vote count to
a programming firm that also programmed the web site for the 2000
Bush-Cheney campaign. Blackwell's chosen host site for the state's
vote count was in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in
Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the servers for the Republican National
Committee, and the Bush White House, were also located.

Brunner has now recommended that all Ohio's voting be done on optical
scan ballots, with reliance on central tabulation. Voters with
disabilities could use AutoMark machines with bar coding devices
that allow the marking of ballots with little or no additional
assistance.

"It's a testament to our state's boards of elections officials that
elections on the new (federally) mandated voting systems have gone
as smoothly as they have in light of these findings," Brunner said.

Conversely, it is also a testament to the ease with which the 2004
election was stolen by election officials who had clear conflicts
of interest aimed at keeping George W. Bush in the White House.


[Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP
STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org)
and of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? (The New Press) with Steve Rosenfeld.
THE FITRAKIS FILES are available at www.freepress.org, where this
article first appeared. Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED
EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org ]