Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger

If you’ve never heard of King Lincoln v. Blackwell, don’t be too surprised.  Project Censored calls the outsourcing of the 2004 Presidential elections in Ohio “one of the most censored stories in the world.”  Originally filed on August 31, 2006 in Ohio, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell is an ongoing civil case to decide if the the Ohio Secretary of State at the time, Kenneth Blackwell, violated the Civil Rights Act (42 USC §§ 1983 and 1984) and the 1st, 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution by conspiring to “deprive and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote and have, in fact, deprived and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote by, in a selective and discriminatory manner, unfairly allocate election resources (such as voting machines), institute a system of provisional ballots, purge voter registrations, and broke the bi-partisan chain of custody ballots”.  The vote at the heart of the issue is the 2004 Presidential election where, in defiance of exit poll data, there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

New filings include a revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell.   Connell died shortly after giving his deposition in a small plane crash that is described as “suspicious”*.  In life, Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and their personal minister of propaganda, Karl Rove. Connell ran a private IT firm called GovTech that created the controversial electronic voting system that Ohio used during the election.  GovTech’s system transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by a company called SmarTech. That is when the alleged vote shift happened that led to Bush’s unexpected victory.

The filing also contains a copy of the contract signed between Kenneth Blackwell and GovTech Solutions as well as a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system.  In a possible indication that the system was designed with fraud in mind, the contracts and maps had never been made public until this filing.  The lead attorney on the case, Cliff Arnebeck, consulted with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the network setup. Specifically, Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the ability to alter the results of the election.  “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 responded, further explaining that SmarTech would have had “full access and could change things when and if they want.”

Spoonamore went on to conclude 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.”  For those of you not computer savvy, a mirror site is like a back back-up.  It works when the main computer system fails.  In contrast, a “man in the middle” is a deliberate computer hacking setup (and a violation of U.S. wiretapping statutes) in which a third party sits in between computer transmissions where they can illegally alter or steal the data.  In an even more revealing statement by Spoonamore during the course of the e-mails with Arnebeck, he claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston.  Blackwell’s response?  “Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you,” Spoonamore wrote to Arnebeck.  In a previously submitted affidavit, Spoonamore testified, “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,” and that “…the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen.

Contrary to any contention that SmarTech’s servers operated simply as mirrors and that a system failure was behind the transfer of data to the Republican partisan firm, the late Michael 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.”  This is also confirmed by Bob Magnan, the state IT specialist for then Secretary of State Blackwell during the 2004 election.  Magnan further claims that the control of the system was in the hands of private contractors at the time.  Magnan was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night.

For those of you already suspect of electronic voting and the election of 2004, these new revelations are a smoking gun and a road map to how the election in Ohio was rigged in favor of George W. Bush.  King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell may be a civil case, but this newly introduced evidence merits a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.

What do you think?

Source: TruthOut.org

* Commenter Otteray Scribe did the heavy lifting on locating more information about the crash, which as it turns out, is not very suspicious at all.  His detailed and thorough post of the NTSB report is here. Thanks for the assist, Otteray Scribe!

~Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger