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
Is that what I said, GeneH, or are you making things up again?
Bob, I know exactly what kinds of things the pilots you refer to may think they saw. The problem is at night, there is no depth perception, lights that look as if they are moving may be stationary and lights that are stationary may look as if they are moving. Things going up may look as if they are descending and vice versa. Night plays far more tricks on the eyes than daylight.
I once flew along for fifteen minutes keeping an eye on the landing light of an aircraft that appeared to be on a collision course with me. I was getting quite anxious about it, since I could not get a good fix on our rate of closure. Then I realized I was looking at Venus.
kderosa,
Are you saying that Cliff Arnebeck lacks good judgment and credibility?
Elaine,
I think he meant to address that to lotta
rafflaw,
“That is a great website.”
What website are you talking about?
rafflaw 1, July 26, 2011 at 12:23 pm
I suspect that Gov. Walker will be taking a hike come January.
Raff,
You mean like on the on the Appalachian Trail,
with Mark Sanford????
rafflaw,
“Excellent comment. Is it yours?”
It is now! Possession in nine-tenths of the law, doncha know?
🙂
Blouise and Elaine,
That is a great website.
SB5 and the teabaggers anti-healthcare issue are both going to be on the November ballot here in Ohio. It’s going to be one hell of an election … and a lot of fun.
The teabaggers are hoping that their anti healthcare issue will allow Ohio to opt out of providing healthcare to all but most legal experts have said the amendment would not override Ohioans’ responsibility to comply with federal law.
It really is going to be a hell of a good time.
Lottakatz,
Noted, but I regularly do as you referenced that site a while ago.
The lack of verifiable voting results was ushered in with HAVA, the Help America Vote Act. An easily hackable, stackable and just plain faulty electronic voting has been the norm ever since. That we spent 8 years under the rule of a regime that was not elected comes as no surprise. That Wisconsin is now saddled with a Supreme Court Judge that was not elected is just one of many elections stolen with the help of the HAVA. The Congress needs to get rid of HAVA. If Obama hadn’t won with such a wide margin in 2008 that the numbers couldn’t be fiddled we would have John McCain as president today IMO. HAVA needs to go.
And everybody needs to periodically visit The Brad Blog for voting and election news:
http://www.bradblog.com/
Otteray Scribe,
Exactly
“good lawyers know that it’s seldom best to bring every nutty claim they can dream up. Legal briefs are all about credibility. Sounds like plaintiff’s lawyer lacks such good judgment and credibility.”
For what the complaint alleges, it’s incredibly thin. I”m wondering if anything was dismissed for failure to state a cause of action.
Blouise, in the case of an official accident report, the word “probable” means “to a reasonable scientific certainty.” That is good enough for introduction of evidence in a criminal proceeding. Civil proceedings only require the lesser standard of “preponderance,” which means 51% percent or more. Reasonable scientific certainty generally refers to confidence at the .05 level on a two-tailed test.
No official report will EVER be to a 100% certainty, and no responsible researcher will go that far in rendering an opinion.
A rigged elections….
Bob Esq,
As were others who saw the same thing from an entirely different perspective.
Otteray Scribe,
Both NTSB and the FBI eventually agreed that the probable cause was a mechanical flaw that had indeed ignited the Boeing 747’s central fuel tank on Flight 800.
The operative word is … probable.
OS,
I never had a problem with the official story. But I gotta tell you those pilots were incredibly adamant about what they saw.
All I;m saying geneH is that good lawyers know that it’s seldom best to bring every nutty claim they can dream up. Legal briefs are all about credibility. Sounds like plaintiff’s lawyer lacks such good judgment and credibility. And,apparently so do you.
kderosa,
Apparently you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a claim being upheld in part and denied in part too. Did your law school sell frozen steaks out of the back door in parking lots?
Bob’s not raining on my parade. I’m just reporting the news, not making it. As I said, I didn’t draft the brief. I happen to agree that a 13th Amendment argument is a stretch. That doesn’t mean the rest of the claim lacks validity.