>>11051Smartech and Airnet) to create a mirror website and backup server hosted by Smartech in Tennessee for Ohio’s election-night returns during the 2004 presidential election. At 11:14pm on election night, Kerry appeared poised to win the presidency. But at that moment, as reported by Craig Unger in his book Boss Rove, the backup server kicked in and “inexplicable anomalies began to flood the vote totals — all of which favored George W. Bush.” Bush was deemed to have won the state and thus the election, defying the exit polls, which Blackwell had attempted to block in Ohio.
After the 2004 election, Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck filed a lawsuit alleging that Karl Rove and his associates had stolen the election by electronically manipulating Ohio’s results. According to a report by McClatchy, a “ 2004 election-night computer architecture map for Blackwell’s office appear[ed] to suggest that as many as 51 of Ohio’s 88 counties periodically sent their results to the secretary of state’s office.” A spokesman for Jennifer Brunner, the Democratic Secretary of State who succeeded Blackwell, “said that computer technicians in her office [were] unable to determine how many, if any, counties transmitted results directly from vote tabulators, rather than from separate computers to shield against outside access to vote counts.”
On November 3, 2008, Arneback “took a sworn deposition from Connell, who had repeatedly tried to quash [the] subpoena.” According to Harpers, Blackwell hired Connell, an anti-abortion activist, in 2004 “to design a website that would post Ohio election results to the public” and to “create a ‘mirror site’ that would kick in to display the vote totals if the official Ohio servers were overwhelmed.” The backup server was provided by Smartech, which was headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee and whose “servers hosted hundreds of high-profile Republican websites (and later on, an assortment of anti-Obama websites).”
Connell testified in deposition that the system he created “was not connected to the [county or state] tabulators in any way.” According to Harpers, he also “denied… any knowledge of whether the mirror site had even been activated,” but Smartech’s server did go “into action at 11:14 p.m. on Election Day.” The transfer of Ohio’s vote count to the backup server remains a mystery because there was no evidence that the main server had failed. According to Global Research, “Connell swore under oath that, ‘[t]o the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario…” Bob Magnan, a state IT specialist for Blackwell in 2004 “agreed that there was no failover scenario”
Here is a link to Mike Connell’s deposition testimony:
https://bradblog.com/Docs/Deposition_MichaelConnell_110308.pdf. Although Connell was subpoenaed to testify at trial, he died in a private plane crash soon after and thus never provided that testimony.
John Kerry has since said that his campaign suspected electronic vote tally manipulation during the 2004 election in Ohio, but decided against dividing the country with a court challenge.
Brunner attempted to clean up after Blackwell in Ohio by, among other things, firing members of a county election board (after the criminal convictions of two members for rigging the 2004 Ohio recount), commissioning a study that revealed alarming ES&S vulnerabilities, and suing Diebold for damages.
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