Where the Skeletons Are Buried

Deja Vu

2004

The 2004 presidential election, among old-timers like me, is notorious for being hacked in Ohio. The race was between Republican former President George Bush (who won) and Democrat John Kerry. George Bush’s campaign manager, was Kenneth Blackwell, and Blackwell was also, fortuitously for Bush, the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, where the election was won. Walden W. O'Dell (the Elon Musk of the time) was the head of the voting machine company Diebold (the Dominion of the time). O’Dell sent a letter to Bush promising to deliver the election to him in Ohio, saying:

''I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''

And deliver it he did.

After the election there was a fairly big ruckus, as it was not that hard to tell that something was amiss. Congressman John Conyers held hearings and ultimately published a report called, “What went wrong in Ohio.” Conyers did not vote to certify the 2004 election and his report included an entire section on voting machine “irregularities.”

Ironically RFK Jr wrote a long article called, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” it also had a lengthy section on problems with electronic voting machines.

“In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.”

The Machine Count Doesn’t Match the Hand Count

I produced and directed a documentary about the 2004 election. I interviewed Jesse Tendler, a regional coordinator of the full hand recount that the Green Party conducted in Ohio. He said, “Not only was there a discrepancy between the hand recount and the original certified vote, in most cases there was also a discrepancy between the hand recount and the machine recount.” That results of that recount in every county were online for people to see, but it did not get much attention at the time.

Holler Back [not] Voting in an American Town - the documentary covers the 2004 presidential election. View the film at hollerbackfilm.com

Michael Connell

After the election there was a court case that investigated problems with the voting machines in Ohio and the Ohio election website. The Ohio election website was programmed by “a prodigiously gifted IT expert named Michael Connell,” a devout catholic and pro-life advocate who also programmed the websites for the Republican National Committee, and George Bush.

The court case claimed that the Ohio election website had gone down three times on election night and while it was down it was routed through Chattanooga Tennessee servers controlled by Connell’s company SMARTtech, as part of a man-in-the-middle attack. When the website came back up, Democrat John Kerry was behind, instead of ahead. An article by Wired’s Kim Zetter from the time says,

“As a Netcraft search shows, the Ohio SoS site was hosted by Smartech in Tennessee on November 3, 2004 (the election was November 2nd) but then reverted to a different Ohio-based host on November 5 through February 6, 2006.”

Here is the diagram of the re-route.

Dead Before He Could Testify

The best reporting on what happened to Michael Connell was done by an investigative journalist Simon Worrall in the article, "The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru." Worrall researched the story for a year. No investigative publication would run it, so he published it at Maxim in 2010. It’s not online at Maxim anymore, but you can read it here. In the article he says,

“But while the rumors, innuendos, and allegations continue to swirl through the ether, evidence has recently emerged that suggests the Ohio vote may have been hacked, and that Connell was involved.”

This was 2010.

The entire article is well worth reading. Connell was supposed to testify in the court case about the 2004 election. He had been deposed once, and was coming back for a more detailed interview. But shortly before he was supposed to testify he died in a mysterious plane crash in a solo plane flight.

“When the fire crews arrived, they found the burning wreckage of a Piper Saratoga strewn across a vacant lot.”

Current election hacking guru Stephen Spoonamore is featured in the article, as someone who knew Connell.

Presidential Candidate John Kerry’s Confession.

In September of 2018, I was listening to 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I was shocked to hear him admit that they suspected the election was hacked and did nothing. I posted a Twitter rant about it at the time. You can listen to the Kerry interview here.

16:51 Brian Lehrer: “There was evidence of election irregularities, but you decided not to challenge it. We had a few activists on this show, back then, who were really angry with you about that. If you had won Ohio, you would have won the presidency, not George W. Bush. What did you know and why did you decide not to pursue it?

17:08 – 18:17 Senator John Kerry: Well it was obviously a very, very, tough decision …

The problem for us was we were doubting whether the machines themselves, uh, had been appropriately measured, and whether the algorithm was correct.

We challenged that ahead of time, by the way. People don't know that. And we were told by the court that you were not able to get that algorithm, to check it because it was proprietary information.

And I believe that it was absolutely incorrect that in the United States of America, the election for the president of the United States, should somehow be the purview of privately owned machines, where the public doesn't have the right to know whether the algorithm’s been checked, or whether they're hackable or not.

And we now know they are hackable.”

But what did you do about it John?

It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

The voting machines are controlled by vendors who are regulated (or not) by the elected officials that get elected on those voting machines. Election cycle after election cycle the machines are vulnerable to hacking and very little is done to improve them by the people who get elected on them.

That is why I have come to believe that the problems with the voting machines are a feature, not a bug.

If you find our work valuable, please subscribe and consider making a tax-deductible donation as well.

Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.

~ Henry David Thoreau