The speed that hackers were able to breach security on dozens of electronic voting machines at one of the United States’ largest cybersecurity conferences underscores the long-standing problem with computerized electronic voting systems in our country. At the annual DefCon cybersecurity conference this July, hacker managed to break into every voting machine within minutes, according to an article in The Hill.[1]

            Thomas Richards, a security consultant, said “It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it” referring to the Premier Election Solutions voting machine currently used in Georgia.[2]

            Computerized voting in the United States was promoted by an interlocking industrial complex of political operatives, technicians and vendors.

            According to the Pew Research Center, 94% of all voters in 2016 voted on electronic voting machines or optically ­scanned ballots nationwide.[3]

            The Norden-Coleman optical scan voting system was the first of its kind to see use in an actual election when it was utilized in Orange County, California in 1964.[4] A decade later the first Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine, the Video Voter, saw use in a trial near Chicago in 1974. This DRE was manufactured by the Frank Thorber Company in Chicago, Illinois.[5]

            In March 1975, electronics expert Roy G, Saltman at the National Bureau of Standards warned about the dangers of electronic voting. In his Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote Counting report, Saltman stressed that: “Increasingly computerization of election-related functions may result in the loss of effective controls over these functions by responsible authorities and that this loss of control may increase the possibility of vote fraud.”[6]
            A year prior, the U.S. government created the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) as an independent regulatory agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance law in federal elections.    

Gary Greenhalgh, later a key figure in promoting computerized voting in the U.S, emerged as the Assistant Staff Director at the FEC from May 1976 to January 1985.[7] In 1983, he also co-founded the International Center on Election Law and Administration with the goal of promoting electronic voting worldwide. Greenhalgh then founded his own Election Center with a similar mission to proselytize on behalf of electronic voting. In 1997, he became Regional Account Manager for Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the largest electronic voting company in the U.S. In the year 2000, he served at ES&S President.[8]
            The Election Assistance Commission (EAC)[9], an independent bipartisan commission created under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, emerged as a leading advocate for electronic voting. Tom Wilkey, EAC Executive Director told the Los Angeles Times in the aftermath of the 2006 Congressional election, that “When you look at a situation [2006 election] where we have 183,000 precincts in this country, there have been very, very few problems proportionately.”[10] Wilkey former president of National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) that administered the testing and certifying of voting machines.[11]

            Doug Lewis is another key proponent of electronic voting and served as director of the Houston-­based Election Center during the 2006 election. David Broder of the Washington Post described Lewis as, “the man who knows more about the conduct of elections than anyone else in the country.”[12] Lewis gushed in USA Today: “It looks like it [2006 election] actually went better than everybody expected. My God, it's a big country, and you'd expect some glitches.”

            In reality, there were significant electronic voting problems in the 2006 election all over the country. As Ellen Theisen, founder of Voters Unite!, points out “What if voting machines failed at thousands of polling places in over half the states, and the problems caused such severe delays in eight states that voting hours were extended? Is that 'just a few glitches?’”[13]

            In Florida, Ohio and elsewhere, the electronic voting machines recorded statistically unlikely undervotes. In a hotly contested Congressional election in Sarasota, Florida, the machines recorded that 13%, or 18,000 of the votes, failed to cast a vote in a race decided by 368 votes.[14] In Montgomery County, Ohio, some 30,000 votes failed to record in the U.S. Senate race because of improper touchscreen machine “calibration.”[15] A recount and court hearing proved that it was impossible to audit the electronic machines that “glitched.”

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s much ­anticipated top-to-bottom computerized voting review, the Everest Study, found Ohio’s election system riddled with “critical security failures.” Released in December 2007, after attempts by the Republican­ dominated legislature to block the funding, the review showed massive problems involved with electronic voting systems. Those failures, she said, “could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State.” They have rendered Ohio’s vote counts “vulnerable” to manipulation and by “fairly simple techniques.”[16]    

            The corporate vendor­ Microsolved, Inc. concluded as part of the study that Ohio’s computer voting machine vendors have “failed to adopt, implement and follow industry­ standard best practices in the development of the system.” Among them, according to the independent academics who wrote a different section of the report, was the “pervasive misapplication of security technology.”[17] They specifically cited the lack of “standard and well ­known practices for the use of cryptology, key and password management and security hardware.” The academics went on to describe computer voting software practices as “deeply flawed.” The result leads to “fragile software in which exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are common in normal use.”[18]

            Early in 2007, there was a push to replace paperless voting machines. Florida's Governor Charlie Crist and the State legislature agreed to ban direct­ recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. After extensive testing in California, Secretary of State (SoS) Debra Bowen, announced that DRE voting systems made by Sequoia and Diebold would be banned from use. Bowen’s testing prompted her Colorado counterpart, Mike Coffman, to decertify many of his state’s e­-voting systems.[19] Rather than install computerized vote counting machines with known system failures and security inadequacies in the run-up to the 2008 election, New York State refused to replace its lever­ based voting machinery by going electronic. Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Voting, asserts, "State after state which adopted electronic touch screen DREs are now abandoning them for paper ballots and ballot scanners. DREs cannot and do not protect our right to vote."
            Wired magazine ran the following headline in a January 2, 2008 computer voting security article: “Voting Groups Urge Presidential Candidates to Demand Paper Ballots For Upcoming Primaries.”[20] Wired reported that “five voting integrity groups” called for the banning of DRE voting machines, citing the Everest Study. “The groups, among them Iowans for Voting Integrity (whose state holds the first caucus tomorrow), cited a recent report out of Ohio that examines voting machines made by Diebold/Premier, Election Systems & Software and Hart InterCivic and found serious security vulnerabilities – among them a vulnerability in ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines that would allow someone to manipulate code on the machine via an infra port,” Wired reported.[21]

            Wilkey and Lewis have been instrumental in initiating computer voting in the U.S. With HAVA, the voting industrial complex, involving privatized voting machine equipment vendors has flourished. HAVA charged the EAC with distributing billions of dollars around the nation to purchase voting machines and voter registration databases. The EAC also has taken over the testing and certifying of America’s voting NASED. But NASED itself, another self­described “nonpartisan nonprofit” group, basically grew out of the Election Center.[22]

            In a sense, Wilkey and Lewis helped to create a self­-enclosed system that has the power to appoint itself, fund itself with government money, and tests and certify computer voting machines while actively ignoring the reality where private, for-profit, often partisan vendors use secret proprietary software and firmware to program the machines. This integrated effort to privatize voting is spreading worldwide through the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES).[23]

            During the Reagan-Bush administration, Greenhalgh and his FEC co­worker Gwenn Hofmann created the International Center on Election Law and Administration (ICELA). Wilkey’s bio on the EAC site also credits him as a founder: “During 1983 . . . [Wilkey] pushed for the creation of the (ICELA).” During the Reagan­-Bush administration, ties were established between the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) and the ICELA. The BSSR provided initial funding to the ICELA.[24]

            The BSSR was founded in 1950 as a division of the school of social sciences and public affairs at American University. It became a nonprofit in 1956 and was used as a propaganda tool of the CIA. Its major areas of study included “. . . communication research; international program evaluation; educational research; urban renewal and community relations; military sociology; and the sociology of occupations,” according to the Yale University Library. (Roper Collection).[25] Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion (Oxford University Press) documents that “. . . the CIA clandestinely underwrote the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) studies of torture. . . .” CIA expert Alfred McCoy, in his A Question of Torture[26]notes that the CIA used the BSSR as “One of the main conduits” for torture experiments.[27]

            By 1985, the BSSR was faltering financially. Greenhalgh’s communications with Vermont’s Secretary of State Jim Douglas at that time show that Greenhalgh was looking for a new home and funding for his Center, and would approach George Mason University, (One of Karl Rove’s training grounds, where Republican strategist Morton Blackwell hosts his Leadership Institute). In 1979, Rove trained at Blackwell’s Leadership Institute. Its slogan: “For conservatives who want to win.” Blackwell helped co­found the influential Christian Right Moral Majority as well as the highly secretive and far ­right Council for National Policy.[28]

            By 1986, Greenhalgh received funding from the Hewlett, Ford, and Joyce Foundations and established ICELA as the nonprofit “Election Center” as part of the Academy for State and Local Government. By 1987, the Election Center vendor membership listed Arthur Young, BRC, MicroVote, Douglas Manufacturing, Triad, R. F. Shoup, Sperry Corp, Hart Graphics, and Office Technology Corporation – the major voting machine vendors of the day. Certainly Greenhalgh was aware of the potential for fraud and vote rigging with the voting machines.[29]

            An internet search for the ICELA reveals the following 1985 quote on the Black Box Voting site: “‘There is a massive potential for problems,’ said Gary L. Greenhalgh, director of the International Center on Election Law and Administration, a consulting group in Washington. He added that the problem with computer ­assisted voting systems was that they ‘centralized the opportunity for fraud.’”[30]

            Roy Saltman, in his 1988 report, “Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying,” recommended that the fledging Election Center be the “go-to” group for all information on elections and vendors.[31] Saltman’s report offers an early history of the Election Center: “The Election Center, affiliated with the Academy for State and Local Government, was established in 1984. The Center is an independent non­profit resource center serving registration and election officials.” The initial efforts by the Election Center to network with state and local election officials and propagandize for the introduction of electronic voting systems in the United States are referenced in Saltman’s report: “The Center has recently distributed the report of a workshop held on Captiva Island, Florida, in February, 1987.[32]

            The workshop concerned computerized vote­ tallying and included, as participants, election officials, vendors, computer scientists, and others interested in the election process.” Saltman offers this pitch in his report: “Election officials require a source of neutral expertise for the receipt of new technical and administrative information. The establishment of the Election Center in the Academy for State and Local Government clearly fulfills a need. Its efforts should be expanded.”[33]

            Ironically, like Greenhalgh, Saltman warned early on about the perils of electronic voting. In his 1975 report, Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote Tallying, he wrote: “Increasing computerization of election­ related functions may result in the loss of effective control over these functions by responsible authorities and that this loss of control may increase the possibility of vote fraud.”[34]

            Saltman, a computer scientist then working with the National Bureau of Standards, also wrote in his August 1988 report that, “The possibilities that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverable frauds” was a problem with electronic voting systems.[35]

            Ronnie Dugger, in his seminal November 7, 1988 New Yorker article, summarized Saltman’s warnings of election tampering such as “. . . altering the computer 6 program or the control punch cards that manipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an honest counting program and replacing it with a fraudulent one, counting fake ballots, altering the vote recorder that voters use at the polls, or changing either the logic that controls precinct ­located vote­ counting devices or the voting summaries in these units’ removable data ­storage units. The problem in this segment of the computer business, as in the field at large, is not only invisibility but also information as electricity.”[36]

            In 1987, Greenhalgh resigned as director of the Election Center to become vice president of operations for the R.F. Shoup Company. The company’s founder, Ransom Shoup, had been convicted in 1979 for conspiring to defraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt to obtain voting machine business, according to the Commercial Appeal newspaper of Memphis. His machines were known as Shouptronics. Under a different name, these machines were used in the disputed 2004 election in Columbus, Ohio.[37]

            In 1996, Chuck Hagel ran for US Senate in Nebraska against popular incumbent Democratic Governor Ben Nelson. Hagel had never held elective office. But he was part-owner of ES&S, a computerized voting machine company whose machines were used in conducting the statewide election. Michael McCarthy, president of ES&S, was Hagel’s campaign treasurer. Hagel became Nebraska’s first Republican elected to the US Senate in 24 years. Hagel’s part ownership of ES&S was hidden from the public during the campaign. One Nebraska newspaper called Hegel’s victory a “stunning upset.” Some 80% of the state’s ballots were cast and counted on ES&S machines.[38]

            A vote count “glitch” on Global Election Systems (later Diebold) machines in Volusia County, Florida, subtracted 16,022 votes from Gore, and added 4,000 votes for George W. Bush. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, who had been hired as a Fox Network temporary election analyst, used the shift to proclaim that his cousin would win Florida and the presidency.[39]
            Many of the names on the DBT purge list were those of citizens who may have been felons in other states but had since moved to Florida, where their right to vote was not legally deniable. According to Palast’s report, criminal demographer Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University said at least 80% of such citizens should have been legally granted the right to vote in Florida. But they were denied anyway. The number of rightfully eligible Florida voters purged based on names coming from Texas, Ohio and Illinois were, each on their own, sufficient to turn the election.[40]

            In September 2000, just prior to the contentious presidential election, Greenhalgh emerged as Vice President of Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), one of the two largest voting machine companies, along with Diebold, that electronically counted or calculated most of the votes in the U.S. A recurring theme in Greenhalgh’s writing from the 1980s was how to make voting accessible for the handicapped. Essentially, the Help America Vote Act enacted after the Florida 2000 election punch card debacle, was sold as a disability rights issue. The National Federation for the Blind and other groups, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, lobbied heavily for touchscreen voting machines in order to ensure access for disabled voters before the 2004 election. The National Federation for the Blind (NFB) was also backed by Diebold, who donated $1,000,000 for a new facility for the NFB.[41]

            Carol Garner took over as the Election Center’s second director in 1987 after Greenhalgh’s departure. She had previously worked in the office of Bill Clements, Governor of Texas. Future George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove had worked for Clements in his 1978 gubernatorial campaign and again served as his key political operative in his successful 1986 re­election campaign.[42]

            Carol Garner’s Election Center successor was Director Doug Lewis, also an important figure in the Texas Republican party in the late 1970s. It was a period of historic growth for the Texas GOP. Dick Cheney had referred to this period as a “new era in Texas politics,” and Lewis served as a fundraiser, campaign manager, and the state Republican party Executive Director. Clements’ predecessor John Connally hired Lewis in 1977 to run his PAC, the John Connally Citizen’s Forum, and later to manage his 1980 presidential bid. All the while Karl Rove was beginning his meteoric rise as the campaign manager for Republicans who would win long ­held Democratic seats. Rove’s campaign tactics aided both George W. Bush’s presidential victories.[43]

            In its coverage of the 1980 Iowa Republican Caucus, the Manchester Union-Leader (New Hampshire) wrote: “the Bush operation has all the smell of a CIA covert Operation....Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a 6% bulge over Reagan.” Bush won the primary over Reagan, 31.6% to 21.5%. Bush declared he had the “Big Mo,” i.e. momentum. This break-down of tabulating equipment at a key point in the vote count became a staple of the electronic tabulation process in elections to come.[44]
            In 1984, at Greenhalgh’s urging, the Election Center, affiliated with the Academy for State and Local Government, was established. The Center was an independent non-profit resource serving US state and local election officials. In 1985, Greenhalgh took over as director.[45]

            In 1984, the New York Times revealed that a company called the Computer Election System of Berkeley, California, created a software program and related equipment “...used in more than a thousand county and local jurisdictions to collect and count 34.4 million of the 93.7 million votes cast in the United States,” more than a third of the total votes. President Reagan signed National Security Directive NSDD245. The New York Times revealed that the secret directive involved: “a branch of the National Security Agency investigating whether a computer program that counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the United States in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.”[46]

            On December 18, 1985, legendary New York Times reporter David Burnham reported in California Official Investigating Computer Voting Security that state Attorney General John Van de Kamp found major errors in the computerized vote count from the 1984 election in California and elsewhere. Problems were found in at least thirteen areas nationwide, including Illinois, Montana and North Dakota. Van de Kamp said he “is concerned about what he sees as a potentially serious problem.”[47]                

            Central tabulating computers were used in an attempt to steal the 1986 election for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a favorite of the Reagan-Bush administration. This is captured in Hendrick Smith’s book “The Power Game” as well as the video “The Power Game: The Presidency.”[48]

            On November 25, 1986, Dr. Michael Ian Shamos, a computer scientist employed by the Pennsylvania Bureau of Elections as an electronic voting systems examiner, issued a report entitled “An Outline of Testimony on Computer Voting Before the Texas Legislature.” His conclusion: “When one company or a conglomerate of companies apply unauditable software from a general distribution point, or participate directly in ballot setup procedures, there exists the possibility of large-scale tampering with elections. An errant programmer or tainted executive could influence or determine the outcome of a majority of election precincts in a country....”[49]
            The July 21, 1986 issue of Election Administration Reports (#80), a newsletter for election administration officials, in reference to a disputed 1986 Democratic primary for County Commissioner in Stark County, Ohio, concluded: “A special computer program was written, in order to count only the disputed contest and not the other contests on the ballot. The mystery, however, was why 165 additional votes had been tallied in the recount, although the number of ballots read by the computer was the same.....A more complete checkout using a large number of ballots would have identified the logical error that caused the program used in the recount to fail to distinguish between voters of different political parties.” In other words, the program awarded Republican votes to certain Democrats, a syndrome that would resurface in the stolen presidential election in Ohio in 2004.[50]

            Thus, even prior to the touchscreen computer voting machines, there were concerns about inaccurate election results involving computer software and central tabulators.

The actual computer voting machines were introduced on a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The results were unpredictable and unexpected – former CIA director George H. W. Bush won a huge upset over Senator Bob Dole, but the mainstream for ­profit corporate media never considered election irregularities. Here’s the Washington Post’s account of the suprising election results when touchscreens were first used: In 1988, George H.W. Bush was trailing Dole by eight points in the last Gallup poll before the New Hampshire primary. Bush won by nine points. The Washington Post covered the Bush upset with the following headline: "Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements.”[51]

            In addition to the congruence between the Election Center, FEC and EAC personnel, scholars should note the CIA-connected IFES “democracy-­building” efforts and its intersection with the so-­called Election Center. Under the guise of democratization, these two organizations have been the propaganda arm for electronic voting, not only in the United States, but throughout the world.[52]

            The International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) promotes itself as “the world’s premiere election assistance organization.” The IFES webpage lists more than one hundred countries that it has worked in from Afghanistan to Yemen.[53]

            The IFES, founded in 1987, was forged in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal from funds provided by a CIA-connected organization. Documents show it received $125,000 from the scandal-ridden National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in June 1989 to assist the Nicaraguan political opposition to the Sandinistas. William Blum in Killing Hope, quotes NED co-founder Allen Weinstein saying, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[54]
            Working under the auspices of the Nicaragua Election Monitoring Project of the New York-based Institute for Media Analysis, Inc. ex¬-contra leader Edgar Chomorro and former CIA analyst David MacMichael, echoed Weinsten’s analysis: “NED now carries out overtly the majority of the CIA's formerly covert political activities.”[55]  
            The IFES’s current website states under “Current Projects” that it is “Building Pakistan’s electoral infrastructure in anticipation of elections in late 2007 or early 2008, IFES is working to strengthen the capacity of the Electoral Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to establish and maintain a credible computerized voter registry . . . .” They will also be offering “technical assistance to the election commission.”[56]

            According to McClatchy newspapers, on December 27, 2007, the day she was assassinated, “Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections . . . .” McClatchy reports that, “Bhutto had 9 been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-­Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-­R.I. to hand over a report charging that the military Inter­Services Intelligence [ISI] agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.”[57]

            “Bhutto was due to meet Specter and Kennedy after dinner last Thursday. She was shot as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi early that evening. Pakistan's government claims instead that she was thrown against the lever of her car's sunroof, fracturing her skull,” according to McClatchy.[58]

McClatchy also reported that Bhutto’s report was “report was ‘very sensitive’ and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.”[59]

F. Clifton White, an obscure, highly­-connected conservative political operative, was a key force in the development of the IFES. The F. Clifton White Applied Research Center for Democracy and Elections (ARC) is central to the IFES. White died in 1993 with a long list of accomplishments. He ran Volunteers for Nixon Lodge in 1960, and created the movement to draft Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. He managed Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for President in 1968 and in 1980, Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey and soon­-to-­be CIA director, “summoned White to his side at their Arlington headquarter as one of the two ‘senior advisors’ (the other was James Baker),” according to the National Review.[60]

“During the 1980s White divided his time between his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, an office in Washington from which he directed the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, an organization that explains the techniques of democratic politics to nation’s belatedly becoming interested in the subject, and the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University in Ohio,” wrote the National Review.[61]

White served on the board of the National Republic Institute for International Affairs, a Republican Party conduit for NED funding and was involved in President George H.W. Bush’s efforts to subvert and purchase the 1990 Nicaraguan election.[62]

But the big push for electronic voting came in the wake of the disastrous 2000 election. Dan Rather’s HDNet investigative report “The Trouble with Touchscreens” suggests that Sequoia Pacific may have been aware of the hanging chad problem in advance. As one Sequoia employee tells Rather, “My own personal opinion was the touch screen voting system wasn’t 10 getting off the ground . . . like they would hope. And because they weren’t having any problems with paper ballots. So, I feel like they – deliberately did all this to have problems with the paper ballots so the electronically voting systems would get off the ground – and which it did in a big way.”[63]

During the 2000 Florida election fiasco, Morton Blackwell described what he saw as the likely tactics of the Democrats: “These people are basically Leninists. They will stop at nothing to win.” In his assessment, “It could get bloody – figuratively and, I fear, literally.”[64]

Leading the charge for touchscreens was Doug Lewis of the Election Center, who was appointed in December 2000 to the National Elections Standards Task Force by the National Association of Secretaries of State. Lewis testified as an “expert” on every single “election reform” commission or task force post­-2000. In 2001, Ohio Secretary of State and key Bush operative in Florida’s 2000 election J. Kenneth Blackwell, was serving on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) advisory panel where he also pushed electronic voting.[65]

This two­ decade-­long effort by a small group of conservative Republican operatives culminated in the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. HAVA created, among other things, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC. HAVA also required states to use federal funding to replace punchcard and lever voting systems with new systems in accordance with HAVA’s voting system standards. In Ohio, while owning stock in Diebold, Secretary of State Blackwell personally negotiated an unbid contract with Diebold to bring touchscreen voting machines into the Buckeye State.[66]

Just prior to the 2006 election, the highly ­accurate Columbus Dispatch poll showed Blackwell losing by 36 points for Governor. Unexplainably, he picked up 12 points a few days later, on Election Day, losing by only 24 points. Throughout Ohio, Democratic candidates lost 10 to ­12 percent of their predicted vote totals. Senator Sherrod Brown, up by 24% in the last Dispatch poll, ending up winning by only 12 points.[67]

Overall, there have been continuous problems with U.S. elections since the imposition of electronic voting machines. A voting ­industrial complex has promoted its preferred product on America’s voters, not only for billions of dollars in profits, but also to influence the political direction of the nation. Future studies should explore the impact of computer voting on election integrity.
            A vote count “glitch” on Global Election Systems (later Diebold) machines in Volusia County, Florida, subtracted 16,022 votes from Gore, and added 4,000 votes for George W. Bush. Bush’s first cousin John Ellis, who had been hired as a Fox Network temporary election analyst, used the shift to proclaim that his cousin would win Florida and the 2000 presidency.[68]
            Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, posted a series of internal Diebold memos relating to the Volusia County miscount on her website, blackboxvoting.com. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complained, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, referred to key “replacement” votes in Volusia County as “unauthorized.”[69]
            Based on exclusive reporting by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, and by award-winning journalist Greg Palast, The Nation magazine reported that Florida Governor Jeb Bush (brother of GOP candidate George W. Bush) electronically purged Florida’s voter registration lists in a partisan manner. He used a secret proprietary computer program from a $4 million contract with Database Technologies (DBT) recently merged with ChoicePoint Inc. of Atlanta, which was the only bidder, to coordinate the definitive electronic purge. ChoicePoint has strong right-wing ties among its Board of Directors.[70]
            The contract was awarded in 1998 by a Republican legislature in league with then-Secretary of State Sandra Mortham, who later became Jeb Bush’s Lieutenant Governor. That August, Mortham was warned by the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections that there was a botched rush “to capriciously take names off the rolls.”[71]
            The purge involved 90,000 or more duly registered Florida voters, very far more than the 537 votes that allegedly decided the election for George W. Bush. The purge affected primarily black and Latino citizens who vote overwhelmingly Democratic, and who would easily have turned the election to Gore. The DBT list included thousands of citizens who had allegedly been convicted of felonies, but actually were not.[72]
            Many of the names on the DBT purge list came from other states, such as Alabama, where a “John Jones” may have been convicted of a felony, while the “John Jones” in Florida was not. But the Florida John Jones was purged from the registration books anyway. In many cases, differing middle initials were ignored, as were differing suffixes such as “Junior” and “III.” Many such misidentified citizens had been lawfully registered for years and showed up to vote on November 7 at their traditional precincts but were told they were not registered and were not allowed to vote.[73]
            Many of the names on the DBT purge list were those of citizens who may have been felons in other states but had since moved to Florida, where their right to vote was not legally deniable. According to Palast’s report, criminal demographer Jeffrey Manza of Northwestern University said at least 80% of such citizens should have been legally granted the right to vote in Florida. But they were denied anyway. The number of rightfully eligible Florida voters purged based on names coming from Texas, Ohio and Illinois were, each on their own, sufficient to turn the election.[74]
            Palast reported that David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC, described the purge as “a patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters.” Blacks, he said, would account for nearly half the “ex-felons” wrongly denied their vote.[75]
            In Hillsborough County, Florida, election supervisors concerned that 54% of the lawful voters electronically denied their vote were black in a county where blacks comprised just 11% of the voting population.[76]
            Overall, DBT electronically “scrubbed” nearly 3,000 voters based on alleged felonies once possibly committed (or not at all) by citizens who came into Florida from at least eight states where their voting rights would have been automatically restored prior to coming to the Sunshine State.[77]
            One electronically scrubbed voter was Pastor Thomas Johnson of Gainesville, Florida. Johnson was pastor of the House of Hope, a faith-based charity that guided ex-convicts from jail into a working life. The program was praised by Johnson’s personal friend, Jeb Bush. Nonetheless, Pastor Johnson was denied the right to vote based on a New York felony from a previous decade.[78]
            The electronic purge proceeded despite previous federal court decisions ruling it illegal. Ultimately, the purge was key to putting George W. Bush in the White House.[79]
            Amidst a global media tsunami, “hanging chads” and other problems complicated the election recount. Violent (but well-dressed) GOP operatives stormed election boards in what were known as the “Brooks Brothers Riots.”[80] Election officials were intimated and the process slowed, deepening the sense of a national crisis.
            Amidst the chaos the crisis was solved by an inexplicable 5-4 vote of the US Supreme Court which stopped the recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. The Justices called this Bush v. Gore landmark a one-time only decision, not meant to set precedent. At least one pro-Bush Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, later regretted her vote.[81]
            The Congressional Black Caucus appeared before the Senate where Gore was the presiding officer and attempted to challenge the Florida electoral vote but at Gore’s request, the Senate refused to allow it to be considered. Hillary Clinton later stated that she wished the election would have been challenged.[82]
            A year later, more thorough recounts of the Florida vote were conducted by an independent media consortium. If the 179,855 so-called spoiled ballots[83] had been counted, Gore would have won by approximately 29,000 votes.
            In his later film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore jokingly mentioned that he was once “the next president of the United States.” But he did nothing to further research or publicize what actually happened in Florida 2000 and around the US with the electronic vote count and other irregularities that denied the will of the voting public and changed the course of history.
            In March 2004, the article “Diebold, Electronic Voting, and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” appeared on freepress.org and on commondreams.com. Mother Jones published a similar article on motherjones.com called Diebold’s Political Machine. Both articles predicted that Ohio would be the new Florida in the 2004 presidential election because of the partisan connections of George W. Bush to the private owners of the electronic voting machines and vote tabulation so ware. The key source for the article, Athan Gibbs, was an African American entrepreneur who had invented a voting machine that gave each voter a verified voting receipt. Approximately one week after the article ran, Gibbs was killed when his car was hit by a truck on an interstate highway.[84]
            Due in part to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), like most of the rest of the country, the majority of Ohio’s 2004 registration records were managed electronically, and votes were cast and counted electronically.
            On Election Day 2004, virtually all Ohio’s votes were tabulated on electronic machines owned by companies with strong Republican ties, including Diebold, ES&S (with ties to Chuck Hagel), and Triad.
            In 2003, Ohio businessman Walden “Wally” O’Dell, promised in a fund raising letter to wealthy GOP supporters that he would deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush. O’Dell ran Diebold, which owned and operated the bulk of Ohio’s electronic voting machines. Diebold also controlled the software that would count the votes that decided the 2004 presidential election.[85]
            O’Dell had visited the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, and was a “Bush Ranger” responsible for delivering more than $100,000 to the Bush/Cheney/Rove campaign for a second term. O’Dell hosted at least one Bush fundraiser with an admission price of $1,000 per guest.[86]
            Ohio’s Secretary of State in 2004 was J. Kenneth Blackwell, who played a role parallel to that played by Kathleen Harris in Florida 2000. The central part of Blackwell’s job was to administer the state’s elections. He simultaneously co-chaired Ohio’s GOP committee to give Bush and Cheney a second term, a re-run of Katherine Harris’s dual role in Florida 2000.
            To count the votes, Blackwell awarded a no-bid contract to GovTech, an Akron-based IT firm owned by Michael Connell, a long-time Bush family operative. Connell had created the Bush-Cheney website for the 2000 presidential campaign. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various statements Connell cited his belief that "abortion is murder" as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party and his strong desire to see candidates who supported legal abortion be defeated.[87]
            Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com. The SmartTech servers at one point housed Karl Rove’s emails. Some of Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated Congressional and court-sanctioned attempts to review them.[88]
            In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network. Connell bragged that LLC was the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR (House Information Resources) to place its server behind the government's firewall.[89]
            Eleven months before the 2004 election, Matt Damschroder, the GOP Director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections, accepted a $10,000 donation from Diebold contractor Pasquale “Patsy” Gallina on behalf of the county’s Republican Party. Damschroder was suspended without pay for a month.[90]
            Prior to the 2004 election, more than 300,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls, virtually all of them in heavily Democratic urban areas such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus.[91] (Bush’s official margin of victory was less than 118,775). They were purged without explanation in a presidential election year, when voter purges did not normally occur in Ohio.
            Blackwell refused to provide paper ballots as requested even by Republican officials in the event machines broke down.
            The implausibility of the vote count was confirmed in part by official vote tallies in key southwestern Ohio counties showing Kerry being credited with far fewer votes than those counted for C. Ellen Connelly, a black Democrat running for the Ohio Supreme Court. Connelly never campaigned in the heavily white rural area and was virtually unknown there. The idea that she would receive more votes than Kerry raised red flags.[92]
            In Mahoning County (Youngstown), voting machines were recalibrated in the middle of Election Day, creating long lines and casting doubt on the vote count. Between twenty and thirty ES&S iVotronic machines broke down in the middle of the voting process and had to be re-calibrated because voters were complaining that they tried to vote for one candidate but the machine indicated that a vote for a different candidate was being recorded. The Mahoning County Board of Elections admitted that 31 of their voting machines were electronically flipping votes.[93]
            In sworn testimony taken after the election, voters in Mahoning County reported pushing John Kerry’s name on their touchscreen voting machines and having George W. Bush’s name light up. In sworn testimony after the election, one voter said this “vote hopping” happened repeatedly on his machine, and that an election official confirmed that it had been doing that “all day.” The poll worker suggested he just keep pushing Kerry’s name until it stuck.[94]
            Voters in Mahoning and Franklin counties using touch-screen machines repeatedly reported pushing Kerry’s name on the screen while having Bush light up. In some cases pushing Kerry’s name would bring on a light that would then fade away, apparently leaving no vote being cast. Voters in Franklin County reported seeing their vote for Kerry disappear from the voting machine screen. This became known as the “Franklin County Fade.”[95]
            The infamous “Loaves and Fishes” vote count in Gahanna, a Columbus suburb inside Franklin County, gave Bush an impossible tally. At the Ward 1B precinct in Gahanna, a suburb of Columbus, 4,258 votes were tallied for George W. Bush where only 638 people were registered. The precinct was housed at the New Life Church, a fundamentalist congregation led by cohorts of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a close associate of George W. Bush. The glitch was blamed on a faulty electronic transmission.[96]
            On Election night, GOP-controlled Miami County announced a total turnout of 31,620 votes, with a majority of about 66% favoring George W. Bush. Later, the Board of Elections added nearly 19,000 votes to the total, about 13,000 of which went to Bush. The second tabulation gave John Kerry precisely the same percentage of the vote as the first one, another virtual statistical impossibility.[97]
            Republican-controlled Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties gave Bush a total margin of victory over Kerry in excess of his entire margin in the state of Ohio and in excess of what he got in 2000 over Al Gore. Official tallies showed Bush beating John Kerry by a collective margin of 132,685 votes in Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties. Bush’s margin in these three counties alone substantially exceeded his 118,775-vote margin of victory in the entire state.[98]
            Minor, obscure third-party candidates got unexplained, improbable high vote counts in a few Cuyahoga County precincts that vote heavily Democratic, denying those votes to Kerry. Results showed that Black neighborhoods voted inexplicably for the far right-wing Constitutional Law Party.[99]
            In Mahoning County (Youngstown) voting machines were re- calibrated in the middle of Election Day, creating long lines and eradicating the reliability of the vote count.[100] 
            Bush IT associate Mike Connell set up the vote-counting apparatus for Ohio’s election results in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The same basement housed the email servers for the Republican National Committee and for Karl Rove.[101]
            At 12:20am on the night of the 2004 presidential election, when election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner, the Ohio computers went down and the state’s vote counting was moved to Tennessee. Blackwell had dismissed state IT workers for the night, leaving the vote count in this historically critical period under the supervision of Bush associate Michael Connell.[102]
            At 12:30am, CNN reported that John Kerry was carrying Ohio with a margin of 4.2% (more than 200,000 votes) and would almost certainly become the next President. The call echoed those made for Al Gore in 2000 before the vote flipping in Volusia County. Around 2am the computers came back up and the Ohio vote count had shifted, giving Bush the presidency. Kerry’s 4.2% margin of victory shifted to a 2.5% margin of victory for Bush. This shift of 6.7% (more than 300,000 votes) has been termed a “virtual statistical impossibility” by Dr. Ron Baiman, professor and statistician, and others.[103]
            About 15% of the 5.6 million votes cast in the Ohio election were recorded by electronic voting machines that had no paper trails and could not be reliably monitored or recounted.[104] This represented about 700,000 votes in an election whose official margin for George W. Bush was 118,775 votes. The reversal of a small percentage of the votes cast on electronic machines could have changed the outcome of the election. A shift of a mere six votes in each of Ohio’s 11,000-plus precincts would have given Kerry the White House.
            The source code for electronic machines used to gather about 80% of the votes cast in US presidential elections has been ruled proprietary by the courts. There is still no way to cross-check or verify the electronic vote count from the disputed 2004 election or any other election held in Ohio or any other state where electronic voting has dominated.
            On a state-by-state basis, the Edison/Mitofsky and other major polling reports showed a strong correspondence between the exit polls and the official vote counts in 38 states plus the District of Columbia. Statistical variations were concentrated in 2004 in four key swing states: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.[105]
            On election night 2004, Jonathan Simon, a lawyer and chiropractor, became the man who captured the screenshots of the national presidential election exit polls. Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research under contract to six major news organizations had conducted the exit polls. The screenshots captured by Simon documented what he called a “Red Shift” in 10 out of the 11 swing states. The unexpected and improbable variations all went toward George W. Bush. Simon would later write an important book on the topic, Code Red.[106]
            Of America’s eleven key swing states, ten experienced similar shifts from Kerry to Bush from 12:30am to the morning after the election. Wisconsin stayed steady for Kerry at 0.4%. Colorado and Florida started with slight leads for Bush and ended with large ones. Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania started with large leads for Kerry and ended with smaller ones. Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio, all showed statistically significant leads for Kerry at 12:30am; they all ended in the morning in the Bush column, giving him a second term. Those four “purple states,” which shifted from blue to red, experienced shifts of 2.2%, 3.9%, 3.7% and, in Ohio, 6.7%.[107]
            US Congressman John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee received so many complaints about election irregularities in Ohio that he held hearings in both Washington DC and Columbus, Ohio in December 2004. The information gathered at the hearings and through investigation by the Judiciary staff was published as a book entitled, What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Election. Noted literary figure Gore Vidal wrote the introduction.[108]
            For the first time in US history, the entire electoral delegation of a state (Ohio) was challenged before the US Congress January 5, 2005. US Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH) of Cleveland, the first black female to represent Ohio in the US House, brought a formal complaint before the US Senate. US Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) provided the required support to allow it to be debated for two hours in both the House and the Senate. The challenge failed to unseat the Electoral College delegation, but set an important precedent.[109]
            In the years following the 2004 election, questions raised about its validity prompted public scrutiny and a wide range of studies.
            In April 2005, a report by the Montgomery County, Maryland Information Technology Department concluded that as a result of 106 machines freezing in the middle of a vote “Maryland election judges are unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was in fact counted.” The IT report found that there was a 12% failure rate with the machines on Election Day – 7% failed completely, while 5% were suspect because of the low official vote totals.[110]
            On July 29, 2005, California Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson denied the certification of the Diebold TSx GEMS v. 1.18.22 voting machines in his state. McPherson cited a 10% failure rate due to jammed printers and computer crashes.[111]
            In August 2005, Paul Hackett, an Iraq war veteran and a Democratic candidate for Congress in southwestern Ohio, lost his bid late in the evening of a close election. At 9pm election night, with 88% of the votes counted, Hackett and his Republican opponent were in a virtual dead heat. More than half the ballots in Clermont County, Ohio had been tabulated and reported. But Clermont County election officials suddenly reported a technical malfunction with optical scan readers. They blamed the problem on “humidity” which allegedly soaked into the Scantron ballots, making it hard for them to pass through computerized tabulators. Once the problem was solved, Hackett went down to a definitive defeat. The percentages by which he lost votes after the glitch was fixed were very different from those beforehand. Vote counts were also higher than expected in the strongest GOP precincts.[112]
            In September 2005, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued its report entitled “Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Underway But Key Activities Need To Be Completed.”[113] The GAO found that “some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.” The GAO report documented eight major security flaws, including:
            Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In other words, the GAO confirmed that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio’s 2004 election on electronic voting machines, a total more than six times Bush’s official margin of victory.[114]
            The GAO confirmed that “it was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.[115]
            The GAO confirmed that “vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” Thus election results could be falsified without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards.[116]
            The GAO confirmed that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password- protected. Thus, access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirmed that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a “widespread conspiracy” but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines. These individuals could then change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush a margin of 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer within a short period of time.[117]
            The GAO confirmed that access to the voting network was compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. Thus even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies. The GAO confirmed that locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter, even for amateur hackers.[118]
            The GAO confirmed that one DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re- emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the presidency was decided. The GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.[119]
            On December 27, 2005, tests conducted on Diebold’s TSx touchscreen voting machine by Emery County, Utah, Clerk Bruce Funk revealed new problems. Funk booted each machine up to check the battery. Screen messages indicated most machines had about 25 MB of memory available, but some had only 7 MB of free memory left. One had only 4 MB of available memory. For perspective, the backup election file generated by the Diebold TSx is about 7.9 MB. The problem raised three possibilities: there might be completely different software in the machines with low memory; some machines might contain different external data; or, some of the machines might have been delivered with different amounts of installed memory.[120]
            In April 2006, Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, Co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-Election Campaign, revealed that he had owned stock in the Diebold voting machine company. Blackwell tried to award unbid state contracts to Diebold worth millions. A top Republican election official admitted that a Diebold operative told him he made a $50,000 donation to Blackwell’s “political interests.”[121]
            In May 2006, Blackwell was awarded the GOP nomination for Ohio governor in a primary election riddled with voting machine breakdowns. In Franklin (Columbus) and Delaware counties, election officials had to “shut down and recalibrate [machines] throughout the day,” according to the Columbus Dispatch. The Dispatch reported that voting machines recorded votes for wrong candidates. Election officials often use recalibration as a code word when machines are reported to be malfunctioning and flipping votes.
            In 2006, Edward Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton, did a public demonstration hack on a Diebold AccuVote TS electronic voting machine, proving it was no problem to engineer any desired outcome, not matter what the desire of the actual voters.[122]
            In 2006, the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit was filed in federal court. The case was a civil action alleging that voters in the 2004 Ohio presidential race were deprived of the right to vote by election officials hacking electronic machines, crippling public access to the voting process and manipulating the vote count.
            In September 2006, federal Judge Algernon Marbley delivered a precedent-setting decision ordering the preservation of the ballots and related documents from the 2004 election. Such ballots were already officially protected by federal law, technically under lock and key, for 24 months. But Blackwell indicated he might order them destroyed before the protection expired. Instead, Marbley ordered Ohio’s 88 county Boards of Election to deliver all materials related to the 2004 election to a repository in Columbus. But when it came time to deliver, 56 of the 88 counties announced their materials were missing. Holmes County officials claimed ballots were destroyed by hot liquid spilled from a coffee urn. In Mahoning County, the ballots were allegedly mistakenly put out to be recycled. Other official explanations were equally absurd. Not one errant official was prosecuted for the destruction of this public property. At least 114,000 ballots from that election remain uncounted. To date there has never been a reliable recount to confirm who was actually the rightful winner of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.[123]
            In August 2006, a Zogby poll found 92% of Americans demanded the right to watch their votes being hand counted. Some 80% rejected the use of secret computer software for vote tabulation.
            On November 1, 2006, the Free Press reported that “Official states electronic voting system added votes never cast in 2004 Presidential election; audit log missing.” The Columbus Free Press documented in a 17-page report that approximately 2500 votes were added to Miami County’s electronic voting system even though they were never cast by actual voters. The audit log for the system was still missing along with all its information for the 2004 presidential election. This was thought to be the first time election officials admitted that computerized cyber-votes not representing real voters were hacked into a system.[124]
            In 2006, the Black Box Voting election integrity organization led by Bev Harris showed in three public demonstrations that the optical scan voting machines used in Florida could be hacked.[125]
            On January 2, 2007, the Free Press reported that there had been a 26.48% undervote in heavily African-American Cuyahoga County in the Congressional 2006 midterm election. The expected rate of undervotes was approximately 3% statewide. Election integrity raised questions as to whether this was related to voting machine calibration.[126]
            On January 27, 2007, the first felony convictions were handed down against two Cleveland poll workers stemming from Ohio’s 2004 presidential election recount. Cuyahoga County prosecutors say the poll workers “rigged” the recount.[127]
            On February 6, 2007, Michael Vu, Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, resigned over his handling of Ohio’s 2004 election and official recount. (Vu has since surfaced as an election official in San Diego).[128].
            On March 6, 2007, a third Cuyahoga County Board of Elections official was found guilty of rigging the 2004 Ohio recount. Also, a recount of the Coshocton County presidential votes raised Kerry’s total from the officially reported 43% to 49%.
            On March 26, 2007, the Free Press reported that a court affidavit claimed that Michael Barbian, Jr. of Triad Governmental Systems, Inc. filed a message to the Hocking County Board of Elections saying he would be in, just prior to the Ohio 2004 recount, “to check out your tabulator and computer...” Triad’s management and ownership are tied to the Republican Party and the Right to Life movement. There was no appointment to inspect the Hocking County BOE’s equipment prior to the recount day.[129]
            On June 21, 2007, Senator John Edwards became the first major presidential candidate to support open source code for U.S. elections. In a letter, Edwards stated that “To ensure security, these machines should be programmed with an open source code for complete transparency, and election results should be safeguarded by voter-verified paper records.” As John Kerry’s running mate, Edwards had vehemently objected to Kerry’s early concession of the presidential race before all votes were counted in Ohio.[130]
            In 2007, whistleblower Stephen Spoonamore told interviewers that Mike Connell, the Bush Family computer specialist who ran the electronic vote count during the Ohio 2004 election, “agrees that the electronic voting systems in the US are not secure” and told Spoonamore said “that he (Connell) is afraid some of the more ruthless partisans of the GOP may have exploited systems he in part worked on for this purpose.” Spoonamore has run or held senior technology positions in six technology companies, and whose clients have included MasterCard, American Express, NBC-GE, and federal agencies including the State Department and the Navy.[131]
            Various threats were repeatedly reported involving Michael Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. Connell was being deposed by attorneys Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck in federal proceedings related to the 2004 election. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio....”[132]
            On Monday, November 3, 2008, one day before national elections, under federal deposition questioning by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis, Michael Connell revealed that while under contract with the State of Ohio to tabulate the 2004 presidential vote count, he was working with SmartTech, the private contractor in charge of Karl Rove’s personal email server, as well as the GOP’s national website and the Bush-Cheney campaign’s website, and with Triad, which had fixed the official 2004 Ohio recount. Essentially this meant that the vote count that decided the 2004 presidential outcome was done in conjunction with a private Republican-sponsored IT firm linked to the Bush family with no independent verification. Connell was informed that he would be called again to be deposed after further discovery. Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees.[133]
            On Friday, December 19, 2008, five weeks after being deposed, and after being informed he would be deposed again in federal court, Connell died at age 45 in a mysterious single-engine plane crash. An expert pilot, Connell was killed while flying his Piper Saratoga plane home to Akron, Ohio from College Park, Maryland, in unremarkable weather. Connell’s family has since raised questions about his death, questioning the official story that his crash was the result of pilot error. The FBI immediately commandeered the crash site from the FAA and cleaned up the scene overnight, rather than wait for daylight. Connell’s cell phone was officially never found. Connell’s suspicious death marked a major set-back in the process of uncovering what really happened in Ohio 2004.[134]
            On September 3, 2009, the ES&S voting machine company purchased Premier Voting, formerly known as Diebold, giving ES&S control of an estimated 80% of the electronic voting market in the U.S.[135] 
            In 2010, computer scientist J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan staged an open-to-the-public demonstration hack into an experimental Internet voting system created in DC for overseas voters, including military. With 24 hours Halderman and some grad students penetrated, took control of the system, and got it to play the U. of M. fight song as a signal that their process had been successfully completed.[136]
            In August 2010, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner sued Diebold alleging that the company’s voting machines “dropped votes in at least 11 counties” in the 2008 presidential primary. Diebold settled the lawsuit by offering discounted voting machines to the counties in question.[137]
            In September 2010, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting reported that an election audit of Shelby County, Tennessee found 3221 phantom votes from voters who were never signed in to vote.
In October 2010, Black Box Voting reported that two former felons, embezzler Jeffrey Dean and narcotics trafficker John Elder, received a contract from King County (Seattle) Washington to computerize the county’s vote-by-mail program. At the time of the award, King County had approximately one million voters, with some 600,000 voting absentee.[138]
            On July 20, 2011, the Free Press obtained and published an election contract signed with GovTech, Michael Connell’s private IT company that allowed the 2004 Ohio electronic vote count to be stolen, plus a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system linked to the IT site in Tennessee. Both documents were filed in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case.[139]
            On December 22, 2011, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) issued a formal investigative report on Election Systems & Software (ES&S) DS200 Precinct County optical scanners. The EAC ruled that the ballot scanners made by ES&S electronic voting machine firm failed 10% of the time to read the votes correctly. The EAC found “three substantial anomalies”:

• Intermittent screen freezes, system lock-ups and shutdowns that prevent the voting system from operating in the manner in which it was designed;
• Failure to log all normal and abnormal voting system events;
• Skewing of the ballot resulting in a negative effect on system accuracy.[140]

Obama’s popular vote should have been higher in 2008, according to mathematician Richard Charnin, and analysts Francois Choquette and James Johnson. They discovered a statistical anomaly that awards Republicans with a higher number of votes than expected based on pre-election polls and exit polls. In September 2012, Choquette and Johnson published a ground-breaking statistical report. Their analysis in 2008-2012 Election Anomalies, Results, Analysis and Concerns showed how Romney inexplicably gained votes in larger precincts when running in primary elections and only when voters are counted by computers. This was true for Romney in the 2008 primary, the 2012 primaries, and general election.[141]
            Dr. Beth Clarkson, a Wichita State statistician, found the same pattern as Choquette and Johnson in the 2012 Ohio presidential election, the 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial election, and the Kansas Senate election that year. Clarkson sued her county board of elections commission when they refused to allow her to audit the county’s 2014 voting paper trial.[142]
            On April 15, 2012, the Free Press obtained public records from all 88 Ohio county Boards of Elections (BOE) documenting that 1,092,392 voters were removed from the voting rolls since the previous presidential election in 2008. Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) led the Buckeye State with 267,071 purges. Franklin County (Columbus) removed 93,578 voters. Franklin County went 58% for Obama in the 2008 election. Hamilton County (Cincinnati) removed 65,536 voters, for a total of 426,185 from these three heavily Democratic Ohio counties. Heavily Republican rural Ohio counties including Hancock, Huron, Sandusky, and Wood, reported no purges at all.[143]
            On October 24, 2012, in the lead-up to the presidential election, the Free Press reported that through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother were major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn held a majority share (three out of the five board members) on Hart InterCivic, whose voting machines were being used in the 2012 election in heavily populated Hamilton County (Cincinnati). Hamilton County was expected to be key to the outcome of the presidential election in Ohio.[144]
            On October 31, 2012, the Free Press learned that ES&S installed “experimental” software patches on voting machines in as many as 39 Ohio counties affecting 4,041,056 registered voters, including those in metropolitan Columbus and Cleveland, involving as much as 80% of the Ohio vote count. The contract called for ES&S technicians and county poll workers to “enter custom codes and interfaces” to the standard election reporting software just as was done with the controversial 2004 Ohio presidential election.[145]
            On November 2, 2012, the Free Press obtained internal memos from the senior staff of the Ohio Secretary of State’s office confirming the installation of untested and uncertified election tabulation software in the apparatus counting the votes in the upcoming election.[146]
            On November 5, 2012 the Free Press revealed invoices that proved Romney-related voting company Hart InterCivic did key maintenance on Cincinnati’s voting machines. Amy Searcy, Hamilton County Board of Elections director of elections, falsely told the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post that Hart InterCivic was not involved with operations or maintenance of their voting machines in Hamilton County. But her signature was on a quote from Hart InterCivic for voting machine repair. One of the invoices from Hart InterCivic to Hamilton County was for $134,125.00 worth of ballots; another was for $15,386.40 worth of maintenance services.[147]
            On the day before the 2016 election, Free Press Editor Bob Fitrakis sued Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted over the “experimental” software patches places on electronic voting machines in 44 Ohio counties and the Secretary of State’s office. Fitrakis also challenged an unbid non-public contract granted to ES&S to install the experimental patches. Republican-appointed Federal Court Judge Frost denied a temporary restraining order on Election Day. Fitrakis immediately went to Ohio’s Common Pleas Court to file the same suit before a sympathetic judge who allowed the case to remain open until the final election results were certified. Judge Serrott indicated that he would allow the case to go forward if there were “funny numbers” in the election.[148]
            In Wisconsin, a long, bitter war between right-wing Republican Governor Scott Walker and grassroots pro-union citizens took various forms of election theft and fraud. In one instance, Walker was defeated in a recall election only to have a GOP poll workers miraculously find enough votes on a laptop computer to save Walker's seat. The Wisconsin GOP enacted photo ID demand and took a wide range of related steps to limit the vote as best it could, preserving Walker's seat and the state for the GOP.[149]
            Many of the problems that have plagued our modern elections still surfaced in 2012. In Ohio, the tabulation website run by the Secretary of State (Republican Jon Husted) went down at 11:13 pm. At 12:23am on Election Day morning, Forbes.com posted a lengthy report on America’s shaky electronic voting technology and how it might be used to tamper with votes in the United States’ foremost swing state.[150]
            In June 2013, the US Supreme Court “...effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval,” according to the New York Times.[151]
            On October 22, 2013, federal prosecutors filed charges against Diebold, Inc. The company had bribed government officials and falsified documents to obtain business in China, Indonesia and Russia.[152]
            In December 2013, the Free Press reported on a crucial document that shed light on Connell’s mysterious death. As the anniversary of his tragic passing approached. The document revealed that then- Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell had signed a legal Statement of Work (SOW) contract fourteen months prior to the 2004 election with Connell’s company GovTech. The contract stated that Connell would have “remote monitoring capabilities” to the computers counting the Ohio 2004 presidential vote that dubiously gave a second term to George W. Bush.[153]
            On November 7, 2014, the Free Press reported on the ability of a secretive election company, Scytl, to manipulate election results through its state-of-the-art software. Scytl counts the overseas vote in presidential elections and has been given access to central vote tabulators in a majority of states.[154]
            In February 2016, the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project reported that over fourteen hundred international election experts gathered data the year before and pronounced that the United States ranked 47th in election integrity among the world’s long-standing democracies. In the 2015 Project report, on a 100-point scale, the U.S. received an integrity rating of 69.3% – one notch ahead of the narco-drug state Colombia at 69.1% and just behind the quasi-narco-drug state of Mexico at 69.8%.[155]

Pete Johnson sued Edison Media Research Inc., the monopoly organization that conducted exit polling in the 2016 primary and general election. Bob Fitrakis, Free Press Editor served as his attorney. On May 11, 2017 the United States District Court, Southern District of Ohio dismissed Johnson's suit. Johnson argued “...that exit polls are protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and that Edison violated his rights by refusing to provide him with unadjusted exit poll data.” At the center of Johnson's claim is the assertion that exit polls are protected speech because “the information gathered and disseminated in 'exit polls' goes the heart of the democratic process.”[156] 
            Johnson suit sought to establish that Edison was acting in collusion with the government. Johnson argued that Edison, by always accepting the state's official vote tally numbers as being correct, no matter how much they deviate from the exit poll numbers, places it in a role as a state actor or arm of the state. Johnson asserted that since the Ohio Secretary of State and Edison were working closely together sharing demographic and voter data, that Edison should be treated as an agent of the state. 
            Also Johnson's suit pointed out that Edison adjusts the exit poll numbers to match the official vote tally numbers and provides the adjusted exit poll numbers to the secretary of state to legitimate the election results. 
            The Court conceded that Edison did make the Ohio Secretary of State aware of its demographics and election outcomes, but this did not make Edison an arm of the state. The Court concluded that: "Edison is a private corporation that merely uses public demographic information made available by the State of Ohio." Edison, of course, does much more than that. It contorts statistics in order to always justify the actual vote count, even when its own exit polls are predicting with scientific certainty that the election has different results. 
            Edison Media Research has a monopoly on presidential election polling. It has justified statistically improbable official election results. Nevertheless, the Court ruled that Edison has a right not to disclose its actual unadjusted data that reflects the actual votes cast in the election. The decision was not appealed. 
            Also, Fitrakis brought suit against Ohio Secretary of State in 2016 for allowing county boards of elections to turn off their ballot imaging feature and audit log security features. The Ohio judge ruled in favor of the counties.[157]
            Former CIA Director James Woolsey and Brian J. Fox, the lead technologists of the National Association of Voting Officials, came out in a New York Times editorial urging “To protect voting use open-source software.” As this paper demonstrates and as Woolsey and Fox write: “Most voting machines’ software can now be easily hacked.” They point out that “Open-source systems are already playing a role in some elections. New Hampshire has used them to allow disabled voters to fill out ballots online or on the phones, while Travis County, in Texas, San Francisco and Los Angeles have allocated funds to move towards open-source voting systems.”[158]
            Full transparency, an end to secret proprietary software and a requirement that every machine has a readable paper ballot that can be hand-counted and recounted are essential t restoring integrity in the American political voting system.

[1]Uchill, J. 2017. “Hackers breach dozens of voting machines brought to conference.” The Hill. http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/344488-hackers-break-into-voting... (August 1, 2017).

[2]Ibid.

[3]DeSilver, Drew. 2016. “On Election Day, Most Voters Use Electronic Or Optical-Scan Ballots.” November 8. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/08/on-election-day-most-voters-use-electronic-or-optical-scan-ballots/. (August 13, 2017).

[4]Arnold, E. (1999). History of Voting Systems in California.

[5]Jones, Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons. 2012. “Broken Ballots,” CSLI Publications, 96.

[6] Saltman, Roy. Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote-Tallying. National Bureau of Standards Special Publication #500-30.

[7] Fitrakis, B. and Wasserman, H. 2017. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections. Columbus, Ohio. CICJ Books, 60.

[8] Ibid.

[9] https://www.eac.gov/

[10] http://articles.latimes.com/2006/nov/03/nation/na-vote3

[11] http://www.nased.org/

[12] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/08/AR200506...

[13] http://www.votersunite.org/

[14] https://www.wired.com/2008/01/voting-groups-u

[15] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2007. “Explosive new vote fraud developments continue to rock Ohio and Florida.” March 23. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2506. (August 14, 2017).

 

[16] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2007. “Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen.” December 14. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2920. (August 14, 2017).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Fitrakis and Wasserman. 2007. “Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen.” Op. Cit.

[20] Zetter, Kim. 2008. “Voting Groups Urge Presidential Candidates to Demand Paper Ballots For Upcoming Primaries.”January 2.  https://www.wired.com/2008/01/voting-groups-u. (August 14, 2017).

[21] Ibid.

[22] Myers, Sheri, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman. 2008. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy.” January 6. http://freepress.org/images/departments/KudzuEffect.pdf. (August 13, 2017), 3.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 4.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27]McCoy, Alfred. 2006, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York, NY. Henry Holt and Company, 33.

[28] Myers, Fitrakis and Wasserman. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 4. Op Cit.

[29] Ibid., 4, 5.

[30] Myers, Fitrakis and Wasserman. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 4. Op Cit., 5.

[31] Saltman, Roy. 1988. Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying. Washington, DC. National Bureau of Standards. http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nbsspecialpublication500-158.pdf. NBS Special Publication 500-158.

[32] Myers, Fitrakis and Wasserman. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 4.Op Cit., 5.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 5. Op Cit.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Dugger, Ronnie. 1988. “Annals Of Democracy Counting Votes.” http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/dugger.shtml. (August 13, 2017).

[37] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 63. Op. Cit.

[38] Ibid., 64.

[39] Ibid., 66.

[40] Ibid., 68.

[41] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 6-7. Op. Cit.

[42] Ibid., 7.

[43] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 6-7. Op. Cit.

[44] Fitrakis, and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 60. Op. Cit.

[45] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 6. Op. Cit.

[46] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 61. Op. Cit.

[47] Ibid. 

[48] Smith, Hedrick. 1988. The Power Game: How Washington Works. New York, NY. Random House, 1.

[49] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 61. Op. Cit.

[50] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 62.

[51] Fitrakis, Robert J., and Harvey Wasserman. 2016. “New Hampshire is the Birthplace of Electronic Election Theft.” February 9. https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/New-Hampshire-is-the-Birth-by-Harvey-Wasserman-Election-Fraud_Election-Systems-And-Software_Elections-And-Campaigns-160208-232.html?p=1&f=New-Hampshire-is-the-Birth-by-Harvey-Wasserman-Election-Fraud_Election-Systems-And-Software_Elections-And-Campaigns-160208-232.html. (August 13, 2017).

[52] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 8. Op. Cit.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 8. Op. Cit.

[57] Shah, Saheed. 2007. Bhutto report: Musharraf planned to fix elections. December 31. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24474037.html. (August 14, 2017)

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid.

[60] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 9. Op. Cit.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Ibid., 9,10.

[64] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 9. Op. Cit.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Myers, Sheri. “The Kudzu Effect: The Voting-Industrial Complex Chokes Our Democracy,” 10. Op. Cit.

[68] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 66. Op. Cit.

[69] Harris, Beverly. 2004. Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century. Renton, WA. Talion Publishing.

[70] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 66-68.

[71] Ibid., 67.

[72] Ibid., 67.

[73] Ibid., 68.

[74] Ibid., 68.

[75] Palast, Greg. 2001. “Florida’s ‘Disappeared Voters’: Disfranchised by the GOP.” January 18. https://www.thenation.com/article/floridas-disappeared-voters-disfranchised-gop/. (August 14, 2017).

[76] Getter, Lisa. 2001. “Florida Net Too Wide in Purge of Voter Rolls.” May 21. http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/21/news/mn-620. (August 14, 2017).

[77] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 52.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Margolicj, David. 2004. “The Path To Florida.” October. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/10/florida-election-2000. (August 14, 2017).

[81] Tobin, Jeffrey. 2013. “Justice O’Connor Regrets.” May 6. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/justice-oconnor-regrets. (August 14, 2017).

[82] (R. Fitrakis, personal communication, January 5, 2005)

[83] Palast, Greg. 2004. “One Million Black Votes Didn’t Count in The 2000 Presidential Election….” June 20. http://www.gregpalast.com/one-million-black-votes-didnt-count-in-the-2000-presidential-election-rnits-not-too-hard-to-get-your-vote-lost-if-some-politicians-want-it-to-be-lost/. (August 14, 2017).

[84] Fitrakis, Robert and Harvey Wasserman. 2004. “Diebold’s Political Machine.” March 5. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine/. August 14, 2017.

[85] Ibid.

[86] Ibid.

[87] Fitrakis, Bob. 2011. “New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked.” July 20. http://freepress.org/article/new-court-filing-reveals-how-2004-ohio-presidential-election-was-hacked. (August 14, 2017).

[88] Fitrakis. Bob. 2013. “The ghost of rigged elections past: New revelations on the death of Michael Connell.” December 11. http://freepress.org/article/ghost-rigged-elections-past-new-revelations-death-michael-connell-0. (August 14, 2017).

[89] Ibid.

[90] Fitrakis, Bob. 2006. “Shocking Diebold conflict of interest revelations from Secretary of State further taint Ohio's electoral credibility.” April 6. http://freepress.org/article/shocking-diebold-conflict-interest-revelations-secretary-state-further-taint-ohios-electoral. (August 14, 2017).

[91] Fitrakis, Bob and Harvey Wasserman. 2007. “Are Rove's missing e-mails the smoking guns of the stolen 2004 election?” April 25. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2562 . (August 14, 2017).

[92] Fitrakis, Bob, Steven Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman. 2005. Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election? Essential Documents. Columbus, Ohio. CICJ Books, p. 1370.

[93] Fitrakis, Bob and Harvey Wasserman. 2005. “New Ohio Voter Transcripts Feed Floodtide of Doubt About Republican Election Manipulation.” November 25. http://freepress.org/article/new-ohio-voter-transcripts-feed-floodtide-doubt-about-republican-election-manipulation. (August 14, 2017).

[94] Ibid.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Fitrakis, Bob and Harvey Wasserman. 2004. “How A Republican Election Supervisor Manipulated The 2004 Central Ohio Vote, In Black And White.” November 23. http://freepress.org/article/how-republican-election-supervisor-manipulated-2004-central-ohio-vote-black-and-white. (August 14, 2017).

[97] Fitrakis, Bob. 2004. “None dare call it voter suppression and fraud.” November 7. None dare call it voter suppression and fraud. (August 14, 2017).

[98] Election Results and Date, 2004 Presidential election, Ohio Secretary of State, https://www.sos.state.oh.us/elections/election-results-and-data/2004-elections-results/president--vice-president-november-2-2004/. (August 14, 2017).

[99] Fitrakis, Bob. 2004. “How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush.” November 22. http://freepress.org/article/how-ohio-election-was-rigged-bush. (August 14, 2017).

[100] Rosenfeld, Steven. 2004. “Ohio election fraud uproar blasting to new level.” December 7. http://freepress.org/article/ohio-election-fraud-uproar-blasting-new-level. (August 14, 2017).

[101] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2008. “The suspicious, disturbing death of election rigger Michael Connell.” December 20. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3320. (August 14, 2017).

[102] Ibid.

[103] Ibid.

[104] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2006. “Court victory lets preserved Ohio 2004 ballots tell new tales of theft and fraud as indictments and convictions mount.” September 25. http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2162. (August 14, 2017).

[105] Freeman, Steven F. 2006. Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud and the Official Count. New York, NY. Seven Stories Press.

[106] Simon, Jonathan D.. 2016. Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century: Election 2016 Edition. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Conyers, Representative John. What Went Wrong in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Election 2005. Chicago, IL. Academy Chicago Publishers.

[109] Stephanie Tubbs-Jones Interview. 2008. Bolinas, CA. Ecological Options Network.

[110] Fitrakis and Wasserman. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, 75. Op. Cit.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2005. “Did the GOP steal another Ohio Election?” August 5. http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1398. (August 14, 2017).

[113] U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2005. Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed. Washington, D.C.. U.S. Government Accountability Office.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Ibid.

[116] Ibid.

[117] . Government Accountability Office. 2005. Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed. Op. Cit.

[118] Ibid.

[119] Ibid.

[120] Black Box Voting. 2006. “Utah testing of the Diebold touch-screen reveals new problems.” March 19. http://freepress.org/article/utah-testing-diebold-touch-screen-reveals-new-problems. (August 14, 2017).

[121] Fitrakis, Bob. “Shocking Diebold conflict of interest revelations from Secretary of State further taint Ohio's electoral credibility.” Op. Cit.

[122] Feldman, Ariel J., J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten. 2006. Security Analysis Of The Diebold Accuvote-Ts Voting Machine. Princeton, NJ.Center for Information Security Policy. Princeton University.

[123] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2006. “Court Victory Lets Preserved Ohio 2004 Ballots Tell New Tales Of Theft And Fraud As Indictments And Convictions Mount.” September 25. http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2162. (August 14, 2017).

[124] Peckarsky, Peter, Ron Baiman, and Robert Fitrakis. 2006. “Official states electronic voting system added votes never cast in 2004 Presidential election; audit log missing.” November 1. http://freepress.org/article/official-states-electronic-voting-system-added-votes-never-cast-2004-presidential-election. (August 14, 2017).

[125] Black Box Voting. 2006. “Florida Op-Scan Systems Hacked Three Ways.” http://electiondefensealliance.org/florida_op_scan_systems_hacked_three_ways. (August 14, 2017).

[126] Phillips, Richard H. 2007. “Auditing The Mid-Term Election.” January 2. http://freepress.org/images/departments/2528.pdf. (August 14, 2017).

[127] LA Times. 2007. “Ohio poll workers convicted.” January 25. http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/25/nation/na-ohio25. (August 14, 2017).

[128] Fitrakis, Bob and Harvey Wasserman. 2007. “Explosive New Vote Fraud Developments Continue To Rock Ohio and Florida.” March 23. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2007/03/23/explosive-new-vote-fraud-developments-continue-rock-ohio-and-florida. (August 14, 2017).

[129] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2007. “New Ohio evidence exposes apparently illegal 2004 recount activity by Hocking County's GOP Election Director, and a stinging complaint is filed in Cleveland.” March 26. http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2509. (August 14, 2017).

[130] Dechert, Alan. 2008. “John Edwards Supports "Open Source" for Voting Systems.” June 27. http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/blog/2007-jun-27/john_edwards_supports_open_source_for_voting_systems. (August 14, 2017).

[131] Unger, Craig. 2012. Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove's Secret Kingdom of Power. New York, NY. Simon & Schuster.

[132] Fitrakis. Bob. 2013. “The ghost of rigged elections past: New revelations on the death of Michael Connell.” Op. Cit.

[133] Fitrakis. Bob. 2013. “The ghost of rigged elections past: New revelations on the death of Michael Connell.” Op. Cit.

[134] Ibid.

[135] Zetter, Kim. 2009. “Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly.” March 8. https://www.wired.com/2010/03/ess-sued-in-antitrust-cas/. (August 14, 2017).

[136] Schecter, Dave. 2010. “Analysis: Professor exposes more voting system flaws.” October 27. http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/10/25/voting.system.flaws/index.html. (August 14, 2017).

[137] Siegel, J. 2010. “State, maker of voting machines settle case.” August 12. http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2010/08/12/state-maker-of-voting-machines-settle-case.html. (August 13, 2017).

[138] Harris, Bev. 2010. “Felon's Fingers in U.S. vote-by-mail system.” October 15. https://www.opednews.com/articles/Felon-s-Fingers-in-U-S-v-by-Bev-Harris-101015-533.html. (August 14, 2017).

[139] Fitrakis, Bob. 2011. “New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked.” July 20. http://freepress.org/article/new-court-filing-reveals-how-2004-ohio-presidential-election-was-hacked. (August 14, 2017).

[140] Fitrakis, Bob, and Harvey Wasserman. 2011. “Has America's stolen election process finally hit prime time?” December 29. http://freepress.org/article/has-americas-stolen-election-process-finally-hit-prime-time. (August 14, 2017).

[141] Clarkson, Beth. 2012. “A Statistician’s Review of “Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies” by Francos Choquette, James Johnson published August 13, 2012.”December 16. http://bethclarkson.com/?p=90. (August 14, 2017).

[142] Ibid.

[143] Fitrakis, Bob. 2012. “The Free Press uncovers one million voters purged in Ohio.” April 15. http://freepress.org/article/free-press-uncovers-one-million-voters-purged-ohio. (August 14, 2017).

[144] Fitrakis, Bob, and Gerry Bello. 2012. “Vote counting company tied to Romney.” September 27. http://freepress.org/article/vote-counting-company-tied-romney. (August 14, 2017).

[145] Levine, Art. 2012. “Ohio, Facing Vote-Rigging Lawsuit, Adds Voter-Purging Software: Are Dems, Liberals, Election Officials Ready to Safeguard Votes?” November 2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/mia-in-voting-machine-war_b_2054411.html. (August 14, 2017).

[146] Fitrakis, Bob, and Gerry Bello. 2012. “The Free Press confirms installation, secret justification of uncertified last minute election tabulation reporting software in Ohio.” November 2. http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2012/4768. (August 14, 2017).

[147] Fitrakis, Bob, and Gerry Bello. 2012. “Invoices prove Romney-related voting company Hart InterCivic does maintenance on Cincinnati voting machines.” November 5. http://freepress.org/article/invoices-prove-romney-related-voting-company-hart-intercivic-does-maintenance-cincinnati. (August 14, 2017).

[148] WS Editors. 2013. “Did an Election Day Lawsuit Stop Karl Rove’s Vote-Rigging Scheme in Ohio?” January 1. https://washingtonspectator.org/did-an-election-day-lawsuit-stop-karl-roves-vote-rigging-scheme-in-ohio/. (August 14, 2017).

[149] Wasserman, Harvey. 2012. “Romney Would Have Won if it Had All Come Down to Ohio.” November 7. https://www.dailykos.com/blog/harveywasserman. (August 14, 2017).

[150] Kosner, Anthony W. 2012. “The Technological Foundations Of Today's Election Are Shaky, Especially In Ohio.” November 6. https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/11/06/the-technological-foundations-of-todays-election-are-shaky-especially-in-ohio/#5f12e2caf2d5. (August 14, 2017).

 

[151] Liptak, Adam. 2013. “Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act.” June 25. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html. (August 14, 2017).

[152] McCoy, Kevin. 2013. “SEC, DOJ charge Diebold in foreign bribery case.” October 22. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/10/22/sec-diebold-bribes/3149797/. (August 14, 2017).

[153] Fitrakis. Bob. 2013. “The ghost of rigged elections past: New revelations on the death of Michael Connell.” Op. Cit.

[154] Fitrakis, Bob, and Gerry Bello. 2014. “Scytl has all the tools it needs for election fraud.” November 7. http://freepress.org/article/scytl-has-all-tools-it-needs-election-fraud. (August 14, 2017).

[155] Norris, Pippa, Ferran Martínez Coma, Alessandro Nai and Max Grömping. 2016. The Year in Elections, 2015. Sydney, University of Sydney. www.electoralintegrityproject.com

[156] Johnson v. Edison Media Research, Inc., 2016.

[157] 2016. “Greg Palast in Ohio on GOP Effort to Remove African Americans from Voter Rolls in Battleground State.” November 8. https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/8/greg_palast_in_ohio_on_gop. (August 14, 2017).

[158] Woolsey, R. James and Brian J. Fox. 2017. “To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software.” August 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/open-source-software-hacker-voting.html. (August 14, 2017).

Originally prepared for the 2017 American Political Science Association Conference.