Fitrakis/Wasserman: The Suspicious, Disturbing Death of Election Rigger Michael Connell

The suspicious, disturbing death of election rigger Michael Connell
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 20, 2008

Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.

Connell died Friday, December 19 when his Piper Saratoga plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. He was flying himself home from the College Park, Maryland airport. An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather, his death cuts off a critical path to much of what may never be known about how the 2004 election was shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush in the wee hours of November 2. His plane crashed between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, one vacant, just 2.5 miles from the Akron-Canton airport.

A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign. Connell may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. 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.

Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama's election: "In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It's just that none come to mind right now." Connell wrote: "This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,...In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal."

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio's votes. Under Connell's supervision, Ohio's presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 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 court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

In 2001, Michael Connell's GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio's presidential campaign. The Buckeye State's 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion---in Bush's favor---between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove's e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed 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,...."

Connell's death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key pieces of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead.

Revised December 29, 2008

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICAS 2004 ELECTION..., available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit which subpoenaed and was deposing Michael Connell.

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Legal Fights, Policy Debates Deepen Over Voting Problems and Solutions

By Steven Rosenfeld, posted on October 29 at AlterNet

With one week to go before the 2008 presidential election, the differences between the political left and right over what is wrong in American elections – and the solutions for Election Day – may be at their most stark and divisive in decades.

On the political right, led by Republican officials and officeholders, is an ever-increasing drumbeat that illegal voters are poised to steal the election. This claim is not hyperbole, but the opening line of a new radio ad by the Ohio Republican Party that began airing Tuesday. Meanwhile, in Lake County, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, the Illinois Republican Party is suing to force all voter registration forms turned in by a low income advocacy group – not ACORN – to be separated, flagged and treated as a second-class of ballots that would have to be validated after Election Day before being counted.

The legal action comes after Lake County Clerk, Willard Helander, a Republican, said that she had received about 1,000 questionable voter registrations from this group, in a county with 400,000 registered voters. Never mind that the number of voter registrations in question, at least when Helander was interviewed two weeks ago, was .25 percent of her county’s total voters, or as Stephen Weir, President of the California Association of Clerks and Elected Officials, said in a recent e-mail, for registration drives the “rough rule of thumb, (is) 44 percent are new registrants, the others are change of name, change of party, change of address, and some are just duplicates.”

The point is that Republicans, first and foremost, see an American electorate that is more interested in voting than at any time since the civil rights era of the 1960s, and instead of embracing those voters, their response has been to demonize the citizenry, vilify voter registration groups, and go to court to create bureaucratic obstacles to block a free and fair vote.

On the center-left, led by voting rights groups whose philosophical roots are in the civil rights movement, are lawyers and voting rights activists who believe that the historic promise of American democracy is based on expanding the right to vote and engaging Americans in elections. Their priority is to ensure the widest possible voter turnout, especially among new voters. This places them at philosophical odds with today’s Republicans -- who are not exactly emulating the party of Lincoln.

These modern civil rights groups have been fighting -- and winning -- most court battles with the GOP in recent weeks over who can vote and which ballots will count. But there are new concerns in recent days that have overtaken their attention. Groups such as the NAACP, Advancement Project, Voter Action, Demos, and others now believe some swing states are not prepared to accommodate a big turnout on Election Day. Moreover, when scrutinizing plans -- such as voting machine and poll worker assignments and new voter registration data -- they see many instances of white communities receiving a disproportionate share of resources when compared to minorities.

In Pennsylvania, this conflict is seen in litigation filed this week against that state’s Democratic secretary of state for a failure to provide back-up paper ballots if voting machines fail. On a more local level -- because county officials run elections -- are machine allocations may have drastically underestimated minority precincts.

The NAACP this week sued the state of Virginia, which has a Democratic governor, urging election officials reallocate voting machines and poll workers. Here is how a Washington Post op-ed by Christopher Edley, Jr., Dean of the U.C. Berkeley Law School, summed up the voting rights community’s philosophy and the current situation on the ground, which was extensively documented by the Advancement Project:

"Suppose in your neighborhood there are 600 registered voters per machine, while across town there are only 120 per machine. (That's a 5 to 1 disparity, which is what exists in some places in Virginia today.) On Election Day, your line wraps around the block and looks to be a four-hour wait, while in other areas lines are nonexistent.

"This ought to be a crime. It amounts to a 'time-tax' on your right to vote, and some of your neighbors will undoubtedly give up and go home. This scenario raises three questions: Nationwide, will it discourage tens of thousands, or untold millions? Which presidential candidate and down-ballot candidates might benefit from this 'tax'? And what can be done in the next few days?"

These voting rights advocates are at odds not just with the GOP in courtroom battles in swing states, but also with election officials, some of who are Democrats. But there is yet another slice of the political spectrum that has its own views about what is wrong with American elections. This is a segment of the activist left, which almost exclusively focuses on the problems associated with computerized voting machinery.

As early voting has begun across the country, there has been a rising tide of reports about voting machine failures and corresponding cries of alarm aimed at the election officials, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party for not taking these problems seriously -- because voting machine failures mean an inability to accurately record and count votes. Two websites that have chronicled the machine failures are VotersUnite.org, which has a daily digest of news reports, and Bradblog.com, which increasingly predicts a massive meltdown will occur on November 4.

There are several real questions with the electronic voting problems. The first concerns magnitude or scale: how many votes will be affected. A news account of a vote jumping between candidates only tells of one or two voters, but if that machine stays in use it could affect hundreds. The second concern is whether public officials -- or the private contractors they hire to run the voting machines -- are able to fix the problems before Election Day, when turnout will spike. Finally, the machine-related problems that have surfaced thus far have not involved counting the vote, only recording it. Thus, a larger and more significant test of these machines is yet to come.

As John Gideon, the editor of VotersUnite’s Daily Voting News wrote in his October 28th report, the Election Day prognosis is not good:


"This morning is the revelation that some Georgia polling places have had lines with as long as 8 hours waiting time due to their voter registration data base being slow. The state claims that the problem is the turnout but that explanation does not make sense in the real world. The number of poll site computers feeding into the central data base computer dictates how fast that system is; not the number of voters. On Election Day there will be many, many more poll site computers all feeding into the central computer at the same time. Things will probably get much, much slower and lines will grow longer."

The key question is what can be done in the next few days to prevent a meltdown on Election Day. In some cases, the answers -- or obstacles -- will follow partisan lines, most notably where the GOP is still seeking to litigate, such as in Lake County, Illinois, or in Ohio where the White House has even asked the Justice Department to intervene on the behalf of the Ohio Republican Party. In other cases, the question of what positive steps can be taken may be more one of political will than available answers.

On Tuesday, though some legal questions remain, Florida’s Republican Governor, Charlie Crist -- perhaps the most progressive national figure in his party on voting issues -- ordered early voting hours be extended to accommodate voters. In Georgia, another GOP state, more early voting centers opened, despite a computer crash that delayed voting for hours.

These responses underscore that there is still time left for some common sense solutions in battleground states like Virginia and Pennsylvania. However, it is notable that those two states do not have early voting. That means that the mistakes and problems that have emerged in early voting in 34 other states -- which theoretically can be addressed by Election Day -- will not surface in these two states until next Tuesday.

“This is new territory and remedies must be pushed through Election Day,” said Eddie Hailes, an Advancement Project Senior Attorney, speaking of the need for proactive steps in those two states. “We have more voter advocates and resources than ever before to push for creative, meaningful alternatives to disenfranchising people who are unable to stand in long lines while others in different zip codes breeze through their voting experiences.

“Election officials can permit voters in DRE (paperless voting machine) jurisdictions to opt for paper ballots if they are in lines for longer than 45 minutes, provide additional ballots with clip boards for voters who don't demand privacy booths, and convert demonstration machines into machines that are available to all voters on Election Day.”

No matter what happens between now and Election Day, voting and voting issues are now before the American public with a depth that has not been seen in decades. The lines that are being drawn by partisans will not go away after Election Day. Whatever unfolds between now and next Tuesday will frame upcoming battles in Congress and in state legislatures starting next January.

Yet beneath all the partisan fury and legal and technical details are a few basic questions that frame the conflicting viewpoints: are new voters being welcomed or rejected; what more do election officials need to do to accommodate voters; and can the technology be trusted to accurately record and count votes.

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Wall Street's 'Disaster Capitalism for Dummies': 14 reasons Main Street loses big while Wall Street sabotages democracy

by Paul B. Farrell, posted on MarketWatch on October 20

Yes, we're dummies. You. Me. All 300 million of us. Clueless. We should be ashamed. We're obsessed about the slogans and rituals of "democracy," distracted by the campaign, polls, debates, rhetoric, half-truths and outright lies. McCain? Obama? Sorry to pop your bubble folks, but it no longer matters who's president.

Why? The real "game changer" already happened. Democracy has been replaced by Wall Street's new "disaster capitalism." That's the big game-changer historians will remember about 2008, masterminded by Wall Street's ultimate "Trojan Horse," Hank Paulson. Imagine: Greed, arrogance and incompetence create a massive bubble, cost trillions, and still Wall Street comes out smelling like roses, richer and more powerful!

Yes, we're idiots: While distracted by the "illusion of democracy" in the endless campaign, Congress surrendered the powers we entrusted to it with very little fight. Congress simply handed over voting power and the keys to trillions in the Treasury to Wall Street's new "Disaster Capitalists" who now control "democracy."

Why did this happen? We're in denial, clueless wimps, that's why. We let it happen. In one generation America has been transformed from a democracy into a strange new form of government, "Disaster Capitalism." Here's how it happened:

Three decades of influence peddling in Washington has built an army of 42,000 special-interest lobbyists representing corporations and the wealthy. Today these lobbyists manipulate America's 537 elected officials with massive campaign contributions that fund candidates who vote their agenda.

This historic buildup accelerated under Reaganomics and went into hyperspeed under Bushonomics, both totally committed to a new disaster capitalism run privately by Wall Street and Corporate America. No-bid contracts in wars and hurricanes. A housing-credit bubble -- while secretly planning for a meltdown.

Finally, the coup de grace: Along came the housing-credit crisis, as planned. Press and public saw a negative, a crisis. Disaster capitalists saw a huge opportunity. Yes, opportunity for big bucks and control of America. Millions of homeowners and marginal banks suffered huge losses. Taxpayers stuck with trillions in debt. But giant banks emerge intact, stronger, with virtual control over government and the power to use taxpayers' funds. They're laughing at us idiots!

Amazing isn't it, Wall Street's Disaster Capitalists screwed up, likely planned or let happen this meltdown and recession. Yet America's clueless taxpayers just reward them by giving the screw-ups massive bailouts, control over more than $2 trillion of tax money, and the power to clean up the mess they made. Oh yes, we are dummies!
This end game was planned for years in secret war rooms on Wall Street, in Corporate America, in Washington and the Forbes 400. Democracy is too cumbersome. It had to be marginalized for Disaster Capitalism to take over. Reagan, Bush and Paulson were Wall Street's "Trojan Horses."

Naomi Klein summarizes the game in "Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism." This "new economy" generates enormous profits feeding off other peoples' misery: Wars, terror attacks, natural catastrophes, poverty, trade sanctions, subprime housing meltdowns and all kinds of economic, financial and political disasters. Natural (Katrina) or manmade (Iraq), either way "disaster capitalism" creates fortunes.

So you, me and the other 300 million better get out of denial. America is no longer a democracy. Voting is irrelevant. Best case scenario: We're a plutocracy, a government ruled by the wealthy, the richest 1%, the Forbes 400, the influential wealthy elite, while the other 99% are their "servants." Meanwhile, the inflation-adjusted income of wage-earners has declined for three decades.

Worst case scenario: America's no democracy and as a result of the meltdown and the surrender of our power to Wall Street's new Disaster Capitalism we are morphing into what one WWII dictator called "corporatism," a "merger of state and corporate power," kind of like what's going on now with Goldman Sachs' ex-boss as de facto president.

Wolves in sheep's clothing

Yes, a strong charge. But like a lot of our readers, I don't like what's happening to America. I'm a patriot. I volunteered for the Marines. Served four years. Volunteered for Korea. I don't like how our freedoms, rights and value system are being subverted in the name of greed, arrogance, self-righteous intolerance and other false gods.
We know for the last eight years disaster capitalists ignored obvious warnings of a coming meltdown. They apparently planned it. They road the bull, got very rich. Now they have the ultimate disaster capitalist weapons, trillions in tax money, virtual control of government.

That's why I fear we're on the edge of a dangerous line between Wall Street's version of disaster capitalism and a toxic "merger of state and corporate power." The wolf is in sheep's clothing. Wall Street pretends we're a democracy. Yet America more closely resembles the kind of "corporatism" that Laurence W. Britt wrote about five years ago in Free Inquiry magazine.

We adapted his historical analysis of 14 key traits for today's discussion. Notice how they have a huge impact your investments and retirement:

1. Wall Street rich get first priority
Think "bailout." Wall Street's greedy con game spins out of control globally. Millions of homeowners misled, lose. Who gets hundreds of billions first? Wall Street's con men.

2. National security obsession
Think of the expansion of executive powers in the name of national security: Preemptive wars, wiretapping private citizens, Gitmo, torture; driven by a dark wealthy neocon elite.

3. Superpower with massive military
Think of our $3 trillion Iraq/Afghan War. Disaster capitalists love the thrill of military power. We outspend all nations, over half the federal budget to strut before the world.

4. Extreme nationalism
Signs are everywhere: Flags, lapel pins, "support the troops" slogans, all to get huge military budgets passed. Challenge them and you're un-American and unpatriotic.

5. Rally the masses by scapegoating enemies
Think "axis of evil," mushroom clouds, "Islamofascists," more terrorist attacks on the homeland. Propaganda creates "enemies" in the public's mind and distracts from real issues.

6. Corruption and cronyism
Think earmarks, no-bid defense contracts, paid mercenaries outnumbering military in Iraq, superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, biofuels, bridge to nowhere, millions donated to campaigns.

7. Obsession with crime
Think of prison-building as just another investment opportunity, rather than focusing on reforming our criminal justice system. Stoke irrational fear of criminals and extremists.

8. Labor and low wages Think corporate earnings versus the wages paid to workers. No "trickling down," leaves more for tricklers: Rich insiders, stockholders. Wages dropping as CEO salaries skyrocket.


9. Contempt for human rights
Think of abuses of habeas corpus, loss of right to trial, bogus charges, plus "demonizing" the victims, all in the name of national defense and homeland security.

10. Mass media manipulation
Think of leaking false information, Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, Colin Powell's United Nation's testimony, Condoleezza Rice's mushroom clouds, WMDs, all to suppress the truth.

11. Obsession with sexism
Think of paternalism, antigays, antiabortion, subordinate women -- then codify the system as the law of the land reinforcing a male-dominated society, punish violators.

12. Disdain for intellectuals
Think of conservative intellectuals Francis Fukuyama and Bill Buckley. Contrast them to Sarah Palin and Joe Sixpack conservatism, Bush's funding cuts for arts and science education.

13. Religion in government
Think of all the faith-based programs versus antiscience in drug approvals, creationism vs. evolution, Ten Commandments enshrined in public buildings, public money to churches.

14. Fraudulent elections
Think of police and prosecutorial intimidation and threats to voters, challenging minority voters, ballots disappearing, party election officials committing outright fraud.

Yes, officially America is still a democracy. We have enough signs and rituals to support that illusion. But the truth is America has become a plutocracy run by and for the wealthy. And since Wall Street's Disaster Capitalism coup de grace, we are rapidly morphing into a dangerous new government.

For more, read Britt's original article.

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Critical US Supreme Court ruling against Rovian GOP vote meddling may prove temporary

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, published on Freepress.org , Monday, October 20

In its on-going campaign to inject chaos and confusion into the voting process, the GOP has sued Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, demanding that she release to county boards of elections lists of registered voters whose information does not precisely match government data bases. The right to vote of such registrants---by most estimates as many as 200,000 in Ohio alone---could then be challenged on a case-by-case basis. George W. Bush was awarded Ohio's 20 electoral votes in 2004 with an official margin of less than 119,000 votes, though more than 100,000 votes cast in that election remain uncounted.

The 200,000 voters targeted by the Republican Party were all registered since January 1, 2008. News source estimates suggest 75-80% of these newly-registered voters are Obama supporters.

Brunner, a Democrat, has argued that the process of sorting through the minutiae of the registration discrepancies and forcing the use of provisional ballots would cause mass confusion, and would do nothing to legitimize the vote count. By all accounts, the discrepancies are usually caused by typographical errors in numbers entered for the Social Security administration and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Rarely do such discrepancies indicate fraudulent behavior or illegitimate registrations.

Last week, after a twisted back-and-forth trail of contradictory lower court decisions, the Supremes ruled that the Republicans "are not sufficiently likely to prevail" in their argument that such discrepancies pose a significant threat to the legitimacy of the electoral process. The Court also ruled that the GOP had not standing as a private organization to file such a suit.

The decision pertains to Ohio, but could have major national impact. Throughout the US, the GOP has been working to strip voters from registration rolls and challenge voting rights predominantly in districts leaning toward the Democrats. Our next article will include an estimate of how many voters that campaign could actually disenfranchise in Ohio.

But the GOP continues to seek ways to disrupt the registration and voting process. In a separate case, the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 that the Secretary of State must allow partisan observers into voting stations where early voting is proceeding. Outside the early voting sites, Republican operatives have photographed early voters and recorded their license plates in an attempt to intimidate and challenge new voters.

The idea of massive fraud by voters continues to be proven as a hyped-up myth. The Cincinnati Enquirer has provided a detailed analysis of Ohio's more than 8 million registered voters and found that problems involving illegitimate voting are minimal. The Enquirer found only 6567 voters who had duplicate registrations. All are individuals who registered twice at their own address, a common routinely resolved by election officials and poll workers. An investigation by Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips of the 2004 election found that of the nearly 800 duplicate registrations he analyzed, none voted more than once. The Enquirer also flagged 589 registered voters who won't be 18 on Election Day.

So contrary to Republican hype, overall the total number of problematic voters appears to be miniscule. The Enquirer concluded that "Data-entry errors make matching voters to other databases an inexact science. Variations on first names, maiden names, and misspellings could red-flag an otherwise eligible voter."

On the other hand, several female Ohio voters have contacted the Free Press asking why the Republican Party would send them absentee ballot forms under maiden names they hadn't used in years. Two of the women feared that they were being targeted for challenges at the polls, since they had a history of voting Democratic.

Since 1953, only six Ohioans have been sent to prison for voter fraud, according to the Columbus Dispatch. But Republican sheriffs and prosecutors are in the midst of a partisan witch hunt the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1960s in the Deep South to harass, arrest and prosecute voting rights groups registering new voters.

In Franklin County, Republican prosecutor Ron O'Brien has issued subpoenas to 13 voters linked to a 527 group, Vote from Home. Joe Deters, a disgraced Republican former state treasurer now Hamilton County prosecutor, has opened a similar investigation.

Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer opened an investigation of 304 new voters, mostly college students, prompting Columbus's African-American mayor Michael B. Coleman to write, "Whether a buffoonish mistake or partisan scheme gone wrong, there's no excuse for such blatant voter intimidation, in which young college students are told they may have to go through a sheriff's investigation just because they registered and voted in Ohio."

The FBI has also opened an investigation of ACORN, the national grassroots organization established in 1970. ACORN has registered some 1.3 million new voters this year, and has become a whipping boy for the GOP nation-wide anti-voter campaign.

This bizarre hysteria against "voter fraud" can be traced directly to the White House and to the McCain campaign. In order to divert attention from voter suppression tactics that helped win Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004, the Bush administration created the myth of "voter fraud." Karl Rove and his political operatives like Mark F. "Thor" Hearne used fake "voting rights" organizations and other obscure groups to finance civil suits and put pressure on the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against voter registration organizations. Twelve federal prosecutors were fired by the Bush Administration for refusing to go along with this witch hunt.

Hearne testified before Rep. Bob Ney's committee at the Ohio House in 2005. Speaking on the last panel, Hearne followed Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who engaged in a bitter verbal dispute with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland), since deceased. Among other things, Jones accused Blackwell of using his official web site to spread outdated information that may have led prospective voters to wrong voting locations.

Hearne claimed to represent the non-partisan watchdog group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). He did not tell the Congressional committee that the ACVR was newly formed and that he was national election counsel to Bush-Cheney '04. Hearne's nonprofit center's publicist, Jim Dyke, is a former communications director for the Republican National Committee.

Based on scant evidence and a single incident of a volunteer allegedly linked to crack use, Hearne pushed a version of voter fraud in Ohio that directly attacked not only ACORN, but the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio. By attacking this combination of groups, Rove and Hearne were targeting the leading forces for registering blacks, poor, union workers and young people in Ohio--those most likely to vote Democratic.

Aided by The Free Enterprise Coalition, a front group connected to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, local Republican operative Mark Rubrick filed an Ohio corrupt practices lawsuit (RICO) against all the voter registration organizations listed above in Wood County.

The civil RICO case, backed by financing from the Free Enterprise Coalition, alleged that the voter registration groups provided ". . . payments made in connections with the violations (in the form of, among other things, 'bounties,' payments or other rewards for collecting and/or processing the registrations including but not limited to illegal drugs, paid to individuals actually engaged in the violations), . . ." At the bottom of the document filed by attorneys Jeffrey Creemer and Douglas Haynam of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, a law firm based in Toledo, the following words appear: "jsc\Free Enterprise Coalition\Amended Complaint.doc" calling into question who was behind the lawsuit.

The suit was later quietly withdrawn after election rights attorney Cliff Arnebeck discovered that the Free Enterprise Coalition had indemnified Rubrick and had promised to pay any and all expenses related to his RICO suit. "I told Rubrick in no uncertain terms that his accusations that the NAACP was a criminal organization were false and that the indemnification from the Free Enterprise Coalition wasn't worth the paper it was written on," Arnebeck said.

Elsewhere throughout the US, the Republicans have used caging and a wide range of other tactics to strip as many likely Democratic voters as possible from the voter rolls. More than 308,000 were disenfranchised in Ohio prior to the 2004 election. At least another 170,000 have been eliminated since, an overall total of roughly ten percent of the Ohio electorate. Nearly all those disenfranchised come from heavily Democratic urban areas. Similar disenfranchisements are being reported throughout the US.

In 2007 Brunner succeeded Blackwell as Ohio's Secretary of State. Blackwell also served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, and helped choreograph the theft of the Buckeye State electoral votes that tipped the election. Brunner has generally attempted to open the voting process in Ohio 2008, but has met with fierce resistance from the GOP, which still controls the Ohio legislature. Among other things, Brunner's attempt to provide paper ballots for all Ohio voters who want them has been reduced by GOP resistance to just 25% availability. The GOP also resisted early and open voting procedures that have allowed Ohioans to cast their ballots for several weeks now.

This new US Supreme Court decision removes a significant morass of confusion and chaos from the voting process. Many of the myriad discrepancies among official data sources "bear no relationship whatsoever to a voter's eligibility to vote a regular, as opposed to a provisional ballot," Brunner explained. The mismatches "may well be used at the county level unnecessarily to challenge fully qualified voters and severely disrupt the voting process."

Trailing badly for the presidency and nearly all other federal offices, the GOP is desperately seeking other routes to inject chaos into the electoral process. It has filed new motions in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, which has seven Republicans and no Democrats, and was re-shaped by more than $7 million in illegal and anonymous campaign donations linked to the US Chamber of Commerce. With this latest filing, the GOP is clearly hoping to revive this challenge to at least 200,000 Ohio voters, and to make this restrictive and confused process into a standard nationwide. The Republicans continue to deploy challengers to the polls wherever possible, and to foster legal attacks against ACORN in particular and the voter registration process in general.

In Ohio and elsewhere the GOP is desperately seeking a way around this new US Supreme Court decision. In 2000 the high court overruled the Florida Supreme Court in a "one time only" decision that stopped a recount and put George W. Bush in the White House.

But if this surprising new pro-democracy decision holds, it could set important precedent for protection of voter rights and help guarantee a fuller and fairer electoral process this year. If not, the electoral system could be crippled yet again, for years to come.

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Naomi Wolf on Palin, the RNC police actions and the risks we face

This is not just another Palin hit piece, but important analysis, especially in light of the arrests of journalists at the Republican National Convention. Posted on Monday, September 22, on Naomi Wolf's blog at Huffington Post.

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand "Palin Power." A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections -- but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you [don't?] have freedom.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit --but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

Then I saw and heard more. Palin is embracing lawlessness in defying Alaskan Legislature subpoenas --this is what Rove-Cheney, and not McCain, believe in doing. She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women's shelters -- Rove's style, not McCain's. I realized what I was seeing.

Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal. The strategy became clear. Time magazine reported that Rove is "dialed in" to the McCain campaign. Rove's protégé Steve Schmidt is now campaign manager. And Politico reported that Rove was heavily involved in McCain's vice presidential selection. Finally a new report shows that there are dozens of Bush and Rove operatives surrounding Sarah Palin and orchestrating her every move.

What's the plan? It is this. McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

How, you may ask, can I assert this? How can I argue, as I now do, that there is actually a war being ramped up against US citizens and our democracy and that Sarah Palin is the figurehead and muse for that war?

Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be McCain's America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove's S and M imagery -- and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I outlined them in The End of America. Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? "Newly released footage, which was buried to avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of people for nothing."

Journalists were arrested -- for reporting. Amy Goodman and ABC producers were arrested. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and others were forced to lie face down as armed agents tied their hands behind their backs. The riot police wore the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain's imagery or strategy: it is Karl Rove's.

In McCain-Palin's America, citizens who are protesting are being charged as terrorists. This means that a violent war had been declared on American citizens. A well known reporter leaked to me on background that St Paul police had dressed as protesters and, dressed in Black -- shades of the Blackshirts of 1920 -- infiltrated protest groups. There were also phalanxes of men in black wearing balaclavas, linking arms and behaving menacingly -- alleged "anarchists." Let me tell you, I have been on the left for thirty years and you can't get three lefties to wear the same t-shirt to a rally, let alone link arms and wear identical face masks: these are not our guys. Agent Provocateurs framing protesters and calling protest "terrorism" constitutes step ten of a police state:

"In what appears to be the first use of criminal charges under the 2002 Minnesota version of the Federal Patriot Act, Ramsey County Prosecutors have formally charged 8 alleged leaders of the RNC Welcoming Committee with Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism... [they] 7 1/2 years in prison under the terrorism enhancement charge which allows for a 50% increase in the maximum penalty."

"Paid, confidential informants... infiltrated the RNCWC on behalf of law enforcement. They allege that members of the group sought to kidnap delegates to the RNC, assault police officers with firebombs and explosives, and sabotage airports in St. Paul. Evidence released to date does not corroborate these allegations with physical evidence or provide any other evidence for these allegations than the claims of the informants. Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence and to also act as provocateurs in raising and urging support for acts of violence."

Under the Palin-Rove police state, you will see escalating infringements on your access to a free internet:

"Sarah Palin was baptized at Wasilla Assembly of God...Last Sunday our research team released a video, a ten-minute mini-documentary, focusing on the Wasilla Assemblies of God and the video seemed on the verge of a massive "viral" breakthrough when YouTube pulled it down, citing 'inappropriate content'. At the point the video was censored by YouTube it had been viewed by almost 160,000 people. The short of it is that YouTube has censored a video documentary that appeared to be close to having an effect on a hard fought and contentious American presidential election..."

Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, there will be no further true elections. Mark Crispin Miller has done sensational and under-reported investigating to establish that -- as I warned -- indeed the GOP staffers on the US Senate Judiciary Committee have been [blog editor's note: this paragraph ends here on the HuffPo site].

The evidence is also buried on the Website of the Majority House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. [blog editor's note: this link, copied from the HuffPo site, goes to a .gif of a short horizontal line.]

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe. >From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
-- "Senate panel's GOP staff spied on Democrats" By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | January 22, 2004

Do you think that spying like this will ever end under a Palin-Rove regime? Dream on. If she and McCain are elected, then every single strategy memo and speech and debate prep note from every opposition candidate from now and on into forever will be read by the regime in power while it is still in the computers of the challengers.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, citizens will be targeted with state cyberterrorism. Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda, a former Reagan official, warned me three years ago that the Bush team went after a Republican who had crossed them through cyberstalking: they messed with his email, messed with his phones and I believe messed with his bank account -- he became a cyber-pariah, unemployable and haunted. With modern technology, there really is less place to hide from the state than there was in East Germany in the Cold War era. I remember feeling a chill: of course. That is the wave of the future once we breach the protections around citizens of FISA and the fourth amendment. That way lies the abyss for us all.

Am I trying to scare you? I am. I am trying to scare you to death and ask you to scare your Republican and independent friends most of all. How do you know when it is war on citizens? When there are mass arrests, journalists are jailed, the opposition is infiltrated, rights are stripped and leaders start to ignore the rule of law.

Almost everyone I work with on projects related to this campaign for liberty has been experiencing computer harassment: emails are stripped, messages disappear. That's not all: people's bank accounts are being tampered with: wire transfers to banks vanish in midair. I personally keep opening bank accounts that are quickly corrupted by fraud. Money vanishes. Coworkers of mine have to keep opening new email accounts as old ones become infected. And most disturbingly to me personally is the mail tampering I have both heard of and experienced firsthand. My tax returns vanished from my mailbox. All my larger envelopes arrive ripped straight open apparently by hand. When I show the postman, he says "That's impossible." Horrifyingly to me is the impact on my family. My childrens' report cards are returned again and again though perfectly addressed; their invitations are turned back; and my daughters many letters from camp? Vanished. All of them. Not one arrived. Try explaining that to a smart thirteen year old. Try explaining it in a way that still makes her feel secure and comfortable.

I am not telling you this because it's about my life. I am telling you this because it is about your life -- whoever you are, Conservative or Liberal, independent or evangelical. Your politics will not protect you in a police state. History shows that nothing protects you in a police state. This is not about my fear and anxiety: it is about what awaits you and everyone you love unless you see this for what it is:

Scharansky divided nations into "fear societies" and "free societies." Make no mistake: Sarah "Evita" Palin is Rove and Cheney's cosmetic rebranding of their fascist push: she will help to establish a true and irreversible "fear society" in this once free once proud nation. For God's sake, do not let her; do not let them.

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Computerworld: Let's Impeach E-Voting

September 8, 2008: Were software patches that didn't fix problems but instead changed results applied to electronic voting machines in two Georgia counties? Were the patches applied at the instruction of a top Diebold executive, without informing local election officials?

This charge has been leveled several times since a rather surprising election in which two Democratic candidates had comfortable leads in polls just before Election Day yet lost by substantial margins. Of course, there's a strong correlation between your degree of suspicion of those results and which party you support. But we should all be frightened if there's no way to prove that tampering didn't occur. And when voting machines are electronic, paperless and proprietary, it's all but impossible to do a recount or check for errors in a way that can uncover a malicious hack.
Election consultant Chris Hood told Rolling Stone magazine that he was working for Diebold in Georgia in 2002 when the head of the company's election division arrived to distribute a patch to workers. That code was applied to only about 5,000 machines in two counties. Hood says it was an unauthorized patch that was kept hidden from state officials. The Georgia allegations are disturbing but, sadly, not unique. An attorney and IT security consultant last month cited that incident to renew challenges to 2004 Ohio elections, which had a similar mix of paperless Diebold machines and statistically curious results.

For the rest of the story, click here. For many more reports of the risks associated with electronic voting systems, click here.

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‘Homegrown’ Suppression of Dissent

by Jules Boykoff

Published on Friday, November 30, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/15/30/5526/

Last month the U.S. House of Representatives flew a stealth mission under the mainstream media’s radar, passing startling legislation that targets constitutionally protected political speech and paves a path for the government’s suppression of dissent.

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 would establish a ten-member National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism primarily comprised of Congress members. It would also give the Department of Homeland Security the power to create “a university-based Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” to “study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots” of U.S.-based radicalization and terrorism.

Despite its overwhelming support in the House–where it passed 404 to 6–this law is severely problematic in three main ways.

First of all, it’s superfluous. We don’t need more laws against “violent radicalization” and “homegrown terrorism.” We already have plenty of legislation outlawing murder, conspiracy, arson, and other crimes that the government often associates with terrorism, not to mention wide-reaching terrorism laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and the Military Commissions Act, all of which can be applied to U.S. citizens.

As such, the bill is less an honest effort to combat actual terrorism than it is ideology-drenched window dressing designed to win political points and electoral votes.

Second, the measure takes aim at political speech that is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution. Groups and individuals trying to further “political or social objectives” are explicitly the focus of the act, which brings up questions around the freedom of assembly.

From a judicial perspective, this bill is a constitutional challenge waiting to happen.

Sure the bill claims, “Any measure taken to prevent violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence…should not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents.”

But given the actual text of the bill and the Bush administration’s penchant to engage in warrantless surveillance, this flimsy caveat assuring that dissent will not be suppressed is tantamount to saying “I don’t do cocaine, I just like the way it smells.”

Third, too often the bill employs alarmingly over-broad definitions. The bill states that “ideologically based violence” is “the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”

It doesn’t take the imagination of an avant-garde poet to envision scenarios in which radical political dissidents could get sucked into the wide-swirling vortex of “ideologically based violence.”

What if protesters use their bodies during a direct action to take over an intersection or to block traffic, as anti-war activists in Olympia, Washington have done recently? Can this seriously be dubbed “homegrown terrorism”?

What about an anarchist who hurls a brick through a corporate window to make a political statement? Is this vandalism really “violent radicalization” or “homegrown terrorism”?

The bill also defines “violent radicalization” in part as “adopting or promoting an extremist belief system,” but what exactly is “an extremist belief system”? Anti-capitalism? Socialism? Anarchism? Neo-conservatism?

Even a cursory look backward through U.S. history reveals heroic figures who could be dubbed “violent radicals” or “homegrown terrorists” under the proposed bill, from U.S. revolutionaries like Sam Adams to gun-toting slavery abolitionists like John Brown to militant civil-rights organizers like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Shortly after the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” The Senate, which is currently considering a virtually identical version of the bill, would do well to resurrect “the spirit of resistance” and finally say no to the Bush administration’s persistent whittling of our civil liberties.

The House roll call vote demonstrates that this is not a partisan issue. The bill’s supporters were obviously bi-partisan, but it’s important to note that opposition to the bill was also bi-partisan, with three Democrats and three Republicans voting against it.

Unlike the media–who have performed a mums-the-word blackout on the bill–concerned citizens from the left, right, and center must oppose this legislation before the Senate slots it into law. We need a nonpartisan groundswell to stand up to this newest onslaught against our civil liberties, before it’s too late.

Jules Boykoff is the author of Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States (AK Press, 2007). He teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon.

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