(May also be found at: http://pacificgreens.org/node/81 )

Open Letter to Secretary of State Kate Brown:

I write to you regarding your recent hiring of Stephen Trout as the new Director of Elections. I have a few questions, but first, I will provide the context in which my questions originate. A number of people have brought to my attention Mr. Trout's history as an elections administrator. Frankly, the information, which can now be found online, is disturbing. Bev Harris, of the nation's premier election oversight group Black Box Voting (BBV), says he is, "a supporter of paperless touch-screens and worse, has demonstrated a dreadful attitude towards citizen oversight."

He was on their "Gotta Be Replaced" list of election administrators who are hostile to election transparency.

Mr. Trout tried to keep BBV from auditing the election in San Bernardino County and is closely tied to Scott Konopasek, who was famously quoted by the NY Times as saying he has to sometimes "massage the data" when asked how the vote totals went down in the middle of a count for a progressive candidate. Konopasek and Trout were ultimately dismissed from both positions

By Jerry Adams, Oregon Voter Rights Coalition.

One of John's legacies has been to co-lead in providing opportunities for civil dialogue among diverse opinion leaders within the field of election integrity.

The opportunities have been a valuable contribution to the EI field. John's dedication through his news work has provided an additional legacy.

I am one of those who have benefited in this arena and would like to acknowledge my gratitude. When a small band of us decided to put on a national conference on EI in Portland a few years back, John gave generously of his time to help make it a success.

John is one of the giants in our field; he will be sorely missed.

Please click here for background on this story posted at Bradblog.

Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:50:55 -0400
Subject: Report of Rove threats against witness Michael Connell
To: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov

Dear Attorney General Mukasey:

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, that if he does not agree to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations. This appears to be in response to our designation of Rove as the principal perpetrator in the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act/RICO claim with respect to which we issued document hold notices last Thursday to you and to the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform.

See:
Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
Video

I have informed court chambers and am in the process of informing the Ohio Attorney General's and US Attorney's offices in Columbus for the purpose, among other things, of seeking protection for Mr. Connell and his family from this reported attempt to intimidate a witness. Concurrently herewith, I am informing Mr. Conyers and Mr. Kucinich in connection with their Congressional oversight responsibilities related to these matters. Because of the serious engagement in this matter that began in 2000 of the Ohio Statehouse Press Corps, 60 Minutes, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, C-Span and Jim VandeHei, and the public's right to know of gross attempts to subvert the rule of law, I am forwarding this information to them, as well.

Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney

Kudos to K. Shawn Edgar for his new documentary covering Oregon's hand count audit. Under a new law, each county in Oregon must hand count at least 3 percent, and a maximum of 10 percent, of their precincts in at least three races. The video covers the hand recount process as it happened in Washington County at the Beaverton Elections Office. The Oregon VRC supported the original bill requiring this process that required a verification of the outcome, not a mere check on the accuracy of a random selection of machines.

11/25/2008 @ 2:56 pm
Nick Juliano
http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=13068

With the recount in the razor-thin Minnesota U.S. Senate race continuing into its second week, Democratic candidate Al Franken's campaign says it has uncovered 6,400 rejected absentee ballots and will ask a state board to count at least some of those votes.

Campaign attorney Marc Elias said Tuesday that the campaign received the rejected ballots from 66 of the state's 87 counties, according to the Associated Press. In some instances, clerical errors or oversight caused the ballot to be improperly rejected.

Franken is running to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. Elections officials have recounted nearly 80 percent of the more than 2 million ballots cast in the Senate race.

Coleman's lead has shrunk since election day but still stands at 211 votes, according to figures compiled by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Franken's campaign, meanwhile, estimates the lead is less than half that and says their candidate is just 84 votes behind.

Each campaign is challenging more than 1,500 votes each, not counting any of the just-discovered absentee ballots Franken plans to ask to have included.

Franken's campaign also says several dozen ballots have gone missing.

The state canvassing board will convene next month to rule whether to count the disputed ballots. Its verdicts on the 3,000-plus ballots at issue likely will decide the election.

An Interloper's Journey to Election Day

(Following is an excerpt of a report from K. Shawn Edgar in conjuntion with his visit to the Washington Co. Election office on Nov. 4, 2008. Watch the video of his visit on the right.)

Prelude
This is where my Washington County elections office entered the story. I had emailed them questions and received flat textbook answers – answers in which the responder avoided details about any possible problems. "It's all by the book, sir. It's all by the book," they assured me. After two to three links had grown in our email chain, I received a direct response from one whom I believed at that time to be the divisions number one man: Luther K. Arnold Jr., the Senior Administrative Specialist.

(After calls and emails to several other officials...) I wound up on the phone with Brenda Bayes of the state elections SOS. Ms. Bayes was cordial and answered my questions by the book – refusing to even consider my base assumption that elections have faults and the process has been manipulated in our recent past (see documents by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast).

Ms. Bayes' great contribution to this part of the story was to pass me the name Mickey Kawai (Wash. Co. Clerk). She turned out to be the manager of my Washington County elections office – the exact person I was hoping to talk with in the first place. On the phone with Mickey Kawai later that day, the background noise from her end spoke in many voices urgent and oscillating. With my eyes closed the scene through the receiver became a whaling ship at sea, and Mickey Kawai became a captain. However, her voice told me she was holding it all together – the chaotic operations of a county elections office the day before our biggest election day in recent history and the amped regular citizens eager to participate in her domain. At the same time there was an underlying threat of a Chernobyl-sized mishap hanging in the air, as much on my end as hers, congealing the entire county. Before I disconnected, she had convinced me to come in with my video camera the following day for the big event. To observe. To participate.

Early on that day, November 4, I had to work my “real” job from 8 to 1, and then bolted straight to the elections office – camera and tripod in hand. My good friend and fellow interloper, Mr. Waldow, met me on the way. We drove by the county building. Two lanes of backed up automobiles for blocks, the right lane full with voters preparing for a drive-by drop of their ballot into the solid steel box flanked by county workers under a portable tent set up in front of the main entrance.

Out front we met county press officer Philip, wearing a high-contrast yellow reflective vest and name badge. Philip gave us the lowdown on the orchestrated effort to reduce traffic and line time, the state and county police played a predominate roll. Also, a second drop site had been set up across the four-lane highway at Kmart.

Process
Inside I set up the tripod and video camera, got shots of several vote casting stations provided for those citizens who didn't receive or lost a ballot, or simply preferred to come in and cast by hand. Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, but many county elections offices have voter's booths and offer provisional ballots, as mentioned above. According to Philip, Washington County residents choose – for diverse reasons – to drop off their ballot on election day, hence the crazed scene described outside the building.

Ballots flow into the county office from every precinct, and are sorted and the outer envelope is removed by party workers. Other workers verify signatures on the back of the actual security envelope that contains the ballot by crosschecking voter registration cards via computer. And then the security envelopes are “wanded in”, meaning each one's arrival is documented by hand-held bar code scanners.

The next part of the operation is all about straightening the ballots and feeding them into the computerized counting machines made to a large extent by a company called Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). Of course, ballot length changes from election to election, and the longer the ballot, the more difficult this process becomes, often causing delays and mistakes.

In a review of voting systems, the EVEREST Report found that every component of the ES&S optical scanning machines were vulnerable at the precinct level to physical tampering that would cause the machine to reboot, adding delays and confusion, as well as the PCMCIA memory cards the scanners use to encode ballot types. At the level of the board of elections office network attacks were found to be the biggest threat.

Although Philip, our press officer, and the staff he introduced us to, were helpful and knowledgeable, they could not bring themselves to believe what they inevitably termed conspiracy theories, and refused to believe my base assumption (formed of previous experience and research like the EVEREST Report) that all ballot counting software and hardware are risky and vulnerable to tampering.

In the moment I wished I had a hard copy of the EVEREST test results to show them, to make them see the danger, but although their heart was in the right place, their eyes were shackled with tunnel vision by training and a need to protect operations – and save face.

A great summary from Harriett Crosby, who is involved in a lawsuit filed in July 2008 to uncover the truth about the 2004 election.

McClatchy News
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/254/story/497984.html#recent_comm

Dear friends,

It's a new day in America, a new era of hope. Obama's election has already transformed the energy of this place. His well organized, disciplined campaign has transcended partisan divides as the transition team searches for excellent people regardless of party. It is a breath of fresh air.

Friends have asked if I think the Michael Connell deposition on Monday deterred Rove from trying to hack another election. My answer: It was clearly Obama who won--his winning personality, his family, his clarity, his honest campaign. Nonetheless, I do believe that our work to bring Connell into the light of legal scrutiny the day before the election was critical to protect the integrity of this election at a time of consequence for the nation.

We at Velvet Revolution VR were running defense for democracy, tackling those who were coming at Obama from the shadowy sidelines: people, like Connell, who were using secret computer IT networks to manipulate the vote count at the tabulation level. It was important to expose the invisible and illegal ways of taking advantage of every weak point in the electoral system by designing computer programs to manipulate elections without leaving a trace.

Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast were publicizing voter disenfranchisement, intimidation, caging, purging voter registration lists and all the visible ways of suppressing the Democratic vote. It was very important this came out in Rolling Stone before the election, so that many people were paying attention. Velvet Revolution was going afterthe invisible corruption--the election tabulation fraud--and so it was much more difficult to get this published in the mainstream media. In spite of hiring Fenton Communications to get out the election fraud story (they put out some good press releases), the media never picked it up.

Make no mistake, there is alarming evidence that Bush stayed in the White House for a second term by stealing the 2004 election. After four years of researching this, listening to whistleblowers and putting the invisible jig-saw puzzle together, we know WHO did it: Karl Rove, his computer IT operative, Mike Connell, Jack Abramoff, Susan Ralston and Ken Blackwell. We know HOW they did it: using computer networks like SMARTech.com, GovTechSolutions.com, gwb43.com, New Media Communications and GOP.com. We know WHEN: in the late hours of election night in 2004--at 11:13 p.m., to be precise--when Blackwell shunted the vote tally from Ohio to GOP servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they were changed just enough to give the election to Bush. We have evidence, from the Ohio Secretary of State's Office, of the election architecture that shows exactly when the vote tally was sent to SMARTech at GOP headquarters in Tennessee, and when it came back. This is how Bush got a second term--and Karl Rove was behind it. Rove will be the next (after Connell) to be subpoenaed in our Ohio lawsuit.

It has been frustrating for me to know all this and not be able to get the media to cover the story as it unfolded. I had been counting on the media and court of public opinion to expose this massive fraud and corruption of our election process. But I was wrong to wait for the media to do the story. They never did. It was a violation of the law and belonged in court.

VR found lawyers in Ohio who reviewed the evidence of these shenanigans, and went to federal court in July, 2008 to expose it. The Judge decided to lift the stay on an existing lawsuit, and then all of this information was put before him. We had the quiet support of the Ohio Secretary of State and Attorney General. To get that support, we had to provide loads of evidence. Details of the lawsuit and hearing are spelled out in many articles on http://www.rovecybergate.com. But the long and short of it is that the judge ruled in ourfavor four times: lifting the stay on the prior lawsuit; subpoenaing Connell; compellingConnell's appearance in court on Friday, Oct. 3; and then ordering him to submit to a deposition on Monday, Nov. 3--the day before Election Day.

Connell's attorneys did everything possible to keep him from testifying. But since he was compelled to appear, he did show up on Friday with three high-powered lawyers from the Bush/Cheney '04 team--and they were ready to fight. It was a contentious three-hour hearing, in which he said he was too busy for a deposition until after the election. The lawyer said this was like the bank robber saying, sorry, he couldn't show up in court because he was too busy making plans to rob the next bank. Attorney Cliff Arnebeck accused Connell in open court of rigging elections for Karl Rove. Connell turned "beet red" when the judge ruled that he would have to come back at noon on Monday to submit to a sworn deposition, exactly 18 hours before the polls were to open.

But Connell was as cool as a cucumber when he showed up in court Monday, Nov. 3 with his lawyers. He was placed under oath and grilled about election fraud, "man in the middle" computer manipulation of the vote count, Trojan horse remote control of the tabulation process, and threats from Rove if he didn't take the heat for all such crimes. He did his best to stonewall, but did indicate that, to his knowledge, there would be no tabulation manipulation of Tuesday's election.

So what happened over the weekend after being under the eye of an attentive Federal Judge? Two weeks ago, Rove was confidently saying that McCain could win ten battleground states to become President. McCain was confidently telling everyone that he would win with a surge in the wee hours of election night (when the numbers could be manipulated). On Thursday, Oct. 30, Rove had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, telling voters to ignore the polls, and that McCain could win. But something changed over the weekend. By Monday after the deposition, Rove wrote on his blog that Obama would win by "a electoral landslide," even in those states he had previously predicted McCain would win. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/04/rove-predicts-obama-landslide/

As Mark Crispin Miller said: "And there was Karl Rove's abrupt decision not to try to rig the outcome, a reversal he signaled Monday evening when he suddenly foretold an electoral landslide for Obama, just hours after Mike Connell, his longtime IT fixer, had been forced to answer questions, under oath, in an Ohio courtroom."

Personally, I believe that a miracle happened. I had given up hope of anything coming of this lawsuit before the election because I was told that newspapers don't do stories until after a judge rules on a case and that these things take forever. But my colleagues at VR persevered, intent on helping to save this election. I was totally surprised last week (just a week ago) to learn that the Judge had ruled against Connell attempt to quash the subpoena and compelled him to show up in court Friday, Oct.31, just days before the election. And then he ordered Connell to come back on Monday to testify under oath, giving him all weekend to ponder his situation. Connell certainly discussed this with his lawyers, and probably with Rove and others. Rove knew he was the next to be subpoenaed by this Judge. They knew that we were onto them, and had evidence of what had happened. They may have decided it just wasn't worth the risk to manipulate another election. So I think the lawsuit and deposition on Monday may have deterred them in a small way from attempting to impede Obama's victory.

The history of America's stolen 2004 election is coming to light, as it must. "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice!" Winning big with a transformational leader like Obama means we can go on the offense in addressing the great issues of our time from global warming to election reform. Guided by our values of open, honest government, we can begin the work of reforming America's flawed election system. There is much to be done to protect the voting rights of every citizen and to ensure that all the votes are fairly counted. Our work is not over.

Love, Harriett

Friday, November 7, 2008 3:20 AM
By Mark Niquette
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Click here for the original

Despite a record number of registered voters this year, intense interest in the presidential election and the historic outcome, Ohio's voter turnout was lower Tuesday than in 2004, unofficial statistics show. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is reporting 67 percent turnout, compared with 72 percent in 2004. She had been predicting 80 percent turnout this time. The percentage could increase as provisional ballots, overseas ballots and other outstanding votes are included during the official canvass in the coming weeks. But overall turnout still is expected to be lower than in 2004, leaving experts at a loss to explain it -- especially because the number of registered voters increased by 319,000 from four years ago. "That's rather puzzling, given the activity level," said Paul Beck, a political-science professor at Ohio State University. The total number of votes cast Tuesday declined in 69 of Ohio's 88 counties when compared with official totals from 2004. In Franklin County, for example, about 10,000 fewer votes were cast this year.

This is a message from Lynn Landes of CounttheBallots.org

I've been contacting these campaigns trying to talk them into doing audits. We know that recounts are notoriously unreliable due to the actions of unscrupulous election officials. Please contact the candidates and urge them to audit as well as ask for a recount. That means their volunteers should collect voter affidavits in select 'suspect' precincts. It's the only thing that will tell the candidate how the voters really voted. Clint Curtis found that his audit results in the 2006 congressional race varied from the 'official' count by 12-24%!!! I have information on both of my websites regarding audits.

Nine races still too close to call

Lynn Landes
www.CountTheBallots.org
www.TheLandesReport.com

10/29/08: Attorneys File To Compel Testimony Of Mike Connell:
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/#102908

Yesterday, Attorneys in Ohio filed papers in federal court to compel the immediate testimony of Michael Connell, the GOP's top IT expert. In short, they argued that Connell, once a willing witness, has hunkered down after threats from Karl Rove and his minions. See Memo here. They allege that Connell is a witness to a crime to steal prior elections, and his knowledge will be helpful to ensure that next week's election is not stolen.

Attached to the motion is a powerful affidavit from Stephen Spoonamore, a cyber-security expert advising the attorneys. Spoonamore states that the 2004 election in Ohio was attacked by a Man in the Middle King Pin computer manipulation that changed the results from Kerry to Bush. See Spoonamore Declaration here. This is a must read for everyone to see how this was, and can be, done.

The Ohio News Service picked up the story here.