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and when I couldn't get local publications to print the truth, I wrote a grant and started my own publication, East County Magazine (published by a nonprofit). Here's what I wrote on September 1 at http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/?q=0809watchdog National election expert believes “fix is in” for fall 2008 election in San Diego Your Voter’s Watchdog tracked down one of the country’s foremost election integrity experts for comments on this and other issues regarding San Diego’s Registrar of Voters. Bob Fitrakis is executive director of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, editor of the Columbus Free Press and winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award at Columbus State Community College. He is also the author of three books alleging theft of the 2004 presidential election including his most work, What Happened in Ohio? – A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. Another book, How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election & Is Rigging 2008, presents disquieting evidence suggesting that Americans’ votes are still not secure. Told of the lawsuit filed in San Diego, Fitrakis observed, “We had those same problems back in Ohio in 2004. We were told not to worry about those things.” One county reported a 95% voter turnout, but an inspection of voter log-in books revealed that far fewer people had signed in. “We found this pattern all over Southern Ohio,” said Fitrakis. Asked if this could be happening in San Diego, Fitrakis replied, “Yes.” He added that in some areas of Ohio, thousands of names were mysteriously added to voter rolls on election day – a full month after the registration deadline closed. Fitrakis express shock upon learning that Michael Vu, who oversaw elections in Cuyahoga County, Ohio during the disputed 2004 presidential election, has been named Assistant Registrar of Voters in San Diego County. San Diego also recently hired Debra Seiler, a former sales representative for Diebold Election Systems (now called Premier Election Systems), as our county’s Registrar of Voters. “We know where the fix is in this year,” Fitrakis said. “If I were in San Diego, I’d be afraid. I’d be very afraid. These are the key operatives who helped hijack the election, particularly in terms of Vu in Ohio.”
Fitrakis offered additional comments on Vu’s tenure running elections in Ohio. “Two of his people were convicted for tampering with the recount. Vu was run out of Cleveland,” the journalist/author recalled. “If somebody hires Vu, it’s a payoff for the dirty tricks in did in Ohio in 2004.”
San Diego County Administrator Walt Eckart defended his hiring decisions at a May 22, 2007 Board of Supervisors’ meeting, stating that he believed Seiler and Vu “served honorably in their prior roles.” Eckart has refused prior requests from Voter’s Watchdog to answer additional questions on this topic.
But Fitrakis countered, “What is his qualification? Keeping people waiting in line for hours? Purging a quarter of the voters in Cleveland? And in some districts, he purged 51% of all the voters. Having chaos and confusion and emergencies where polling sites were moved with Cleveland Public Schools at the last second?” Vu has never provided a satisfactory explanation for the purgings, according to Fitrakis.
Diebold “accidentally” purged 10,000 voters in Cleveland because Vu had contracted out the board of elections to run the County’s electronic poll list, he said. “It sounds like they’re probably going to play the same game out there,” Fitrakis cautioned San Diego voters. Fitrakis charges that purges were done systematically in precincts with mainly poor, minority and predominantly Democratic voters. “None of the GOP counties were purged,” he added.
Asked what citizens can do to prevent such occurrences here, he replied, “Immediately go down to the Registrar of Voters and demand under the public records law to know who has been purged and why. You need to call these people and reregister them to vote immediately, because these are deliberate campaigns.” He questioned why anyone should be purged unless there is proof that a voter has died or moved out of the county. “In Ohio, we found 80% still lived in the county, and over 20% still lived at the same address,” he added. Fitrakis also urged election integrity advocates to seek records of which technicians have access to voting machines.
McCain advisor/security expert turns whistleblower, alleges election tampering by GOP
Leading cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore has come forward as a whistleblower alleging election tamperng in 2002 and 2004 elections, giving new life to a civil rights lawsuit filed against Ohio’s former Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell. “The suit is essentially claiming there was a deliberate pattern of disenfranchising minority and student voters in the 2004 election,” Fitrakis explained. New developments implicate former White House advisor Karl Rove: www.bradblog.com/?p=6189
Spoonamore works with major credit card companies running programs to detect fraud. He also consults with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, worked on IT encryption for the military and a Mars mission, and has worked as an advisor to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. After reviewing records in 14 Ohio Counties using Triad voting systems in 2004, Spoonamore concluded that such results would “instantaneously launch a credit card fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation.”
Spoonamore, a life-long Republican, believes the evidence indicates vote-tampering in Ohio as well as in 2002 Georgia races where patches were installed personally by the CEO of Diebold. (Note, this reporter, in a CityBeat article that won a San Diego Press Club award, has previously interviewed a Diebold whistleblower who alleged election tampering involving the Georgia patches: www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?id=3674)
Spoonamore, who found no different between the purported patch and the original code, has turned his evidence over to the U.S. Department of Justice. But just how diligently will the Justice Department, already exposed for firing U.S. attorneys for partisan reasons, investigate allegations of vote tampering by the GOP or its supporters?
Watch a full series of interviews with Spoonamore here (segments listed at right): www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTBLfgos5b8&feature=related
Election integrity advocates in the Ohio lawsuit now seek to depose Michael Connell, a prominent Bush family supporter now working as McCain’s IT developer. Connell conducted computer work in both the 2002 Florida and 2004 Ohio elections. “Connell’s Repubilcan internet development company, New Media Communications, developed a program to `tune’ election tabulators in real time,” said Fitrakis, adding that Connell’s company was behind the Swift Boaters for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry in 2004.
During the final hour of the 2004 election, Blackwell ordered an overload, meaning votes Ohio votes were counted in Tennessee—and a surge of Bush votes during the last hour changed the outcome of the presidential race. “Kenneth Blackwell outsourced the hosting of vote counting, which was on the same server as the GOP IT systems,” Fitrakis reported. That server hosted hundreds of partisan sites---including JWB43.3, which has been identified as the site where hundreds of missing e-mails from Rove originated.
Now Connell claims his company has penetrated firewalls of Congress as his servers have set up sites for the House Intelligence, Ways and Means, Judiciary and Administration committees.
Fitrakis says the public should question why major exit polls were off for the first time in history when a former CIA director’s son, George W. Bush, ran for president—twice. “There’s been a long history of the CIA itself tampering with elections in the third world. They’ve admitted that before Congress,” he said. “My belief is that that which was done covertly before in the third world is now happening overtly here in the U.S.”
He urged people to contact the House Judiciary Committee and urge them to review impeachment articles 28 and 28 submitted by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, which address inquires into the 2004 election. “Why not put Mike Connell and Steve Spoonamore under oath and ask them if the apparatuses in place in Ohio—and throughout the nation—can be used to rig elections or hack the vote?” he asked.
Voting Machine Issues
Serious problems were found in Ohio with both touch screen voting machines (which have been decertified in California after a hack-test ordered by Secretary of State Debra Bowen found numerous vulnerabilities to electronic hacking) and Diebold Optical Scan voting machines – the very same systems slated for use in our November election.
Touchscreens were found to be miscalibrated so that the screen would light up when touched, leading voters to believe their votes had been counted. But the mechanism for voting was actually just outside the box. To have your vote count, “you’d have to have a really fat finger,” Fitrakis quipped.
Ohio’s Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announced plans in August to sue Diebold to “essentially remove all their machines because they don’t count correctly,” he said.
Ohio also had “tremendous problems” with Opti-Scans used in 2004. “There are literally to this day thousands of people who used them and never had their votes counted,” said Fitrakis, who objects to private technicians from voting machine companies such as Diebold accessing machines with memory cards, ostensibly to recalibrate machines. “In 2004, you had memory cards with no votes on them,” he said. “Also if a machine is too sensitive, it doesn’t read the actual voter-verified paper ballot. Thousands of them were just taken and stuffed underneath bins by election officials and never counted to this day.”
Fitrakis advocates paper ballots (not paper trails), hand-counted at precincts and witnessed by members of the public and representatives of each political party. “Ninety-five percent of democracies in the world vote on paper,” said Fitrakis, who has served as an international election observer.
San Diego election integrity activist Brina-Rae Schuchman agrees, and further calls for citizen hand counts and audits of absentee ballots by citizens. “We need Secretary of State Bowen and California Attorney General Jerry Brown to do what is right; to examine the machines and to sue for our taxpayer money back for every infraction,” she wrote in an e-mail to the Voter’s Watchdog. “The e-voting machine vendors and America’s election officials seem to have forgotten that they must work” in the public interest.”
Schucman said she is “very worried about San Diego elections” because Diebold central tabulators and Opti-scanners are still inn use here. “No one can be sure what secret instructions are buried in the programs that count the votes,” she added.
“Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, the vast majority of people want transparent, fair elections,” Fitrakis concluded. ““People should care because they are Americans and believe in fundamentals of Democracy.”
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