Gahanna (yes, that one) was Ken Blackwell's top 10 contributor

[FullCountNotRecount]

Gahanna, Ohio, known for a stuffing 4,000 extra votes for Bush in the computer ballot tabulator was in the top ten of giving to Ken Blackwell, the Bush Chairman and Election overseer in Ohio.

http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance/candidate.phtml?si=200435&c=407276&p=13#geography

[Eloriel]

1. Link

Or something?

Please?

[FullCountNotRecount]

2. there

http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance/candidate.phtml?si=200435&c=407276&p=13#geography

Go down on page to find list of towns.

[Quakerfriend]

3. Nice find! n/t

[Eloriel]

4. Thanks

Macon, GA almost as much. Hmmm. Strange.

[dewaldd]

5. what is the per capita average on that?

[FullCountNotRecount]

6. Might just be a coincidence...

but that town name so jumped out at me I had to post it.

[mackdaddy]

7. Probably from Contributors in "rich" area.

I lived a few miles from there. Gahanna is an attached suburb of Columbus. It has an older side which has working class homes, and the newer developments have Very large homes and a lot of corporate heads with 500k plus incomes living in the area. This is probably where the contributors for this kind of money came from.

It is quite a coincidence though with the big voting machine count failure from the same area.

[mirandapriestly]

8. The "glitch" took place at the New Life Church which is a right

wing church tied to Liberty University, which I think is interesting. A lot of New Life churches were used as polling places. From the Bob Fitrakis article:
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
The right-wing New Life Church voting glitch is interesting. Free Press reporter Marley Greiner has been tracking Blackwell’s relationship with far right-wing religious forces like Biblical America and Christian dominionist groups that want to establish theocratic religious rule in America. Blackwell was campaigning around the state with the Reverend Rod Parsley as part of a “Silent No More” tour in support of amending the Ohio Constitution to outlaw gay marriage, on the ballot as Issue One. Many mainstream commentators claim it was the widely popular Issue One amendment campaign that brought out Bush voters in record numbers in rural Ohio. Gay marriage was already outlawed by state statute, and six of the seven Ohio Supreme Court justices are Republicans.

[kk897]

13. *This* is why I've been trying to get people

interested in the "far right wing affecting election" thread I started. There is a pretty clear connection.

Thanks for pointing it out, though!

[Ducks In A Row]

9. need to email this to keith olbermann

you know, to round out his story. :)

[goodboy]

10. figures...how about Upper Arlington, where Walley "I guarantee it" O'dell

lives?

[Malikshah]

11. Is Gahanna close to Jahanna...Arabic word for Hell?

Or did I make some translation mistake??

Curiouser and curiouser...

[Hobbes199]

12. I've been thinking it was very similar to Gehenna all along...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehenna

Original word means "garbage dump" — no offense to OH.

[kk897]

14. OK, now I'm freaking out

The biggest individual contributor in Ohio for 2004 looks to be

David L. Brennan of White Hat Management

http://www.followthemoney.org/database/StateGlance/contributor.phtml?si=200435&d=6580394

OK, so what? Here's what... White Hat Management runs charter schools and, oddly, organizations supporting homeschooling (only "odd" if you don't know the connection to Sovereign Citizens Movement):

http://www.whitehatmgmt.com/about.htm

It's based in Akron. Akron is *big* far right/Sovereign Citizens country. Plus there's this little thing in the back of my mind... niggling little thing...

"HOPE Academy High School is a high-tech high school in Cleveland, Ohio, that serves grades 9-10 utilizing leading edge technology in the delivery of curriculum." (from the above link).

Hate to mention it, but isn't Fisher talking about using this kind of thing? Oh, and in Februrary they got a contract to open schools in... wait for it... Florida:

http://www.whitehatmgmt.com/press_recent32.htm

There's something here. There's something here.

[mirandapriestly]

15. It connects to Florida too, hmm

[Digit]

18. Did you send this to Bev?

Any evidence/clues need to get into the proper hands.

[kk897]

21. Well, no...

...I mean, it's not like she *knows* me or something, and would notice my email out of the thousands they surely receive. They're so busy, would they even have time to track down some wild stuff like this?

[floridadem30]

16. kick

[BlueCaliDem]

17. Gahanna...Gehenna...Hmmm...

Gahanna, is a city in Ohio where Bush got "blessed" with 4000 more votes than he actually earned through a right-wing church...

Gehenna, in the bible, is another word for "hell"; the so-called place of the prince of darkness...

Except for two vowels, does anyone else see the irony in these two places? :D

[FullCountNotRecount]

19. Ha Ha Ha Ha Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Ha Ha Ha Ha

That's the best devilish laugh I could come up with...

[go west young man]

20. Whatever happened to the 3000 to 4000 vote discrepency?

I read somewhere previously that computer scientists had said that the "error" doesn't make sense in computer terms. In other words the programs should have made errors across the page and not on one candidate and also that the error should have been much more astronomical in binary code terms. So how did Ohio resolve this issue? And how did they explain it? Its one of two things. An computer error that doesn't act like a normal computer error or it was put there by a human being. Which is it and does anyone have any source info on this anomilie?

[seriousstan]

22. Here is the Columbus Dispatch story......

Officials from the board of elections and the machine's manufacturer have ruled out internal tampering or outside computer hacking as the cause of the error, Anthony said, although they're still trying to determine its exact cause.

The error occurred when a voting-machine cartridge was plugged into a laptop computer at one of the locations from which precincts transmitted their results to the board after polls closed.

The cartridge was read correctly at the board of elections office, Anthony said, and its later totals matched the Gahanna voting machine's internal tapes.

The error, which gave Bush 4,258 votes in a precinct with only 638 voters, has been cited throughout the country by those who suspect either fraud or faulty technology defeated Democratic Sen. John Kerry on Nov. 2 in Ohio and nationwide. Subsequent counts found Bush with 365 votes in the precinct, to Kerry's 260.

[kk897]

23. yes, I'm sure it was read "correctly" at the BoE. n/t

[seriousstan]

24. There are 6 levels of redundancy, the other five were fine.

Three paper tapes and three registers in the memory module. Only one register in the memory module read incorrectly. That is what the redundancy is for, to catch errors. While it made a cute national interest story, you can't ride this pony to outright condemnation of the machine or the results.

[go west young man]

25. So what your saying is that there was no chance

the laptop was hacked when it went online to the BOE? Because that would fit the theory that most people have that hacking took place during uploads to or from the Central tabulators. Still it leaves my other question "how is it possible only Bush was affected by this error?" Computer scientists say it doesn't make sense. Also it is odd that Bush got that number of votes. It would fit the description once again of a hacker going down the precincts and just adding 3 or 4000 to each. How is it possible that this one register in the memory module came up with this number is what I'm asking I guess? Thanks for helping me understand this Stan.

[seriousstan]

26. They have not been able to duplicate the error

The theories range from the cartridge was not inserted correctly to the cartridge was removed prematurely. Having worked the polls that night, I would lean toward the latter as it is an error you would make due to haste.

As for the hacking, there are 6 levels of redundancy. One of the paper tapes is posted the night of the election at the polls after they close, visible for all to see. I think the true question is why would someone go to the James Bond like trouble of secretly hacking an uplink and then change the numbers to such an obviously impossible combination.....4000 for Bush, 300 for Kerry and a total of 640 having voted??

You understand that there are ALWAYS multiple representatives from both parties present at every stage of the election.