The software created for the Ohio secretary of state's Election Night 2004 website was created by GovTech Solutions, a firm co-founded by longtime GOP computing guru Mike Connell. He also redesigned the Bush campaign's website in 2000 and told "Inside Business" magazine in 1999, "I wouldn't be where I am today without the Bush campaign and the Bush family because the Bushes truly are about family and I'm loyal to my network."

These firms worked closely with another company, Government Consulting Resources, Ltd (GCR), run by Dr. Alan Dillman, a professor at Cedarville University, a small fundamentalist Christian college in Ohio, to count the votes on election night in Ohio:

"Dillman personally led the effort from the GCR side, teaming with key members of Blackwell's staff," [a press release from Cedar University] said. "GCR teamed with several other firms -- including key players such as GovTech Solutions, which performed the software development -- to deliver the end result. SMARTech provided the backup and additional system capacity, and Mercury Interactive performed the stress testing."

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not only controlled the vote-counting process in Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the Bush campaign, but it also controlled the technology that allowed the tally of the vote in Ohio's 88 counties to be reported to the media and voters.

Having Ken Blackwell, a notoriously partisan hack, in charge of the Ohio's 2004 election apparently wasn't enough for Rove and Company. Nor was the GOP's vaunted voter suppression efforts deemed sufficient to insure a Bush victory in Ohio. They also made sure that the companies controlling the voting process from start to finish all had Republican Party ties, from Diebold and ESS, who manufactured many of the electronic voting machines, to the the companies whose technology controlled how those votes were counted that night.

Which may explain some of the highly improbable (and in some cases impossible) voter turnout figures that were reported from several traditionally Republican counties on election night:

On Election Night 2004, many of the totals reported by the Secretary of State were based on local precinct results that were impossible. In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter turnout. In Republican Perry County, two precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent respectively. In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only 638 people voted for president. In Concord Southwest in Miami County, the certified election results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689 registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547 voters had signed in. [...]

It was known Bush would carry rural Ohio. But the vote totals from these last-to-report counties, where Karl Rove said there was an unprecedented late-hour evangelical vote giving the White House a moral mandate, were highly improbable and suggested vote count fraud to pad Bush's numbers. Just how flimsy the reported GOP totals were was not known on Election Night and has not been examined by the national media. But an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff begun after Election Day 2004 and completed before the Electoral College met on Jan. 6, 2005, was first to publicly point to vote count fraud in rural Ohio.

Now how did such anomalies occur when we all know that the computers and software which manage the literally billions of financial transactions, credit card purchases, etc., each day are considered so reliable? It's not like there were billion of Ohio votes to count that night. Well, maybe this had something to do with it:

These strange election results were routed by county election officials through Ohio's Secretary of State's office, through partisan IT providers and software, and the final results were hosted out of a computer based in Tennessee announcing the winner. The Cedarville University releases boasted the system "was running like a champ." It said, "The system kept running through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."

Let's consider that for a moment, shall we? County election officials send in their vote counts to the Secretary of State's office headed by Ken Blackwell through servers managed by the same company (SMARTech) that hosts the servers used by the Republican National Committee, using software developed by another company (GovTech Solutions) with close ties to the Bush family, and the Bush administration. The election results are then published on a website hosted by a server in Tennessee owned by SMARTech. All these operations were overseen by another company (GCR) owned and operated by a professor at a small fundamentalist Christian college in Ohio.

Oddly enough, when the vote totals from various rural counties are counted using this system, they reflect figures that, in some cases, exceed (1) the number of registered voters in those counties and/or (2) the number of signatures recorded the voting registers which each voter must sign before being allowed to vote by the local election officials. Other vote counts simply show voter turnout numbers in the highest percentages on record for the counties in question.

So, what was the final result on election night after all these rural county vote counts came in to Ken Blackwell's Office and then made their circuitous way to SMARTech's server in Tennessee? I think you know the answer to that one:

Beginning with a timeline on Election Night after a national media consortium exit poll predicted Democrat John Kerry would win Ohio, the first Ohio returns were from the state's Democratic urban strongholds, showing Kerry in the lead.

This was the case until shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Nov. 5, when for roughly 90 minutes the Ohio election results reported on the Secretary of State's website were frozen. Shortly before 2am EST election returns came in from a handful of the state's rural Republican enclaves, bumping Bush's numbers over the top.

How Bush won Ohio can now be understood in the context a four pronged attack by Republican officials and their operatives on the integrity of Ohio's election.

First Prong: Before the election, contest voter registrations and purge voter rolls, to limit the number of eligible voters from minority districts, where the residents traditionally vote for Democrats.

Second Prong: On election day, suppress the vote in Democratic strongholds by (1) using Republican volunteers to challenge minority voters' right to vote, (2) fail to supply sufficient voting machines to Democratic precincts to create long lines to discourage voters, (3) employ Republican operatives to spread false rumors in minority communities about where they should vote, when they should vote, and what will happen to them if they try to vote, (4) use the presence of law enforcement at the site of minority precincts to intimidate potential voters.

Third Prong: Reject as many provisional ballots cast as possible. Since most of the provisional ballots that were rejected were cast in Democratic districts, this reduced the number of votes for the Democratic candidate for President, John Kerry.

Fourth Prong: Control the vote counting process using companies with deep ties to Bush and the Republican party so that vote totals from Republican strongholds in rural counties can be inflated and/or switched to register more votes for Bush.

The evidence is out there, if only someone is willing to pursue an investigation. Election officials in Cuyahoga county have already been convicted of rigging a court ordered partial recount in order to prevent a full recount of all of the Ohio votes cast in the tainted 2004 election. Much of this election fraud has already been documented by House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff in its report "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio" as well as by private investigations by Bob Fitrakis and others.

What hasn't been well documented until recently was the connection between the companies in charge of counting the votes from Ohio's 2004 election, SMARTech and GovTech Solutions, the Bush administration and the Republican National Committee. It seems only logical to investigate the possibility that these companies, the same companies who are still employed by the Bush administration and the RNC, might have "fixed" the election results in Ohio in order to ensure a victory in the Electoral College by George Bush in 2004.

We can't change the election results from 2004 through Congressional investigations into the election fraud that occurred in Ohio's 2004 election. However, by uncovering the seamy reality of how the Republicans perpetrated that fraud on the voters of Ohio, and on the American people, we can help prevent the theft of future elections by these same criminals.

2004 Election Election Fraud Voter Suppression SMARTech Corp. GovTech Solutions Government Consulting Resource Mike Connell Alan Dillman Ken Blackwell Republican National Committee George W. Bush Election Integrity Ohio Bob Fitrakis John Kerry Karl Rove