American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  Obviously there was nepotism involved in Fox News’s decision. CBS later said that a “critical” factor in its own call for Bush was the vote count in Florida’s Volusia County, where it turned out that more than 16,000 votes had been subtracted from Gore’s total by the electronic voting machines. One of Gore’s campaign staff got suspicious and found out he was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes. That’s when Gore took back his concession. Later on, the “mistake” was tracked to a company called Global Election Systems. Two months after the election, an internal memo from their master programmer, Talbot Iredale, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been uploaded improperly—and unnecessarily. Iredale said: “There is always the possibility that the ‘second memory card’ or ‘second upload’ came from an unauthorized source.”2

  That phrase “unauthorized source” kinda raises a red flag, doesn’t it. This “faulty memory card” was pretty much forgotten once everybody started talking about hanging chads and butterfly ballots. Now I myself am pretty much computer illiterate, but my wife is not. She’s not a person that swears often, but every day when she’s on the computer, I’m listening to her cuss. That speaks volumes to me on a basic level; it tells me that computers often screw up. Because, let’s face it, they’re still made by humans, and we’re going to make mistakes. So they can be manipulated. When you see all the identity fraud that goes on today, how easy would it be to create voter fraud? It’s ripe.

  I believe all votes should still be paper ballots and hand-counted. I’m proud to say Minnesota is still that way, and I hope this never changes. Look at it like this: Would you use an ATM machine that didn’t give you a receipt? Well, these electronic voting machines don’t do that. There’s no way to keep a record of whom you voted for, so there can’t be a valid recount. When computers can be used to change votes, it challenges the legality of our system. The only way to change that is to go back and make it as primitive as you can, one person one vote.

  Changing the vote electronically was far from the only scam going down in Florida in 2000. Journalist Greg Palast was reporting soon after the election about how Katharine Harris and Jeb Bush set out to do some “ethnic cleansing” on the voter rolls ahead of time. You see, Florida has a state law that convicted felons aren’t allowed to vote. So they hired a private contractor called Database Technologies (DBT), a division of ChoicePoint, whose board was studded with Republican bigwigs, to look for any crooks who were also registered voters. The database eventually listed 57,700 Florida citizens, and local election supervisors were told to purge them.

  Except, more than 90 percent of those people never committed any felonies! More than half of them were either black or Hispanic, and likely to have voted for a Democrat. Early in 2001, when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission became the only agency to look into how Florida handled the disputed election, it concluded there had been a possible conspiracy by Katharine Harris and others. Besides denying the so-called “felons” their voting rights, Jeb Bush had ordered state troopers near the polling sites to delay people for hours while they searched their cars. Two photo IDs were required at some precincts, even though Florida law only required one. In certain black precincts, ballot boxes disappeared or ended up found later in strange places, never having been collected.3

  This story ran big in the media—but only across the Atlantic in England. Palast tried to get it into the American media in the weeks when the recount was still happening. CBS told him it didn’t seem to hold up. Why? Well, because they’d called Jeb Bush’s office to ask.4 The Washington Post did run a Page One story, but not until June of 2001—even though they’d had the story seven months earlier, when it might have made a difference. 5 Our media should be ashamed of their part in undermining American democracy. You had newsmen like Tim Russert saying, the day after the election, that it was probably time for Gore to “play statesman and concede.”6 Did you ever hear of any media suggesting that Bush call it a day? Not a one!

  The dirty tricks just kept on happening. Remember how both sides fought about the counting of absentee ballots from overseas? One Republican operative says there was a long conference call after the election where Bush’s boys talked about having some people near overseas military bases organize a little get-out-the-vote drive. They’d be registered voters, of course, but just happened to have forgotten to cast their ballot on election day. So what if it was a few days later? As of November 13, a total of 446 military absentee ballots had arrived; by the 17th, the number had soared to 3,733. Raise any eyebrows that maybe somebody should’ve been charged with a felony?7

  I get a sense of déjà vu when I see what’s happened more recently with the disrupters of the Obama Administration’s Town Hall meetings on health care. There was a manual recount underway in Miami-Dade County when dozens of screaming GOP demonstrators—shipped in from Washington—started banging on doors and a picture window at the election headquarters. Several people got “trampled, punched or kicked.” Gore had already received a net gain of 168 votes when the canvassing board panicked and stopped the recount. Most of the mob ended up receiving nice rewards within the Republican Party.8

  So, on December 12, just when a Florida District Court judge was about to order a complete statewide hand recount, the Supreme Court rendered its decision. Justice Anthony Scalia said he thought that to keep on counting would “threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legality of his decision.”9 What legality? I have never understood what precedents the Supreme Court used in doing this. You had a branch of federal government stepping in and interfering with what should be completely a states’ rights issue. The feds should have no dog in the fight. I agree with Vince Bugliosi, who wrote that the justices who did this should be put in jail for overstepping their bounds!

  After it was too late, the Washington Post published a piece about how if all the votes had been recounted in all 67 counties, Gore would probably have been in the White House. A study cited by CBS and AP, conducted by the University of Chicago, reported: “Under any standard that tabulated all disputed votes statewide, Gore erased Bush’s advantage” and won by a narrow margin.10 Ho-hum, I guess, the deal was already done.

  Of course, Gore won the national popular vote from the get-go. How can you get a half million more votes than the other guy and lose? The presidential is the only election where we allow that to happen. We should have gotten rid of the Electoral College long ago. It was fine back in the days when everybody was still on horseback. We now have cars and airplanes, and it’s time to leave an antiquated system behind. Who’s profiting from keeping it going? As a third-party guy, I was hoping 2004 would bring the opposite result: Bush would win the popular vote and Kerry would take the Electoral. Maybe that would have brought them to the table to abolish the whole thing.

  But 2004, it turned out, was even more blatant election theft than in 2000. The exit polls were predicting a huge victory for Kerry. But, by late that night, somehow Bush had taken a decisive lead and Kerry conceded on the day after. “There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale,” the New York Times “informed” us. The Washington Post called any talk of vote fraud “conspiracy theories.”11

  Bull-crap. For starters here’s what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. later documented: “Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots—or received them too late to vote—after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equi
pment—roughly one for every 100 cast.”12

  The electronic voting machines played an even bigger role in the 2004 election, with 36 million votes being cast on the touch-screen systems owned by four private companies that use their own proprietary software. Three of those companies had close ties to the Republican Party. One of them, Diebold (including employees and their families) had contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998. The company’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, had gone so far in a fund-raising e-mail as to promise to deliver Ohio to Bush in ’04!13 With enemies like that, Kerry could have used a few friends demanding a return to paper ballots.

  Ohio was where Bush’s “victory” put him over the top in the electoral college. From 12:20 in the morning until around 2 AM, the flow of information in Ohio mysteriously stopped while the vote count switched dramatically to Bush’s side.14 A comfortable 118,000-vote-plus official margin in Ohio then gave him a second term as president. But what really went down? “Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines, and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency.”15 Lou Harris, who basically invented modern political polling, said: “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.”16

  The fellow in charge of the vote-counting was Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also happened to be the co-chair of Bush’s reelection committee there. And nobody seemed concerned about a conflict of interest? Back in 2000, Blackwell had been Bush’s “principal electoral system adviser” during the Florida recount, where I guess he took some lessons from Katharine Harris. When Congressman John Conyers looked into what took place in Ohio, his report in January 2005 set forth “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. ... caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.” Conyers told RFK Jr. that Blackwell “made Katharine Harris look like a cupcake.”17

  Playing devil’s advocate for a minute, I heard from a Democratic friend who worked Ohio that they just didn’t get the people out to vote like they should have. And I think the Democratic Party blew the 2004 election, to the point where it shouldn’t have come down to Ohio. Why did they allow the Republicans to twist things around and make George Bush a war hero, when he was actually a draft-dodger? And then turn Kerry, who fought valiantly in Vietnam, into a coward? I would never have handled it that way. Let’s pull the military records and compare them, find out who was the real guy serving his country. I can’t understand why the Democrats allowed this to take place. But maybe Kerry had played too many games of compromise over his years in politics. He told my collaborator, Dick Russell, in 2008, and I quote: “I know I won the election. But by the time my lawyers could come up with a smoking gun in Ohio, it was too late.” My question is, how come Kerry has never come out publicly and talked about that. Doesn’t he think he has a responsibility to try and stop history from repeating again?

  The story of what went on behind the scenes in Ohio really started to surface as we approached the next presidential election in 2008. That’s where things get interesting. To set the stage, we need to go back to a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against Ohio officials in August of 2006. At the time, Blackwell was still secretary of state and was running for governor on the Republican ticket. A well-known voting rights attorney named Cliff Anebeck set out to charge Blackwell and his cronies with “election fraud, vote dilution, vote suppression, recount fraud and other violations.”18 The judge in the case followed up with a court order that all ballot evidence relating to the 2004 election be preserved for another year (beyond the legally required 22 months, which was about to expire).

  After Democrats swept into the major Ohio offices in 2006, the judge ordered everything turned over to the new secretary of state, a woman named Jennifer Brunner. Well, guess what? The board of elections in 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties had either lost, shredded, or dumped nearly 1.6 million ballots and other election records. The reasons? Oh, various things. Spilled coffee, a flooded storage area, some miscommunication with “greenies” there to pick up recyclables. All accidental, sorry about that.19

  There were a lot of discussions after that between lawyer Cliff Arnebeck and government officials. They talked about a settlement, or a grand jury investigation, or Congress getting involved. Secretary of State Brunner wanted to focus on assuring the integrity of the next election, rather than be distracted by the past. So Arnebeck agreed to narrow things to taking the deposition of one man, Michael Connell, who was Karl Rove’s computer expert and lived in Akron, Ohio.20

  A friend of Connell’s named Stephen Spoonamore had already decided to go public. Arnebeck says Spoonamore is “the best expert witness I’ve ever worked with, courageous and willing to take complex facts and circumstances and give you highly qualified, credible judgments.”21 His friends call him “Spoon,” and he’s an expert in electronic data security and what’s called “digital network architecture.” He’d designed or consulted on computer systems for MasterCard, American Express, the State Department and many more companies and government agencies. A registered Republican, Spoonamore was a staunch believer in the democratic process. Knowing plenty about how thieves could hack information, he’d been concerned about the prospects for fraud with electronic voting machines since the late 1990s.22

  Spoonamore also happened to live in Ohio, and on election night 2004, was doing some monitoring when he began noticing trends in a number of Ohio counties where Kerry started out ahead but then radically different totals ended up favoring Bush. Spoonamore started thinking about the possibility of a “kingpin attack,” where a computer inserted into the communications flow has the ability to change information at both ends of an IT system. It’s Greek to me, but for you geeks out there, it’s also known as the “man in the middle” plan. Based on the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registering, Spoonamore figured out that the same server form was used by the GOP for most of their hosting, and that tracked back to a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called SMARTech.

  Here’s an excerpt from the Chattanooga daily paper, from March 2004: “Along the information superhighway, the road to another term in the White House for George Bush begins in Chattanooga. From a second story suite in the Pioneer Bank Building on Broad Street, millions of Internet connections and e-mail blasts by the president’s reelection campaign are regularly broadcast by SMARTech Inc.” The company was run by Jeff Averbeck, an “Internet entrepreneur who first began working as a consultant for the Republican National Committee in 2000.”23

  Lawyers made a Freedom of Information Act request that confirms what Spoonamore uncovered. In November 2003, Blackwell’s office had enlisted a company called GovTech Solutions, owned by Mike Connell, to establish a duplicate control center for election day ’04. The results would be sent directly to subcontractor SMARTech and its backup server out in Tennessee. The contract specified that there would be “a hardware VPN device [that] will allow access to a private network connecting the servers for database replication services as well as remote admin[istration].” Meaning, I’m told, that anybody could get into the network and make whatever adjustments they wanted. The election results could be observed and changed, using remote access through high-speed Internet from any location.24 The primary control was SMARTech headquarters. “We have no idea what was set up in Chattanooga,” Spoonamore says. “There could have been 20 Republican operatives, and from that point they could have made a direct hop to the White House. They could have been running this from the War Room!”25

  Early on Election Day, George W. Bush and Karl Rove flew into Columbus, Ohio, to meet with Blackwell.26 Connell managed the setup that enabled Blackwell to study maps of the precincts and voter turnout in order to figure out how many votes they needed.27 A third company that Connell brough
t into the scheme was Triad, a major donor to Bush’s campaign. They were run by some far-right Christians, the Rapp family. Triad supplied the network computers that stored all the voter registration information, and hosted the county board of elections results on its Web server.28

  Connell admitted making Govtech, SMARTech, and Triad look like a single unit for the Ohio election returns.29 Congressman Conyers had written to Triad in December 2004, asking about their ability to access the vote-counting computers remotely.30 Triad, it seems, had changed the hard drive in the tabulator computer before the recount. The only reason to do that, Spoonamore says, would be to erase and destroy evidence of a software manipulation of that tabulator.

  Out of the blue, Connell called Spoonamore late in 2005. They’d never met before, but Connell had heard of the systems Spoonamore developed to protect democracy advocates from being hacked in hostile overseas environments. In one such location, Connell was helping out some Christian advocacy groups. Unbeknownst to Connell, Spoonamore already knew a fair bit about him from his research into election activities and the voting machines. Connell had created Web sites for Jeb Bush’s run for governor, and for George W. in 2000. Connell’s company got the first private contract to build and manage congressional e-mail servers and firewalls. This gave him the ability and means to read documents and e-mails, copy data, and set up “back doors.”31 Then he did the Web site for Blackwell’s office in Ohio; another client of Connell’s was Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that went after Kerry on his service record!