Hacking Votes, Saving Babies

Take about fifteen minutes of your time, if you’re so inclined, to listen to Stephen Spoonamore on a radio show yesterday, 10/2. The link is here. It’s an interesting interview, and runs for three segments of the show, commercial-free. After the second segment it sounds like the interview is over, but it’s not.

Spoonamore believes that the 2004 presidential election was hacked, and he is very specific about how it was done in Ohio. On election day the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office, run by Ken Blackwell, switched its election tabulating computer over to a private company – Smartech – in Chattanooga, Tennessee. All of the state’s election results were run through that computer, which was was originally only to be used as a backup in case of emergency. That computer captured and forwarded all the state’s election results to the Ohio Secretary of State’s office. Votes were flipped.

Smartech, by the way, is coincidentally is the same company that hosted the domain for the Bush White House that allowed them to communicate outside official channels.

Ohio’s votes were tabulated by a private company that was neither supervised nor audited. It is only because of Spoonamore that we know they were involved.

This resulted in odd election outcomes such as the “Connally Anomaly”, where an underfinanced down-ballot judge in Cleveland, Judge Ellen Connally, an African-American woman who strongly supports both gay marriage and abortion rights, beat the pants off Kerry in rural southwest Ohio, and nowhere else. If the official Kerry and Bush’s votes were to be flipped in those counties, the Connally vote would statistically fall in line with the rest of the state.

From Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., writing in Salon:

The “Connally Anomaly” is not so easily dismissed. In particular because an analysis performed by the National Election Data Archive for Rolling Stone reveals that Connally’s margin of loss to her opponent Thomas Moyer in these counties falls in line with statewide expectations. The anomalous skew, by contrast, is between Kerry and Bush’s numbers.

Connally was heavily outspent and down-ballot, and should not have outpolled Kerry anywhere in the state. While that happens occasionally, in Ohio in 2004, where exit polls showed Kerry winning with 54.2% of the vote, it should raise an eyebrow or two.

Spoonamore, a computer security specialist who has 20 years experience who has done system security work for banks, Telco, EMS, military and others, makes a pitch for the vote counting system that he believes is hardest to hack: hand counted paper ballots. He says that no computerized vote-counting system is safe, and that anyone now – anyone – can hack our voting systems. It isn’t necessarily just Republicans.

Final note: Spoonamore believes that fundamentalist Christians are behind the hacking efforts nationwide, and that they believe their motives are noble: they are saving babies.