pudge's Journal: More On Ohio

Quoth the nutters:

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

The answer appears to be yes.

Actually, no.

There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website -- which gave the world the presidential election results -- was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzalesâ(TM)s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Fine. Let's say that these "Republican" web servers manipulated the results.

The web site is not the canonical report. Each county keeps its own election reports on their own internal machines, and they report to the state on its own internal systems, and those results are merely reported on the web site. If there is any discrepancy, not only is it easy to uncover, but it is impossible to hide without a statewide government conspiracy, because you're not just fixing the totals on the web server, but the totals on the internal systems of every county involved.

There were some abnormalities, but as I have mentioned before, a prominent DNC statistician told me directly that they were insufficient to affect the outcome. And nothing has changed since he told me that last September.

The funny thing to me, of course, is that the evidence of "theft" is far weaker in 2004 Ohio than it is in 2004 Washington (the gubernatorial race). And not only is the evidence more significant, but the race was far closer, too. And I don't think the election was stolen here, either.

The Pending Slashdot Story...

[johndiii]

According to the links posted in the pending story [slashdot.org], the address in question (the one that was hosting the the Ohio Secretary of State site) was not in the range of RNC addresses.

If we're going to pursue guilt-by-hosting-company-association, there are probably a few other interesting examples.

For this one, it seems likely that they wanted some extra bandwidth to cover the heavier load of election night. Anyone who thinks that hosting a web site has any relation to manipulating the results is indeed a nutter

Re:

[pudge]

I just pointed out the false headline to the editors, and it is going to be fixed, I believe. I think this is a nonstory, but it could be somewhat interesting I suppose, if people can look at it and conclude "nothing to see here." :-) But we do need to get the facts right, and the headline that stated the RNC controlled the Ohio server was not right.

One of my faves

[nocomment]

When people are trying to sound like they know something about the "election fraud", I typically just tell them that if they just forget about that, I'll forget about how JFK got elected (hint: hundreds of people in alphabetical order all voted simultaneously and in order for JFK at various polling centers around the nation). That usually serves to give some perspective on it, particularly if they happened to be alive then and remember (another hint: I wasn't).