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The 2008 and 2012 elections.
John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, was not a fan of Karl Rove, but his campaign hired Paul Manafort to assist the campaign for a time. In 2007, Manafort had a lobbying firm called 3EDC, which listed New Media (Mike Connell) and Airnet (Jeff Averbeck) as “strategic partners.” (It was election attorney Bob Fitrakis who first reported this connection.) McCain, however, fired 3EDC before the 2008 election, which Obama won.
In 2012, Ohio Secretary of State John Husted (R), was caught allowing ES&S to install uncertified software patches throughout Ohio just before the election. Fitrakis, who made this alarming discovery as well, sued to compel Husted to remove the patches. Although the court dismissed the case as premature (no damages), she said that she would be “happy” to consider ordering a recount after the election. Fitrakis apparently deemed this unnecessary when Obama won re-election, triggering the infamous on air melt down of political consultant Karl Rove (George W. Bush’s former senior advisor) when Ohio didn’t go as Rove had expected.
The hacker group Anonymous has claimed that it prevented Karl Rove’s associates from stealing the 2012 election. As noted by Salon, however, it has never produced evidence to prove its claim.
Meanwhile, in 2016, citizen advocates discovered that Husted had allowed election officials throughout Ohio to disable voting machines’ “ballot image” audit functions. Litigation again ensued, and the court again ruled in Husted’s favor. Trump proceeded to defy the exit polls and win the state in 2016.
Ohio’s current Secretary of State is Frank LaRose who chose Ken Blackwell to lead his transition team and is in the midst of purging more than 200,000 supposedly “inactive” voters from the state’s voter rolls despite numerous concerns, including the recent discovery that 1600 active voters were mistakenly included on the purge list. The vendor responsible for this “mistake”? ES&S.
The National Election Defense Coalition, Public Citizen, OSET, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and other election-integrity groups have asked the House Administration Committee, which is chaired by Representative Zoe Lofgren, to conduct a hearing and call the vendors to provide testimony, presumably about ownership and other security concerns. But it is not at all clear that the Committee will oblige.
Even if it does subpoena the vendors, it is unclear how deep the Democratic House majority will be willing to dig. The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer (D), co-wrote the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which allocated billions of dollars for new voting machines without requiring a paper trail. Not only that, Hoyer joined with Mitch McConnell and Bob Ney — who later went to prison for accepting bribes from Diebold lobbyist Jack Abramoff— to defeat legislation that would have included such a requirement. Hoyer also sits on the International Foundation for Electoral Systems with Dan Sweitzer, Tad DeVine, and Ken Blackwell.
Vendor lies re: election security
Voting machine vendors have an alarming history of deception. In July 2018, cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter reported that, despite ES&S’s prior denials, ES&S’s election-management system (EMS) computers were sold with remote access software between 2000 and 2006. ES&S won’t say where it installed the remote access software that it lied about, but claims it’s been removed. According to Zetter’s article, Diebold’s EMS computers were sold with remote access software as well, and Dominion refused to comment.
The installation of remote access software in EMS computers is a big deal because these are centralized county or state computers used to program all voting machines in the county or state. According to Zetter’s reporting, some of these computers also include the central tabulators that aggregate all precinct totals.
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