Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix? - Thom Hartmann/Truth-Out
Anonymous, Karl Rove and 2012 Election Fix?Monday, 19 November 2012 16:02
By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks , The Daily Take | News Analysis
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At around 11:25 pm EST on election night, Karl Rove knew something had gone terribly wrong.
Minutes earlier, Fox News called the key battleground state of Ohio for President Obama, sealing his re-election. But as the network took live shots of jubilant Obama supporters celebrating their victory camped outside the Obama re-election headquarters in Chicago, Karl Rove began building a case against the call his employer network had just made.
Rove explained that when Fox called Ohio, only 74% of the vote was in showing President Obama with a lead of roughly 30,000 votes. But, as Rove contended, with 77% reporting according to the Ohio Secretary of State office, the President’s lead had been slashed to just 991 votes.
“We gotta be careful about calling the thing,” Rove said, “I’d be very cautious about intruding in on this process.”
Rove was supremely confident that the numbers coming in from Ohio throughout the night that favored President Obama weren’t indicative of who would win Ohio when all the votes were ultimately tabulated by the state's computers. With a quarter of the vote still out there, Rove was anticipating a shift to the Right just after 11 pm, which, coincidentally, is exactly what happened in 2004.
That year, John Kerry and the entire nation were watching Ohio just after the 11pm hour. Florida had just been called for George W. Bush and according to the Electoral College math whoever won Ohio would win the election. And considering that exit polls from the state showed John Kerry with a substantial lead, there were a lot of tense moments for Karl Rove and the Republicans that night.
Then the clock struck 11:14pm, and the servers counting the votes in Ohio crashed. Election officials had planned for this sort of thing to happen and already contracted with a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee called SMARTech to be the failsafe should the servers in Ohio go down.
As journalist Craig Unger lays bare in his book, Boss Rove, SMARTech was drenched in Republican politics. One of the early founders of the company was Mercer Reynolds who used to the finance chairman of the Republican Party. SMARTech’s top client was none other than the Bush-Cheney campaign itself and SMARTech also did work for Jeb Bush and the Republican National Committee. And it was Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, who ensured that SMARTech received the contract to count votes on election night should the servers go down, which they did at exactly 11:14pm.
Sixty long seconds later the servers came back up in Ohio, but now with vote rerouted through SMARTech in Chattanooga. And, coincidentally, Bush’s prospects for re-election were suddenly a lot brighter. The vote totals that poured into the system from SmartTECH's computer in Chattanooga were flipping the exit polls on their head. The lead Kerry had in the exit polls had magically reversed by more than 6%, something unheard of in any other nation in the developed world, giving Bush the win in Ohio and the presidency for another four years.
Unger further explains in his book that the only independent analysis of what happened in Ohio was done by Richard Hayes Phillips and published in the book, Witness to a Crime. Phillips and his team analyzed more than 120,000 ballots, 127 polls books, and 141 signature books from Ohio’s 2004 election.
Phillips found zero irregularities in vote totals from all the counties that reported results before the servers crashed at 11:14pm. But of the fourteen counties that came in after the crash connected Ohio's election computers to SmartTECH's computers in Chattanooga, every single one of them showed voter irregularities - that all favored George W. Bush.
For example...
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More: http://truth-out.org/news/item/12845-anonymous-karl-rove-and-2012-election-fix
= new reply since forum marked as read
We know that electronic vote machines have been found to flip votes and no telling what all these numbers went through during the time after the server went down. I'll believe that rove is capable and will do what ever he needs to win, I've seen it before. I also believe that the puke party operatives will pretty much do the same to gain control.
False statements or not I don't think you or any one else has given us evidence that supports your take on this.
Generally when I see smoke I find fire. What I'm saying is if someone is so adamantly trying to shoot down a popular thought, many times it turns out that the shooter was wrong all along. Enough times for me to take pause
At any rate you believe what you want and I'll believe what I want.
Peace 
have a good day
If this is true, then the implications are enormous and could take down the entire Republican Party and finally wake Americans up to the fact that our privatized vote system is shockingly flawed and insecure.
In their press release, Anonymous concludes, “We have a warning for Karl – sail again at your own peril. We may just put all the evidence into a tidy little package and give it to a painfully bored nemesis hanging out in a certain embassy in London.”
In an era of internet lulz and digital false flags, we must demand proof for these sort of claims made by Anonymous. But given Karl Rove’s history with elections in Ohio and the known vulnerabilities with our corporate owned electronic voting machines, there may be both smoke and fire with these election night allegations.
That’s why it’s vitally important for Anonymous to release any information or evidence it has about this plot to not just Julian Assange, but to law enforcement authorities as well. Otherwise, the alleged democracy-saving actions of the hacktivist group will instead be regarded as useless internet antics, relegated to the dustbins of history.
Same as OP.
evidence of the fruits of their labour. I really do feel that orange is much more flattering colour for Rove 
I didn't make a video and send it to a site with a donate button, but I did save the planet.
The proof, you say. Well, that's obvious, the planet isn't ruled by aliens, now is it! 
They think they are.. but...
Not so much.
Or VR or whatever the fuck it says.
Circumstances are always innocent, only the people are guilty
When you say, "There's enough evidence to suspect something hinky with this election" I'm certain you are not referring to the video. But, i would like to see the evidence, and so would the DoJ, the USAs, and your local DA. Better get to it.
I'd really like the whole truth at some point in time, but I'm more concerned about holding our Congress Critters feet to the flame and taking advantage of the fact that WE DID WIN.
I know there are other factors that contributed to shutting down the cheating that was going on. 3 lawsuits. LOTS of witnesses and halfway decent coverage if not in the MSM then on social media where myself and so many others told our family that lying and cheating is no way to win an election.
Whatever Anonymous did or did not do they will prove or won't. IF it contributed, then it STILL wouldn't have mattered if we hadn't gone balls to the wall and gotten every possible vote out there that we could. 2014 needs to be an even BIGGER landslide. Not just a MANDATE but a fricken BODY SLAM of the party of obstruction.
MY MOTIVATION IS THAT WE WON DESPITE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS, APPARENT ELECTION TAMPERING AND COUNTLESS HOURS OF FREEPER EFFORT TO THWART THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE.
My motivation is to DO IT AGAIN in 2014. I want to knock these bullies back so far they have to pick up their teeth in 3rd grade. (Metaphorically speaking of course.)
IF all Anonymous has is powerful head game against Karl Rove, I say let them play on WHILE WE KEEP working the DEM process to the hilt and steam roll over these oppositional - defiant, snot - nosed, whining bullies now that we have them down on the ground knowing who is the boss and keeping it that way.
THE BEAT DOWN IS NOT OVER. Analyze later.
THAT'S MY MOTIVATION.
Thanks for asking!!
Making mocking comments about people who are expressing righteous concern about voting integrity is so incredibly offensive to me that I can hardly control my disgust.
I'm very glad to see others pushing back against this abhorrent behavior.
Those who point out the folly of the conspiracy ARE PART OF THE CONSPIRACY!
Are you?
Or are you channeling Peewee Herman?
and that is a lot of hubris on your part.
I'm one of the biggest skeptics you probably will ever encounter. I'm not swayed one way or the other at this point regarding Anon's claim or that the email was from Anonymous. I'm also not swayed that there wasn't an attempt to electronically steal the votes in Ohio by a cabal that would favor the Republicans.
I'm also not stupid enough to declare it emphatically as you do, that it couldn't happen one way or the other.
If there is a conspiracy, which you disavow, and there was no attempt to thwart the conspiracy (read that as "stolen election"
- now that would be really stupid, wouldn't it?
The chances of the likes of you or me learning the truth behind the scenes are about a million to one.
I will tell you one thing about being a true skeptic though, there is no such thing as coincidence.
It is sad to see how many people lack the simple skill of critical reasoning.
Jesus Fucking Christ = Restoring Reason to Election Integrity Madness
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021851707
It is a new affliction, stinging the crazies on both ends of the political spectrum, and they have gone wild bull-horning their beliefs, lack of evidence be damned. The election fraud meme used to force voter ID laws is the supreme example. Now, a post-election mania has filled public fora and cooler minds are having to waste time damping the fires of irrationality. Marcos says it best so far:
Anonymous claims it stopped Karl Rove from hacking the vote
Rove had nothing to do with Orca. This is idiotic. As is this stupid claim that Anonymous stopped anything.
I swear to fucking god, the "Rove was going to steal the election" bullshit is patently ridiculous. And, in fact, it's CT.
So warning here, where people might or might not see it -- I will wield the ban-hammer ruthlessly against anyone who further spreads this shit.
by kos on Sat Nov 17, 2012 - http://www.dailykos.com/comments/1162678/48471137#c642
Now this in an e-mail from Bev Harris:
My e-mail seems to have two recurring themes lately, each from the opposite side of the political spectrum. It goes like this:
"Hey, have you seen this? Anonymous claims to have hacked Karl Rove's intended election manipulation."
And this:
"Are you doing anything about the rampant voter fraud that put Obama in office?"
1. The alleged "hack" by Anonymous may or may not have been real, but if it was, a careful reading indicates that it was not a hack of voting machines, but more akin to the odious phone-jamming scheme used by a Republican operative in New Hampshire some years back. Whether you wear a blue or red political shirt, this kind of attack is nothing to brag about. It involves interfering with get out the vote efforts, and regardless of which side is working on get out the vote, obstructing such efforts is uncool.
There is no credible proof that this Anonymous hack even happened. If it did, it violated the principle of encouraging political participation. We have to be careful about stories such as this, because they can divert important work on election transparency into chasing phantoms.
2. The "rampant voter fraud" claim diverts attention from where wholesale tampering actually takes place. If you plan to rig an election, you do it as an inside job, not with alleged busloads of people casting multiple votes, and not with herds of voter impersonators fooling election judges.
You do it with absentees, you do it by manipulating who can vote, you do it by altering the voting machine counts, you do it by thwarting chain of custody. In other words, it's not the outsiders -- the voters -- where the focus needs to be. Let's keep our eye on the ball. Who handled the ballots? Who watched? Who programmed the machines? Was the list loaded into electronic pollbooks the real one? Was the count interrupted for some reason? Did any ballots disappear? Were people prevented from voting? How do we know that the ballots said to have been mailed in are the same ones that were counted, and how do we know they were put into the pool by real voters rather than an elections worker?
We need to step away from our favorite political candidates to deal with the underlying structural problem. Until we fix transparency problems, actual tampering -- considerably more damaging than anything Anonymous claimed to have done -- will happen over and over.
The real problem that we have to wrap our heads around, educate others about, and solve, is public right to see and authenticate the count.
Germany ruled that the public must be able to see and authenticate every essential step of the election, without need for special expertise, and that no after the fact procedure can be substituted for the right to authenticate the original count.
That is exactly the model we here in the USA need to work towards, but first, we have to help the public understand that public controls over our own elections are the very essence of self-government, and self-government is the basis for all democratic systems.
There are four things the public must be able to see and authenticate:
1) Who can vote (voter list)
2) Who did vote (poll list)
3) Counting of the vote
4) Chain of custody
These are the fundamental issues, and we will restore these to the American public, once we properly identify them and demand these things, with no compromise and no wasting time on side issues, half-measures, or capitulation.
You may ask what you can do to help. I love that question. It's so much better than the passive "what is being done?"
Each major civil rights movement has several stages. We are now moving from the focus group stage, where we have been learning to craft the most accurate description of the problem to be solved, in the most persuasive terms, and into the distribution stage, where we are passing the message -- quite literally -- from person to person to build momentum to help tip the scales in legal and legislative efforts.
So that's what you can do: Learn to discuss election transparency in terms of basic right to self-govern, which is the principle that is the foundation for all democratic systems. To have self-governance, you have to have real, tangible, meaningful transparency.
Specifically, "The public must be able to see and authenticate each essential step of the election, without need for special expertise, and no after-the-fact procedure can be substituted for the right to authenticate the original.
* * * * *
It is obvious who does this stuff and why.
It is tragic to see who falls for it.
Interesting post. 
