TECHNOIR (27 page)

            “Oh fuck!” said Mike L. Connell, and those were some of the last words he would speak. Connell, an experienced pilot, was returning from Washington in his single-engine Piper Saratoga on December 19th, 2008, and nearing Akron-Canton Airport, close to his home. He was just three miles away when his plane fell out of the sky and crashed in an upscale neighborhood. He perished in the crash. What caused the plane to nose-dive is unknown and under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Preliminary findings could be released in 2010. Mike L. Connell, 45, leaves behind a wife and four children.

            Leaving behind kids is sad and painful for anyone to contemplate. No child should see their father pass so suddenly. But this isn’t the worst of it for the Connell family. They are also dealing with the strange circumstances behind his death.

            Like a restless spirit lost in this world, Connell’s passing also leaves in limbo an answer to a mystery. An answer that can blow away the dark clouds hanging over the
2004 Presidential Election
and shed light on whether it had been rigged in favor of President George W. Bush over Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry. Whatever the answer may be, perhaps in death, Connell, and his grieving family can give strength to the movement to protect US elections, once considered sacred for Americans. Thus his legacy as a father, an activist, and a professional, can live on with purpose, because it is a legacy now lost. Helping his cause is his sister Shannon, who recently joined a number of liberal activists, journalists and lawyers, who are convinced her brother was murdered for political reasons, specifically so to cover the tracks of those who rigged the 2004 Presidential Election. She was quoted in a 2010 issue of
Maxim
magazine saying if there are signs of foul play, she will file a wrongful-death suit again Karl Rove.

            Connell was a wizard when it came to computers and networking; and IT pro of major-league status. He was also religious; a devout Catholic, and probably a borderline fanatical anti-abortionist. When it came to politics he was also a hardcore player – Connell was Karl Rove’s IT go-to-guy. Rove of course was President Bush’s chief strategist, and a wizard himself when it came to elections and dirty tricks used to win them. Here’s just one case-in-point: In 2000, as Sen. John McCain began gaining on President Bush in the Republican primary, Rove spread rumors the Vietnam War hero and former POW had been a stool pigeon for the North Vietnamese. And that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. It would go even lower – McCain was a homosexual.

            Connell’s first company, GovTech Solutions, was a top IT consultant for the Republican National Committee (RNC). Moreover, he was an IT pro who provided “campaign web services,” as stated      by
SourceWatch.org
, for both Bush campaigns (2000, 2004). During the 2004 election campaign, Connell helped maintain the website for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the anti-Kerry effort that somehow convinced many Americans that Kerry, even though he fought in ‘Nam and killed Viet Cong, was actually not a war hero, and instead “W” was, even though his elitist butt never came close to true combat. Connell also helped manage New Media Communications, another web-service outfit hosting OhioRepublicanParty.com, BushCheney2004.com and BlackwellForOhio.com, who you may not be familiar with, but who is a person who plays a major part in this tragedy.

            But when it comes to Connell’s untimely death, someday it might come out that it was ultimately linked to what he did for the state of Ohio on Election Day 2004. GovTech was running the website and servers used by the government of Ohio to tabulate the vote that day. His website showed the Ohio vote count in real time; a website hosted on his GovTech servers. Thus the state of Ohio had outsourced their electronic vote-counting network to a die-hard Republican working for Karl Rove.

            Essentially, Connell’s connection to Republicans can be summed up this way: Connell had done IT work for each election Rove has been rumored to have rigged – a Senate vote in Georgia 1998, Presidential Election 2000 in Florida, and Ohio 2004.

            Was Connell a GOP-hired super hacker? Bent on helping Republican candidates manipulate the vote on election days by electronically spying on vote counts being tabulated by new and suspect electronic-voting machines connected to networks that had secret links to
“Man-in-the-Middle”
attacks? Or was he privy to this sabotaging, but simply afraid, with good reason, to blow the whistle? As speculation builds, the answers to these questions could be why his plane took a dive and he took the fall for the 2004 rigging of the Presidential Election.

            Fast-forward to September, 2009, when a strange document was mailed to the FBI, Connell’s wife, the National Transportation Board, and to Cliff Arnebeck, an attorney who resides in Columbus, Ohio, and who is sometimes described as an elections’ fraud attorney. Arnebeck says the document detailed the operation to get Connell. “It was a hit,” says Arnebeck, describing in essence the writer’s intent, who went by the name Mark Felt, a name now famous because he was “Deep Throat.”

            “Connell was terminated for national security reasons,” Arnebeck says. The document stated, for example, that Connell’s plane has to be “sanitized.” The site was cleaned up within hours; everything gone by the next morning, said Arnebeck. Connell’s wife told
Maxim
her husband’s BlackBerry, which was loaded with sensitive information, is missing, yet she managed to find the ear bud he used for the BlackBerry. Arnebeck suggests the so-called accident is covered in fingerprints of those working for one of America’s growing corporate militias. Moreover, if this is a hoax, then the hoaxer is in serious trouble because it’s a federal crime to try to trick the FBI, adds Arnebeck.

            For several years Arnebeck has been investigating the 2004 Presidential Election and some of the strange voting anomalies that occurred in Ohio. Anomalies that favored “W” and cheated Democratic candidate John Kerry. To that end, Arnebeck filed a lawsuit on behalf of voters from central Ohio – mostly marginalized minorities – who he believes were either purged from rolls, unlawfully discouraged to vote, or their precincts were deliberately shorted voting machines. He filed the lawsuit,
King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell
, in 2006. Blackwell, an African-American, is the former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a staunch Republican, whose office (Ohio Secretary of State) runs all federal and state elections for Ohio. He was Ohio’s Chief Elections Official, yet during this exact same time, he was also
the co-chair
of The Committee to Re-elect George W. Bush 2004. Don't forget the state of Ohio had outsourced its vote tabulation and vote-count website (election.sos.state.oh.us) to Connell’s GovTech. And as Arnebeck’s lawsuit went forward, Connell became a key witness in the case. A witness he subpoenaed for a deposition that was took place hours before the
2008 Presidential Election. Connell attorneys fought hard in a hearing to nix the deposition, as Connell appeared anxious and “beet red,” stated reports. No such luck, the judge ordered him to talk. His plane went down roughly 45 days later. And for now, his deposition remains sealed.

            “Mike Connell has been called the Forrest Gump of IT consultants,” says Arnebeck. “He’s everywhere Rove was when an election was suspected of being rigged.” And, he adds, “Rove was way ahead of the curve” when it came to computers and networks counting huge numbers of election ballots.

            When I spoke to Arnebeck in 2010 he showed an obvious empathy towards Connell and his family. Nevertheless, he is going to continue to pursue the rigging of the 2004 Presidential Election for Bush. There’s too much evidence to not pursue. Plus there’s too much at stake –  future elections, and future generations, depend on people like Arnebeck.

            How Connell becameinvolved in Arnebeck’s lawsuit starts in 2006. But first, Arnebeck’s lawsuit, and how it unfolded starts at dawn on the first Tuesday of November, 2004, in Ohio. It was a tight race that year, and Ohio was considered “Ground Zero.” Whoever took Ohio and its 20 Electoral Votes would win the Presidential Election. Simple as that. But what wasn’t easy, for either candidate, was winning Ohio, one of the most politically, culturally and financially diverse states of the Union.

            Ohio is home to 11.5 million people, many concentrated in several urban centers dominated by black and white middle-to-lower-class “blue collar” Americans. Many of these Ohio urbanites have turned to the Democrats over the last thirty years. And thus they were motivated to vote for John Kerry, especially after being practically dragged to the polls by nearly a dozen urban-focused, left-leaning grassroots efforts to get the vote out, such as America Coming Together, which had its people going door-to-door 18 months before Election Day! Helping matters for the Democrats was the crappy Ohio job market, which started to tank January of 2001, the month “W” took office. Indeed, Ohio lost more than tens-of-thousands of manufacturing jobs under Bush.

            Surrounding these Ohio urban cores like a massive doughnut are suburbs and “exurbs” that reach far out into the Ohio farmland. These suburbs and their tract homes and well-trimmed lawns are jammed with middle-to-upper crust whites, many devoted to their corporate employer. Thus they approved of Bush’s pro-corporate agenda. But they were also driven by calls from Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to keep the War on Terror floored to the proverbial car mat. Or were these calls War on Terror propaganda? During the roasting Ohio summer of 2004, federal and local agents publicly indicted – basically paraded out in front of the entire world – Columbus, Ohio resident and Somalian immigrant Nuradin Abdi, who had been arrested eight months before at dawn the day after Thanksgiving 2003. Federal agents said Abdi had plans to shoot-up a local mall. And during his very-public court appearance in 2004, he disturbingly shook his head for no apparent reason while also muttering to himself, sending a chill through white, conservative (suburban) Columbus. This incident, of course, would be eclipsed, on a national level, when just days before the election, Osama bin Laden released a tape to the media.

            Lastly, the vast Ohio countryside. Voters here were also gaga for Bush, but sided more with W’s religious, evangelical Christian character which he loved to flex while leading the country. In the Ohio heartland, talking politics on the pulpit – supposedly unconstitutional – is an every-Sunday morning occurrence. Indeed, evangelical Christians from the Buckeye state really didn’t have a choice, considering many were said to be brainwashed by their mega-churches, which in Ohio, operate their own TV stations and give away free cars to converts. Imagine what would happen if you were openly rooting for the other guy (read Satan)? You could find your inglorious self on TV and have your car taken away.

            The bottom line is, when it comes to Ohio voting demographics, no matter how diverse, is the fact that if you can motivate Ohio’s urban centers to get out and vote for your candidate, you have a good chance of winning.

            And on the day of days, as a cold rain fell in Ohio, the urban peoples of Ohio were motivated. As the morning light tried hard to fight through a sick grey soup, long lines started to grow at urban Ohio voting precincts. For the most part, these snake-ish lines only formed in Ohio cities, nowhere else in the state. Lines right out the door and into the rain. But
most
city people waited and waited. (How I am so sure? I waited with them. For nearly three hours I stood in a north Columbus precinct to vote.) Certainly a lot of voters abandon their lines; some experts believe tens-of-thousands of urban voters left without casting a ballot. Kerry lost that day, 2,860,000 votes to 2,740,000. Just 100,000 votes short.

            Making urban Ohioans wait in line, however, was just one tactic from an election-stealing playbook the GOP used so to steal the White House. Seeing a huge voter turnout on Nov. 2nd was inevitable; Republicans working for Ohio’s 88 county Board of Elections deliberately shorted the number of voting machines needed for urban Ohio precincts. One high-ranking Republican who worked in my county’s election board (Columbus, Ohio, the epicenter of Ground Zero for 2004), had earlier in the year been on the receiving end of a $10,000 gift from Diebold, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines. A manufacturer based in Ohio, owned by a family that financially and verbally supported Bush. Diebold’s CEO even told a GOP fund raising crowd he was going to “deliver” the election to ‘ole W!

            Here’s more bullshit that occurred that day:

•           Days before the vote, Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell, who’s not only running Ohio’s vote but also helping to run President Bush’s re-election campaign, issues a directive that says voters must vote in the precinct they live in. Then with hours to go, Blackwell re-shuffled the numbering of Ohio’s voting precincts, causing confusion and chaos at precincts which would soon be overwhelmed by long lines. It didn’t help matters that Republicans had also hired lawyers they stationed at these urban precincts so to challenge voters who were stunned to find they were in the wrong precinct and being turned away.

•           As the day went on, some Ohio county Board of Election offices were visited by “technicians” of Triad Government Services, Inc., which had manufactured thousands of voting machine tabulators for Ohio. These technicians “adjusted the tabulators” from an unknown number of voting machines, said Arnebeck. The tabulator is a counting mechanism within certain voting machines located at the Board of Elections. These particular tabulators were making the final count for their county before forwarding their vote to a statewide count. On election days, votes on a county tabulator start at 0 for each candidate. Arnebeck says these technicians may have adjusted the vote count by taking some away from Kerry, while boosting Bush’s count. In the stunning and definitive documentary
Free For All!
by John Ennis, he interviews a former Ohio Board of Election's Deputy Director for Hocking County, Sherole Eaton, who says when the Triad technician showed up unexpectedly at her county board of  elections office on Nov. 2nd, 2004, she didn't think anything of it – at first. But then he immediately began taking voting machines apart, she said. “All he did was work on the tabulators,” Eaton told Ennis. “And then he left. And they went to 44 counties and did the same thing.” Eaton later would tell her county and state leadership she wanted an investigation. Blackwell fired her soon after. His explanation: She wasn’t a team player. Triad, by the way, is owned by the Rapp family of Xenia, Ohio. They are evangelical Christians and big-time GOPers, as in large cash donors. But it gets worse: Rapp Systems Corporation “sells commemorative editions of the Palm Beach County, Florida ‘butterfly ballot’ that confused elderly Democratic voters in 2000 who mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore,” wrote independent journalist Steven Rosenfeld, who works for
Alternet.org
.