The outcome of the 2004 Ohio General Election has always been a thorn in my side. I was tracking it on election night and it never made sense to me. Never.

Over time, evidence has emerged that supports the allegation that Ohio's vote data made an unscheduled detour through Chatanooga, TN and during that stop, was doctored to make sure George W. Bush won Ohio and the election.

FreePress.org:

Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, Spoonamore declared: "The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control." Spoonamore also swore that "...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers." Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio's 2004 election votes to SmarTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a company owned by Republican partisans as one of the most censored stories in the world.

This is one story where a picture really is worth a thousand words. Click the thumbnail at the top of the page to see the larger view of the chart. The part you need to pay attention to are the red arrows. They illustrate how the data flow could have been leveraged to tweak results in Bush's direction under the careful oversight of Ken Blackwell, Ohio's corrupt Secretary of State.

SmarTech has an interesting genealogy. It was run by the late Michael Connell, IT guy for Karl Rove and the Bush family. He also ran GovTech, the company contracted by the state of Ohio (Blackwell) to handle the IT aspects of return processing. Connell was closely associated with the Donatelli clan and other notorious Republican bad guys. From Plaintiffs' brief (PDF):

A group of academic researchers functioning under the rubric of ePluribus Media discovered and reported, shortly after the 2006 election, that a partisan Republican company, SmarTech, was hosting the Ohio Secretary of State's vote count for both the 2004/2006 elections. Collaborative research with a member of this network, holding a PhD in a scientific field, and establishment of a fact/expert relationship with Stephen Spoonamore led to plaintiffs’ counsel Arnebeck and Fitrakis meeting with U.S. House Representatives Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, and U.S. House Representatives Chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations Oversight, Kucinich, to discuss the possibility of bringing witnesses Stephen Spoonamore and Michael Connell before their respective committees. This was in fulfillment of plaintiffs’ commitment to help gain federal involvement in the inquiry into the election theft of 2004 as part of the settlement concept for this case. This collaboration was also the basis upon which plaintiffs were able to establish relationship between Michael Connell’s work on behalf of Karl Rove in elections, and Connell’s work on behalf of the tobacco industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups, including the front group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, that operated as a purportedly independent expenditure group in the 2004 presidential election. Plaintiffs’ trial counsel had previously been involved in successful litigation against the Ohio and United States Chamber of Commerce in connection with their illegal expenditures of secret corporate money to influence the outcome of Ohio Supreme Court elections over the 2000 through 2004 election cycles.

Here's another disturbing quote from the brief:

In 2009, a CIA expert on the rigging of elections in foreign countries described at a meeting of the Election Assistance Commission just such a man-in-the-middle attack in the notorious 2004 Ukraine presidential election. The unraveling of the Ukrainian presidential election fraud had the help of overheard cell phone conversations directing the cover-up of the rigging operation. On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.

I've been following this since 2004 and I don't intend to stop now. Having evidence of a built-in architecture for vote fraud is, I believe, just the tip of an iceberg that should begin to thaw any time now. In the meantime, let this argument from the brief resonate with each and every one of us who know in our gut that Republicans steal elections they can't win, whether by fraud or by disenfranchisement.