Netcraft Shows Smartech Running Ohio Election Servers

goombah99 writes "Netcraft is showing that an event happened in the Ohio 2004 election that is difficult to explain. The Secretary of State's website, which handles election reporting, normally is directed to an Ohio-based IP address hosted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. On Nov. 3 2004, Netcraft shows the website pointing out of state to a server owned by Smartech Corp. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers, Smartech's block of IP addresses 64.203.96.0 – 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire range of addresses owned by the Republican National Committee. Smartech hosted the recently notorious gbw43.com domain used from the White House in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, from which thousands of White House emails vanished." Update: 04/25 01:24 GMT by KD : ePluribus Media published a piece called Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again on election eve 2006, when a similar DNS switch to Smartech occurred. They have been investigating the larger story of IT on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for two years.

Comments

Re:Misunderstanding

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

I've looked into a lot of these claims, and most of them are nonsense.

That may be true, but let me share a personal anecdote. Studying in Ohio during 2004, I was glad that my vote might "count" for something, and eagerly anticipated the elections. Being in a (rich and somewhat elitist) college town, you can imagine that liberal sentiment was widespread. Sure, there were a few Bush supporters, but almost everyone I knew of planned on voting Kerry. This is a sizable group of people, several thousand.

The (Republican) voting officials assigned us just TWO voting machines, which coincidentally turned out to be the two oldest in the county. One broke after about an hour in use.

Personally, I ended up standing in line almost 11 hours to vote. Some people stayed in excess of 13 hours (by far the highest in the nation). Needless to say, our votes didn't make it into the county tallies.

Meanwhile, the "townies" (rural and overwhelmingly Bush supporters according to results) had surplus machines, and faced no wait.

I'm not saying that Kerry would have won anyway, but just the brazenness of these people's anti-competitive activities astounded me. I can certainly believe that lesser forms of the same or similar methods were enforced in other areas of the state. IIRC, Ken Blackwell, then Secretary of State (no idea if he still is), said that he would do whatever it took to re-elect Bush. I think that's a quote, but I'm not certain. Certainly, this implies no illegal activity, but given the political climate, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.

Re:Breaking News

[pinchhazard]

"Losing" does not mean that they are killing more of "us" than we are "them."

Losing means we are losing our country's dignity by continuing our unprovoked invasion of another country.

Losing means we are losing our brightest stars, sacrificing for political reasons those who would most readily pick up arms in defense of this country. This includes many of our bravest and brightest. What would do more good for this country, having a soldier in Iraq, toiling in endless war, or having that person back at home, raising their children to become good people like themselves?

Losing primarily means that this is not considered by either side to be a conventional war, with winners and losers. The violence and indignation will go on for as long as we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it will continue after we leave. The fighting will continue indefinitely. And as such, given that we are foreign invaders, and our "enemies" are defending their home, we cannot "win."