Security vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines threaten to skew results in the upcoming national election, says a Republican security expert. Stephen Spoonamore has come forward as a whistleblower willing to testify in an Ohio court case stemming from the 2004 Presidential elections.
Spoonamore, former CEO of Cybrinth, specialist in data management and remote electronic monitoring, and card-carrying member of the GOP, explains in a series of YouTube videos how Diebold e-voting machines can be hacked and manipulated to change vote tallies. The videos were posted by Velvet Revolution, an activist group with the aim of exposing voter fraud and returning to paper ballets.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAyEfovA404The voting machines, according to Spoonamore, communicate with central government systems in the same way mobile phones connect with each other. The machine sends a signal to a tower, is filtered through third-party, corporate-owned computers identifying both sender and receiver, and then the votes-which are anonymous and without any type of paper trail-are then forwarded to the government receiver.
The inherent problem is that third party wireless intercept of information. Spoonamore says without a doubt tabulations can be intercepted and changed before they are sent on to officials. More specifically, as was the case in Ohio in 2004, tabulations were funneled through servers in Chattanooga, TN, owned by SmarTech. Coincidentally, the Bush Administration has used these servers for sending and receiving email to avoid public scrutiny.
Spoonamore, who has helped develop security solutions for MasterCard, American Express, Bloomberg, Boeing, NBC, News Corp., the Dept. of Energy, the US Navy, and the Dept. of State, is on record, in a sworn affidavit, explaining how easily these voting machines can be hacked and manipulated.
In that affidavit, dated September 18, 2008, he mentions the involvement of Mike Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, and a web designer and IT consultant for high-level Republicans. Connell was served with a subpoena on Sept. 22, compelling his testimony about vote-tampering in Ohio in 2004.
That case involves controversial strategist and Bush campaign advisor Karl Rove, who has also been subpoenaed. Why four years later? An Ohio judge finally lifted a stay that was on the case in an effort to avoid litigants' attempts to delay it until after the 2008 elections this November. Spoonamore's testimony was heralded as a catalyst for this event.Spoonamore can't say Connell was directly involved with vote-tampering, but swears Connell knows who was. Until the subpoena, Connell has refused to testify.
Most disturbing about Spoonamore's claims is that there is already a plan in play to swing the Presidential race to John McCain, who he claims will win by 3 electoral votes and 51% of the popular vote. If these claims were made someone less credible, it would be fodder for conspiracy theory.
Why haven't you heard about this all over the news? Good question and not one easily answered. In 2006, former ABC producer and investigative journalist Rebecca Abrahams resorted to a blog post to detail apparent voter fraud in 2004, because ABC lawyers killed the story in fear of lawsuits from Diebold.
Abrahams also posts an interview with a person she calls "Diebthroat," a temporary contractor who worked for Diebold. Diebthroat explains how shortly before a Georgia election in 2002, the president of Diebold instructed him to install a patch in voting machines in specific Georgia counties. Diebthroat said the patches were said to be for fixing the clocks, but the clocks on all machines continued to be broken after the installs. Diebthroat was surprised at the level of access Diebold employees had to the voting machines, before and during Election Day, and at the outcome of the election as traditionally Democrat counties went strongly for Republican candidates.
Diebthroat's story is remarkably similar to former Diebold contractor Chris Hood's, who claims Diebold president Bob Urosevitch himself performed maintenance on the machines. Hood also talks about, in this video posted by Velvet Revolution, being tasked to install broken clock patches on machines shortly before the elections. VR says the video was supposed to air on a major news network two weeks before the 2006 elections, but was pulled.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKnIghBsU58Sure enough, you won't find another major news outlet anywhere near this story. Searches for his name on Google News, Yahoo News, Ask, and MSN brought back only a handful of Internet sites few have ever heard of.
Spoonamore, whose says his love of American democracy outweighs his loyalty to the Republican party, complains Diebold's machines are not just vulnerable to Diebold employees, but also to foreign agents. Both Hood and Spoonamore say the flaws that existed in the machines before still exist. Hood goes so far as to say they were purposefully left in play.
