HE'S BACK!!! Karl Rove, King of Election Fraud!

Craig Unger has written a new book "Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power" about the mastermind of George Bush’s two successful but crooked runs at the US Presidency.

Rove, as Unger explains, is at the center of two of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration. The Valerie Plame Wilson affair and the U.S. attorneys’ scandal. Rove was ALMOST indicted for the Plame affair but as we all know, the 13th commandment is not to get caught, and the 14th commandment is if you get caught not to get prosecuted. (Especially easy if you have gamed the judicial system with cronies who selectively prosecute only members of the other Party!)

Rove wasn’t gotten rid of, sadly, with the passing of the Bush administration. Today Unger calls Rove the most powerful political OPERATIVE in America, in charge of the American Crossroads Super Pac and the non-profit affiliate, Crossroads GPS. Rove has offered up a massive war chest for Mitt Romney’s campaign. According to Mr. Unger the overriding and massive ambition of Karl Rove is “the forging of a historic re-alignment of America’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.” We all know that party will NOT represent the bottom 99% of the citizenry.

Unger’s explains the first phase of Rove’s rise to power back in Texas:

“.... he took an issue that seemed obscure at the time, known as tort reform. It’s giving the rights of people to collect in product liability cases. And he went to Philip Morris, who put him on his payroll, and to big pharmaceutical companies and so forth and said, "Look, you guys risk billions and billions of dollars in product liability. Give a few million to my candidates, and we will take over the Texas Supreme Court, we’ll take over the Texas legislature, we’ll put George W. Bush in as governor, and we will save you billions of dollars." And he did precisely that. And he ended up with—he flipped the—the Texas Supreme Court was completely dominated by Democrats. It became completely Republican. And he ended up with some very loyal campaign contributors, like Bob Perry—who is no relation to Rick Perry—Harold Simmons and so forth. These are Texas billionaires. And they’ve stuck with him for about 30 years.”

Perhaps Rove’s greatest evil victory thus far was during the 2004 election when he engineered colossal election corruption which guaranteed the White House for Bush another illegitimate term. He allegedly skewed the voter results from Ohio by colluding with its Republican Secretary of State as well as a pro-Republican Party corporation for, among other things, electronic vote counting called SMARTech.

The following excerpts are from a 2007 article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman on the incredible election corruption in Ohio in 2004 and how it gave the election fraudulently to Bush instead of Kerry, again with a great deal of help from Ken Blackwell The Secretary of State of Ohio who was a “some friends help you move bodies” staunch Republican. He and Karl Rove cronied up it seems to ensure the American people did not decide the 2004 election, as they were not allowed to decide the 2000 election. Instead that power went to the Republican Party machine.

"... a critical late night period after the presidential election of 2004. In these crucial hours, computerized vote tallies may have been shifted to move the Ohio vote count from John Kerry to George W. Bush, giving Bush the presidency.

"Earlier that day, Rove and Bush flew into Columbus. Local election officials say they met with Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Columbus. Also apparently in attendance was Matt Damschroder, executive director of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections.

"These four men, along with Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, were at the core of a multi-pronged strategy that gave Bush Ohio's twenty Electoral College votes, and thus the presidency. Bennett and Damschroder held key positions on election boards in the state's two most populous counties, with the biggest inner city concentrations of Democratic voters.

"There were four key phases to the GOP's election theft strategy:

"Prior to the election, the GOP focused on massive voter disenfranchisement, with a selective reduction of voter turnout in urban Democratic strongholds. Blackwell issued confusing and contradictory edicts on voter eligibility, registration requirements, and provisional ballots; on shifting precinct locations; on denial and misprinting of absentee ballots, and more. Among other things, election officials, including Bennett, stripped nearly 300,000 voters from registration rolls in heavily Democratic areas in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo.

"On election day, the GOP focussed on voter intimidation, denial of voting rights to legally eligible ex-felons, denial of voting machines to inner city precincts, malfunctioning of those machines, destruction of provisional ballots and more.

"In Franklin, Cuyahoga and other urban counties, huge lines left mostly African-American voters waiting in the rain for three hours and more. A Democratic Party survey shows more than 100,000 voters failed to vote due to these lines, which plagued heavily Democratic inner city precincts (but not Republican suburban ones) throughout the state. The survey shows another 50,000 ballots may have been discarded at the polling stations. In addition, to this day, more than 100,000 machine-rejected and provisional ballots remain uncounted. The official Bush margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.

snip

"Ultimately, however, it is the GOP's computerized control of the vote count that may have been decisive. ....

snip

"Despite the massive disenfranchisement of Ohio Democrats, there is every indication John Kerry won Ohio 2004. Exit polls shown on national television at 12:20am gave Kerry a clear lead in Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico. These "purple states" were Democratic blue late in the night, but, against virtually impossible odds, all turned Bush red by morning.

"Along the way, Gahanna, Ohio's "loaves & fishes" vote count, showed 4,258 ballots for Bush in a precinct where just 638 people voted. Voting machines in Youngstown and Columbus lit up for Bush when Kerry's name was pushed. Rural Republican precincts registered more than 100% turnouts, while inner city Democratic ones went as low as 7%. Warren County declared a "Homeland Security" alert, removed the ballot count from public scrutiny, then recorded a huge, unlikely margin for Bush.

snip

"But the most critical reversals may have come as exit polls indicated that despite massive Democratic disenfranchisement, and even with preliminary vote count manipulations, Kerry would win Ohio by 4.2%, a margin well in excess of 200,000 votes.

"The key to that reversal may be electronic. It has now become widely known that the same web-hosting firm that served a range of GOP websites, including the one for the Republican National Committee, also hosted the official site that Blackwell used to report the Ohio vote count.

"... the RNC tech network's hosting firm is SMARTech.com, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. SMARTech hosts georgew.bush.com, mc.org and gop.com among other Republican web domains, in a bank basement.

"Furthermore, the same hosting site that handled redirections from Blackwell's "official" site also handled the White House e-mail accounts that have become central to investigations of the Gonzales purge of eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were themselves involved in vote fraud investigations. [these emails were suspiciously later erased and the alleged person who erased them, Mike Connell, killed in a plane crash.]

"Conflicts of interest in programming services and remote-access capability appear throughout the RNC's computer networks, Rove's secret White House e-mail, and the electronic vehicles used by Blackwell to finally reveal his "official" presidential vote counts for Ohio 2004.

"One factor may be Ohio's electronic touch-screen voting systems, on which were cast more than 800,000 votes in an election decided by about one-seventh that total. Such vulnerabilities, among other things, have been confirmed in exhaustive reports by Conyers's Committee, by the Government Accountability Office, by the Carter-Baker Commission, by Princeton University, by the Brennan Center, and by others.

"But overall, the electronic record of every vote in Ohio was transmitted to the Secretary of State's office, and hosted in real time in Chattanooga. Under such circumstances, the joint hosting of the White House e-mail system and accessibility by Blackwell and Rove to the same computer networks linked to the Ohio vote count, takes on an added dimension”

Craig Unger writes of the corporation SMARTech:

And this company started off as a very legitimate high-tech company in Chattanooga during the dot-com boom. It later reformed under a different name and different ownership, but by then it had become very much a political operation. So, this was a highly, highly partisan Republican high-tech company. It hosted—its biggest clients included the Bush-Cheney campaign, it included Jeb Bush, it included the Republican National Committee. It streamed live the convention, the Republican convention.

And somehow or other, in 2004, in the state of Ohio, which was the single most crucial state in the Electoral College, when it came to the actual voting, the secretary of state of Ohio, a guy named Ken Blackwell—and the secretary of state’s job is to—part of it is to ensure fair, nonpartisan elections—happened to be co-chair of the Bush campaign. Now, there’s no conflict there. And he gave a contract to host the fail oversight for the Republican—rather, for the votes in 2004, to none other than SMARTech. And this is where things went a little crazy.

snip

Right, Well, about at 11:14 p.m., things started to happen, exactly 11:14 p.m. And as the votes came in, it was clear it was going to be an all-nighter in terms of the results. And around 11:00, Florida was called for Bush, and that meant the entire fate of the election hinged on Ohio. So, suddenly—excuse me—the servers for the [Ohio] secretary of state’s computers were flooded with queries.

... And they needed to lock into the fail oversight in Chattanooga with SMARTech. And this is where the results went a little crazy. And suddenly, an enormous number of irregular returns came in, and the votes shifted. The exit polls had shown Kerry winning Ohio, and therefore the election. And it looked like he had won the presidential election. I remember that day vividly because I was getting reports from the exit polls, and I went around telling people it looked like Kerry had won. But there was a 6.7 percent difference between the exit polls and the actual results. And as a result, the election ended up going to Bush. And that was the entire story.

snip

—one of the things that’s very interesting is how evidence disappeared again and again and again in this case. And what you saw is that in all of these scandals—in the U.S. attorneys scandal and the Valerie Plame scandal—Rove’s emails were subpoenaed, and they were hosted at SMARTech. And, oops, millions of emails mysteriously disappeared. Now, these were supposedly under the—protected by the Presidential Preservation Records Act [Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act], and the destruction of government documents is a very, very serious crime. But every attempt to investigate turns up naught.

Unger sees more serious election manipulation occurring again under the effective machinations of Karl Rove and others, with Republican Party-loyal or even Democratic Party-loyal corporations becoming more and more involved with election processing and oversight. Winning uber alles in gamesmanship never statesmanship-oriented American politics.

Could this happen again? I think—you know, I think electronic voting is very, very dangerous, and it’s very easy to manipulate. But I also found evidence in Ohio of extraordinary kinds of fraud that could happen with punchcard ballots, as well, through very elaborate and byzantine means of—known as cross-voting. And I think a lot of people don’t realize, when you go into a voting booth and you see another voting booth nearby, if you voted the same way in the adjoining booth, in the wrong booth, or if your punchcard is counted by the different computer, it would register to a different vote. And we saw this happened—

snip

And we saw a lot of that in Ohio. And the giveaway was in an African-American precinct, where there were third-party people on the ballot there, including a white supremacist—someone linked to a white supremacist party. And suddenly in this African-American precinct, this—and African Americans tend to be very, very disciplined Democratic voters. They’ve been 95 percent Democratic in the past. And suddenly, this man who is linked to a white supremacist got 40 percent of the vote. And you could see exactly what had happened.

snip

He [Rove] faces, and the Republican Party faces, an extraordinary challenge in the—with the Hispanic boom. There are now 50 million Hispanics in the United States. In 2020, at the current rate of growth, there will be 70 million. If they start to vote, they tend to lean heavily Democratic, and you will start to see states like Texas and Arizona flip from red to blue. And Rove is trying to stop that. And one campaign he’s supported is what is known as a campaign fighting voter fraud. And as I found out, I think the fraud about—the Brennan Center at the NYU School of Law says the fraud about—voter fraud is itself a fraud. And there have only been 10 documented cases of people voting under false names in the first decade of this century. So, why—but in response to that minuscule number, there are campaigns in more than 30 states to have voter—require voter IDs and so forth. This will inhibit voting from new immigrants, from minorities, from the elderly and so forth, who, again, lean heavily Democratic.

Boss Rove. How can this cockroach of a human being, and others like him, continue to game and effectively annihilate the democratic system? Apparently, very easily.

[cross-posted on correntewire and open salon]