IT expert compelled by fed. court to testify on '04 Ohio election administration

e Pluribus Media Journal reported that today, Monday November 4, Computer IT expert Mike Connell will be forced by a federal judge to testify about what he knew about the construction of computer architecture in the 2004 election in Ohio.

By veteran Ohio politics reporter John Michael Spinelli:

Columbus, Ohio: With only a couple more days until the nation votes, the news from yesterday's federal court hearing in Cleveland that Mike Connell, an IT expert who was working for then-Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in Ohio on election nights in 2004 and 2006, will come in to testify on what he knows about the computer architecture setup on those election nights and whether Bush wrongfully won Ohio and a second term in the White House and whether such systems still exist, is as nail biting as any final episode of "24" when anti-terrorist maverick agent Jack Bauer saves the day by neutralizing a nuclear bomb from exploding.

In an email message to OhioNewsBureau Saturday, chief plaintiff lawyer Clifford O. Arnebeck, whose 2006 lawsuit alleging voter suppression in 2004 has now morphed into an attempt to prevent the possible corrupt activities that a man of interest like Connell can shed light on from happening again in three days, was in the Carl Stokes Federal Court Building in Cleveland Friday, along with Connell and his trio of defense attorneys. "At the end of the day yesterday at the US District Court, Judge Solomon Oliver denied Michael Connell's motion to quash the subpoena issued for his deposition testimony, and ordered the deposition to take place at noon on Monday November 3, 2008 in Cleveland," Arnebeck wrote.

Arnebeck and others have long known that Connell was a key inside IT contractor for Ken Blackwell in the administration of the 2004 and 2006 elections, at the same time he was managing the IT function for the Bush Presidential campaigns and other Republican partisan campaigns, from 2000 to 2004 to 2006.

Arnebeck and his his cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore , who is lending his credibility and knowledge to the allegation contained in the King Lincoln case before US District Judge Algernon in Columbus, have identified Connell as a key witness to Karl Rove's various maneuvers affecting elections during this decade.

Connell's defense attorneys, from the powerful Columbus law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan and Aronoff , have sought to delay their client having to sit and testify until after Tuesday's General Election. Connell, who has worked for the Bush family for decades, with assignments that included working in various positions for Jeb and George W. Bush, switched Republican teams a while back and teamed up with Arizona Sen. John McCain. The underdog Republican has in the remaining weeks of this election exuded a unique air of confidence that he can win Ohio, and maybe other states, despite trailing his opposition in most states. This air of supreme confidence troubles Arnebeck and Spoonamore, who supports McCain and knows Connell from professional acquaintances. In Ohio, depending on what polls are used, the race between the two is either within the margin of error (meaning it's a statistical dead heat) or shows Obama up by as many as 12 percentage points.

Election watchers and researchers who have been tracking the trail of Connell through their own methods of cyber sleuthing for years, believe Connell and his associates may have compromised the presidential election in Ohio in 2004 by inserting a computer, among other tactics, into the Ohio secretary of state's vote information transferal system. Such tampering, they say, could explain how votes were "tuned" to Bush and away from Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president that year. Experts, such asSpoonamore, an expert on data security, thought the election results turned odd in a dozen or so Ohio counties late on Election Day.

Gleaned from privileged sources, Arnebeck thinks Connell will "not lie" if he's asked pointed questions on what he knows about the work he and his company did for Blackwell then, and whether any vestiges of that work, such as secret cyber back-doors or other computer architecture work, still exist and whether they are in place to again flip votes from Obama to McCain for this election like some believe happened four years ago.

The reference to the popular TV series "24" may not be so far fetched as it seems. The star of that series is always chasing the bad guys against a ticking clock that usually has some explosive device attacked to it. The explosive device in Ohio, while not a bomb with devastating potential, could be aDoomesday Machine for voting that operates to the benefit of Republicans when the vote is close enough, as it could be in Ohio, so that the cyber thievery of the system can do its work with little to no detection.

"This sends a signal to every member of Karl Rove's team of 'electricians' assigned to fix vote counts in Tuesday's election. When you turn a switch to flip a lot of votes, just think of it as turning the key on a jail house door, behind which you will be spending a lot of years," Arnebeck warned Rove and others who have malicious ideas about subverting the will of voters, as he suspects occurred during previous elections.