Esquire: Russians may have hacked vote totals

[diva77]

33. Vote hacking could easily be an inside job in USA, not necessarily carried out by Russians.

The votes were shunted through a Republican server on election night, 2004 in Ohio, under Kenneth Blackwell, SOS Ohio and co-chair of Dubya's re-election campaign.

https://www.wired.com/2007/04/did_ohio_electi/

Did Ohio Election Data Run Through Republican Servers?

Election_ohioSlashdot is renewing a controversy that popped up previously but has been re-energized by the recent White House e-mail scandal.

Back in 2004 during the presidential election, the Ohio secretary of state web site, which reports election results after they come in from counties on election day, routed through a hosting company called Smartech Corporation in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Smartech also hosts a range of sites for the Republican National Committee, among them the controversial gwb43.com domain that some White House officials are said to have used for correspondence to evade having their emails disclosed through public records requests.

As a Netcraft search shows, the Ohio SoS site was hosted by Smartech in Tennessee on November 3, 2004 (the election was November 2nd) but then reverted to a different Ohio-based host on November 5 through February 6, 2006.

This information made the rounds last year and now voting activists have seized it as evidence that the RNC controlled the votes on election night in Ohio and altered them. No one has explained how that would work. Hosting a web site that displays election results is not the same as changing votes that are tabulated and first reported at the county level.

Nonetheless, the fact that the SoS election results page passes through a host that is so closely connected to the RNC is worth noting. It’s not a surprise, however, since former Ohio SoS Ken Blackwell was co-chair of President Bush’s re-election campaign. The sleuths at epluribusmedia.org point out that Blackwell’s office revamped the election night reporting system to deliver faster results and handle more traffic and that included outsourcing the hosting on election night to Smartech, a firm that handles a lot of other business for the RNC.