A reader's observations prompted this followup. Was Blackwell forced to jettison the routing of Election Night returns through TN-based servers by the exposure of our earlier report?
Cross-posted from ePluribusMedia
On Election Day, November 7, 2006, ePluribus Media reported that technology
developed for live reporting of election results by the Secretary of State of
Ohio was programmed, hosted, and operated by companies that are related
to the Republican National Committee.
On two occasions in recent elections, a third-party source recorded that the website 'election.sos.state.oh.us' was operating at an IP address which falls within the range assigned to service hosted by Chattanooga, TN-based Smartechcorp. The IP address assigned to 'election.sos.state.oh.us', 64.203.98.137, lies between IP addresses assigned to VoterVault.com and NRCC.org which are managed by the RNC and affiliates.
GOP Internet technology guru Mike Connell owns the RNC-affiliate, NewMedia Communications, and its 'non-partisan' spinoff GovTech Solutions. The companies provide campaign and technical services to a "Who's Who" list of Republicans including the 2004 Bush-Cheney effort. Another notable is J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretatry of State of Ohio, who recent coverage of 'pay-to-play' conracting scandals reports to have paid the companies nearly half a million dollars.
As Connell programmed Bush-Cheney 2004, both NewMedia and GovTech Solutions were reported as developers of the Ohio SOS Election Night Project designed by Blackwell to handle the large traffic volume anticipated on November 2, 2004.
Readers of the ePM story observed that the Election Night Dashboard site hosted on GOP service at the Smartechcorp-assigned IP address reported the same real-time election results as Ohio SOS server residing on Ohio IT OARnet network.
The screen grabs provided show that the GOP system reported the same results as the Ohio SOS server did at the same time and, so, was simultaneously accessing Blackwell's official real-time results overnight of November 7, 2006.
The page dependencies provided us suggest that the graphic presentation of
the Dashboard is constructed from identical images and CSS code at either website
but distinct processing must account for the difference in the size of the page
returned to the brower.
After ePluribus Media called attention to 64.203.98.137, it appears Blackwell
may have reconsidered overtly hosting election results data on GOP servers out
of state. On election day 2006, the Ohio IT website clearly held up to traffic that night, so you have to question the point of hosting the election results
on another server in the first place.
Summary:
- We discovered that Blackwell's plan to outsource Election Night Results reporting was to a GOP operative, NewMedia Communications.
- The principal runs services out of the hosting service provided by Smartechcorp in Tennessee.
- We reported these results on eleciton day and from the observations and screencaps provided to us, the Ohio SOS may NOT have routed users of his Election Night Results system to TN this time but, rather, kept them on servers in Ohio.
- Nonetheless, the Smartechcorp systems were still receiving the same live feed as was reported through sos.state.oh.us servers in Ohio.