Unsurprising! 2004 Presidential Election Was Probably Hacked

Think back about seven years.  It's election day and the numbers are looking close.  Much like the 2000 election came down to the state of Florida, it's beginning to look like this year's contest is going to be settled in Ohio.  Fortunately for the Democrats, the exit polling is looking very good for Senator John Kerry.  Hope is in the air and it's beginning to look like George W. Bush, a man who technically didn't even win the previous election, is finally going to be sent packing.  But as the returns start to come in from Ohio that night, the numbers suddenly start trending the other way.  Despite weak exit polling all day, George W. Bush suddenly emerges victorious in Ohio and democratic pollsters are suddenly left extremely confused.  How could they have been so wrong in their calculations?

Turns out they probably weren't.

New court filings indicate that servers put in place by SmarTech, a partisan Republican organization with direct ties to the White House, may have tampered with the results.  The SmarTech servers were ostensibly included as backups to carry out vote counting in the event of a crash by the primary servers.  However, late in the evening on election night, vote counting was in fact shifted over to the SmarTech servers even though the primary servers were in perfect working order.  The time of the data shift naturally coincides with the turning of the tide from Kerry to Bush.  Moreover, upon further inspection of the recently-made-public architectural maps, IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore has concluded that the SmarTech servers were actually designed with this very purpose in mind, and not, in fact, as a redundant system.

And to top it all off, Michael Connell, who served as an IT expert to both the Bush Family and to Karl Rove and who designed the architecture that included the SmarTech servers, was killed in a "suspicious" single-engine plane crash about a month after giving a court deposition.

I wish I could say any of this was at all surprising, but instead it just feels like a validation of something a lot of people felt to be true that election night seven years ago.