Why is it important to rehash what Connell did in 2000 Florida and 2004 Ohio? Because those very same key elements for potential election theft are firmly in place within the McCain campaign for 2008.

The filing of “document hold” notices targeting Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce announced on July 17 by Ohio Attorney Cliff Arnebeck has focused attention on Mike Connell, CEO of New Media Communications (and a key figure in several other IT companies), as instrumental in significant irregularities of the Ohio vote in the 2004 presidential election.

Mike Connell built the non-partisan State of Ohio Election Night Results reporting system which, in real time, tracked the final Ohio vote tallies for its citizens. Yet that very same Mike Connell, in what could appear to be a conflict of interest, also created and ran the 2004 George Bush and Ken Blackwell websites as well as the Ohio state GOP site.

Mike Connell: IT Guru

Mike Connell is the RNC's IT guru connected to many websites of Ohio, Florida and the Federal governments. He is now believed to have been under the direction of Karl Rove during the contested elections of 2000 and 2004. In the current cycle, Karl Rove joined John McCain's campaign in March 2008 while Connell reportedly began laying his groundwork for it after August 2006. If allegations are true, what happened in 2000 and 2004 is merely the warm up act to what’s in store for 2008.

In 2006, oddly enough, a Computerworld reporter⁰ sought out Mike Connell -- rather than Karl Rove -- to inquire into the GOP's electoral outlook. It was Connell (not Rove) who described how substantially the GOP was counting on microtargeting to make the difference in a difficult year. Two years earlier, Connell was the strategist who summarized  "A Republican Perspective: What Worked Online in the 2004 U.S. Elections"in a presentation slidedeck.  In that analysis, he emphasized email list development, microtargeting and the big data push of 2004, 72-hour programs, and special GOTV emails detailed even to the level of providing driving directions to the polls.

Finally, in this context, it's worth noting that halfway through the Florida recount debacle, in an interview with Connell and his wife, the interviewer made crystal clear how strictly partisan were the CEOs of Connell's two companies:

The company (New Media Communications) will not work for Democrats. The Connells said the couple's political ideals and passions motivate their creativity.

"It's important to believe in what you do," Mrs. Connell said. "It's part of our job to be involved."¹

That's the point! Niche Marketing Ekes Out a Sliver of Victory

 The agenda of any election campaign is to win your candidate "one vote more than 50 percent."

Connell freely offers his campaign promise for the 2000 election: "There are things we will be doing on election day that haven't even been dreamt of yet." ²

If you join the expertise of a network engineer to the skills of a niche demographic analyst who slices and dices political consumer markets for targeted messaging on the Internet, you get a Mike Connell.

Mr. Connell said his belief in the candidates and causes for which New Media works is an important part of the company's success. Being a trusted partisan also gets Mr. Connell invited to campaign strategy sessions.

''To do our job, we need to have a seat at the table,'' he said

... Mr. Connell was reluctant to discuss whether he communicates often with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top strategist, but said, ''Good ideas will go as high as they have to to get approval.'' ³

And, if you've given Mike Connell access to the tabulation database of a swing state's votes, in realtime, then you've got a specialist who understands what the margin of error looks like when it walks out of the voting booth.

“New Media also develops advanced targeting models that accurately project voter turn-out and assign vote goals down to the precinct level” ⁴

New Media Communications, Gov Tech Solutions: Two Faces of Mike Connell

A stylized chameleon was the first New Media Communications website's symbol for adaptability that the fittest companies need "to out smart, out maneuver and out hustle your fierce competitors...Because it's a law of the jungle.”

Connell has long history as a partisan political loyalist, but he also has a second role as an IT contractor to government agencies.
Connell began to fade his own color into a non-partisan background on April 7, 2000, a month after helping to close the coffin on McCain's bid to be the Republican presidential nominee.

Connell’s wife, Heather, joined his DCI-New Media partner, Tom Synhorst ⁵,to file papers with Ohio Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell to form GovTech Solutions, LLC. The chameleon’s skin had changed. Using the camouflage of a 'third party' was a simple variation on DCI-New Media's standard deception documented on their own website and used in their ongoing corporate 'astroturf' operations. ⁶

Although officially listed separately as a woman-owned business and an independent company, New Media and GovTech are closely connected. Connell told the magazine CrainTech in 2001 that the new name simply represented a rebranding of New Media Communications’ government services operations and that GovTech Solutions would operate out of New Media’s offices in Virginia.

The roots of GovTech Solutions and the move into government contracting can be found in the work that Connell’s New Media did earlier in Florida.

Well-Connected and Plugged in in Florida

Wired Connections

Although GovTech Solutions in 2001 represented his non-partisan face, Connell, the partisan, has been connected to the National GOP since 1987 when he campaigned for George H.W. Bush. As Jeb Bush ran for governor of Florida, Connell's affiliations extended into Florida's political network. This was perhaps directly the result, first advertised in PR on New Media's website in 1998, of his alliance (turned business partnership) with the principals of DCI Group. ⁷

At the time, DCI was (and it still is) a very successful grassroots telemarketing and lobbying company that ran all the major black-bag operations for the Republican Party. Under Bush, it has become the White House's external political arm⁸

In 1998 Connell also created jeb.org which helped elect Jeb Bush governor of Florida. Running the website that elects the Governor provides entrée for getting contract jobs all over state government. Following the election, Connell’s company received multiple contracts to develop and manage websites for Florida state agencies. Our research identified four state technology jobs done by Mike Connell:

• Florida Executive Office of the Governor
• Florida State Board of Administration
• Florida Departmet of Education - Public Schools Reports
• Florida Department of Community Affairs

These sites were under Connell's active development while, simultaneously, he was working on development and update of a slew of GOP and GOP candidate sites. He was also introducing the RNC's army of operatives to the eGOP Project.

Crony Connectivity or Political Affiliations throughout Florida GOP and State Government

Not only was Connell plugged into the government servers, he was also connected to powerful political and business individuals.

Mike Connell's Florida political affiliations are important since they provided touchpoints for him, as the RNC's Internet guru, to the State of Florida IT networks distinct from his access through state contract work. The following list provides just a brief overview of some of the points of connection that Connell had with key players.

Florida’s Porous Network

After the 1998 election of Jeb Bush, Roy Cales (who registered the domain name for the Florida Republican Party Chairman Tom Slades’ Tidewater Consulting domain name -- see list of Affiliations above) started out as Director of Information Services for the governor and then was appointed the Chief Information officer for entire the State of Florida. Cales, with all of the government intranets and web services under his control, was, as we’ve seen, a known associate of Mike Connell

So Mike Connell has four state contracts and is connected to the Chief Information Officer for the entire state. And in Florida there were well documented problems with internal security and, of course, the disputed election of 2000, in which counting technology played a major role, makes it a place of special sensitivity.

Before the history of Florida's 2000 election was written on faulty paper ballots, a persistent trail of IT system audits routinely recommended fixes to the security and access control deficits in Florida’s government’s diverse network infrastructure.

For example, an Inspector General's audit of contracting and oversight procedures for Information Technology (IT) consulting services procured by the Executive Office of the Governor¹¹) reported in September 2000 that "Security issues were not addressed in consultant agreements."

These security issues were simply not fixed before the 2000 election. In an IT Audit of Katherine Harris' Department of State (remember her Division of Elections), the Auditor General described his Finding 2 in the DOS' Division of Corporations in March 2001:

The Department had not implemented or utilized sufficient access controls to adequately protect programs and data files from improper disclosure and modification or appropriately monitor security/access activities.

That same 2001 Report noted similar deficiencies had been reported in the Security Services Vulnerability Report after in-depth examination by Science Applications International Corporation in June 2000. And worse, the same security problems remained uncorrected from the previous Audit of DOS, reported in March 1998. ¹²

Perhaps the general basis of findings like this can be seen in press reports, for example, that during the 36-day vote recount SOS Katherine Harris had two GOP operatives ¹³--J.M. "Mac" Stipanovich and Adam Goodman working on State computers in her office. Their harddrives were erased before suspect information could be secured.

Inside that same DOS whose Division of Elections tabulates the State of Florida's votes, no remedy to multiple reports of the porous IT security was attempted until the month after the Constitutional Crisis was precipitated by the most contested presidential election ¹⁴ of modern history.

Even lacking affiliated political partners holding high state jobs, Mike Connell's expertise would be unhindered in movement through the porous security of networks reported by stacks of IT system audits. The presence of Mike Connell’s firms with their partisan orientations and areas of expertise inside state governments in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 raises important questions about the integrity of the coming November 2008 vote.¹⁶

Seven years later, especially given what happened in Ohio 2004, we still have questions:

One:  Were the two faces of Connell(partisan IT guru running GOP campaign sites while having access to state government web sites) a deliberate pattern positioning him to manipulate vote tallies … or merely coincidence?

Two:  Was the creation of GovTech Solutions, with his wife as the CEO, an attempt to hide Connell’s involvement … or just a callous attempt to qualify for woman owned business treatment? ¹⁰

Three:  How much risk to the election of 2008 is implied by Connell's early presence on the McCain roster and his close connection to the RNC, Karl Rove and his Bush campaign operatives?

Four:  Do recent changes in the legal outlook -- as Ohio election attorneys move forward on allegations of racketeering and the alleged threats of blackmail against Connell and his family -- bear on the integrity of the coming election?

We'd just like to know.

Annotated Footnotes

⁰ Heather Havenstein. "Parties Look to IT for Electon Edge. Democrats Deploy New IT Tools; GOP Expands MicroTargeting." November 3, 2006. Computerworld

¹ Crain's Cleveland Business Monday. November 27, 2000.

² September, 1998. Internet Survival Guide: Designing Lively Web Sites Campaigns & Elections. "In an electoral system where a small number of votes can swing an election, you need every advantage you can get"

³ November 2, 1999: Spinning the Web: It's no longer politics as usual, as webmasters run candidates' campaigns in cyberspace.

⁴ October 11, 2004: New Media pours political heart into boosting Bush web site web.archive.org/web/19980109035219/newmedia.technomania.com/politics.html

⁵Tom Synhorst was a partner with Connell in the DCI-New Media entity and there's no available record to indicate that Synhorst ever divested his share of GovTech Solutions.

⁶ web.archive.org/web/20001028052127/www.dci-newmedia.com/approach.html 'Third-party coalitions' can say things that a corporation sometimes can’t, whether for legal, public relations or brand reasons. 'Astroturf' refers to the creation of a seemingly independent third party entity for the purpose of advocating the creator's objective.

⁷ Public sources often cite DCI Group as the creator of a variety of corporate astroturf 'coalitions' and campaigns but many or most of the examples, in fact, were the product of DCI-New Media, LLC, a third party partnership between New Media Communications and DCI Group, LLC merged out of existence by Q4 of 2001. Into 2001, those the third party creations took technical service from Connell's resources.

Since the DCI-New Media partnership was incorporated in November 1999, the Rove testimonial first claimed by FHLS / FLS-DCI in July 2001 applies equally to DCI-New Media.

"I know these guys well. They become partners with the campaigns they work with. From designing the program to drafting scripts, from selecting targets to making the calls in a professional, successful way, they work as hard to win your races as you do."
~ Karl Rove ~

⁸ Raymond, Allen with Ian Spiegelman. Confessions of a Republican Operative: How to Rig an Election. February 2008: Simon and Schuster p. 158. Amazon’s reference for the book

⁹ New Media's first contact listing in Tallahassee. and Technomania Index

¹⁰ For extensive discussion about Mike and Heather Connell’s ownership and shell game with their various companies, see Who is Michael L. Connell? Part I: The Atwater School of Politics andWho is Mike Connell behind the firewall: Part II

¹¹ Not surprisingly, the consulting services provider to the Executive Office of the Governor (Jeb Bush) was a Connell website project.

¹²Secretary of State Katherine Harris is unlikely to have remedied such problems in the Division of Elections before November 2000, according to the Agency Response:

We concur with the recommendations. The Department has developed an Information Technology Security program, which was approved and implemented on 12 January 2001...

¹³Harris Disappearing Act

¹⁴ In the subsequent recount done by the NORC at University of Chicago NORC at University of Chicago According to Wikipedia: “The recount also showed that had there been a full statewide recount of all counties, Al Gore would have received more votes than Bush. However, neither campaign requested such a total statewide recount, and it was never formally carried out.”

¹⁵ www.gwu.edu/~action/2008/mccain/mccainorgfl.html

¹⁶http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2008/M6/C00430470/B_PAYEE_C00430470.html

http://query.nictusa.com/pres/2008/M7/C00430470/B_PAYEE_C00430470.html

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About the Author: Luaptifer is a researcher, who holds a PhD in a scientific field and is interested in restoring democracy to America. He is member of the ePluribus Media Advisory board. He has assistance from Cho and Bronxdem, as well as Todd Johnson, and Intranets. Other ePluribus Media contributors are: GreyHawk, Kfred, Harmonyguy, HighAcidity, RayneToday, Standingup, wanderindiana, Roxy, silence, susie dow, indyjones48, sawcielackey, ricardo4, TimRoff, Michael Spinelli, Leftylimblog, Velvet Revolution, sluggjd, biblio, D.E. Ford, zan, avahome

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