The Ohio recount began with a "nuclear blast" from Green presidential candidate David Cobb:

Witness says voting company tampered with machines after vote and tried to plant false information into Ohio recount

Green says voting company tampered with recount effort

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

David Cobb, the unsuccessful Green Party presidential candidate, aired startling allegations at the Democratic House Judiciary Committee’s Columbus hearings Monday, alleging that a voting company representative tampered with voting equipment in Columbus last Friday and attempted to plant false information into the Ohio recount.

Cobb says that a witness who had requested anonymity watched a representative of Triad Systems enter the Columbus Board of Elections unannounced and tamper with a vote tabulator which then lost all data.

The representative then, Cobb said, tried to convince employees to post false information so that it would appear as if the data was valid and had never been lost.

Brad Friedman continues the story:

A source inside the Judiciary Committee -- just back in D.C. after returning from Ohio -- has informed The BRAD BLOG that testimony at today's hearings from Green party presidential candidate David Cobb at today's hearings in Columbus shook up their investigations "at least as much" as the stunning surprise of Clint Curtis' sworn testimony reported exclusively by BRAD BLOG earlier today!...

The eyewitness, who was unnamed in the public hearings, was later identified and interviewed privately by staffers from the office of Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), the ranking Democrat on the U.S. House Judiciary committee.

Reliable sources have informed The BRAD BLOG that the investigation into this matter by Conyers is currently "ongoing" and the conclusion of staffers so far is that the eyewitness and information presented is "100% real and credible".

This story is producing major shockwaves at DemocraticUnderground

Cobb concluded in emotional testimony that "this is going on all over the state of Ohio."

Apparently so. Patricia Blochowiak observed the recount in Medina County and detailed 7 specific problems, including

1. The precincts to recount were not chosen randomly.

2. Witnesses were not allowed to review the selection and preparation of the ballots to test the voting machines, nor did we have an opportunity to examine them, either before or after they were used to test the machines. We did not see the testing of the machines.

John Kerry's new Ohio lawyer, Don McTigue, is trying to stop the recount fraud. Here is the 11-point letter he sent to county election officials on Friday. McTigue is right on the mark, demanding true random sampling of precincts (to prevent exactly the manipulation by Triad in Columbus above)... ballot images stored in the each of the redundant memories of touchscreen machines... programming and calibration of the tabulating system, scanners, and electronic voting machines verified by independent experts... verify the logic and accuracy of the computer tabulating program for each precinct... visually inspect all undervote and overvote ballots... inspect envelopes and related paperwork for all uncounted provisional and absentee ballots... etc.

Conyers' committee received some shocking new affidavits, including evidence of paid Republican fraud, as reported by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman:

In Franklin County, a worker at the Holiday Inn observed a team of 25 people who called themselves the "Texas Strike Force" using payphones to make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system. The "Texas Strike Force" members paid their way to Ohio, but their hotel accommodations were paid for by the Ohio Republican Party, whose headquarters is across the street. The hotel worker heard one caller threaten a likely voter with being reported to the FBI and returning to jail if he voted. Another hotel worker called the police, who came but did nothing.

In Knox County, students at Kenyon College, a liberal arts school, stood in line for up to 11 hours, because only one voting machine was in use. However, at nearby Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, there were ample voting machines and no lines. This suggests the GOP shorting of voting machines was a more widespread tactic than just targeting inner-city neighborhoods...

Another exit poll affidavit, filed by Ron Paul Baiman, an economist and statistician at the University of Illinois and University of Chicago, said the swing in national exit poll results, recorded at 12:33 a.m., when Kerry was winning with 50.8 percent of the vote, to Bush winning with 51.2 percent, was,  "in lay terms, impossible."

"This is more than a 100 percent swing in the other direction of the exit poll margin, he said. "There is less than a one in 25,000,000 (1/25,507,308) chance of this occurring."

DU's jmknapp adds this important testimony:

Professor Norman Robbins (professor emeritus, Case Western) presented a statistical study showing systematic voter disenfranchisement, particularly in the area of of rejected provisional ballots. In his presentation he used a graph I had sent him, which was pretty cool. Evidently, based on his team's analysis, voters were purged from the registration rolls in Cuyahoga County late this year, and thus were forced to fill out provisional ballots Nov. 2, which were then rejected for the reason "not registered." His team has identified hundreds of voters who were purged and subsequently rejected.

Down in Florida, Clint Curtis's story is moving from the blogosphere to professional journalism, thanks to Kim Zetter of Wired, who filed an excellent report covering many different views of Curtis. Curtis has an impressive track record as a whistleblower:

In 2002, [reporter Laura] Zuckerman wrote about allegations Curtis made that Yang Enterprises overcharged the Department of Transportation for work it never performed. In addition, Curtis told Zuckerman that Yang employed an illegal Chinese national while working on government contracts for NASA, and that the company was possibly spying on NASA by downloading documents from the NASA computer system...

The overbilling charge was confirmed by a Department of Transportation employee, although an official state investigation found no wrongdoing. Curtis thinks pressure from Feeney and others helped squelch the investigation, charges that Zuckerman did not find implausible from her own research.

And Last March, the Chinese national that Curtis discussed, Hai Lin Nee, was arrested in a 4-year-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement sting operation for trying to mail sensitive computer chips to Beijing in 1999 in violation of export rules.

But no one at Yang has been arrested for spying on NASA or stealing documents, despite a letter Curtis sent to a NASA investigator in February 2002 suggesting the company might be doing so. Curtis believes Feeney squelched that investigation as well to protect Yang. Both CREW and staff for Sen. Nelson's office are looking into those charges.

BradBlog has posted video of Curtis' sworn testimony to House Democrats. RawStory.com published a transcript (also Chris Baker).

On the media front, I'm glad to report that Keith Olbermann is back on the story. Olbermann rightly smacked Ken Blackwell over the Friday lockdown (and overnight breakin) in Greene County. And he wrongly smacked John Kerry for "flip-flopping" on the recount via Newsweek's Howard Fineman.

“If Kerry and his lawyer really thought there was real mischief going on, they should have had all their guns out there investigating what happened in Ohio and they should have been strong and vocal.”

Memo to Olbermann (and Howard Fineman): a loose network of blog-based and Congress-based researchers are uncovering Ohio fraud one painstaking crime at a time. John Kerry's lawyers are reading the blogs and digesting these revelations each day, and stepping up their investigations as the frauds become clearer. If you are omniscient, then please save us all this research effort and tell us every technique the GOP used to steal Ohio. If you are puzzling out the details as we - and John Kerry's lawyers - are doing, then try showing all of us truth-seekers a little respect. And instead of interviewing distant hacks like Fineman, how about interviewing the people at the epicenter of the story: David Cobb, Cliff Arnebeck, John Bonifaz, Bob Fitrakis, Susan Truitt, and John Conyers!

Janet Babin of NPR affiliate WCPN in Cleveland interviewed many of these individuals (and also Ken Blackwell) in a story broadcast on the Tavis Smiley Show.

Finally, the AP's Carrie Spencer has given us truth-seekers a new label: dissidents.

The Ohio delegation to the Electoral College cast its votes for President Bush on Monday, hours after dissident groups asked the state Supreme Court to review the outcome of the state's presidential race.

I've been reading newspapers for a few decades, and I've only seen "dissident" used in reference to human rights activists opposing dictatorships or totalitarian regimes. Typically, such "dissidents" end up in jail - or worse. Is the AP trying to send us a subtle message - like putting a horse's head in our bed? I'd love to write Ms. Spencer, but AP reporters (like their kindred CIA agents) don't publish their e-mail addresses.