The hactivist group Anonymous is claiming that Karl Rove attempted to rig the election for Mitt Romney using ORCA, Rove’s Get Out the Vote program. They claim that ORCA is really a vote tabulation manipulation software — though they have not been able to provide proof of their actions.
Two days after the election, The Daily Kos reports that Anonymous posted an open letter regarding the reported attempted election fraud, saying in part:
“We began following the ‘digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way.
“After a rather short time, we identified the digital structure of Karl’s operation and even that of his ORCA. This was an easy task in that the barn doors were left open and the wind swept us inside.”
The Examiner notes that Anonymous decided that the best interest of the people was not to allow the plan to happen, then bring it to light, but to keep Rove’s reported plan from happening. According to the story, the hackers coded firewalls to block the “kingmakers” from making changes to the votes on Election Day in three key states: Ohio, Virginia, and Florida.
They go on to say that on Election Day, Rove’s “worker bees” allegedly made 105 attempts to break through Anonymous’ firewall, but the hacker network was able to keep them out. The group has offered coded, yet specific, details about Rove’s alleged attempt, hinting that more details may be made available on Wiki Leaks in the future.
Anonymous also stated that it issued a warning to Karl Rove in October against rigging the election, threatening to turn over their evidence to authorities. The November release made no mention of alerting authorities.
While there is no evidence of Karl Rove rigging the presidential election, the hacker group has claimed responsibility for and pulled off impressive feats, like hacking into highly secure military, government, and corporate networks. Until evidence can be shown to substantiate Anonymous’ claim, however, we can only speculate.
