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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector-Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com BlackBoxVoting.org TUESDAY NOV 16 2004: Volusia County on lockdown County election records just got put on lockdown Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all. Here's what happened so far: Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. Black Box Voting didn't back down. Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone. Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for "privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed ones. She insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to Berkeley elections attorney, Lowell Finley). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and an arrangment was made to come back this morning to review them. Lana Hires, a Volusia County employee who gained some notoriety in an election 2000 Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting investigators in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested going to the warehouse. Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door. There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed. So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out. A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly. Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it, for the public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way." Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and everyone stood around discussing the merits of the "black bag" public records request. The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened. Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans. Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape? Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared. Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office. So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage. So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials. This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder. By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server. Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that. Everyone agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia. ***** Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org 'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida by Thom Hartmann There was something odd about the poll tapes. A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.) Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures. Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her. Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door." In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence. "On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes." Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off. "It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for." When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev. Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there. "We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it." As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up." She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request." The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well. And then things got even odder. "We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building." This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed. "And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'" A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records." The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car." Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas." But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged. "The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas." When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable. "You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud." That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time." Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida). Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county. As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes." Why? "Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud." Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award- winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy." ***** Ohio Recount Must Start Now By David Cobb and Michael Badnarik t r u t h o u t | Statement Thursday 18 November 2004 Attorneys for Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian Michael Badnarik have sent letters to each Ohio county election director asking them to begin preparations immediately for the recount of the presidential vote. Although a demand for a recount is usually not made until after the vote has been certified, there are concerns that waiting that long would not allow enough time for the recount to be completed before the Ohio presidential electors meet on December 13 in Columbus. The Ohio Secretary of State's office has told the press that certification of the vote would occur around December 6, allowing only a handful of days for a full recount prior to the December 13 meeting. In letters dated November 17 and sent by overnight delivery, Cobb and Badnarik's attorneys say that "{s}uch a timeframe will not allow for a meaningful recount and will undermine our clients' rights under applicable law, including Ohio recount law." Cobb and Badnarik will file the recount demand jointly. The letters go on to say that "the lack of a meaningful recount will also violate the rights under federal and state constitutional and statutory law of all Ohio citizens who cast a ballot for President on Election Day. Immediate action is necessary so that the recount procedures may begin as soon as possible." "This is consistent with our standing up for the right to vote and for each vote to be counted. What's the point of having a recount if it won't be completed in time? Everyone knows what happened in Florida in 2000 and no one wants to see that happen again," said Blair Bobier, Media Director for the Cobb-LaMarche campaign. Bobier said the formal recount demand and the bond of $113,600 would be officially filed on Friday. Cobb and Badnarik are represented by John Bonifaz, General Counsel of the National Voting Rights Institute and Ohio attorney Nancy Holland Myers. The Cobb-LaMarche campaign is now in the process of recruiting volunteers and raising funds for monitoring the actual recount process. Volunteers and donors should visit the campaign website for more information. Note: please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] if you want to volunteer. ***** Big Media's Democracy Double Standards By Robert Parry November 23, 2004 ConsortiumNews.com The Washington Post and other leading American newspapers are up in arms about the legitimacy of a presidential election where exit polls showed the challenger winning but where the incumbent party came out on top, amid complaints about heavy-handed election-day tactics and possibly rigged vote tallies. In a lead editorial, the Post cited the divergent exit polls, along with voter claims about ballot irregularities, as prime reasons for overturning the official results. For its part, the New York Times cited reports of "suspiciously, even fantastically, high turnouts in regions that supported" the government candidate. The U.S. news media is making clear that the truth about these electoral anomalies must be told. Of course, the election in question occurred in the Ukraine. In the United States - where exit polls showed John Kerry winning on Nov. 2, where Republican tactics discouraged African-American voting in Democratic precincts, and where George W. Bush's vote totals in many counties were eyebrow-raising - the Post, the Times and other top news outlets mocked anyone who questioned the results. For instance, when we noted Bush's surprising performance in Dade, Broward and other Florida counties, a Washington Post article termed us "spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Washington Post's Sloppy Analysis."] Meanwhile, the New York Times accepted unsupported explanations for why the U.S. exit polls were so wrong, including the theory that Kerry supporters were chattier than Bush voters. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Evidence of a Second Bush Coup?"] Hypocrisy? What Hypocrisy? But why the double standard? Why would Ukrainian exit polls be deemed reliable evidence of fraud while American exit polls would simply be inexplicably wrong nationwide and in six battleground states where Kerry was shown to be leading but Bush ultimately won? Logically, it would seem that U.S. exit polls would be more reliable because of the far greater experience in refining sampling techniques than in the Ukraine. Also, given the Ukraine's authoritarian past, one might expect that Ukrainian voters would be more likely to rebuff pollsters or give false answers than American voters. Instead, the U.S. news media chucked out or "corrected" the U.S. exit polls - CNN made them conform to the official results - while embracing the Ukrainian exit polls as a true measure of the popular will. To compound the irony, the Washington Post editorial is now calling on George W. Bush to defend democratic principles halfway around the world. In the Nov. 23 editorial entitled "Coup in Kiev," the Post wrote, "For the Bush administration, the responsibility starts with stating the unvarnished truth about what has happened in an election..." the one in the Ukraine, of course. Election 2000 "Unvarnished truth" was far less important to the Post, the Times and other U.S. news organizations when they were reporting on the results of Election 2000. Then, the cherished value was "unity," as Americans were urged to ignore the fact that Al Gore got more votes and instead rally behind George W. Bush, even though he had dispatched thugs to Florida to disrupt recounts and then enlisted his political allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.] In the months that followed Election 2000, the U.S. news media even put the cause of Bush's legitimacy ahead of its duty to accurately inform the public. In November 2001, after conducting an unofficial recount of Florida's ballots, the news outlets discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted - regardless of the standard used for evaluating chads - Gore won. That finding meant that Gore was the rightful occupant of the White House and that Bush was a fraudulent president. But in those days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the news organizations again opted for "unity" over "unvarnished truth," fudging their own results and burying the lead of Gore's electoral victory. To falsely tout Bush's "victory," the Post, the Times, CNN and other news outlets arbitrarily - and erroneously - ditched so- called "overvotes," in which voters both checked and wrote in a candidate's name. Not only were these votes legal under Florida law but they apparently would have been included in the statewide recount if the five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened at Bush's behest. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "So Bush Did Steal the White House."] Weak Democrats In another case of painful irony, the U.S. Democratic Party is expressing more outrage about electoral fairness in the Ukraine than in the United States. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, which is sponsored by the Democratic Party, put out a statement declaring that "fundamental flaws in Ukraine's presidential election process subverted its legitimacy." [NYT, Nov. 23, 2004] However, at home, the Democrats have accepted the Nov. 2 outcome passively, despite widespread fury within the Democratic base about what many see as the Bush campaign's abusive practices. Again, "unity" has trumped "unvarnished truth." It has fallen to several third-party candidates to seek limited recounts in several states, including Ohio and New Hampshire, a move at least designed to give assurance to millions of Americans that the Bush campaign didn't get away with stealing a second election. Meanwhile, the national Democratic Party has chosen to sit on the sidelines, presumably to avoid accusations of irresponsibility from the Washington Post and other parts of the big U.S. news media. So, as the Ukrainian people take to the streets to defend the principles of democracy, including the concept that a just government derives from the consent of the governed, the United States - once democracy's beacon to the world - presents its commitment to those ideals more through hypocrisy abroad than action at home. Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <FONT COLOR="#000099">$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. 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