[Fwd: Stinking Evidence]

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found
in Florida
By Thom Hartmann
CommonDreams.org

Thursday 18 November 2004

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 is a Project Censored Award-winning
and best-selling author and host of a
nationally-syndicated daily progressive talk show. His
website is thomhartmann.com and his most recent books
include "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."

--
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North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>
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