'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida

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Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:20:32 -0500

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida

 

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida

by Thom Hartmann, CommonDreams.org

 

November 18, 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 (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. "