-- Luke
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 12:56 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Fla poll tapes
> [I have no idea how true any of this is, but enough odd stuff is
> accumulating that people should be curious, no?]
>
> 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,
> <http://www.louisehartmann.com/clips/BevHarrisNov04.mp3>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,
>
<http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Local/03AreaWEST04
EPOL111804.htm>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.
> <http://www.thomhartmann.com/commondreams.shtml>www.thomhartmann.com
> His most recent books are
>
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400051576/commondreams-20/ref=nosi
m/>The
> Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,"
>
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579549551/commondreams-20/ref=nosi
m/>Unequal
> Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
> Rights,"
>
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1882109384/commondreams-20/ref=nosi
m/>We
> The People: A Call To Take Back America," and
>
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400052084/commondreams-20/ref=nosi
m/>What
> Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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