On a day in which the first of the three major news outlets -- CBS -- joined the fray of Votergate 2004, new details emerged on one of the most shocking news stories of the past four weeks: the potential disclosure of hard evidence that election officials in a critical background state altered documents to enhance the presidential vote totals for incumbent candidate George W. Bush.
Casual observers of the Votergate fiasco will be surprised to learn that no major news outlet has led with this story in the short time (between two and three days) the story has been widely available for public consumption. And cautious observers of world events will be concerned to learn that the details of this story were first aired on the controversial foreign-language television station, Al Jazeera. Yet it took no more than one twenty-four hour news cycle for a story based largely on direct quotes from the involved parties and even demonstrative evidence -- a videotape of the event -- to move from the fringes of polite American discourse to the very center of the growing debate over suspicious presidential vote totals in the critical state of Ohio. [See story, below: "Butler County Tabulation Merits Audit," The Nashua Advocate, 11/30/04].
David Corn, writer for well-established print news outlet The Nation, has written an article for CBS News in which he details the crucial facts:
"...the-election-was-rigged activists are raising other issues regarding the Florida vote count. When Bev Harris, a prominent critic of electronic voting who runs www.blackboxvoting.org, showed up at the elections office of Volusia County -- where Kerry won by 3,723 votes -- in mid-November seeking poll tapes for the optical scan voting machines used during the election, she found a set of the poll tapes discarded in a garbage bag."
Taken by itself, this news would hardly raise many eyebrows. But when the direct quotes and hard evidence which contextualize this story are included, the situation becomes far cloudier and more troubling indeed.
When Harris arrived at the Volusia County Elections Office on November 16th, 2004, looking for the "poll tapes" Corn mentions above -- which tapes are the sole printouts provided by optical scan voting machines on election day, detailing the final results of the tabulation made on each machine -- she was given a set of printouts which did not contain any of the legally-required poll-worker signatures. When Harris complained that she wished to see the original poll tapes, not facsimiles, she was directed to come to the Volusia County Elections Office Warehouse the following morning.
When Harris arrived early the next morning, she discovered, to her great surprise, three elections officials standing over a table littered with poll tapes. She was spotted in the entranceway to the building by one of the officials and the door to the warehouse was, quite literally, slammed in her face. However, on the porch of the warehouse she found a garbage bag chock full of poll tapes. According to Harris, "[the bag] was technically stinking...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 Harris was spotted looking through the garbage by the now-cloistered elections officials, the police were called. [The Advocate finds this fact alone to be rather suspicious, as Harris had been invited to the warehouse by the aforementioned officials]. Kathleen Wynne, also of Black Box Voting, notes that "we caught the whole thing on videotape...[and] I don't think you'll ever see anything like this -- Bev Harris having a tug of war with an elections worker over a bag of garbage...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."
Ultimately, after the concerns of the local police were mollified, Harris had an opportunity to compare the original poll tapes with the "copies" she had been inexplicably (and, apparently, in violation of a properly-filed legal request) handed and sent away with. As Harris tells it, "We were sitting there comparing the real tapes with the ones that were given us, 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."
If fraud caught on tape once is appalling, fraud caught twice is horrific -- every bit as much for the audacity of its perpetrators as for the grossness of the act itself. Indeed, when Ellen Brodsky, yet another Black Box Voting member, and present on-scene with Harris and Wynne, checked the garbage to find the second "bin full of things" referenced by Harris above, she found, incredibly, more of the original, signed poll tapes she and her associates had already (now twice) demanded to see.
"And I must tell you," Harris notes, "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?'" To which one of the elections officials on-scene replied that some backup copies of tapes from the November 2nd election were destined for the shredder. When the Dayton News queried the Volusia County Elections Supervisor regarding this response, they were told that, on election night, "[o]ne tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card, [while] the backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car." [The Advocate Staff requests that any reader who understands this explanation -- that a county would destroy its back-up polling evidence prior to official certification of its vote totals -- please comment on this piece, below, and enlighten our Staff].
When Harris and her associates, non-plussed by this oddly counterintuitive explanation, compared the original tapes, which had now been grudgingly provided to them, with the unsigned printouts Black Box Voting associates had already received, "[t]he difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined, and most of those were in minority areas." She added, "[t]he pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."
This discovery -- apparently caught on videotape and (if the quotes above do any justice to the truth of the matter) essentially stipulated to by all of the parties involved (except as to the motivation for the extraordinary acts of the Volusia County elections officials) -- is made all the more startling by the now well-publicized Hout Report, which concluded that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry lost as many of 260,000 votes in Florida due to malfunctioning electronic voting machines. That Report has yet to be either refuted or scientifically verified, though Corn notes, in his CBS News article, that a researcher at another institution, M.I.T., has conceded that the Report reveals "an interesting pattern." A professor at Columbia University has also noted, as one possible explanation for the findings of the report, "cheating."
See Related Stories:
("All I Know Is What I Don't Read in the Papers", Keith Olbermann, 11/19/04 [re: The Hout Report])
Article
("New Evidence of Possible U.S. Election Fraud," Al Jazeera, 11/21/04)
Article
("More on the 'Stolen Election'", The Nation, David Corn, 11/30/04)
Article
(CBS News, "The Election Heist That Wasn't", David Corn, 12/1/04)
Article
(Website of Black Box Voting, [Director, Bev Harris])
Website
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