Did Bev Harris Catch Vote Fraud in The Act?

HACK THE VOTE EVIDENCE?

Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org was interviewed by the liberal radio host Thom Hartmann about the incidents in Volusia County. OpEd News has Thom Hartmann's column.

[She], 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.

"She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview (mp3), that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."

Comments on Daily Kos include the observation that there are four days to call for a recount in Florida.

The Resounding Silence from the media continues.

There was a time in America when the media would actually practice journalism. They would investigate. They would corroborate. They would scrutinize. In modern day America , this must be proving to be too daunting for our faux media.

Orlando Weekly has a review of all the evidence suggesting GOP vote hacking.

Olberman on John Kerry being AWOL on this issue. He also writes about the media being AWOL on election problems.

University Researchers: Florida electronic voting "went awry"

Other more typical Florida vote problems - election clerks calling blacks the n-word and noting that on poll lists, missing ballots.

Pollster Zogby now saying "something is wrong here" about the votes compared to polling.

As Thom Hartman, and Stalin and Limbaugh noted: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."

Limbaugh's Republicans, led by Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert in the House and Bill Frist in the Senate, were fighting hard to keep their corporate friends counting the vote, by blocking legislation introduced in the House by Rep. Rush Holt (H.R. 2239) and in the Senate by Senators Bob Graham and Hillary Clinton (S. 2313).

The Restore Elector Confidence in Our Representative Democracy (RECORD) Act would require voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper ballot and to be randomly audited. During the past two years, neither bill has made it out of committee in the Republican-controlled House or Senate, so in 2004 it was private, for-profit corporations who, for the most part, counted the votes, be they touch-screen, optical scanners, or even punch cards. On

November 11th, 2004, Doug Halonen reported in TV Week that former Enron lobbyist and current RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie had, at a National Press Club event that day, called for an end to exit polls. Gillespie, it turns out, is concerned about the emotional well being of Republicans who may feel as "discouraged" as he felt when he saw the initial exit polls.