| Huge Diebold Disparities Uncovered In New
Hampshire Recount |
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Huge disparities between votes cast on Diebold electronic voting machines and actual hand counted tallies are emerging during the New Hampshire recount, with Hillary Clinton gaining the most from over a hundred unaccounted for votes in one Manchester Ward.
The recount in Manchester’s Ward 5 revealed a disparity whereby establishment candidates received over a hundred ‘black hole’ votes between them that could not be tallied during the hand count.
Diebold Result Hand Count
CLINTON 683 619
EDWARDS 255 217
OBAMA 404 365
At the moment there is no indication of where these extra votes came from, but the figures again cast the accuracy of Diebold voting machines into severe doubt and provide further evidence of the need for a return to hand counted paper ballots only in all federal elections.
Brad Friedman at The Brad Blog continues to provide great coverage of the recount, unlike New Hampshire’s foremost news outlet WMUR, whose "only source seems to be whatever (New Hampshire Secretary of State) Gardner tells them," according to Friedman.
In addition, 550 ballots in Stratham were not read by the Diebold machines at all and were rejected as blank ballots.
Voting Rights attorney John Bonifaz also told Friedman of his deep concerns about the transparency of both the initial election as well as the recount.
"I’m very concerned that this is not a fully transparent process that is happening there," he said.
Diebold memory cards used in New Hampshire, which have been proven to be vulnerable to hacking and could easily be used to steal an election, are "missing" according to state officials.
Bonifaz, "Says he was told by Secretary of State William Gardner that his office doesn’t get involved in tracking what happens to those memory cards. Some have reportedly been returned to LHS, and may have had their memory erased already," reports Friedman.
"When you have a private company counting 80% of the votes, and you later learn that the memory cards are unaccounted for, you have a serious question about the transparency and accountability in that process," Bonifaz said.
Federal law mandates that all materials from elections be preserved for 22 months thereafter, so if the memory cards have been wiped then LHS Associates, who it was revealed last week had hired a narcotics trafficker to a high-level executive position, would be facing criminal charges.
In another shocking development, vote fraud expert Bev Harris witnessed first hand that a majority of ballot boxes had 8 inch slits in their side. Election Defense Alliance’s Sally Castleman followed the boxes back to the ballot vault and also noticed the cuts.
Read Bev’s report here:
No worries, say New Hampshire officials when cuts up to eight inches long are spotted in newly delivered ballot boxes. "The only seal that counts is the one on top."
Except the seal on top can be peeled off without leaving a trace, then reaffixed.
Black Box Voting has been doing a chain of custody exam for the New Hampshire Primary's recount. On Wednesday night, Election Defense Alliance's Sally Castleman mentioned a troubling observation: After following the ballots back to the ballot vault following Wednesday's recount, she had the opportunity to enter the ballot vault, and noticed what looked like cuts, or slits, in the side of many ballot boxes. New Hampshire officials assured us that these cuts, which slice through the tape and seals do not permit access to the uncounted ballots, pointing to a label on the boxtop which they call a seal.
But the "seal" can be removed, like a Post-it, and reaffixed. So it's not a seal all!
We wanted to know if the ballot boxes were slit while in the vault, in the transport van, or came from the towns with slits in them.
I confirmed this morning that many if not most of the boxes scheduled to be counted today had slits in them. I went out when a vanload of ballots arrived, and saw that they were slit at the time they arrived by van. Susan Pynchon and I drove to two nearby towns and watched as they handed over their ballot boxes to "Butch and Hoppy", the two men who drive around in the state in a van picking the ballots up. We observed as they loaded boxes of ballots into the van with no slits at all in them. We videotaped each of these up close. They arrived at the destination without slits. The label on the top was affixed, but in some cases was crumpled, or also damaged.
Of cource, the label affixed to the top can be removed and reattached without telltale signs.
No vault tonight
A significant departure from the normal chain of custody path occurred tonight. They decided not to use the vault to store the ballots.
More:
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Writing this last night, I was quite tired. I will post photos - the slits are not "through the box" in the sense that they are in the middle of the cardboard. They deliver the ballots in a variety of cardboard boxes. The lid of the cardboard box is taped and has various seals on it, some old, from using the box before, some new. The slits cut through any tape or seals. They don't cut into the cardboard itself, and I'm going to edit the post above to clarify that.
The other thing that isn't clear from the above post is the timing.
The normal procedure has been:
- bring the incoming ballot boxes into the front door of the building
- roll them through the counting room, which is a large room similar to a library reference room
- from there to roll the cart containing the incoming ballot boxes through the back door of the counting room
- insert key card into the warehouse area door
- roll the ballots down the hall in the warehouse
- open the ballot "vault" door with a key (it is a sturdy metal door but opens with a single key)
- put the incoming ballots in the vault
- When they will be counted, take them from the vault back into the counting room.
1. We noticed the slits in the vault and confirmed when they brought the ballots out that the slits were still there.
2. Then we looked at the ballot boxes as they were being delivered. Those, too, had slits.
3. Then we visited towns that had ballots scheduled for pickup. We had time to visit only two towns. Both towns had ballot boxes with no slits.
4. While at these towns, we waited for the pickup van to show up. When it did, we videotaped the ballot boxes already in it.
5. When we got back to the archive building where they were having the recount, we awaited the van with the ballot boxes we just videotaped. We waited quite a while. Almost everyone left, the recount ended for the day, and still no van. The van finally pulled in after all but a couple observers had gone home. We videotaped what came out of the van. It was in the same condition as what we videotaped at the towns. Of course, Butch and Hoppy knew we had been taking videotape because we did it right in front of them.
What they did last night, with the incoming batch that we had photographed in the field, was roll them into the counting room. We waited. The handful of officials waited. These officials included Secretary of State Bill Gardner, Head of the Archive building Frank Mevers, Assistant secretary of state David Scanlan, Ballot transport drivers "Butch and Hoppy" (whose names are really Armand and Peter); Kucinich representatives Manny and Pat, a secretary of state assistant named, I think, Karen Hand.
They waited. We waited. It was very odd, to me at least. The ballots were sitting in the middle of the counting room, all these officials were standing around talking quietly with each other. I assumed they were waiting for something, results sheets perhaps. I decided to stay with video ready until the ballots were wheeled back to the vault.
One of the transport guys, "Hoppy" I think, then said that the ballots would not be taken to the vault that night because it was "closed" -- implying that whoever had the key was no longer there. Frank Mevers had the key. But I saw Frank Mevers. And the ballots had been moved to the vault even later the night before, because counting teams had stayed and counted up until about 7 pm.
So Sally and I waited. They affixed one of these post-it peelable labels on each front door and said everyone will leave out the back door and the order was given for all to leave. We filed out the back door. I asked Secretary of State Bill Gardner why there was a change in procedure. He did not answer. I asked him again. After about three tries, he just said "it's secure."
The handful of officials and the two Kucinich people hung around the back door. I asked more questions about why the ballots were being left in a room with no key card. They put one of the label stickers over the door and said "it's secure." I continued to wait with this small group of people. Finally they told us to leave and everyone left the building.
We got in our car and drove a ways away. Most of the people left. Bill Gardner and Anthony Stevens stayed around for a while, standing outside the loading bay talking. Then they left.
The upshot: The ballots we had videotaped in the van being transported, which arrived intact without slits, were not taken to the vault and were not kept in a location requiring keycard access last night (except that entering the building itself requires a keycard)
* * * * *
To put my concerns about this in context:
Paddy Shaffer and I arrived at the archive building on Tuesday afternoon prepared to videotape incoming ballots as they came in that afternoon and throughout the night. We were told the (in my opinion) contrived story that no videotaping would be permitted because mental patients from a hospital about a block away might wander into the parking lot/loading area. We made a point of pressuring Bill Gardner to have this ban lifted.
They had clearly been planning for ballots to begin arriving Tuesday. I asked Frank Mevers, head of the archive building, if he could walk us through the observation area where the ballot intake process would take place. At that point he went into the back, had a long phone call, and came out saying they wouldn't be delivering the ballots that night.
Another thing I noticed was that, during the intake examination and sorting (sorting republican ballots and uncast ballots from cast ballots) some of the cardboard boxes were opened from the bottom -- completely avoiding the need to even touch the seal.
I will say that, to the credit of at least some of the staff (or to the credit that I was watching), when they put the labels on the boxes they were re-sealing they put the filament tape partially over a new label. While I observed this on some of the boxes that entered the room, I can't say I looked that carefully at most of them. (Also, I was only there the first day and thus only saw boxes from Manchester. It should be pointed out that some of the boxes are metal boxes -- I suspect that both labels and tape can be cleanly removed from them. The metal boxes also had locks on them -- I don't know how widely held are the keys.)
I still am wondering what the known handling of the ballots is after they leave the voters' hands. Do they immediately go into the machine? Or are they batched? Also, how are republican and democratic ballots separated? Are the boxes we saw at the recount supposed to have been sealed at the polls with the public (or at least observers) present?
Go to: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/71404.html?1200667606 for more.
or here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
This is HUGE news and the Mainstream Media is ignoring this!!!!!!
What a Democracy we live in!
i
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