[Voterescue] Update from Bev Harris on NH recount situation

[Vickie Karp]

Posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 - 9:15 pm by Bev Harris on
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At this point we can pretty much guarantee the New Hampshire recount for
Kucinich will match -- and that's not a good thing, because unless chain
of custody can be documented properly, the recount doesn't provide real
answers.

Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich did not order a statewide recount
today, only two counties, and the Republican candidate, Albert Howard,
was cut out of the recount altogether. I'll write more on the details
later this week.

I have been doing field work since Saturday here in New Hampshire.
Donations have been helping underwrite the costs of a citizen dream team:
I invited some outstanding people to join me here to evaluate chain of
custody for the recount: Susan Pynchon (Florida Fair Elections Coalition,
has helped unravel the Sarasota situation); Melisa Urda (Illinois Ballot
Integrity Project, has helped get the Illinois attorney general to issue
a special directive ordering DuPage County to follow the law); and Paddy
Shaffer (Ohio Election Justice Campaign, with Richard Hayes Phillips
helped unravel the ballot chain of custody in Ohio). Others, like
Election Defense Alliance Sally Castleman, have been organizing a team of
citizen videographers, while Bruce O'Dell and Theron Horton have been
quietly crunching the numbers to pinpoint locations with unusual
footprints. (I also hoped to have the great Kathleen Wynne, but had to
red-eye out to New Hampshire on such short notice that the timing didn't
work this time.)

VERDICT: New Hampshire is unable to document its chain of custody
properly, lacks written procedures, its secretary of state has said he
doesn't know where its memory cards are, and LHS has been encroaching on
state elections with near-total control. I'll be preparing a Special
Report when I return from New Hampshire with documents and video to
support this assessment.

VIDEO CAMERA CONFISCATION?

In New Hampshire, ballots are brought from each town and ward to a
central location for recounts. We got a tip today that the location would
be the state archive building, so we went there hoping for a
walk-through.

There, police told us that videotaping the delivery of the ballots and
the unloading of the ballots, would be prohibited and cameras would be
confiscated if people were caught doing this. The rationale, we were
told, was that they had placed the ballot delivery area in a state
building with a parking lot that belonged to a mental hospital located on
the grounds about a block away. On the theory that cameras might catch a
mental patient wandering around and invade his privacy, all videotaping
would be prohibited.

Now, there was 14 inches of snow yesterday and the drifts and mounds are
up to 10 feet high, so the idea that a mental patient could even walk
through this to the state archives to get their privacy invaded by a
camera filming ballot unloading seemed preposterous. Paddy Shaffer got on
the horn and called the chief of the "campus police" handling the mental
hospital and he confirmed that cameras would be confiscated. We later
alerted Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who called off the police
video-busting rule.

SECRECY IN CHAIN OF CUSTODY

One official told us he thought the location of the delivered ballots
should be a secret and that there would be no public observation of the
intake process. We asked for the written procedures for the ballot intake
and he said he hadn't been provided with any. Another member of the
secretary of state's office said he could not confirm or deny that the
ballots would be delivered to the archive building at all, and when you
see the video of this you'll see that this was evasiveness, not lack of
information.

We received a verbal description of the check-in process, which included
a list of locations coming in and a check-off sheet. When we asked about
the observaton area the official left, then came back and said no ballots
would be delivered to the archives. Later, we learned that they would,
after all, be delivered to the archives but only one city at a time. No
written procedures for any of this, and quite a confusing time was being
had by all.

"TRUST ME ELECTIONS"

A member of the Kucinich campaign tried to "wave me off" from looking
into ballot chain of custody this evening. Another member of the Kucinich
campaign said she has 100% confidence in the ballot chain of custody,
even though, when I asked, she admitted she didn't know where the ballots
go after leaving the towns.

This should be a huge concern for us. As the previous article, "Walking
into a trap?" indicates, if you order a recount without first getting
answers to the chain of custody questions, you may end up with a sham
recount with stuffed or substituted ballots. No candidate's campaign
should be satisfied with "trust" without asking and demanding answers to
chain of custody questions.

I was told by one of the Kucinich people that chain of custody has always
been completely trustworthy in the past, and that I should stick to
securing the memory cards and chips and not get into ballot chain of
custody issues. Basing an analysis of the CURRENT chain of custody on
past (or imagined) chain of custody perceptions is like saying, "I won't
lock the door tonight because I have locked it in the past."

WHAT'S NEXT?

They are recounting Manchester ballots tomorrow.

PREDICTION: They'll match all right. Exactly as Nancy Tobi predicted.
This recount will be used to illustrate that the LHS-coded voting
machines should be trusted.

It's very difficult to prepare articles with documentation and video
while spending days and nights in the field, but I hope to get more
information to you shortly about some of the field work of Susan Pynchon
and Melisa Urda, who visited New Hampshire election sites asking
questions about ballot accounting procedures, memory card storage, and
looking into various questions. They obtained a fairly horrific document
from LHS Associates.

Stay tuned. Bev Harris, Founder and DirectorBlack Box Voting  (www.blackboxvoting.org)
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