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Edited on Fri Dec-03-04 10:53 AM by BevHarris
And this is very preliminary.
1. Volusia has several anomalies consistent with fraud, but these anomalies could possibly be explained by extreme stupidity combined with a complete breakdown in election procedures in 33% of the precincts at once.
2. There is a history in Volusia of likely fraud in a presidential race (2000) but the presidential contest in Volusia in 2004 could not have swayed the result in Florida, unless taken in conjunction with a number of other counties. The data for the other counties is not yet available due to stonewalling the records request in Florida's biggest counties.
3. The specific anomalies in Volusia show a highly unusual pattern that does not appear to be present in any other location in Florida. The specific pattern is very much consistent with fraud, but the mechanism implied by the anomalies would indicate local, inside fraud rather than outside penetration or national scope.
4. There are other races in Volusia that would also have made attractive targets for fraud, on a local level. The most significant contest, and the most lucrative target on a local level, was the supervisor of elections race. The current supervisor, Deanie Lowe, is retiring. The race between two candidates was as follows, Ann McFall (the underdog, who was the protege of Deanie Lowe) and Patricia Northey, favored to win, who had vowed to clean up the elections office, including promising to fire a key person with a high level of access.
The candidate promising to clean up the elections office lost, though she had been favored to win. She lost by about 4,000 votes, out of 229,000.
5. If fraud did occur, and if the mechanism implied by the specific anomalies was used, the most votes that could be affected, by our calculations, was about 20,000.
6. We have additional auditing to do, specific to the types of anomalies we found. There are significant problems, in that chain of custody is not intact in Volusia County for most of the key documents and records.
I have been told that people will be very disappointed that Volusia County does not appear to hold the key to overturning the presidential race. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501c(3) we cannot work on overturning specific candidate races. What we can do is investigate anomalies, and you don't know until all the steps are complete what the answers will be. (Kinda like doing your taxes).
But regardless, it is what it is. We're looking for the truth, not engaging in partisan politics.
We are working on two additional investigations, one with decidedly national implications. Because of the time pressures on that, we have provided the information we have on that to decisionmakers and make-it-happen types, and if they figure it out first, that would be great. In the mean time, we'll continue to work on that.
We do not travel with a high-speed scanner. It was recommended to me that we get a digital camera to get photos of documents so we can get them on the web more easily. However, for those interested in the Volusia poll tapes, that is 900 pages; We would rather not pull out the ones we find most interesting to publish them on the web at this time, because we have additional investigations we are doing, such as interviewing poll workers from these areas, and we don't want this work to be pre-empted by damage control actions, once they know what our specific theory is and where we're focusing our attention.
Concurrently, there is a court hearing today on whether to dismiss a case to set aside the Volusia County election. That is a separate action, and will affect two things:
1) Our ability to look at more documents, as they may become sequestered as evidence, and we are not plaintiffs in the case
2) The wisdom of putting materials on the web. As long as there is active litigation, I think it's a dumb idea to stick evidence on the Internet. (You don't see the defendants doing that, do you?) All that does is give the opposition a detailed road map to use in preparing their case. While it is true they have the same raw documents, when we put them on the Web, that comes with analysis and singling out what conclusions we think can be drawn -- in other words, giving away the case.
This update is an informal one, not the final conclusion for Volusia. We are still collecting documents.
Thanks,
Bev Harris
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