FROM BEV HARRIS, BLACKBOXVOTING.ORG

Over the weekend (before the election), a multi-group effort called Protect the Count was blasted across the nation, spearheaded by Black Box Voting, prepared at the request of YouTube and working with Video the Vote and Election Defense Alliance. This follows distribution of over 100,000 copies of the Black Box Voting Tool Kit online, and 20,000 by request in hard copy form, and these got into the hands of state campaign leaders, labor unions, and public interest groups

In a nutshell, the main thrust of the early November "Protect the Count" program was to deter the middleman attacks by capturing evidence of the poll tape results on video. Teams of citizens (and lawyers) fanned out across the states of New Hampshire, Ohio, and the labor unions grabbed video cameras in parts of Florida; Texas, Oregon, Tennessee, people were everywhere with cameras nailing down spot check evidence before it got to the middlemen

But the biggest part of the strategy was to refuse to give in to the efforts to get us to identify the precincts to be monitored, to make the evidence collection unpredictably both in quantity and locations, and then rattle sabres loudly to let everyone know various people were here and there with their cameras

Had there been efforts to implement a middleman results attack, even a handful of five or six mismatched tapes would put a spotlight on the chain of middlemen

In addition, an alert citizen in Massachusetts learned that the memory card programmer for all of New England, LHS, was planning to come around and pick up its memory cards on Wednesday morning following the election. She obtained an opinion from the Massachusetts secretary of state - town clerks were to keep the cards for 30 days -- and Black Box Voting blasted an e-mail to our constituents in five states recommending they call their town clerks to remind them NOT to give memory cards to LHS until all recount and litigation periods had completed. We also faxed every town clerk in New Hampshire to hold memory cards, and the New Hampshire secretary of state issued a directive to keep the cards. McCain had already achieved two major upsets in New Hampshire (2000 and 2008 primaries) with LHS programming the cards. He was in New Hampshire just days before the election bragging "I LOVE to be an underdog in New Hampshire." I'll bet

But LHS depends on primarily Democratic elections in New England, and to hand McCain New Hampshire would have placed it not only in the bullseye of national media attention, but would arouse annoyance from it's customer base, which is New England politicians

This said, and while I agree that the tampering issues with Republicans are particularly ruthless, there is absolutely no reason to believe that Democratic politicians don't partake heartily of the many opportunities. Most politics is local, and you'll find plenty of tampered elections when you look there, both Democrat and Republican -- and this is not a theory, it's a fact.

The number of indictments and convictions I cited in my Moonshine Elections report -- which included politicians also in New York, California, Illinois and many non-moonshine states -- documents that election tampering happens, it's not particularly rare, and it uses lots of different approaches. I look at it as "election kleptomania" -- those who do it just can't resist whatever opportunity presents itself, whether that means yanking people off the rolls illegally, manually entering stuff on the tabulator, finding more ballots when needed, or diddling the memory card

The reason Obama won was that he overran it. But you shouldn't have to win by a landslide to win.

And the citizenry did play a role in deterrence

Bev
Founder - Black Box Voting