The "seals" are not seals. The "chain of custody" is not a chain of custody. Ballots being transported by the "state police" are actually transported by Butch and Hoppy, who are not employed by the state police. Butch and Hoppy's real names are not really Butch and Hoppy.
In New Hampshire, it's all hidden in plain sight.
If you are on the home page of Black Box Voting, click "more" to see a brief photo essay for how this all works.
This is the van that "Butch" and "Hoppy" drive. These two men pick up all the ballots in New Hampshire from more than 230 locations and bring them to one central location for the recount.
"Butch" has a real name: Armand Dubois. He doesn't like to be photographed and in video after video, he ducks out of the shots. He wears a baseball cap and dark glasses. At one point he said "you're taking a picture of me?"
Perhaps he's shy, but this is an evaluation of chain of custody, which includes knowing the names and background for people who ride around the state inside a van containing the ballots for the presidential primary election.
According to "Butch", the real name for "Hoppy" is Peter, but we do not yet know the last name. "Hoppy" is not camera shy, but we would like to know his real name and background. (Do not post personal or speculative information here. It will be removed. E-mail privately to crew@blackboxvoting.org )
If photos appear as broken link, right-click and choose "show picture" -- this is a timing issue with our forum software and some computers and connections may experience this problem. Right click, show picture. That solves it.
Ballots are contained in a variety of cardboard boxes, with a few metal boxes thrown in from certain parts of Manchester. The New Hampshire secretary of state's office, which provides the labels for the boxes and provides the ballots for all the towns, claims they leave the decision up to the towns as to how to secure their ballots.
When people ask about the security of using old, used cardboard boxes to transport and store the official ballots for the presidential primary election, New Hampshire state officials quickly frame the issue as one of "frugality" and paint the problem over with rustic charm.
That doesn't address the problem. The random nature of the boxes enables both accidental and deliberate chain of custody breaches.
If the state of New Hampshire can provide the ballots and tell the towns what labels to use, they can tell them what container to store ballots in, or at the very least, publish guidelines for this.
Originally, the ballots were to be delivered to the state archive warehouse without notification to the public as to when they would arrive, and without permitting the public to photograph or videotape the ballot intake process.
The team assembled by Black Box Voting objected to this and insisted on public access to view the incoming ballot boxes and the intake process. We prevailed, at least temporarily.
So they have been bringing the ballots in the front door, taking them through the counting room, out the back door, through the electronically key-coded door into the archive warehouse, down the hall inside the key-carded warehouse, placing them in what they call a "vault" which is actually a small room with a lock that can be opened by a single key.
Ballots being transported from "vault" to counting room
Other items besides ballots have been kept in the "vault" as well:
Items left in ballot vault after transporting ballots, held in "vault" overnight, to the counting room.
Two other observations about the state archive warehouse:
They use the same bar code identification system for all items.
There are no windows and no way to observe what is going on in the warehouse. It has two loading bays in addition to the electronically key-carded door, and the counted ballots are NOT stored in the "vault" but rather, on shelves like all the other documents. Here is a photo of the loading bays:
As ballots are being transported back and forth to the warehouse "vault" and being counted in the counting room, boxes are being loaded and unloaded from the loading bay behind the building.
Secretary of state Bill Gardner has several assistant and deputy secretaries of state. The assistant secretary of state in charge of ballots and ballot chain of custody is David Scanlan.
Here is David Scanlon (far end) moving a ballot cart with state archive employee Brian Burford.
The box below was shipped from the secretary of state TO the town clerk. The pinkish label is a shipping lable and so is the label next to it saying "deliver to":
The rebuttal provided by state and archive employees to concerns about the particular slit shown above is that the label on the top is the only thing that counts.
I'll post a closeup photo of the top label further down. On the top label are the signatures of the selectmen and information about location and information about the ballots inside.
I chose the above photo because it provides a clear image of the SHIP TO labels and also shows the label on the box top that is said to secure the ballot box. I cannot tell from this photo whether the clear tape is on top of that label or underneath it, but let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume the label on top is further secured with clear plastic tape.
This is not a chain of custody. There is absolutely no way for any observer to tell whether the clear plastic tape (if it's over the top label) was affixed on the night of the election, by the town clerk after the election, by Butch and Hoppy or a person they met enroute, or in the vault in the middle of the night.
It is easy to get distracted with off-topic questions like "are you accusing Butch and Hoppy?" or to take at face value someone's statement that the tape was put there on election night.
THAT IS NOT A CHAIN OF CUSTODY.
The only item that even remotely resembles a chain of custody is the signed label on the top of the box. Since we have no idea when the other tape was put on, or who affixed it, that tape cannot be considered part of the chain of custody.
Furthermore, this taping of the label was not a consistent practice from box to box or town to town.
I think we can all understand that the town clerk would slit open the end of the box to retrieve shipped ballots.
That explains the slits that ONLY slit the two original shipping labels.
That doesn't answer the chain of custody questions revealed by the above slit. The questions raised by the above photo in my mind are:
1) Can someone get their hand into the slit?
2) Was the box slit secured by tape or anything when it came out of the van?
3) Was the box slit secured in any way at the town before pickup?
4) Is there any record of what the box looked like on election night and also, before pickup? In other words, do the signatures even match, is the tape in the same places.
5) If there is no tape securing the label at the top, it would be the ONLY thing securing the box since the sides are slit. If this label is removed, does it leave telltale evidence?
6) Does the slitting of the labels upon receipt of original ballots explain all openings on all ballot boxes?
Here is a ballot box that has been counted. It has both the lable affixed at the town with the selectmen's signatures on it, and a new label affixed to show it has been counted.
Here is an empty ballot box with the top label attached. The ballots are in the process of being counted. As Anthony Stevens, from the sec. state office, watched I checked to see whether the labels on the top of the boxes leave any mark if you remove and reaffix.
They stopped my experiment after I had peeled about two inches.
I now call these labels "Post-Its".
It is important NOT to allow referring to these labels as "seals" because they are not seals, they are removable labels. When writing about the chain of custody in New Hampshire, we should not refer to the boxes as being "sealed" by these labels, which are in many cases the only line of defense when the end of the box top is sliced.
These are labels. Not seals. A "seal" actually "seals" the container. These labels do not seal it.
The person with responsibility for making sure the seals are actually seals is Assistant Secretary of State David Scanlan. He chose labels that are not seals.
I asked Scanlan if he believed the ballot boxes were secure when slit at the end. He said the boxes are secure because of the label on the top. Here's a hand in the slit. You decide if you are comfortable with this.
He was referring to what I call the "PostIt" note.
After seeing the condition of the ballot boxes coming out of the vault, I was curious about the condition of the boxes as they were unloaded from the van. The photos below are of ballots unloaded from the van during the early afternoon of Thursday, Jan. 17:
Pat and Manny, the representatives for Kucinich, did not go back to the ballot vault with me. To the best of my knowledge, the only people who went back there were the Hillary Clinton observers.
The Kucinich representatives have said they are comfortable with the chain of custody. I did not see them take a single photograph, nor did I see them lodge any protest about this.
Republican ballots were also brought in, to the best of my knowledge, WITHOUT notifying the Republican candidate who has paid for a recount.
The next series of photos will be from the towns we visited to capture photos of the condition of the ballot boxes before they were loaded into the van. I will do that in a separate thread, perhaps later, and open this thread for discussion now.
In New Hampshire, the ballot chain of custody is a bunch of broken cardboard boxes with a post-it on top.
Whether elections are stolen by control of votes or by the Supreme Court, enforcement of the law is in the hands of political appointees.
While I smiled about Mayor Daley's help in John Kennedy's campaign, I frown on the Bush "victories". When Robin Hood steals from the rich, that's fine with me-- but not so when Robin robs the working class. I know. it is hypocritical, that's why I admit it.
To enforce fairness should be the genuine goal of both parties, but I fear no one's serious about voting accuracy. Election Day would be a national holiday and voting could extend through 48 hours, on a weekend, perhaps, if we were serious about voting. But they're no more genuine about voting than about the mass murder currently taking place in Iraq.
Eight years after the US Supreme Court had the gall to state that: "..counting votes could be unfair to George W. Bush..", voting is still a grey area, susceptible to all kinds of mischief, like you have documented. But we can't get the Speaker of the House to enforce US law, much less to endorse equitable voting systems reform that provides for the rights of all Americans. Even the US Justice Dept. has ceased to enforce voting rights laws.
Yet life goes on, while thousands die for the profit of American corporate interests and our life-support system is strangled by the dumping of vast corporate production costs upon our air and waters.
Our government was arguably founded to defy corporate money-- the East India and Hudson's Bay companies, and the wealth of European royalty. The evidence is in, but the jury's still out on whether we, the people, will ever finally escape market forces that depreciate our lives.
by
martinweiss (19 articles, 4 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 337 comments)
on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 11:16:28 AM
How can we possibly trust this election process when chain of custody is laughable, at best.
Nice work, BBV ~ and all your crew. There is always merit in being involved in a recount, or an audit, because it reveals these problems that most Americans are unaware of.
by
Rady Ananda (109 articles, 257 quicklinks, 23 diaries, 842 comments)
on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 11:32:48 AM
Given the statistical insignificance between the votes cast in initial primary and recounted votes ( http://www.sos.nh.gov/recountresults.htm ), is it proposed that someone(s) - between the dates of the primary and recount - went around the state and adjusted the ballots in the boxes to get the recount numbers? Or are you just claiming that the initial ballots cast were discarded at the municipal and/or ward level, "forged" ballots were run through the optical scanners (where applicable), and then the "forged" ballots were sealed into the containers for a possible recount?
Either way, you do realize the level of logistical control - not to mentioned conspiracy - needed to successfully pull of an election fraud of this type at the state level? And like every conspiracy theory, the more people that "know" - the more likely the conspiracy will be revealed. Yet - no conspiracy has been revealed other than Butch and Hoppy are aliases (shocker there).
The pictures are nice and presented to build a theme of conspiracy via incompetence. But I only see incompetence, if anything. As to the issue of frugality on container choice, why do you think New Hampshire has no sales tax or state income tax and the state legislators collect a $100 annual salary? We in New Hampshire are frugal.
by
Tom Murphy (3 articles, 4 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 1707 comments)
on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 3:54:13 PM
You are either naive to a degree that defies comprehension, ignorant of history, or an accomplice to election fraud.
You seem to relish in playing "devil's advocate", but in this instance you become intolerable.
There is enough to be suspect about because of the governments resistance to having transparency and accountability in our election process. One would think that after the 2000 farce there would have been a major effort to reform our election system to make it a model for the world to follow. Not only did that not happen every effort to keep that from happening has been made and the situation has only gotten worse.
But for some strange reason you don't seem to see this. To you everything's just fine. The evidence you claim to not see is evident, the fact that you refuse to see it makes your argument and you seem trite.
Every now and then, because of the roll you wish to play, you come up with some interesting view points, but this isn't one of those times. This is just a waste of time.
by
Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1401 comments)
on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 5:49:28 PM
And yet, you failed to answer my ignorant but simple questions... How were "they" able to have the initial primary vote count (optical scan and hand count) essentially match the paper ballot only recount? I'm curious as to an explanation.
by
Tom Murphy (3 articles, 4 quicklinks, 10 diaries, 1707 comments)
on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 10:40:44 PM
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