New Hampshire Republican Recount Shows Widespread Chain of Custody Tampering

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A citizens’ watchdog group has discovered irregularities ranging from ballot boxes found empty, pre-opened or “sealed” with re-usable sticky-note tape and left unguarded in insecure areas to missing Diebold memory cards.

The count commenced on January 24, a day after Democrat Dennis Kucinich halted his own recount toward which he had paid $27,000. Kucinich’s funds ran out with the task 40% complete and few significant disparities to show, according to NH Assistant Secretary of State David Scanlan.

Suggestions of impropriety on the Republican side first arose immediately following the January 8 primary in Concord, when candidate Ron Paul discovered that 31 votes cast for him in Sutton Township had gone unreported. Sutton Town Clerk Jennifer Call later admitted to the omission, chalking it up to “human error.”

Although Paul himself did not ask for a recount, Albert Howard, a little-known candidate from Ann Arbor, Michigan, did. The effort is being largely financed by money raised from individual Paul supporters and by Mr. Howard.

And the problems uncovered by the citizen observers, which go back to the handling of the ballots prior to the actual recounts, may yet shore up Republican claims of tampering.

Starting on January 20, volunteers who have poured into Concord to monitor the proceedings have found security compromised at every turn.

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, consultant/interviewee for the Emmy-nominated 2006 HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, and a top authority on voting fraud, arrived early on the scene and has documented her 9-day investigation on her website, BlackBoxVoting.org.

With fellow volunteers like Vicki Karp, co-author of Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America, Harris has followed the van assigned to pick up boxes of ballots from around the Granite State on wild 90 mph chases, challenged an evasive NH Secretary of State Bill Gardner about his refusal to store ballot boxes brought to the State Archive Warehouse—location of the recount—in a secure vault overnight, and watched in disbelief as an official, proudly demonstrating the “accuracy” of the Diebold AccVote Optical Scan machines used in 80% of the primary vote, plugged in eight “No” and two “Yes” ballots only to see the printout return a tally of nine “No” and one “Yes.”

She also found the Warehouse building unlocked overnight, and was able to reach the stacks of “sealed” ballot boxes and demonstrate the “peelability” of the Secretary of State’s special seals before being asked to leave. Her claims are supported by some 20 hours of original video footage, much of it available on her website.

Harris, whose courtroom testimony has helped to send vote fraud perpetrators to jail in the past, calls the entire New Hampshire recount a criminal enterprise. “It has all the earmarks of it,” she says. She has called for the resignations of Secretary of State Gardner and Assistant Secretary of State David Scanlan.

Meanwhile, the Republican recount continues.

Ron Paul has now requested a recount in Louisiana