On the night of the New Hampshire primary, the media far and wide were invited to watch as ballot boxes were locked into a vault requiring key-card access. It was an impressive show. I've worked with those sort of systems before - in fact, I've been beholden to them for a paycheck (though I really liked my situation, where my card would get me into just about anywhere) - and I trust them to some extent. At the very least, they keep the riff-raff out, and they do offer some public display of security.
The following night, Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting catches Bill Gardner, N.H. Secretary of State, overseeing boxes full of ballots being left in an unsecured area accessible to janitors and God-knows-who-else. Questioned repeatedly, Mr. Gardner is not able to answer why the ballots are being left in an unsecured area. He refuses to answer whether or not the vault is full. He refuses to answer why, suddenly, ballots have been moved outside of the secured vault and into an area subject to tampering.
Secretary of State Gardner stands around mostly dumbfounded, while other unidentified officials answer in his stead. "Make sure you're here in the morning, and you will see, this door that's sealed now, this building's secure, those ballots are secure," Gardner says. The door is then "sealed" with a piece of paper-tape that several officials sign. It looks right official and shit!
Until the following morning, when Bev and her crew arrive, as invited by Secretary of State Gardner. They manage to find an entire box full of the paper "seals" used as a security measure on the door and the ballot boxes. Testing the seals, they are easily applied to a box, peeled off with no trace, re-applied, peeled off again with no trace, etc. The very "seals" that are supposedly guaranteeing the security not only of the ballot boxes themselves, but also of the facility in which they're being stored, are so easily tampered with as to be laughable.
This is not an audit trail. This is not a chain of custody. Moreover, these ballots are not secure, and no New Hampshire voter can be confident that their vote was not tampered with! As much as I respect Bev Harris and her folks, even they could have potentially altered the contents of those ballot boxes, had they so wished.
We will never know how the ballots really stacked up. If Bev and her watchdogs could compromise the "seals" in a matter of seconds, who else might have come into the "secure" room in their absence, in the interim between the time that Bev was escorted out, and the time that she returned as invited the following morning? What might they have done? Why were boxes full of ballots specifically left outside of the vault that was presented to the network media the previous day?
Perhaps something in here wasn't abided by. I dunno, I'm no lawyer. I'm just a guy who likes to eat a splendid dinner and see the lovely tall sights on a Friday night. I'm just a liberal being drawn more and more to a certain Republican named Ron Paul.
I love abortion, I hate the idea of women (or girls) having kids they don't want and can't support. I love food stamps, with limits; I'm in favor of the idea of supporting those among us who haven't figured out how to make it yet, as long as they're willing to work. I love Social Security, even though I'm well aware that no matter how much I pay in, nothing will be there for me 35 years from now. I love guns (bet that was a surprise). I have no religion, and never will. Yet here I am thinking quite seriously about voting for a guy who calls himself a Republican, for the first time in my life.
That ought to say something about how fucked up our entire political process is at this point. A bleeding-heart liberal who sees eye to eye with a conservative. Turns out, though, Ron Paul is actually a conservative. Eliminate the IRS, stop the war on drugs, gut the federal government, and put decisions back under the auspices of the states. Y'know, like that thing called the Constitution of the United States called for.
Wake up, motherfuckers. We've got 10 months to go, and it's time we start holding people accountable.
