Shallow Thoughts

Akkana's Musings on Open Source, Science, and Nature.

Fri, 19 Nov 2004

Blackbox Voting Exposes Poll Tape Fraud

Installment one of Bev Harris and BlackBoxVoting.org's Freedom of Information Request: the Stinking Poll Tapes.

Harris & company went to Volusia County, Florida to request the "poll tapes" from the election: the printed record that each machine produces at the end of the day, signed and dated by election workers.

What they were given was unsigned printouts dated November 16, the day before their arrival.

Upon investigating, they found several curious things:

  1. Elections officials meeting clustered over poll tapes, who shut the door on them when they asked what was going on;
  2. A garbage bag full of original, signed poll tapes, dated the day of the election;
  3. Another garbage bag of original poll tapes at a different location;
  4. Apparent discrepancies between the original, signed, dated poll tapes and the supposed copies which the elections officials had originally tried to give them.

This is all over the blogosphere, but doesn't appear to have hit much of the mainstream press so far, not even Wired, except for one early article in the East Volusia News-JournalOnline. But the story making the rounds claims Black Box Voting has it all on video.

Stay tuned!

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[ 23:12 Nov 19, 2004    More politics/election04 | permalink to this entry ]

Bentonite Magma!

Reading the ingredients on a bottle of calamine lotion turned up something interesting.

Funny, it didn't feel quite that hot going on!

(And yes, calamine implies that my earlier comment about poison oak being gone only means that the visible leaves are gone. Oops! Current theory is that it happened when Dave touched the baby newt while moving it off the trail, and that the newt had been crawling in poison oak. Though it's slightly possible that it could have been the newt itself: it turns out that California newts are indeed poisonous, though only if you eat them. From that page: When a predator approaches the newt strikes a warning posture showing its brightly colored underside. This is a warning that the newt is poisonous. If the predator continues the newt will secrete white milky oil out of the skin on its back. If the predator eats the newt, the predator will die quickly from the poison. The newt will then crawl back out of the animal's mouth and continue on its way. )

Unrelated to newts or poison oak is another humorous picture I took a while ago and have been meaning to upload: No Swimming.

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[ 10:55 Nov 19, 2004    More humor | permalink to this entry ]