5 Responses

1. 

   1)

   Badger said on 1/29/2008 @ 3:20pm PT: [Permalink]

   For those that don’t know yet, it’s pretty easy to find state election laws. So you can check for yourself against the statements made.

   Once again but abbreviated this time. Go to the site to read it all. It’s pretty clear who is supposed to provide the seals. Funny that Scanlan can’t provide that information. The buck stops with the Secretary of State.

   I would also interpret the transportation of ballots to mean the State Police actually transfer the ballots- not follow a van with the ballots. Most State Police would have a couple vans that could do that:

   http://www.sos.nh.gov/statutes.htm

   659:95 Sealing and Certifying Ballots………in the containers provided by the secretary of state as required by RSA 659:97 and shall seal such container with the sealer provided by the secretary of state as required by RSA 659:97…….

   659:97 Secretary of State to Prepare Containers, Sealers. The secretary of state shall, before any state election, prepare and distribute to each town and ward clerk containers to be used for preserving ballots and sealers to seal each such container. He shall prepare special containers and sealers to be used for preserving any special and separate ballots for questions to voters. The secretary of state shall prescribe the size and form of such containers and sealers and shall prescribe the form of any endorsement blank printed upon the sealers provided that the blank is in substance consistent with the provisions of RSA 659:95.

   660:5 Conduct of Recount. If directed by the secretary of state, the state police shall collect all ballots requested from the town or city clerks having custody of them and shall deliver them to the public facility designated by the secretary of state. ………

2. 

   2)

   Greg said on 1/29/2008 @ 4:26pm PT: [Permalink]

   I can’t wait to see part 2 (gotta get the popcorn)

3. 

   3)

   Linda said on 1/29/2008 @ 6:28pm PT: [Permalink]

   Unbelievable. There has GOT to be a way to break down the hostile barrier that public elections officials have put up between themselves and the citizens/voters. There is really no cause for them to behave in that manner.

   The only reasons a public elections entity would be unwilling to be transparent to citizens/voters would be because (a) they don’t want to be bothered, which is just absolutely unacceptable, or (b) they have something or some reason to hide. Either way doesn’t look good.

4. 

   4)

   Bev Harris said on 1/30/2008 @ 11:28am PT: [Permalink]

   The New Hampshire officials are extra accessible and not at all hostile to citizens.

   Unless you ask them questions they don’t want to answer.

   This is the kinder, gentler version of “Trust Me” elections – too many citizens are lured in by the opportunity to have access to friendly public officials, but the blessing of access can easily become the curse of access when citizens come to believe they mustn’t ask tough questions in order to protect their access.

   I have had very cordial relationships, and access, to New Hampshire officials in the past. It was with tremendous regret that I was forced to confront them and thus damage a “good working relationship.”

   However: The “good working relationship” didn’t produce any results. After Hursti himself testified in New Hampshire, they still took NO STEPS to protect their election. After I personally showed both Stevens and Scanlan that the “seals” did not seal, no one did a thing about it. And let’s think about that: All they needed to do was contact the town clerks and tell them to add more tape.

   Instead, the town clerks reportedly got a directive from Bill Gardner not to let citizens photograph the ballot boxes before pickup.

   For more than a year, citizens from many different areas tried to work with New Hampshire officials. In the end, though, you have to look at what they do, not what they say. What they did was enable a sole source vendor to program every memory card, KNOWING that one of the top executives for that vendor was a convicted narcotics trafficker. What they did was “upgrade” their old Accuvote system, which was not federally certified, to precisely the model hacked by Hursti in the Black Box Voting/Hacking Democracy study. What they did was fail to enact a single mitigation procedure as other states, like California, have done. What they did was try to keep ballot pickup and intake processes out of public view (see upcoming Hoppy & Butch show video). What they did was fail to secure the recount ballots.

   After you look at what they do, even the friendliest, most accessible “relationship” is not worth omitting the truth in reporting.

   Don’t we wish the mainstream media would re-learn that?

   “No government should be without censors…and where the press is free, no one ever will…It would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former [the government] and persecute the latter [its critics]” — Thomas Jefferson

5. 

   5)

   Dan Stafford said on 1/31/2008 @ 3:54am PT: [Permalink]

   There is an obvious violation of the NH statutes if the above quotation is accurate. It says that “659:97 Secretary of State to Prepare Containers, Sealers. The secretary of state shall, before any state election, prepare and distribute to each town and ward clerk containers to be used for preserving ballots and sealers to seal each such container. He shall prepare special containers and sealers to be used for preserving any special and separate ballots for questions to voters. The secretary of state shall prescribe the size and form of such containers and sealers and shall prescribe the form of any endorsement blank printed upon the sealers provided that the blank is in substance consistent with the provisions of RSA 659:95.”

   Did the SOS provide all those cardboard boxes to the towns and counties? Yeah, riiiight.

   Is there anything in NH statute that states the requirements for the security or physical properties of the containers and seals? It certainly doesn’t look like it.

   The whole thing in NH is a total cartoon.

   Dan