[EL] Quick clarification

[Bev Harris]

Hi Lori,

> You call these double votes, but even assuming they are the same people,
> how do you know you aren't looking at errors in the data?

Well, these are good points. But these errors are not from merging the data --
though they may be errors in the data.

Here's what happened in Shelby County: In late July 2010, during early voting
for the August 2010 primary, the district attorney announced prosecutions of
two people for double voting in 2006. Then, just days later, thousands of
people went to vote at the polls on Election Day and were told they had already
voted.

This obviously produces a chilling effect, and it turned out they admitted that
they had loaded the wrong database into the Election Day e-pollbooks,
erroneously reporting that thousands had already voted when they had not.

The county is 52% Black, and typically about 70% Democrat, but the election
result for the August 2010 Primary was a White Republican sweep. Ten candidates
sued, and I assisted them in fighting for the records to unravel what really
happened.

The Republican story was that there was a low turnout for Democrats, and
besides, that "the demographics of the voter turnout matched the result."

The election administrator should have been cited for contempt of court at least
three times, but was not; on one occasion, after they had been ordered to
produce a file listing from their computers, we caught them on videotape
loading their computers on carts and running out of the building with them,
loading them into cars and driving off. The chancellor, who was by that time on
site at the elections office, then ordered them to produce a copy of the backup
tapes for their hard drives. They did this, but the information wasn't turned
over by the court to the plaintiffs until eight hours before the trial started.
Extracting the tapes was a rather extensive process, and the case was dismissed
before the evidence could be examined.

So eventually these backup tapes came into my possession, and I extracted them.
They contained about 160 gigs of information, including 89 voter databases at
various points in time.

In Tennessee, the elections administration is appointed by the party in control
of the state legislature. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats were in control and the
Shelby County elections administration were Democrats appointed by Democrats.
In 2009 and 2010, the elections administration became Republican appointed by
Republican.

This provided an interesting opportunity. I have both the files from the
Democratic administration and the Republican administration.

Using the "last modified" date on the file properties, I was able to reconstruct
a timeline and a sequence of files in chronological order.

Now, the 2006 General election and the 22 people reported to have double voted
remain exactly consistent in files saved from 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.
Some of them -- Willie Blackshire, for instance -- appear to have a pattern
where there are two identities with same first, last, birthdate, and both
identities have votes reported over a period of years, often in the same
election but sometimes not.

Others had one "twin" purged in 2009. Sometimes during the purge process the
voter history was lost.

To complicate matters, some voter history components became scrambled in 2009
following an e-pollbook meltdown, and there was considerable suspicion in the
community about the supposedly accidentally wrong database put in there in
2010.

What I am doing is parsing out a whole set of problems.

The ExpressPoll electronic pollbooks should be junked. They are prone to
large-scale error. There is what I call a "personnel problem" where the staff
has been making thousands of changes in the official reports without disclosing
that they have done so to anyone.

There are incorrect voter histories, they did an alteration to insert their
voter registration database into their vote counting program, effectively
acting as a middleman, which does not meet federal guidelines (Tennessee says
they don't have to use certified systems) and which would be illegal in most
states.

But I wouldn't doubt that there was some double voting going on also. In Shelby
County in 2010 I believe it was, an elected representative - or state senator -
Ophelia Ford, I think, was recalled from her election and they had to have a
new one because poll workers were caught voting dead people into the books.

We need to look at the data, without trying to "find" a certain result, whether
that be trying to find voter fraud or trying to prove there wasn't any. The
data is what it is, and in Shelby County, because of the unprecedented quantity
of data, we may be able to shed more light than usual on what really happened.

Best,

Bev Harris

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