Libertarian says voting company tampered with recount effort

By John Byrne | RAW STORY    13 December 2004

David Cobb, the unsuccessful Green Party presidential candidate, aired startling allegations at the Democratic House Judiciary Committee?s Columbus hearings Monday, alleging that a voting company representative tampered with voting equipment in Columbus last Friday and attempted to plant false information into the Ohio recount.

Cobb says that a witness who had requested anonymity watched a representative of Triad Systems enter the Columbus Board of Elections unannounced and tamper with a vote tabulator which then lost all data.

The representative then, Cobb said, tried to convince employees to post false information so that it would appear as if the data was valid and had never been lost.

This following is RAW STORY ?s transcript Cobb?s speech as recorded by Inside Track News? broadcast (mp3 file), an independent media outlet that covered the event. The story has been followed in detail at The Brad Blog.

?A representative from Triad Systems came into this county?s Board of Election?s office unannounced, that is on this Friday. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the upcoming recount.

?He then headed into the back room where Triad supplies tabulators, that is the machine that counts the ballots, is kept. This Triad representative told them that there was problem with the system, that the system had a bad battery and it had ?lost all its data.?

?He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it. And in another [incomprehensible] in the room. And he had spare parts in his coat, as one of the people moved in [sic] remarked how very heavy it was.

?He finally reassembled everything and said it was working but not to turn it off. He then asked which precinct would be counted in the 3 percent recount test and that one which had been ed as if it had the right number of votes was relayed to him he then went back and did something else to the tabulator.

?The Triad Systems representative suggested that since the hand recount had to match the machine count exactly and since it would hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers such as to make them look like employee information or
  
something similar.

?The people doing the hand count could then he said just report those numbers no matter what the actually counted in the ballot. This would then ?match? the tabulator report for this precinct exactly.

Minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) replied, ?David Cobb, I need to you to arrange a meeting with our staff immediately.?

Cobb asserted that such practices were ?going on across the state.?

The Cleveland Free Press? Editor David Fitrakis also submitted a list of documented Ohio voting irregularities Dec. 8, which Conyers? office has posted online in pdf format.