VOTESCAM THE STEALING OF AMERICA JAMES M. COLLIER KENNETH E COLLIER Votescam: The Stealing Of America All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in crititcal [sic] articles or reviews. For information: Victoria House Press, 67 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005 Copyright 1992 © by James M. Collier ISBN: 0-9634165-0-8 Library of Congress Catalogue Number 93-093814 Cover Design & Illustration: Steve Gordon To our daughters Amy, Unity and Victoria CONTENTS Book One: 1970-1989 The Premise 1 1. Electronic Hoodwink 4 2. Ballots Not Bullets 25 3. The Silent Press 58 4. It Takes a Thief 82 5. A Tangled Web 100 6. Hounds of Hell 128 7. The Petersen Memo 140 8. Video Vigilantes 144 9. Shots in the Dark 166 10. Watergatetown 184 11. Power Corrupts 203 12. Strange Bedfellows 234 13. Full Circle 248 14. Star Chamber Session 269 Book Two: 1990-1992 15. Pieces Of The Puzzle 288 16. The 13th Floor 298 17. The Last Dispatch 314 Epilogue 18. Knowledge Is Power 325 19. Can't You Hear The Whistle Blowin'? 339 Appendix 364 BOOK ONE 1970-1989 "Who shall stand guard to the guards themselves?" -- Juvenal THE PREMISE Votescam asserts the unthinkable. It is a strange and frightening true detective story. It contains fact, film, documents and visions seldom seen by the public. It is a troubling look at the corruption of the American vote that most Americans cannot bear to believe is even partly true. The authors assert, and back it up with daring reporting, that your vote and mine may now be a meaningless bit of energy directed by preprogrammed computers -- which can be fixed to select certain pre-ordained candidates and leave no footprints or paper trail. In short, computers are covertly stealing your vote. + For almost three decades the American vote has been subject to government-sponsored electronic theft. + The vote has been stolen from you by a cartel of federal "national security" bureaucrats, who include higher-ups in the Central Intelligence Agency, political party leaders, Congressmen, co-opted journalists -- and the owners and managers of the major Establishment news media, who have decided in concert that how America's votes are counted, by whom they are counted and how the results are verified and delivered to the public is, as one of them put it, "Not a proper area of inquiry." + By means of an unofficial private corporation named News Election Service (NES), the Establishment press has actual physical control of the counting and dissemination of the vote, and it refuses to let the public know how it is done. This book also contends that the theft of your vote or Votescam, is part of a supposedly patriotic "collaboration" between federal officials and the news media that began shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, when the "responsible" American press was persuaded by American intelligence services to hide from the American people the actual implications of the Kennedy murder. My brothers, Jim and Ken Collier, report this story as if the "hounds of hell," as Ken used to put it, were snapping at their journalistic heels. I, too, am a journalist and editor by profession, and a skeptic by training. Yet, as hard as I have tried not to, I now believe they were actually holding the tail of an elephantine conspiracy that they uncovered, inch by heart-rending inch. After reading Votescam, the impatient citizen may well ask: "Why if there is truth in the charges, are there no indictments?" That question is one of many provoked by Votescam's reporting, and if Americans actually value their vote then there will be indictments based on this book's data and documentation. My brothers peeked behind Oz's curtain and into a voting booth where people of power had secret hold of all the levers -- as well as all the keys on the computer keyboard. Yes, that's one hell of a conspiracy and it -- as Jim and Ken uncorked it -- doesn't stop there. You may be shocked, annoyed, angry astounded or alarmed to find out where and how deep my brothers feel it penetrates. Votescam is one of the weirdest trips 1990s Americans may take. My hope is that you will suspend disbelief for a while and read it with an open mind. If it raises questions you will demand answers. Answers to "improper inquiries" is what this book is about. It's what excellent journalism, in its best days, is also about. Barnard L. Collier New York City 1992 1 ELECTRONIC HOODWINK "We can now speak the most majestic words a democracy can offer: 'The people have spoken'..." First words spoken by President-elect, George Bush, November 8, 1988 victory speech in Houston, Texas, 11:30 PM EST "Once, during the time when days were darker, I made a promise. Thanks, New Hampshire!" Same speech, final words. It was not "the People" of the United States of America who did "the speaking" on that election day, although most of them believed it was, and still believe so. In fact, the People did not speak at all, and George Bush may have known it or, at least, strongly suspected it. The voices most of us really heard that day were the voices of computers -- strong, loud, authoritative, unquestioned in their electronic finality. The computers counted more than 55 million American votes in 1988 -- more than enough to swing election after election across the nation. In that election, a difference of just 535,000 or so votes would have put Dukakis into the White House. The computers that spoke in November 1988 held in their inner .workings small boxes that contained secret codes that only the sellers of the computers could read. The programs, or "source codes," were regarded as "trade secrets," The sellers of the vote-counting software zealously guarded their programs from the public, from election officials, from everyone -- on the dubious grounds that competitors could steal their ideas if the source codes were open to inspection. You may ask: What "ideas" does it require to count something as simple as ballots? Can the "ideas" be much more complex than, let's say, a supermarket computerized cash register or an automatic bank teller machine? The computer voting machines do not have to do anything complicated at all; they simply must be able to register votes for the correct candidate or party or proposal, tabulate them, count them up, and deliver arithmetically correct additions. People with no formal training, even children, used to do it all the time. So why can't the public know what those secret source codes instruct the computers to do? It only makes common sense that every gear, every mechanism, every nook and cranny of every part of the voting process ought to be in the sunlight, wide open to public view. How else can the public be reasonably assured that they are participating in an unrigged election where their vote actually means something? Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count. There is so profound a public despair about keeping the vote system honest that a man with immaculate academic credentials can sound the alarm on Dan Rather's CBS Evening News -- charging that America's elections are being compromised by computer felons -- and still get only three calls about it. Dr. Howard Strauss, a Princeton computer sciences professor and a member of a tiny nationwide group of worried citizens who call themselves "Election Watch," says: "The presidential election of 1992, without too much difficulty and with little chance of the felons getting caught, could be stolen by computers for one candidate or another. The candidate who can win by computer has worked jar enough ahead to rig the election by getting his 'consultants' to write the software that runs thousands of vote-counting computers from coast to coast. There are so many computers that use the same software now that a presidential election can be tampered with- in fact, may already be tampered with. Because of the trade secrecy, nobody can be the wiser." Computers in voting machines are effectively immune from checking and rechecking. If they are fixed, you cannot know it, and you cannot be at all sure of an honest tally. In the 1988 Republican primary in New Hampshire, there was no panel of computer experts who worked for the people and thoroughly examined the source codes before and after the voting. It is likely that a notoriously riggable collection of "Shouptronic" computers "preordained" voting results to give George Bush his "Hail Mary" victory in New Hampshire. Nobody save a small group of computer engineers, like John Sununu, the state's Republican governor, would be the wiser. If you think back carefully to November 8, 1988, it may strike you that your belief in who won at the polls was not formed as the result of openly voiced "ayes" or "nays" in a public forum. Nor was your perception of who won or lost based on the honest and visible marks on paper ballots that were checked and rechecked by all concerned parties or their chosen representatives. The truth, if you recall it clearly, is that you learned about George Bush's astounding victory in New Hampshire from a television program or newspaper, which supposedly learned about it from a computer center into which other computers fed information. You learned the "predicted outcome" within minutes after the polls in New Hampshire closed, and by and large you believed what you heard because you had no cause, it seemed, to be skeptical or suspicious. If you had any doubts about how the vote was counted, you probably dismissed them after asking yourself questions like: 1) Why would the computer people lie? 2) How could they lie? There must be public checks and balances. 3) If they lie, how can they get away with it? The losers will surely raise hell. Because you, and most of us, dismiss the possibility that the American vote is routinely stolen, distorted or otherwise monkeyed with by corrupt computer wizards, you resist questioning further and dismiss as crackpots or fanatics those who do. Yet, not long ago, Robert Flaherty, the president of News Election Services (NES), the private company that compiles voting results and feeds them to the major media, was asked to make it clear how the NES system works. As usual when asked about how NES counts and disseminates the vote, he replied: "This is not a proper area of inquiry." Can it be that the methods used to accept, tally and broadcast the results of the American vote are improper areas for questioning? "Yes," says Mr. Flaherty, "that is a proprietary matter not open to the public." We will describe the operations of the secretive NES later on, although it is noteworthy here to mention that this corporation, which fanatically guards its people and processes from the public view, is a consortium of the three major television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS, plus the Associated Press wire service, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other news-gathering organizations. These "First Amendment" institutions each raise the cry of "impropriety" and "improper inquiry" when asked about their unspoken role in the American vote count. Actually, the major news organizations foster the illusion that the American press competes to get the correct vote count to the public, and they imply by omission that "ballots" are counted in the traditional, accountable ways that once fostered confidence and a sense of fairness in the hearts and minds of the American voter. However the American voter has grown steadily more apathetic in both presidential and off-year elections, with sometimes less than 25 percent of those eligible taking the opportunity to cast a ballot The press blames this on the politicians and the public itself, but the public may be aware, if only vaguely that in some unfathomable way their vote counts for little or nothing. There have been too many odd coincidences and peculiar results over the past quarter century, and the decline in voter participation in national elections over the past two decades is directly proportional to the rise of computerized voting. The People are naive about computer voting and somewhat less than entirely computer literate. They do intuit, however, that it is a mistake to put much faith in the integrity of computerized voting systems. Except in matters spiritual, intelligent people tend not to place much faith in what they cannot see. They could see paper ballots marked and placed into a slot in ballot boxes, and except for certain infamous precincts in Chicago, people generally trusted the American voting process. They could see it, touch it, and their vote left a paper trail that could be followed if there was a need for verification. That can no longer be said. The instant after a voter chooses his or her ballot selection on a computer, the electronic impulse that is triggered either records that vote or it does not. Either way, the computer program immediately erases all record of the transaction except for the result, which is subject to an infinite variety of switching, column jumping, multiplication, division, subtraction, addition and erasure. All these operations take place in the electronic universe within the computer and are entirely under the direction of the program or "source code" It is impossible to go back to the original event, like you can with a paper ballot, and start over again in case fraud is suspected. With computer voting the results are virtually final, and, in all cases, hatched in the electronic dark. No human eye can watch or protect your vote once it is cast in a computer voting machine. People who mistrust the voting process cannot, in the traditional American way, accept the defeat of their candidates gracefully and work loyally with the winners. Instead, more and more American voters are feeling "had," "scammed," "hoodwinked" by the voting system. Trust has almost departed. There is the nagging, unproven, yet pervasive feeling that the "experts," the "spin doctors," the "covert operators" and the "private interests" have put their technicians and consultants in absolute control of the national vote count, and that in any selected situation these computer wizards can and will program the vote as their masters wish. All over the United States of America there are people who listen to the facts about computer voting and then tell horror stories of candidates, who didn't have a prayer before election day, then slip into office by an uncheckable computer vote. Most common is the story of the computer that "breaks down" when one candidate is securely in the lead, and after the computer is "fixed," the losing candidate pulls ahead and wins. The evil feelings left behind by such shenanigans are festering across America. Among the wickedest recent examples of possible computerized vote fraud, of the sort that has disillusioned millions of Americans, is the 1988 New Hampshire primary that saved George Bush from getting knocked out of the race to the White House. Was the New Hampshire Primary scenario a modern classic in computerized vote manipulation? Here is the gist of it. The Bush campaign of 1988, as historians have since recollected it, was filled with CIA-type disinformation operations and deceptions of the sort that America used in Viet Nam, Chile and the Soviet Union. Since George Bush was one of the most admired CIA directors in the history of the organization, this was not so surprising. Yet George Bush stood to lose the Republican Party nomination if he was beaten by Sen. Robert Dole in the snows of New Hampshire. He had suffered a terrible political wound when Dole won big by a show of hands in an unriggable Iowa caucus. Bush came to New Hampshire with all the earmarks of a loser whom the press had come to identify as a "wimp." Political observers were downbeat in their observations of Bush's chances in the face of Dole's Iowa momentum. Virtually every television and newspaper poll had Bush losing by up to eight points just hours before the balloting. Desperate times require desperate measures. Perhaps that's what it required for "steps to be taken," and phone calls to be made. Then came a widely reported promise made by Bush to his campaign manager, Gov. Sununu. It happens that Sununu's computer engineering skills approach "genius" on the tests. If Sununu could "deliver" New Hampshire, and Bush didn't care how and didn't want to know how -- then Sununu would become his chief of staff in the White House. When election day was over the following headline appeared in the Washington Post: NEW HAMPSHIRE CONFOUNDED MOST POLLSTERS Voters Were a Step Ahead of Tracking Measurements By Lloyd Grove Washington Post Staff Writer For Vice President Bush and his supporters, Tuesday's 9-percentage-point victory over Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) in New Hampshire was a delightful surprise; for Andrew Kohut, it was a horror story. Kohut is president of the Gallup poll, whose final New Hampshire survey was wrong by 17 points: it had put Dole ahead by 8; Bush won by 9. "I was dismayed," Kohut acknowledged yesterday. This New Hampshire primary was perhaps the most polled primary election in American history, and in the end, the Republican voters in the state confounded the predictions of nearly every published survey of voter opinion. Gallup's glaring error and the miscalls of other polling organizations once again raise questions about the accuracy of polls, their use by the media and the impact they have on voters' choices and the public perception of elections. In New Hampshire this year, news organizations' use of "tracking polls" to try to follow the movement of public opinion night after night came to dominate news accounts of the campaigning and the thinking of the campaigns themselves. Tracking polls usually survey a relatively small number of voters every night: 150 to 400 in each party, in the case of The Post-ABC poll. The results are averaged over several days. See POLLS, A11, Col. 1 Had the terms of Bush's "promise" to Sununu been met? Whatever magic Sununu was able to conjure up during those final hours preceding the overnight resurrection of the Bush campaign, it worked. There are those who believe that such a wild reversal of form would have been subject to an immediate inquiry by the stewards if it had happened in the Kentucky Derby. Any horseplayer would have nodded sagely, put a finger up to his eye, pulled down the lower lid, and signaled: "Fix." Yet in New Hampshire, there was some wonderment expressed in the press, and little more. There was no rechecking of the computerized voting machines, no inquiry into the path of the vote from the voting machines to the central tallying place, no public scrutiny of the mechanisms of the mighty peculiar vote that saved George Bush's career and leapfrogged the relatively obscure Sununu into the White House. Nothing was said in the press about the secretly programmed computer chips inside the "Shouptronic" Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines in Manchester, the state's largest city. These 200-pound systems were so easily tampered with that the integrity of the results they gave -- and George Bush was the beneficiary of their tallies -- will forever be in doubt. Consider these points: 1. The "Shouptronic" was purchased directly from a company whose owner, Ransom Shoup, had been twice convicted of vote fraud in Philadelphia. 2. It bristled with telephone lines that made it possible for instructions from the outside to be telephoned into the machine without anyone's dear knowledge. 3. It completely lacked an "audit trail," an independent record that could be checked in case the machine "broke down" or its results were challenged. 4. Roy G. Saltman, of the federal Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology, called the Shouptronic "much more risky" than any other computerized tabulation system because "You are fundamentally required to accept the logical operation of the machine, there is no way to do an independent check." A year later, in June of 1989, Robert J. Naegele, who had investigated all computerized voting systems for New York State, warned: "The DRE (which the Shouptronic was) is still at least a year and possibly two away from what I would consider a marketable product. The hardware problems are relatively minor, but the software problems are conceptual and really major". A source close to Gov. Sununu insists that Sununu knew from his perspective as a politician, and his expertise as a computer engineer, that the Shouptronic was prime for tampering. How could such an offense against the United States electoral process have been carried out under the gaze of professionals from the nation's TV networks, newspapers and wire services? There are lawyers who will argue that the party primary election is essentially an intra-party matter over which "outsiders" have no legal rights. That, in fact, if a political party wants to rig its elections, it can do so without violation of federal, state or local laws. As long as men and women in charge of the vote count are on the take, or can be persuaded that tampering is "good for the party," that one candidate should win no matter what the vote count is -- then wholesale vote rigging throughout America can be accomplished quite easily. It is a sick and vicious way to operate within the two-party system, and there is reason to believe that it is epidemic on a national scale. The concept is clear, simple and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer. Of course, there are problems about getting control of more and more computers, and that problem has been brilliantly solved with the help, and in some cases the unwitting collaboration, of the major news-gathering organizations. Over the past generation, when television news became an unstoppable force in America's political life, competition grew between the major networks to be "first" with the voting results -- proving they had better reporters, better contacts, better organizations than the opposition. At first, the race to call the winners was sportsmanlike and played much like print journalism played "scoops." Then, almost imperceptibly, the networks' urge to "give the public timely results" crossed over the line into territory more sinister. The early position taken by network spokesmen was that slow vote counts increased the likelihood of vote fraud, and besides, the American people had a "right" to know as soon as possible how their candidates fared. You may ask: Why all the rush? In a fair election, how does the passage of a reasonable amount of time, less than a day or two, say, negatively affect the outcome of the election or the people's perception of it? In the early days of the nation it required months to find out who was elected president, since the electoral college met in January to cast their votes. Clearly, democracy can survive without immediate election results. Yet the media's clamor for speed went on, encouraged by inventors who had early knowledge of computers and knew how to use them to accelerate the processes of ordinary life. It became possible, with fast counters developed by International Business Machine Corporation, to use punch cards, with rows of small, rectangular holes, as ballots. These old cards could be counted at the rate of thousands per minute by an IBM sorting machine hooked up with a photoelectric cell and a computerized tabulator. It seemed like progress at the time. Vote counting got a lot faster in a big hurry. But after several years, IBM realized that the Vote-amatic voting machine, the patents on which IBM had bought from its inventor, T. K. Harris, was actually a Pandora's box. IBM, following several disturbing public relations problems brought about by both incompetent and malicious "mishaps" during elections, took its name off the product. IBM eventually sold its rights in the company after IBM's president, Thomas Watson, read an article that implied he might be trying to install IBM voting machines in enough precincts to win him the first electronically rigged election for President of the United States. Watson had no ambitions to become a U.S. president and was mortified that his computers would be implicated in antidemocratic functions. With the crusty, impeccable IBM out of the business, the scramble to produce new, improved, less scrupulous voting hardware and software began in earnest. Entrepreneurs made fortunes peddling the early computerized counters to towns and cities across America. They sold the machines as the "patriotic," "progressive" thing to do for American voters. Newspaper and broadcast media seldom bothered to look into the voting machine industry and, in fact, took advantage of the speed the new machines offered in counting. The press did not investigate the accuracy, or lack of it, of the final tallies. All of the computerized machines, from the earliest versions on, were peculiarly susceptible to vote fraud despite the ingenuous claims made by the manufacturers. The issue of "speed" in counting actually meant little or nothing to the voting public, except as it was staged as a competition by the press. Yes, the computers offered speed on the one hand, but on the other hand they all, without exception, did their operations in the electronic dark where ordinary citizens, who had previously taken the responsibility for a fair and accurate vote, could never venture. Most Americans did not realize that such an anti-democratic virus had infected their vote. Most do not realize it today. If you ask your friends to describe how their vote (if they cast a vote) is counted, they are unlikely to get much further than the polling booth and the rudimentary requirements to operate the machine. Beyond that they are probably ignorant. Most people expect that the Democrat and Republican poll watchers will watch out for their interests, and if not them, the Board of Elections or some federal elections commission will keep the fraud down to manageable proportions. Naturally, in the vacuum of ethics and in the depths of ignorance about computerized voting, the opportunists arrived on the scene. It was already clear that IBM considered the business too dirty to mess with. Yet salesmen had placed the machines, along with service contracts and consulting fees, in thousands of America's precincts. All over the nation the local election boards were taking delivery of Trojan horses that could be programmed to bide their time and then, when the proper moment came, to mistabulate election results on command. Computer experts with even the most vestigial imaginations figured out dozens of ways to compromise a vote, many of them so elegant that getting caught was almost impossible. During a little-publicized court trial in West Virginia, it was revealed that there were ways to stop the computers during a count, while everyone watched. Simply fiddle with a few switches, turn the computer back on again, and thereby alter the entire vote, or parts of it. If anyone asked questions, the fixers could make any number of plausible excuses. Mostly all they had to say was "just checking that everything's running okay," and that was satisfactory. With voting machines attached to telephone lines it was possible to meddle with the actual vote from a telephone miles away. Getting caught was not possible. "Deniability" and "untrackability" were built into the secret source codes that animated the machines. It was possible to rig elections electronically in separate communities across the country, but until 1964 it was not considered possible to rig a national election. Then, in August 1964, News Election Service was created. Perhaps the most important piece of history uncovered during the Votescam probe is a potently candid study of the U.S. electoral system conducted in 1980 by the CIA-linked Air Command and Staff College in cooperation with the University of New Mexico. It establishes the TV corporate networks' interest in NES. The study was commissioned by the CIA and published in the International Journal of Public Administration that was distributed to selected government agencies. We discovered a copy in the Library of Congress. It is safe to say that almost nobody in America is aware of the activities of NES on election night. The on-air scripts of each TV network during the years since the founding of NES have seldom, if ever, mentioned its existence. The silence smacks of collusion among press "competitors" to keep NES away from public scrutiny A portion of the study read: "The United States government has no elections office and does not attempt to administer congressional elections. The responsibility for the administration of elections and certification of winners in the United States national election rests with a consortium of private entities, including 111,000 members of the national League of Women Voters. The formal structure of election administration in the United States is not capable of providing the major TV networks with timely results of the presidential and congressional elections. In the case of counting actual ballots on national election night, public officials have abdicated responsibility of aggregation of election night vote totals to a private organization, News Election Service of New York (NES). NES is a wholly-owned subsidiary joint-venture of national television networks ABC, CBS and NBC and the press wire-services AP and UPI. This private organization performs without a contract: without supervision by public officials. It makes decisions concerning its duties according to its own criteria. The question and accountability of News Election Service has not arisen in the nation's press because the responsibility NES now has in counting the nation's votes was assumed gradually over a lengthy period without ever being evaluated as an item on the public agenda. (Underlined for emphasis. Ed.) This privately owned vote counting cartel (NES) uses the vast membership of the network-subsidized League of Women Voters as field personnel whose exclusive job is to phone in unofficial vote totals to NES on election night. NES also operates a "master computer" in New York City, located on 34th Street. (Because the League of Women Voters has about it a perfume of volunteerism and do-goodism, the fact that it is actually a political club with a political agenda and a hungry treasury is shrouded by the false myth that it is a reliable election-day watchdog.) The NES mainframe computer has the capability, via telephone lines, of "talking" back and forth with county and state government mainframes. During the important 60-day certification period after an election, the counts in the county and state mainframes can still be manipulated by outsiders to conform to earlier TV "projections." Without this capability of using the NES mainframe to "balance the books " between initial network projections of Bush as "winner" and the final official totals published two months later, Bush may have lost the election to Dukakis. It is the prescription for the covert stealing of America. 2 BALLOTS NOT BULLETS "Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets" -- Abraham Lincoln Accept the idea for a few hours that your vote is, in fact, being stolen before your eyes. Put aside your beliefs or disbeliefs in the rectitude of the federal, state and local governments. Journey back to a time just a year after "Woodstock," when today's new grandfathers were in their twenties and both Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were still alive. We are two brothers from Michigan at play in Miami in 1970. The Cuban refugees have not yet taken political control. We have shared professions as rock and roll empresarios, drug store owners, suntan lotion manufacturers and journalists. When Jim Morrison of "The Doors" executed his notorious simulated jerk-off jump from the stage into the crowd,, and set in motion the chain of events that plagued him until his death in Paris, it was us, Jim and Ken Collier, who promoted that historic show. We also swallowed the financial consequences after Morrison and "The Doors" left town. It is after "The Doors" hysteria that we are in Miami trying to decide what to do next. We want to do something that just might raise eyebrows and blood pressure in a Richard Nixon world. We decide to write a book. We could write two books about rock and roll and the actual life backstage, but we have a lot of friends in the music business, and if we tell the truth we alienate most of them. The idea of combining a book with running for public office comes up. "It seems like a good idea," Ken says. "It's a great idea. You going to run, or me?" We went to Dell Publishing in New York and sold the idea that Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and all the hippies against the system had all overlooked an intriguing possibility - to use the system and see if things that needed to get done actually could get done without revolution. Ken would run for Congress and scrupulously work within the system to find out. We titled the book: Running Through the System: Ballots Not Bullets. The editors agreed that it was a good idea and paid us $3,500 as an advance. Winning the congressional seat was not a requirement of Dell. They also agreed that we would not ask for contributions. The campaign would be as "grass roots" as possible, based on the theory that even the poorest person in America can run for office by merely knocking on every door, shaking every hand and giving speeches at every political club or church. Whatever percentage of the vote we managed to get at the end of the campaign trail would depend strictly on whether the people believed in us. Ken was already the front man at our rock club, Thee Image, and he had that Sixties need to see things change. From the time he was a teenager he had a burning desire to be a Congressman, a profession he considered idealistic and romantic. He had been buying ad space on the back page of the University of Miami Hurricane student newspaper (Jim had been The Hurricane managing editor in 1959) in the name of Thee Image to write essays on the political upheavals of the time: against the Viet Nam war, for freedom of speech, against imprisonment of political radicals. Now Ken closed his eyes and put the possibilities together. His imagination was tweaked by the potential for high drama. At 29 years old, a romantic poet, Ken was brazen, impulsive, Tom Wolfe-like in his stature, over six feet of it, big hands, big head, big shoes, big dreams. "We can do it," Jim said. Two years older than Ken, Jim was quiet and private. Nothing intrigued him more than orchestrating scenes from behind the scenes. "I'll be your campaign manager." "Who do we run against?" Ken asked. "Hmmmmmm." Claude Pepper was a lusty old Harvard man with a face like an overripe tomato. He was known as "The Father of Social Security" He was also the incumbent in the House of Representatives. Pepper was a cosmopolitan, and he was happy to be in Washington where his talents as a speaker and a storyteller were recognized and appreciated. Pepper was on the board of the bank that held the lease on the building that housed Thee Image. The bank had refused to renew the lease after "The Doors" concert, using the controversy in the press as an excuse. Rock and roll, they said, was an unsavory influence on the community, even though parents, police and prosecutors were invited into the club without charge, at any time, to see that the kids were not subjected to drug dealing. "Let's run for Congress against Claude Pepper," Jim said. It was decided that Ken would run as a Democrat ($2,100 was paid for the filing fee and it came from a Ted Nugent concert we held at the Miami Jai-Alai Fronton). Neither of us were Nixon Republicans and to run as an independent would have been decidedly outside the system. On July 21, 1970 the grass roots campaign began. We talked at every possible church. We went into public housing in Liberty City and Overtown, which were black innercity areas. We passed out leaflets and talked some more. In the Jewish sections of Miami Beach there were public meetings held in banks and on South Beach (now the art deco revival section). The old people were charmed by Ken, who swapped stories with World War II vets about his paratrooper jumps. We campaigned 42 days, 18 hours-a-day every day. When the U.S. Congress recessed in August, Claude Pepper returned home to Dade County Prior to his showing up we had almost convinced leaders of the black community, which included newspaper editors, civic activists and HUD executives, that Ken's ideas were the wave of the future, the hope of the next generation. In August, with the recess in Congress, Claude Pepper returned to the area and the atmosphere abruptly changed. At a black church in Liberty City, we attended an obligatory political breakfast. Five-minute speeches were scheduled by all the candidates. Pepper, who was nearly 70-years old, gave his speech in his usual mush-mouthed way He sat down and Ken got up to speak. But the moderator pointedly ignored him. When Ken realized that he wasn't going to get equal time, he asked: "Does anybody care to hear me speak?" Pepper nodded his head at two very serious guys. They approached Ken from both sides, grabbed his arms, and dragged him out like a fish. We called the cops on a pay phone. Alcee Hastings, who eventually became the first black federal judge in the area, rushed outside. "Don't go back in there," he warned. "They'll beat you up next time. It's dangerous." We called the television stations and told them how a candidate got dragged out of a political breakfast. Only Channel 4's reporter came and took pictures of the purple bruises on Ken's arms. But at the studio, the news director didn't even look at the tape. "This isn't going to air," he told the reporter. And that was that. One of the theories of the Dell book Running Through The System, was that we use the system whenever possible. So instead of merely going back in and shooting the old bastard, we swore out a warrant for Pepper's arrest for ordering the assault. Not one word in the media. We couldn't get even a second on television. We sent a telegram to the Federal Communications Commission and complained, within the system, that we couldn't get any television time. The FCC wrote back to the local stations and said, unspecifically, "Give them time." One station gave us 18 seconds. Pepper went to Texas avoiding arrest, while his lawyers visited a judge without our knowledge (ex parte) and had the warrant quashed. They might have been irked by the garbage incident. We had to make a clear statement about our candidacy One that would show that Pepper was basically a hypocrite who didn't care about anyone but the richest segment, white or black. Our opportunity came when we walked through the streets of the black areas and saw the results of a political project that black leaders called "Teen Clean." The idea was to clean up houses, gutters, streets, lawns of all the garbage that had turned the area into a slum. The teens turned out with great enthusiasm and they piled coconuts, palm fronds, broken glass, toilet seats, rusty old refrigerators, and mattresses in heaps on the street, some as high as six feet. The Metro garbage trucks were supposed to pick it all up, but although most of the drivers were black, their white bosses refused to let them go. The reason: "We didn't expect hundreds of piles of Teen Clean garbage and we don't have the budget for it." People in the community were angry, and they felt betrayed. Rats and roaches, however, loved the stuff. "Look," Jim suggested, "let's rent a pick-up truck, pick a load of that shit up and get some press at the same time." So one hot August afternoon, we appeared in Liberty City in a half-ton truck and loaded it up. We had the enthusiastic help of about 100 local kids. Then Ken drove east across the 36th Street Causeway to pristine Miami Beach. Had any alert cop seen us heading east with a load of garbage, he would surely have stopped us. Nobody brings garbage to Miami Beach. Once across the bay we headed for the bank on 17th street, where we backed the truck up to the front door, pulled the hydraulic handle, and watched as a half ton of unsavory objects built a monument to the Pepper campaign. Just before we drove away, Jim grabbed a cardboard sign that read, "This is a Teen Clean Project" and jammed it into the top of the heap like the flag at Iwo Jima. Later we drove by the bank, on whose board Pepper sat, and watched as hired black men scooped up the garbage into a truck and then headed back west across the causeway. We parked the truck in front of our townhouses and waited. Two Miami Beach detectives eventually knocked on Ken's door. "We not only did it," Jim assured them, "but were going to do it again tomorrow." We did go back into Liberty City the next day for a repeat performance, but all the garbage was being picked up by a fleet of Metro trucks. And although there were photographers, police and reporters who saw the garbage pile in front of the bank, not a word was mentioned in the media, not even in the black-owned newspaper. The remainder of the campaign was waged mainly in the streets. Miami in August can be a sticky mixture of sun, squalls and stifling heat. All day we trudged the streets, putting fliers in doors of houses, talking to people who were home, some giving us a cold drink. Pepper bought TV time and seldom left his home. Then, in the last two days before the vote, as we made our last up-this -street-down-that-street run, we saw Pepper's face everywhere. He had used county employees to nail his campaign posters on hundreds of telephone poles in the black communities. He put none on the Beach. "That's illegal," Ken said, ripping one down. "He can't put his posters on public property." That night we drove the convertible along each street, Jim standing on the trunk, and we ripped every poster down. It took four hours, but that night we slept great. On election evening we were at Ken's house to watch the returns on television. The numbers were flashed on the screen about every 20 minutes and our percentage of the vote remained consistent at 16 percent. Channels 4 and 7 were giving the election full coverage but Channel 10, for the first time in its history, ran a movie instead of voting results. Sometime after 9 p.m. our vote percentage jumped to 31 percent. "Hey, we just doubled our vote!" Ken was excited. "If it holds we'll have enough strength to run again in 72," Jim said. Suddenly the news director came on the air and announced that the election "computer has broken down." Instead of giving official returns from the courthouse, the station would instead broadcast returns based on its "projections." When the next "projection" was flashed 20 minutes later, Ken's vote had fallen back to 16 percent. No other vote had fluctuated, only ours. We didn't know it at the time, but across the country in the 1970s and 1980s, that sequence of events was a phenomenon that became rather common. 1) A candidate is ahead, the good guy, the one who wanted the city audit, the one who'll make a difference. 2) Television announcement: "The computer has broken down at the courthouse and official votes will no longer be forthcoming." 3) When the computer comes back, your guy is behind again, and there he or she remains. By the 11 p.m. news it was over. We hadn't expected to win; after all, we spent so little money, we bought no television time and we were new at political campaigns. But what was that 31 percent we got at about 9:30? The next day we drove to the Board of Elections in Miami, and after watching a while, we asked Election Supervisor Martin Braterman if we could look at the canvass sheets we saw stored in an open vault. He escorted us to the vault and Jim started flipping the sheets, trying to get a quick visual grasp of the entire stack. He had never seen a canvass sheet before so he had no idea of what he was looking at, much less what he was looking for. "I'm not sure," he said. "but it looks like there are more votes cast than people who voted." Ken, who was still surveying the room, moved in closer. "Where?... show me." "Get out," Braterman ordered, "you guys are nuisances." "This is public information," Ken said. "Are you telling us that we are not entitled to examine public information about the electoral process?" "This is not the right time. We're certifying the vote here." Ken persisted. "We want to see them now because something looks very wrong with the sheets. Let us look at them before something happens to them. It's evidence." There was more heated dialogue. Ken sat on the counter and refused to go until he could examine the canvass sheets. Braterman picked up the phone: "We got a disturbance here. Send a cop." A few minutes later a young policeman asked Ken what he was doing. "Just checking out the system," Ken grinned. The policeman laughed, Ken laughed. Then he booked Ken on a misdemeanor. Jim bailed him out. The next day, with a call to the election division, we got a full explanation of what a canvass sheet was: the official, hand-written record of the voting machine tallies. There are rules written on the flip-side of the sheet. The official rules state: At 7 a.m. the precinct captains must open up the back of the voting machine and certify that all candidate counters are set with zeroes showing. They sign their names to those sheets swearing that they actually saw the zeroes. Then the machine is closed and locked for the day while voting goes on. At 7 p.m., after the voting ends, the back is again opened with keys, and representatives from each party call out the numbers to the precinct people who fill in the front side of each canvass sheet. Three canvass sheets are filled out per machine One sheet is to be posted on the wall after the election for the public. One goes to the Elections Department. One is sent to the County Judge's office. Once we knew what it was we were looking for we returned to the Elections Department where Braterman, still grumpy from the day before, again refused an examination of the records. Not wanting to get busted again we walked over to the County Judge's office where copies of the sheets were already bound in a book. The clerk there permitted closer examination. "What are we looking for?" Ken asked. "Look for a pattern." The sheets were three feet wide and two feet high. On the front there were a lot of squares corresponding to each candidate, and there were numbers in most of the squares in the handwriting, it seemed, of just the one person who filled out each sheet. On the back were from ten to twelve signatures of workers who swore they saw all zeroes in the morning and final numbers at night. As we turned the pages Jim was puzzled: "There's a kind of uniform grayness about all these sheets. Look here." He flipped the pages like one would do to a cartoon layout. "Except for these few precincts -- look." He pointed to a page of scrawly looking numbers. "See?" Ken could see it immediately. The handwriting on about five of the pages was messy and broken... and real looking. "But the rest of this stack is too neat, isn't it? All of these appear to be written by the same hand!" "You think these might be forgeries?" "Let's find a handwriting expert." The Yellow Pages listed only one handwriting expert, Robert Lynch. We telephoned him and made an appointment to meet at the courthouse the next morning. Lynch turned out to be a man in his fifties. He wore glasses but he only needed one flip through the bound stack before making his pronouncement. "These are not forgeries." We had absolutely no reason to believe that Lynch was anything other than your honest neighborhood handwriting expert. If he said they weren't forgeries, what was the use in chasing rabbits down that hole? With our forgery suspicion gone, the election investigation appeared to be over. We went back to shooting pool, learning Short Goju karate, sailing catamarans and racing Pontiac and Chevy 427's. We were also busy selling our local newspaper, The Daily Planet, on street comers. "The question that still bugs me," Jim said, "is how did we get that 31 percent? I mean, why that momentary thrill? Was it an error?" "Maybe it was real," Ken answered. "Maybe somehow they let the true vote through. When they saw what it was, they cut it off." "That's a possibility." Soon after the November election, in which Claude Pepper was confirmed as Congressman, we went to the local television stations to ask them for copies of the on-air computer "readouts" used during the primary election count. Both TV stations said that they no longer had possession of the readouts. They were now held by Professor Ross Beiler, in the political science department of the University of Miami. We immediately went to Better's office on the Coral Gables campus. It was just a 10-foot by 10-foot cubicle off a loggia, and the door was open. We walked in and there, scattered in disarray on his desk, were the readouts we wanted. They were big, about the same size as the canvass sheets, with the dark and light green lines of IBM standard computer paper. They showed vote totals and the times the totals were tallied. There were the names of the stations on them: WCKT (4) and WTVJ (7). Plus some notes and signatures. "Grab those," Ken whispered. Jim scooped up a handful of the sheets and turned to walk out. At that instant. Professor Beiler walked in the door. He was a tall, hayseedy looking man. He grabbed Jim, who was a black belt in karate, by the back of the neck and said: "Put those back." "Exactly what were you going to do with these?" Ken asked. "I'm going to Washington on a sabbatical. I was going to destroy them." "Destroy them? You can't do that." "They belong to me." "We need them for an investigation." Ken picked up a few papers. "Put those down." "All right," Ken said, dropping them back on the desk, "let's put them in the safe in the office of the dean of students." The professor hesitated. "Professor, it would be the legally proper thing to do." "Just for six months," he agreed, "and you can't look at them during that time." "Let's type up an agreement." As Beiler sat at the typewriter, with his back to the room, Jim seized the moment and stuffed about ten readout pages under his shirt and slipped unnoticed out the door. He ran to the car, where he jammed the papers in the trunk. Acouple of hours later we excitedly spread the contraband on the pool table in Jim's living room. "Look at this," Jim pointed to one of the columns on the sheet. "The first report is at 7:24 p.m.... just 24 minutes after the polls closed." He scanned the sheet... he knew the future was coming. "It shows the first vote totals are based on," he found the column... "returns from Pepper's Congressional district... see?... it called our race so it's gotta be in our district. This column says ACTUAL VOTES. There's a zero here. No actual votes. And..." his finger moved to the next column, "here it says PROJECTED VOTES... 7,100 for us and... 46,000 for Pepper." "So?" "Under 'MACHINES REPORTING'... one machine." "Lemme see." We checked the green computer readouts which we arranged in neat piles under the pool table light. In one of the vertical columns labeled "MACHINES REPORTING" the number "1" appeared. Jim grinned. "They used one machine's totals to predict how many votes 250 candidates would get?" He scrambled quickly through the papers until he found the 9:21 p.m. readout. There it was, the 31 percent that had flashed on the screen. "We're not crazy" Jim said. Ken looked at the numbers. The documents showed that no actual votes were being reported from 7 p.m. until the 11 p.m. news. We had assumed that the computer had broken down at the time they announced it, 9:21 p.m., but these readouts indicated that the TV stations were not getting official votes from the opening bell. "They must have relied on information from their reporters at the precincts," Ken said. "Maybe," Jim answered, "but 99 percent of the vote was counted by 11 p.m. They would have needed at least 340 reporters to cover the 340 precincts." We checked the sheets closer and found that the on-air reporting times were set at every 20 minutes throughout the evening. The last report was at 11:15 p.m. "Ninety-nine percent of the precincts were reported by the time people had to go to bed," Ken mused. "That's very neat." "If they weren't getting actual votes all night, from 7 p.m. on, and they predicted the final outcome in 24 minutes using one voting machine, maybe they knew they were going to have a blackout all along," Jim said. "So it was a cover story." "Gotta be." "Could they have blacked it out on purpose so they could project winners?" But the most puzzling question, if we were to believe that the election wasn't rigged, was how Channel 7 could have predicted the exact outcome of 40 races with 250 candidates altogether on the basis of information from just one voting machine located somewhere in Claude Pepper's district. And how could they do it in just 24 minutes? That 24 minutes rang and rerang and re-re-rerang inside our heads. We talked all night trying to make the pieces of the puzzle fit. By morning we still thought that something was rotten in the count. There are no tests to determine when the last rock on the ledge of life slips and plunges you into the crater of causes. Suddenly police stations become grossly familiar. So do the courtrooms of various judges. The offices of lawyers are not avoided anymore. Organizations like the CIA and the FBI keep their ears open when you come around. Your home may at times become mobile and the sky becomes your roof. Fear that your cause may be lost ceaselessly batters your confidence. Your relationship with others is more or less determined by the extent to which they will tolerate your cause, which for some of your loved ones may be less attractive than maggot soup. For us, the last rock fell when we discovered that all the predictions made within 24 minutes after the polls closed were based on results called in from one single voting machine. We decided to get mad. In those days it was easy to become involved in causes. The Sierra Club was just starting then and it was a loud, strident, articulate toddler. The anti-nukers and pro-abortionists were beginning to set up chapters all over the world and get their messages out by means of concerts and LP records. Richard Nixon was taking hold of power in Washington and if he behaved anything like he had when he lived on Key Biscayne with his friend, Bebe Rebozo, then Nixon was destined for historic trouble. Yes, this was before Watergate, before Nixon resigned, when his attention was turned mostly toward China. So instead of organizing a group called something like "Victims of Tampered Elections" (VOTE), getting members to pay $15 annual dues ($300,000) to join the cause, put out Votescam newsletters, get our collective voices heard on Capitol Hill, we took up the pen feather and challenged the sword. Years later with bloodied pen feather in hand, we would understand that people with great illusions are destined to die in the desert, sucking on their sneaker, while waiting for the water truck to come. All we had to do now was track down that one magic machine. How did they decide in which precinct that machine would be placed? Pepper's district was spread from east to west across the center of Dade County -- from the ocean on the east to the Everglades on the west. The neighborhoods were generally segregated into black, Jewish and WASP. During the campaign we walked down every street in those neighborhoods. None of them could possibly be so typical of us all that the votes coming from just one of its machines could be projected to predict exact final vote totals. Jim asked: "How did channel 7 and 4 get those numbers? Did people call them in from, the precincts? Did they have a reporter in each of 340 precincts?" "And what about the computer program?" Ken added. "Do they have a formula, or, let's say a multiplier of some sort that they use to project those numbers from the precincts?" Jim wondered. He scrawled figures on a piece of paper. "If we figure that everything Beiler knew before 7 p.m. is listed under the letter "A"...," he wrote the letter "A" on the paper. "The letter "A" would have to represent his formula, or his program. I mean, he couldn't just take the votes off that one machine and magically project them to get a final result without some sort of program. "Now, let's call the vote totals he got from that one machine "B" Jim wrote "B" on the paper. "To make it easy we'll say you got 10 votes on that machine" He wrote "10" under the letter "B" "So what would that mean?" "Well," Ken answered, "he'd either have to multiply that "10" or he'd have to add something to the "10" to get a final number." "Could he do anything else?" "I don't know anything about computers, but he can't change the laws of mathematics... he can only multiply that "10" to get a final number... or he can add something to that "10"... I don't care how sophisticated a computer is, all it can do is multiply or add, period." It seemed so simple. An A x B=C formula. A (Multiplier) x B (Actual votes)=C (The total). And it's the only formula possible no matter how bright a programmer you are. If you use an A x B=C formula, you must also always know two of the numbers in advance to calculate the third. But if you know two out of three of those numbers in advance, you've rigged the election. In the green pile of documents we found the Channel 4 readout, the first report showing only vote percentages (not final totals) was broadcast at 7:04 p.m. Channel 4 projected the outcome for 250 candidates in just 4 minutes! Hell, you can't even boil a three minute egg in four minutes. We had a 427-horsepower red Pontiac convertible which the Dade County highway patrol had come to know and respect over the years. The next morning it took us to look for answers. We drove up to the state capitol at Tallahassee, a lushly green southern city in the hills of the Florida Panhandle about 400 miles north of Miami. From the Secretary of State's office we got the final vote totals for every candidate in the three elections held in Dade County in 1970. We copied them and brought them back home. The first thing we did was to lay out the Tallahassee sheets on the pool table and divide them into piles. September primary, October runoff and November final election. Then we arranged the television readouts in time sequence in order to compare the numbers that the state eventually registered as official against the projections from the television stations. We checked the totals in the Governor's race and found that an aggregate of 141,000 votes were cast on September 8th. Then we checked the runoff election held a month later and the exact same figure -- 141,000 votes were cast again! "How is that possible?" Ken asked, and then he answered himself, "It isn't. The losing candidates dropped out of the race, and whenever that happens the vote drops, too." So we checked the final election in November and found once again that 141,000 votes were cast in the Governor's race. In hockey they call that a hat trick. In politics we call it a fix. "This is the Stepford vote," Jim said, hardly able to contain his glee. "These bastards didn't have time to change the numbers in the 30 days between elections, so they just ran the same numbers even though all but two of the candidates were out of the race." Ken was already looking for the figures on the Senate race. "It was a five-person contest in the primary and 122,000 votes were cast in total," he said. "Look at this! There's 122,000 votes cast in the runoff, and..." he flipped the sheets to the finals. "Well, what do you know... 122,000." Jim picked up the cue stick and smashed the white ball into the rack. He was angry and yet he marvelled at the sheer audacity of the scheme He pointed the cue at Ken. "Do you think the Secretary of State is involved?" "Hell, what about the press?" Ken threw back. "If the press knew these numbers and never questioned them, then they're either stupid or collaborators." It was an intriguing thought. We knew the press was capable of keeping candidates who didn't spend advertising dollars from getting publicity but was it possible they would actually protect the people who were pulling this off? "What do you think would happen if we went to the Herald with this story?" Jim asked. "You think they'd touch it?" "Let's push it." Then we compared the Tallahassee final totals with the numbers on the September 8th readouts from Channel 7. "Holy shit! Look at this." Ken was doing a dance on one foot. "What?" "Compare Channel 7's readouts... this is their unofficial projections of what the final totals will be At 9:31... the projection in the unofficial vote total column reads 96,499 votes. That's what they predict the final outcome will be." Then he shifted to the Tallahassee official totals. "And in these official returns, read what it says: 96,499. That's one-hundred percent perfect! They called a perfect race. I'd like to see that computer program." Jim paced around the table. "They took four minutes on Channel 4 to predict percentages for 250 candidates. You can't even read that many numbers off the back of the machines in four minutes, much less read them... run to a phone... call the TV stations... re-read them to an operator who has to punch them onto IBM cards and then run them through a computer for broadcast to the public. You just can't do that in four minutes." "And what about precincts?" Ken asked. "Did both stations use the same precincts? Did they use the same reporters or were 680 people out there, on payrolls from both stations, calling back votes?" Jim shook his head in disbelief We sat and contemplated the possibilities. Ken said: "Maybe this goes on all the time and we were too out of the action to notice, like most people are. Who thinks about how votes are counted anyway? Nobody pays attention. We didn't. We just expected a clean, open election like they taught us in Civics 101 at Royal Oak High School." "So if you find out that there's a rigged vote with the television stations in on it, who do you go to to complain?" Jim asked. The next move was to get back to Beiler and find out about his super-amazing computer program. Ken called the University of Miami and got Beiler's telephone number in Washington at the American University. In a taped conversation he went right to the point. "What kind of program could you have devised where the information from one machine was used to predict the results of all the races within one percent of perfect?" "I didn't do it," Beiler replied. "It'd be a million-to-one odds that anyone could do that. I was just the on-air analyst but I didn't program it. I don't know how to program." "Who did it, then?" "It's a fellow named Elton Davis, who works on computers for a land sales company He's the one who did it for Channel 7." "Thank you, sir." A solid lead. We had to pay Mr. Davis a visit where he worked at Cavanaugh Land Sales, which sold West Coast Florida swampland for development. The office was across the 79th Street Causeway from Channel 7's studios. We made an appointment. The next day we sat across from a chunky, muscular man in a small and cluttered office. There was a chalk board on the wall. "Professor Beiler says you programmed the Channel 7 computer," Ken began. "What was the formula you used that could predict 100 percent correct final totals with just one machine reporting?" Davis stood and walked a few feet to the blackboard. He picked up the chalk in the tray, stood on his tip-toes, and reached up as if to begin to write. Now, Ken thought, we're going to get the magic algorithm. Then Davis slowly put the chalk back down, turned to us and in an icy voice, said: "You'll never prove it. Now, get out." We couldn't believe it. He opened the door and pointed outside. Ken tried to ask another question but Davis was mute. There was nothing more he was going to say. It was time to call the FBI. We now knew for sure that the man who was supposed to have written the computer vote-count program had something sinister to hide. The FBI offices were on Biscayne Boulevard just north of the downtown business area. We were escorted into a small office and then asked if we would agree to be photographed. If we said no, maybe they would refuse to listen. So we put our heads in one of those neck-holders, like the old New England stocks, and a clerk snapped a picture. They didn't request fingerprints. "We want to make a statement, but we want a stenographer to take it down. We'll sign it and take a copy," Jim said. The agent, in the government-issue blue suit, agreed. The statement was twelve pages long and all of what we knew was in it, with as little supposition as we were capable of. We told of Beiler's "million-to-one" statement, the virtually impossible accuracy of a one-machine perfect projection, and Davis' warning that we'd "never prove it." We asked that the FBI interview Beiler and Davis about possible vote fraud in a federal election. Then it was time to track down that one miracle machine. Ken telephoned the news director at Channel 7 and asked "who had called in the information from the precincts with the raw vote totals from the machines?" He told us that members of the League of Women Voters, not reporters, had been hired to work in precincts selected by Beiler. "You mean there weren't people in all precincts?" Ken asked. "No," the news director said, "just in some sample precincts." "Then how could you have shown 99 percent of the vote counted by 11 p.m. if you only had a few people in a few sample precincts... in light of the fact that you weren't getting any actual votes from the courthouse?" There was a long pause. "Call Joyce Deiffenderfer. She's the president of the League." In early December, we kept an appointment at Joyce Deiffenderfer's home in a section of Coral Gables known for manicured lawns, lush tropical foliage and big-mortgage houses. She answered the door. Deiffenderfer was tall, about six feet, austere, unsmiling, and bordering on uncordial. She had a friend with her; a woman, who looked as if she was there to be a witness. Jim explained the mystery of the one-machine projection and asked: "Were you told there was a specific machine that was going to be used to extrapolate a projection?" "No," she answered. "Can you give me a list of the people from the League who worked that night in the precincts?" "There is no list." She began to look uncomfortable. "There were no League women in the precincts that night." That was a puzzling surprise. "Channel 7 says the League gave them returns." She saw the drift. "There was no such thing," she repeated. She started to speak again, changed her mind, and then blurted out: "I don't want to get caught in this thing." She began to weep. Her female companion watched without uttering a word. We were almost sympathetic. She had just admitted that nobody was in the precincts that night, there was no magic machine, ergo, there could not have been any projected reporting by the television stations based on information supplied by the League. "Will you go to the. press and make a statement?" Jim asked quietly. "Yes, I will," she said. We shook hands all round and departed. We were, in a word, ecstatic. Jim rushed over to The Daily Planet to file the story. When the lease had been pulled on Thee Image, our "bully pulpit" was dismantled. So we bought half of the Miami Free Press from a guy named Jerry Powers and changed its name to The Daily Planet. With the Planet as our new bullhorn we could fight for the causes of the Sixties, created mostly by Nixon's miasma, without begging some local whipped newspaper editor for permission. One of our first Planet stories was about Tom Hayden. Hayden was another buddy of our youth in Royal Oak, Michigan, where we edited the high school paper together. Ken was the photographer who miraculously kept getting photos of record-breaking sports events. Jim and Tom edited the paper. The three of us also created a campus humor paper, The Daily Smirker, way back then which still survives today. Tom had ended the Sixties with that Chicago Seven flourish which landed him in jail for the last time. So when he told us that nobody but Joan Baez had given a nickel to the Seven's defense fund, we headlined it in the Planet. The Underground Press Service picked up the story and distributed it to every other underground paper in the nation, including the college press. The Seven's defense fund swelled mightily soon after. It was winter and the Sixties were over. But the Planetwas still there for us to run the story about Joyce Deiffenderfer. It appeared under the headline: "I DON'T WANT TO GET CAUGHT IN THIS THING." We also went to the FBI, made another statement, and asked them to talk to Joyce Deiffenderfer. Christmas passed, then came New Year 1971. We had the evidence, but there was no move on the part of the press to give it a milligram of ink or air time. Here was a major story that was being absolutely ignored by the Miami Herald, the Miami News, and every TV station. The frustration was galling. "It's like kicking a marshmallow," Jim said. We called the FBI to see how its investigation was progressing and one agent or another would always say: "Sorry, it's not our job to tell you anything." Then we called our editor at Dell to tell him what we'd found, the state of the story, the ramifications of what we'd experienced. As we waited on the line, a strong, authoritative woman's voice came on. "This is Helen Meyer," she said. She was the outright owner and publisher of Dell in those days, and for a wild moment we expected her to congratulate us on our book idea, maybe even invite us to a publisher's cocktail party. Instead she said: "I'm cancelling your contract as of today. This book will not be printed."* It was as if we had just fallen out of a Zeppelin. Why the high-level hostility the lack of explanation? We hadn't been in touch with her or Dell for a year. After that telephone call everybody at Dell was out to lunch or in a meeting. We had the $3,500, but was the investigation we found so intriguing really over? "Where are we?" Ken asked. "Dead in the water." There was some wallowing in self-pity and some crying in our beer. Then, two days later on Ken's thirtieth birthday a new idea popped up to get Votescam off zero. Ken got the brainstorm to send a telegram to Richard Nixon. The act of composing and sending a telegram to the President of the United States is like dipping a toe into contemporary history. There are advantages and drawbacks, depending on the tenor of the times and the subject matter. It is akin to sending a rocket ship into the void -- you don't know what it's going to hit or how far it will go. But on that day, as we sent the telegram via Western Union, we just thought it was a hell of a way to blow out the birthday candles. * We later discovered that Ms. Meyer was a long time friend of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, a fact that will be better understood later in this book. TELEGRAM White House, 23 April 1971 Washington, DC Dear Mr. President, For the past several months we have pieced together documentation and theory regarding a Federal-State-Local election in Dade County September 8, 1970. Evidence indicates major vote fraud was perpetrated. Television coverage on Channels 4 and 7 (WTVJ, WCKT) featured computer "projections" of voter turnout and final vote totals by 7:24 p.m. Projections made by Channel 7 were based on returns from only one voting machine. We questioned persons involved and believe election results were pre-arranged by all three TV news departments acting to promote the deception that official returns from the Dade County courthouse would be delayed due to a "computer breakdown." We are providing documentation to Miami FBI, and urgently request that your office direct U.S. Attorney General to investigate. Kenneth Collier James Collier 3 THE SILENT PRESS "For those who govern, the first thing required is indifference to newspapers." -- Thiers The sudden death of our book deal, we reasoned, was the first sure sign that our efforts and instigations had made waves outside the Miami area. The fourteen months between April 23, 1971, when we sent the telegram to President Nixon, and June 17, 1972, when President Nixon's "plumbers" were captured in the Watergate, was a period in Miami when a good deal of noise was made about the vote fraud issue. The first above-ground story about rigged elections in Miami appeared on August 29, 1971 in the Miami Beach Reporter under the byline of its old and respected editor-publisher, Paul M. Bruun. Bruun was the last independent editor in Dade County. He didn't owe much to anybody. His word was respected and his opinion carried weight among both Jews and Gentiles on Miami Beach. He was tall, elegant, in his seventies, a man with snowy white hair and moustache. He flourished a cane, had a rich, deep, rumbling voice, and a big Basset hound named Caesar led him about on a leash. He was a world-class gossip and a bon vivant. Most important, he was wealthy and hard to corrupt. His column titled "Bruun Over Miami" was famous among the postwar settlers, especially on the Beach. We ghostwrote "The Great Dade Election Rig Continues" story for him as a factual account of the voting controversy based on the Channel 7 computer readouts. He told us that he would put his byline on the story only if his own independent checking verified every fact and allegation. As a hedge against libel suits, Bruun sent a copy of the story to all whose names were mentioned. He advised them that they could "exercise veto power over the story" if they could demonstrate a fault in its factual underpinning. When no objections were raised, the following story appeared in the Reporter beneath a headline which read: THE GREAT VOTE-FORECASTING MYSTERY -- AND SOME QUESTIONS... by Paul M. Bruun, Publisher Introduction For months I have hoped that some, whom I am willing to admit know far more about such electronic computations than I do, would answer some very pertinent questions. Nothing has been printed or broadcast by anybody which in any manner answered any of the questions that have been really bugging me. Read this carefully and see whether you agree there are many that bother you. Though this is basically a story about Channels 4 and 7, I have sought in vain to find out exactly why television station WPLG, Channel 10, did not broadcast this all-important election, though I understand that elaborate plans had been made by the Post-Newsweek subsidiary to do so. What happened that two out of three supposedly competing TV news departments had the broadcasting of projected election results all to themselves? In all fairness, I sent a copy of this story to Channels 4, 7 and 10, to the Miami News, to the Miami Herald, to Professors Beiler, Shipley and Wood of the University of Miami Political Science Department with a copy to U. M. President, Dr. Henry King Stanford. In my vault I have the material from which this story was written. I think it is news. The daily press in Miami obviously doesn't think this is news. Why? Here goes, with all the facts that I can present..." The story then went on to recount the election night TV coverage on Channels 4 and 7 featuring the "miracle" projections. It asked the question: "Was the election rigged?" Bruun also interviewed Dr. Beiler, who said: "Oh, let's say even at this point I've had very little experience with computers. You see, what I've always done is simply write the specifications and the programmer programs." When Bruun questioned the computer-programmer employed by Channel 7 to provide computerized "projections based on results phoned in from so-called sample precincts" he was told: "...ask Dr. Beiler about it. I only put in those machines whatever he tells me." Paul Bruun expressed his amazement in the article which continues: "So here we have the two men responsible for the odds-defying feat of projecting with near-perfect accuracy the detailed outcome of a lengthy election ballot on the basis of phoned-in unofficial returns from the solitary voting machine -- and yet each man denies any detailed knowledge of how it was done. "Radio station WKAT revealed that an investigation is now underway, conducted by one of the losing candidates, to determine if the election itself could have been rigged "by a Dade County Machine in absolute control of local establishment mass media." The U.S. Justice Department has been engaged in accepting information pertinent to this case through the Miami field office of the FBI. "Martin Braterman, Dade County elections supervisor at the time of the election, resigned in November 1970 after serving for five years. His resignation came just after Dr. Beiler provided our investigations with the Channel 7 computer read-outs. Braterman told this newspaper's publisher: 'Whatever happens at the TV stations on election night has nothing to do with the results of the election. How could it?' Following are some examples of the amazing accuracy of the 7:24 p.m. projections. TOTAL VOTES CAST TOTAL VOTES CAST Projection Official totals Governor 141,387 141,866 Sen. #43 45,696 45,881 House #98 97,031 96,499 House #104 67,940 68,491 House #107 81,802 81,539 The Big Three television stations are network affiliates of ABC, CBS and NBC. The ownership of Channels 4 and 7 has been based in Dade County since the advent of television in 1949. Washington-based Post-Newsweek has owned and operated Channel 10 (whose call-letters WPLG stand for the late Phillip L. Graham, husband of Katharine Graham of the Washington Post communications empire) for less than two years. Both Miami-based stations televised continuous coverage from the moment the polls dosed. But Washington Post-controlled Channel 10, WPLG, suddenly cancelled elaborately planned coverage which was to have featured the polling techniques of Irwin Premack Associates, a Tampa firm which had been paid $27,000 to provide commentary. At the last minute WPLG's rented computer at its location in the First National Bank Building "broke down," according to WPLG news director Carl Zedell. A movie was run instead. The so-called "blackout" on reports to the public of ACTUAL OFFICIAL VOTES from the Dade County Courthouse is evidenced by two documented facts: 1. The computer read-outs used as the on-air script for Dr. Beiler at Channel 7 show that no actual votes had been received by the station until 11:15 p.m., four hours and fifteen minutes after the beginning of televised election coverage. 2. After the supposed computer breakdown, newscasters Ralph Renick, V.P. News Department, Channel 4 and George Crolius, of Channel 7, repeatedly told the public they would use a high-speed computer analysis to project the outcome based on returns from phoned-in sample precincts. The "condition" of the Dade County computer, however, was at all times contrary to what the public was being told by TV newspeople. According to an official press release from Dade data processing chief Leonard White, "The county computer at the courthouse was never down and it was never slow." Professor Tom Wood, Beiler's associate on Channel 7 election analysis offered the Reporter this comment: "It looks like we hit the lucky machine. I guess it was right in the middle of things." This newspaper challenges both Miami TV stations (4 and 7) and/or the political science professors at the University of Miami to demonstrate the manner in which all of the foregoing was accomplished. And where exactly is the single voting machine which served as bellwether for the balance of 1,647 voting machines active that night? Are we to seriously believe that any relative handful of votes can be "projected" to be "typical" of us all? Would the people who voted on that single machine be Black, White, Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, Irish, Blue collar, White-collar, Upper-Middle-Lower class models of the way an entire county thinks? Or is the existence of that mystery voting machine a myth? If, as seems indicated by the foregoing, the election should turn out to have been rigged, then this story will be a catalyst in bringing about its ultimate exposure." Paul was the kind of man who chortled about stories like this. He knew damned well how uncomfortable he was going to make some very pretentious people, and he loved it. They might be able to say that Jim and Ken Collier were something near to crackpots, or dangerous, or full of misinformation, but they did not dare to say that about Paul Bruun, who was the elder statesman, whose paper was second echelon but who could rake them over some very hot coals if he wanted it to. Paul Bruun was not about to back off any issue he agreed to start, and any press person worth a quarter knew it. So the immediate letters of denial were pained and defensive, but not insulting. Here is Channel 7's Corporate reply: Dear Me Bruun: I wish to acknowledge receipt of your letter of August 13, 1971, with a draft of the story that you plan to publish on Sunday August 29. It appears to me that your primary contention is that by 7:24 p.m. on September 8, 1970, the local television stations accurately projected all races based "solely on the returns from one solitary voting machine." I wish to assure you that the premise is untrue and preposterous. Further, the implication of wrong doing and conspiracy is ridiculous. Sincerely Edmund N. Ansin, Executive Vice President and General Manager Sunbeam Television Corporation Channel 7 WCKT Channel 4's Corporate reply: Dear Paul: I am happy you have given us the opportunity to comment on the story you planned to run in the Reporter concerning election coverage by the Miami TV stations. From my own knowledge, I know a great deal of the information which has been given to you on this subject is incorrect and I want to put forth the facts as I know them for you to be able to make a responsible journalistic judgement. ... The implication that there was collaboration between the two stations in the projecting of results and the "withholding" of actual information is completely erroneous. I think you know, Paul, that the various Miami TV operations are, on the contrary quite competitive. ... There is no secrecy with respect to the readouts which our computer produced during the course of the evening or such data which we have retained concerning the actual information transferred from the Courthouse. You are welcome to look at this material, although anyone not familiar with computers would need some substantial interpretation to understand the data. (Emphasis added.) ... This station does not claim to have projected perfect percentages on each candidate in every race by 7:04 p.m.; in fact, in several of the races we were unable to "call" a winner by the end of our election coverage because our projections showed the races to be too close to declare one man definitely the winner. ... It is clear that computers employed by television stations do not decide on an election. They merely provide a means by which actual votes cast in selected representative precincts may be projected in order to give an estimate of the winner. The winning candidate obviously is decided by the voter at the ballot box. ... Ralph Renick (v.p. News) and I will be pleased to go over this matter with you in person. The story as presently written, at least as pertains to this station, contains a great deal of erroneous information and presents a totally misleading picture of the procedures which we employ in reporting election results. ... Being in the news business ourselves, we realize that it is sometimes difficult to track down the true facts; I hope that the information I have outlined above goes some distance in providing you with the data concerning the tight standards of WTVJ practices. ... We are quite proud of the competence which we have developed in the projection of election results through the utilization of sample precincts and we have no desire to hide from you or anyone else the care with which we program our computers to achieve reliable estimates at the earliest moment. Sincerely WR. Brazzil, V.P. in Charge WTVJ Channel 4 Miami, Florida Next, one of the University of Miami professors who appeared on Channel 7 the night of the elections:, Dear Mr. Bruun: Thank you for your recent letter enclosing a copy of the story you propose to publish. To my mind, there is no need to comment on a tale so preposterous. Sincerely yours, Dr. Thomas J. Wood Department of Politics and Public Affairs University of Miami Also, a letter from the editor of the Miami News. Dear Paul, I am interested largely by the accuracy of the computer... The votes had already been cast and the election decided before the computer results were broadcast. While the accuracy of the projections was amazing, I do not see what effect they had on the outcome of the elections. Nor do I see what the stations have to gain with anything other than accuracy. If indeed, they used only one voting machine to make the projections, the risk of being wrong was theirs. I do not know of a "Dade County Machine" in absolute control of local mass media. Nobody is in control of me. I don't see any evidence that anybody but you is in control of you. Sincerely, Sylvan Meyer Editor, The Miami News Finally, a letter from the chief executive of the University of Miami. Dear Paul: Your note and a copy of the article regarding those voting machine projections arrived yesterday I simply have not had time to read it carefully enough to comment. I will look it over within the next few days and let you have my comments, if any. I have great confidence in these professors. Sincerely yours, Henry King Stanford U. of M. President We needed more answers to questions like: How was the fraud accomplished in the field where votes were tallied by 4,000 precinct officials countywide? Who was in a position to do it? How many people would have had to be in on the scheme? Why would any plotters go to the trouble? What part, if any, did the League of Women Voters play? "We've got to keep up the pressure," Jim kept repeating. And we did. On September 24, 1971, the University of Miami student newspaper, The Hurricane, chose an eye-opening headline to debut its version of the story: PROFESSORS IMPLICATED IN LOCAL ELECTION RIGGING We were pleased with the pugnacious tone of the headline, though purists suggested it was libelous. The Hurricane's editor-in-chief, Scott Bressler, stood by the story and wrote the following editorial that accompanied it: ELECTION RIGGING QUESTIONS MUST HAVE ANSWERS The alleged rigging of last year's Dade County election as presented by the Miami Beach Reporter... has been written off by most as totally absurd. Indeed the charges leveled are fantastic by any stretch of the imagination. Charges of countywide election fraud sound like they belong in a Humphrey Bogart movie. The only catch, however, is that too many questions have been left unanswered. One voting machine (out of 1,648) was used to accurately project the entire election involving some 40 races and more than 250 candidates. Which machine was it? What was the formula used by the TV stations to accurately project the entire election at 7:24 p.m. before any official votes had been reported? Why were there no actual votes reported until 11:15? Some say the computer broke down. Others say it didn't. What is the correct answer? Why have the three television stations and the Miami Herald and the Miami News completely ignored this story? They may claim that it's not true, but can they deny its news value? We feel that these questions must be answered. The Hurricane certainly does not feel that three of its professors were involved in an election fraud but we do feel the necessity to find the answers and restore the public's faith in Dade County's electoral process. Within a week, on October 1, 1971, The Hurricane revived the issue once again by printing a Letter to the Editor from Miami News editor Sylvan Meyer, who steadfastly refused to use his own columns in Miami's second largest daily to air the controversy he was helping to create. NEWS EDITOR COMMENTS ON ELECTION STORY To the Editor: Permit me to make a few comments about your news story and editorial. I concede the vote projection was remarkably accurate. Unfortunately, computers are reflecting this sort of accuracy all over the country. The question of computer projections is not a new one and has been the subject of national debate for several years. There is no way to prevent people from projecting, by guess or by computer, the results of elections and I am not sure I would try to prevent them from doing so if it were within my power. The Miami News did not run a story when shown this material because we do not feel it is a story. It was an issue originally raised by the Collier brothers, two men I would not trust under any circumstances. They have their own political thing and that's okay, but their information in this matter is not news, it is a "so what?" I do not believe the story to be true, in that it certainly does not establish either a motive nor a result contrary to the public interest. (Emphasis added.) I do not believe it has news value because it is entirely speculative and maligns the reputation of otherwise honorable men without cause and without justification. Your editorial implies that there has been a loss of faith in the integrity of Dade County's electoral process. If this is true, I am not aware of it and I certainly do not believe that the information gathered by Paul Bruun, the Colliers, et al, has resulted in such a loss of faith. On October 29, 1971, Bressler reported: CONCERNED DEMOCRATS INVESTIGATE ALLEGED DADE ELECTION RIGGING The story of an alleged election rigging involving three UM professors will be investigated by the Concerned Democrats, a coalition of liberal groups in Dade County and statewide. The group, after listening to the evidence presented by one of its own members in a closed-door session last Tuesday night, voted to go ahead with the inquiry. Presentation of pertinent evidence in the case was made by Alvin Entin, a lawyer in the Miami area, who told the Hurricane, "I'm not saying that any of the charges are true, but there was found to be enough probable cause to look into it further. From what we've seen there are questions which have to be answered. A lot of people are saying the Colliers are crazy, but you cannot dismiss the evidence just by calling names. Why won't Dr. Beiler clear this up or tell us anything? If he did, I would be willing to believe him since I don't think he's crazy. The Concerned Democrats plan to send letters to the three professors, the three TV networks, the two Miami daily newspapers and the local TV news departments to help get to the bottom of this. "We have a responsibility to look into this. Personally, I'm scared to death. I believe in the system and all I can say is. God forbid that this is true," Entin said. In October, this letter appeared in The Hurricane: BEILER SCOLDS 'CANE EDITOR FOR IRRESPONSIBILITY To the Editor: To determine whether election results are real or fraudulent is fairly easy. Some 340 precincts returned reports called Canvass Sheets signed by at least ten election officials in each precinct. These and the physical counting-wheels in the voting machines themselves which were available for re-checking within a certain time period prescribed by law, constitute the guarantee that any dishonesty would have to be at the individual polling places themselves. Do you honestly believe that 3,400 election officials were in on the so-called "rigging"? I am amazed at your ignorance and your lack of investigating enterprise when faced with the products of totally irresponsible journalism. You merely copy it. You are fully as bad at The Planet and the Reporter. You should learn now, so that you do not get sued if you ever go into journalism on a responsible paper or channel. Of course, I have no interest in "laying to rest" such hare-brained "journalism," which condemns itself on its face. The Colliers wasted a great deal of my time with this nonsense. I am certainly not going to let you do the same. As little as I think of your behavior in this matter, I don't think you have their problem. Ross C. Beiler On November 11, 1971, The Daily Planet, Miami's underground newspaper, ran the following treatment by editor Buzz Kilman: THE SILENT PRESS (THE ELECTION NOBODY EVER HEARD OF...) When is a story not a story? Several weeks ago the Miami Beach Reporter broke with a story that the 1970 Dade County election was rigged. Impossible? Maybe, but a lot of impossible things happened on the night of September 8, 1970 that either have not or cannot be explained by those who accomplished them. Since Publisher Bruun printed the story in the Reporter, The Daily Planet, the South Miami News, the Hialeah Home News and the UM Hurricane have run followups. Throughout the local media uproar, not a word of the mess has been printed in Miami's two dailys, the News and the Herald. Why? As time goes on, this question becomes almost as interesting as the original charge that the elections were rigged. Although both of Miami's dailies have privately dismissed the notion that an election rigging took place, they have failed to explain, privately or in their own newspapers, why they are ignoring what is obviously an outrageously intriguing story. The Colliers devoutly believe that some sort of conspiracy was culminated on the evening of September 8, 1970 -- and this is a line of thought too overwhelming for even the most enthusiastic reporter... and yet, it's not inconceivable as it wouldn't be the first election to be rigged. Privately, however, the Colliers' obsession has been considered more carefully -- and has been the object of much off-the-record discussion among area newsmen. I have personally talked with several, among them Bill Byer of Channel 10, the Post-Newsweek subsidiary, and Pat Murphy, editor of the Coral Gables Times, a Herald-owned newspaper, who have expressed at least a degree of bewilderment on the subject, although they have not been moved to inquire further. In a telephone conversation, Byer termed the issue "serious" and added that it was -- and I quote -- "a sick, sad, sorry situation." Every newsperson in the city and probably the state knows about the charges. A great many of them, responsible, establishment reporters, have expressed to me concern over the implications for future elections if computers and the media ever do take over the election system. The most chilling aspect of the entire affair is the ominous and unexplainable silence of the Establishment media in the face of undeniable controversy. What is so special about this case? And that was that. It wasn't as if the press was entirely a pussycat then. In 1971 there was a maelstrom of "investigative reporting" going on all over the country, to the extent that one investigation (with many dubious and unanswered motives) eventually resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon and a new balance of power between the government and the press. To recall history: In the autumn of 1971 President Nixon was enraged by Daniel Ellsberg's activities in the "Pentagon Papers" affair. To Nixon, the fact that Ellsberg, a low-level, very wealthy civilian in the Defense Department, turned over Pentagon secrets to The New York Times and The Washington Post was deeply disturbing: unpatriotic, perhaps traitorous. Worse, was the US. Supreme Court's refusal to issue a restraining order preventing the Ellsberg information from becoming public. The primary revelation Nixon felt ought to be kept secret was the material that proved the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident was a total ruse concocted by the Executive Branch to stampede the U.S. Congress into voting the President unrestricted war powers in Southeast Asia. Apparently, the 1964 naval encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin, where a U.S. cruiser was supposedly fired on by North Vietnamese boats, simply never occurred. Championing Ellsberg, however, was Nixon's harshest critic, Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, whose First Amendment rights to publish the information were upheld by the high court. Smarting from the Ellsberg case, Nixon, through his Attorney General, John Mitchell, started investigating Mrs. Graham and all her holdings in an effort to find evidence that could jeopardize her empire, including her newly-acquired FCC license for television station WPLG, Miami. WPLG was purchased in 1969 for $20 million. (By 1989 it was estimated to be worth just under $900 million). In the heirarchy [sic] of Miami's press barons, "Kate" Graham was a queen and her family held imperial power in Florida, as well as in and around Washington. Her brother-in-law, Robert, was elected to the Florida legislature on September 8, 1970. He went on to serve two elected terms as Florida governor and then rose to fill a US. Senate seat. Whenever the media leaders of Miami called a conference, Mrs. Graham would chair the function. Such meetings took place at the University of Miami. Channel 7 was owned by the university itself. Channel 4 was owned by Wometco Enterprises, an entertainment and vending machine company. When Katharine Graham took her place at the head of the conference table, she was flanked by Miami Herald lawyer Dan Paul and UM president Henry King Stanford. Further along the table in a prescribed order of rank were the president of the local chapter of the League of Women Voters (LWV); .the Dade County Manager; the chief circuit court judge; the liaison from the Chamber of Commerce; assorted lawyers representing Channels 4 and 7. Mrs. Graham, as she was to prove during the Watergate revelations of the Washington Post, had the balls of a Picasso goat. If she had to take on Richard Nixon to get his attention and respect, she would risk her realm to do it. In the Miami area, her power over the press and politicians was unchallenged. Freedom of the press was a battle cry at the time, and Richard Nixon was on one side and Mrs. Graham and occasionally the Sulzbergers of the New York Times were on the other. That was the political atmosphere we were operating in, and it seemed that most things were possible and that corruption was being rooted out by crusading, gutsy publishers and editors even at the highest levels. Then why we wondered, was vote fraud such a special case? In a private conversation with Jim, Henry King Stanford, the University of Miami's president, gave his perspective on the problem. "It's such an explosive issue," he said, "that your proof must be incontrovertable [sic]. Frankly, there are holes in the story that you've got to close before you can demand that the big papers take you seriously If you don't come up with a plausible way to explain how 4,000 poll workers' signatures could be circumvented in such a conspiracy, then your theory will die of its own weight." That was a tall, tall order and we knew he was right. But how the hell could we go about explaining those thousands of corroborating signatures? 4 IT TAKES A THIEF "The major fact about history is that a large part of it appears to be criminal." -- Anonymous Our quest looked insanely futile but we stubbornly refused to quit until we were as dead as our theories seemed to be. We worried about being too far out, too intuitive, seeing connections where there were none. The word was that we had gotten "too extreme," and that we'd "lost balance." Yet the story never faded. We would wander the beaches and wonder about the possible ramifications of what we had dug up. Nonetheless, we decided to pursue it. Jim was the hottest after it. As an avid chess player, he was intrigued by the complexity of it all. Ken kept getting married and having children, and his children's mothers were never too thrilled about the quest. That slowed him down, but it never stopped him. We needed somebody wise and credible with whom we could talk on the local scene, to validate or reject our conclusions. The agents at the FBI said that U.S. Attorney Robert W. Rust was a good listener. He was, but he was consistently noncommittal about the use, if any, his superiors in the Justice Department were making of our field work. We never saw the man. He was reachable only by telephone, and our phone conversations were probably recorded. Because Rust would willingly spend twenty minutes at a time on the phone discussing the implications of our theories, we assumed the jury in the Justice Department was still open minded about the case. We found ourselves in accord with Rust on two points. If the elections in Dade County were being systematically rigged, it had to be accomplished and/or by: 1) Massive tampering with the voting machines; 2) Massive forgery in the certificates attested to by the signature of poll workers. Both possibilities seemed far fetched, illogical or impossible. The 1,648 machines would have to have been pre-set with vote totals without poll workers finding out. The poll workers' duties included visually checking the mechanical counters in back of the machines before allowing voting on election morning. If forgery was the method, it would appear to be a Houdini-like trick. Each of the 1,648 machines' certificates of canvass were signed in triplicate by at least ten poll-workers per precinct, twice a day, adding up to roughly 32,960 separate signatures. As impossible as either of those two possibilities sounded, we didn't discount them entirely because of Dade County's track record of "polecat" elections. Polecat elections stink to high heaven. Our skepticism was founded in the lore of Dade County polecat politics, circa 1959, when perhaps the most important election ever held in the region took place. It was a county-wide referendum in which each of the 27 separate municipalities in Dade County were asked to give up their power to govern themselves autonomously. They were being asked instead to turn over self-governing power to the proposed "Metropolitan Government," or Metro, for short. Opposition to the "power grab" was fierce and the debate dominated the press for months before the balloting. The Miami Herald strongly backed the proposition. The Metro Charter, a set of rules defining the powers of Metro-Dade, was written by Miami Herald lawyer Dan Paul. The Charter was a product of many consultations with the insiders, who met regularly in the UM boardroom, under the twin chairmanship of Herald publisher John S. Knight and U.M. President Henry King Stanford. The voluntary divestiture of power by Dade's cluster of independent cities would bring about a whole new way of governing, tax collecting, public servicing, public contracting and election administration. Billions of dollars in commercial and property futures were at stake. The Fifties were drawing to a close. The architects of regional government viewed their new model of governance by "experts" as a new era. No longer would there be dependence on charismatic publicly elected officials, whose credentials to lead often consisted of no more than a willingness to shake every hand in the neighborhood. Elite planners sought to diminish the power of mayors, chiefs of police and local heroes of one kind or another who influence public policy. In their place, operating largely behind-the-scenes with no accountability to the public , would be Public Administration Service (PAS) graduates, trained to be loyal to the Charter. More often than not the county manager came from a different part of the country. It was to be government by "grid," so that personnel from PAS could be nimbly interchanged throughout the United States, without fanfare, to fill advisory "slots," such as county manager. As the 1959 Metro referendum drew near, citizens who preferred the old-fashioned way of governing banded together with such vigor that a Miami News poll conducted by houndstooth-clean editor Bill Baggs showed Metro was headed for a kick in the ass and down to defeat. (The News was still independent in those days.) Baggs commented that it would be surprising if the forces for Metro mustered any backing at all beyond the elite, special-interest voters who stood to benefit financially. Then, on election night, the electoral reality-quake struck. Metro won, according to the votes counted on Dade's carefully tended Automatic Voting Machines. And while there was some head shaking and muttering after the results were in, the discontent was scantily reported and soon forgotten. Talk radio was a mere glitter in Larry King's eyes then. But as years passed, old-timers began wondering aloud on the early talk radio programs if something fishy hadn't occurred back in 1959 when Metro was voted in. In 1971, a caller mentioned a group known as "the warehouse gang" as the ones most likely to be behind the original Metro election victory. The caller hinted mysteriously of a cadre of "good old boys" who had long been in charge of the county's voting machines, which were stored between elections at a warehouse in Opa Locka, Dade's most rural backwater municipality located on the edge of the Everglades. There, it was rumored, a flourishing criminal enterprise had evolved over the years. The manipulators in county politics came to depend on the voting machine mechanics to guarantee the outcome of multimillion dollar bond issues and other controversial measures. It was common knowledge, one informant told us, that, "Those guys can make a mechanical voting machine whistle Dixie." The Opa Locka warehouse at the Opa-Locka Airport is a big World War Two-type hangar. The airport is a vast expanse of concrete at the edge of black swamp water. It's flat and the trees are very low and Jim learned to fly Cessna 150s and 172s out there. Frank Vickery, a big, old, taciturn "cracker," was in charge of the warehouse. He didn't have much to do out in the swamp all day and he was bored. So he was happy to accept the court order we handed him giving us permission to examine documents. He liked to talk and show people around. So he led and we listened. Inside the hangar were 1,648 gray-green voting machines with levers, plus a lot of extras, all lined up in rows. They were made by the Automatic Voting Machine Company of Jamestown, New York.. "Can you show us the candidate counters and the wheels inside?" Jim asked. He led us to a nearby machine and opened up the back with a key. There were a lot of plastic, wheels, three-digit counters underneath a black grid. The insides looked pretty simple. "How can you rig this thing?" Ken asked. "One of the best ways," Frank chuckled, "is to put decals over the counters so that when you see them in the morning it says "000" but underneath it says maybe "090," which in any precinct is a pretty good bonus." "What else?" "There's such a thing as a predetermined counter. It's already set up before the election... by shaving the plastic wheel inside so that it slips ahead 100 or 200 or 300 votes. Any good mechanic can do it with a razor blade" He took us to his office and reached into his desk, bringing out one of the counter wheels in his big rough hands. "This is a shaved predetermined counter," he said. "Can we keep one?" "Sure, take it." Jim put the wheel in his pocket. "Who works on these machines?" "They're worked on by the mechanics for Wometco. They have vending machines and movie houses. They can make those suckers sing." We shook hands with Frank and said goodbye. Ken walked outside whistling the tune to: "Way down south in the land of cotton, good times there are not forgotten... Lookaway! Lookaway! Lookaway Dixieland." Within a week the photograph of the shaved wheel on the counter was on the front page of the Planet. Then Jim called Ellis Rubin, a Miami Beach lawyer whose tactic was to get as much publicity as possible for his clients and causes. Rubin was a tall, lanky, good looking guy in his mid thirties. He had run for Congress as a Republican and lost. We didn't know it at the time, but Rubin's campaign manager had been U.S. Attorney Robert Rust. We didn't know, either, that Rubin was thick as cold grits with the CIA and other intelligence-gathering outfits. We told him the whole story, or as much as we could get into an hour or so. There was a charisma about Rubin, an intellectual intensity that we liked. He might be able to break the silence in the press because he had chutzpah, brains and the ear of a lot of reporters who liked his style. He said he'd do what he could, pro bono, and we believed him. He was one of the few characters we encountered who was always as good as his word. After that trip to Opa Locka, we figured there must be some documents out at the hangar that we didn't get to see. We had to go back. We decided that we as American citizens had the right to know everything involved with our so-called free and fair vote. On a bright, sunny January morning we drove back to the Opa-Locka warehouse and parked in front of the door. As soon as we walked in we saw, about fifty feet ahead of us, a set of wooden steps going up to a loft suspended from the ceiling. "What are you guys doing here?" It was Vickery. "We want to check that loft over there," Jim said. "I got a court order here that says you guys aren't allowed back in here." ; He showed us a piece of paper signed by circuit court chief judge, Henry Balaban. "You can tell Balaban what to do with his order," Ken said. Vickery headed for his office. "He's probably going to call the cops." We didn't waste any time. We sprinted up the steps and into the loft. Before us were boxes and boxes of documents that obviously pertained to the 1970 elections. "I can't believe it!" Jim breathed. "Falling into shit." "Where do we start?" "Just look and grab." We took as many papers as we thought were significant from different boxes with a millisecond or so to decide, and we stuffed them under our shirts, smoothing them down so they showed as little as possible. Then we headed out of the loft and back to the car. But as we were coming down the ladder, we saw three men coming toward us, with the ex-supervisor of elections, Martin Braterman, leading the way. He was dressed in a black overcoat and broadbrimmed black fedora. His appearance in the garb of a traditional "bad guy" was almost surrealistic, given the precarious legal position we found ourselves in. "What are you guys doing here?" he demanded. "This is County property. Get out or I'll have you arrested." We didn't say a word. We brushed past him and his two associates and walked to the car as fast as we could, with as much dignity as we could muster. Ken theatrically burned rubber getting away. Every mile we put between ourselves and the warehouse buoyed our spirits. Within a few minutes on the open road we were making plans to return to the loft. Once more we spread out the contraband on Jim's pool table. It was a smorgasbord of stuff. We had: 1) IBM computer cards with the candidate's name typed on each and hand-written numbers on them. 2) What appeared to be crib sheets that had handwritten numbers that included a time of day, and then other numbers, also in pencil, in the same handwriting. 3) Mimeographed, stapled-together sheets that showed the handouts that were given to the press. It was a workup model, handprinted with a red pencil. On the front of it were the words: "Machine Totals Before Correction." (What did before correction mean? ) 4) A press release from Leonard White, who ran the computer for the courthouse during the primary His job was to feed the actual votes over the telephone line, called the "A" line, to the Herald and the television stations. It said, "Misinformation" had been given out by the news media on September 8th about the courthouse computer's alleged breakdown. It said that due to careful programming the computer "was never slow and never down." 5) A letter to all precinct workers telling them that they had to be at a "schooling" session two weeks in advance of the election, and they all had to sign in and give their true signatures, otherwise they would not be paid. Then there was a ream or so of other papers a little less outstanding but certainly fascinating. "Man, I want to tell you, this is a hell of a haul," Jim said. "We could have gotten this same stuff, of course, if we had followed the system," Ken said dryly. "Okay," Jim took a deep breath, "let's see if it makes sense. Old Martin Braterman resigned. Now he turns up at the warehouse to protect this cache of documents." "Right," Ken said, "and we now have documents that show there was a way to procure the true signatures from the precinct workers two weeks ahead of the election. Plus, the television stations lied about the computer at the courthouse breaking down and the press release is evidence of that." "They just needed an excuse to go on the air with their projections. We know that a lot of numbers, handwritten before the election, turned out to be final totals after the election was official." "Back to the FBI?" "Yup." We gave the FBI agents originals and copies of the evidence, including the press release, the computer cards, the workup sheets and the letter from Braterman asking for the signatures. "Does this disappear into the void, too?" Jim asked. "Yes," the agent smiled. We sent much of the same material to Richard Gerstein, the State Attorney. He told us we had violated a court order to get the material and he refused to deal with it. Jim called US. Attorney Rust. "It's time for a meeting with the Justice Department in Washington." Rust was his usual vague self. "Goddamit, we deserve it," Jim's anger spilled over. "We've got the evidence and we want somebody to look at it." Rust scheduled it for the end of March with Craig C. Donsanto, a Justice Department attorney. Jim drove to Washington, while Ken stayed in Miami with his wife and daughter. The afternoon of the meeting, Jim walked to the Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue and found his way to Donsanto's office. It wasn't a corner office, and it wasn't a cubicle either, but a middle of the corridor mid-sized office. Donsanto was in his late twenties and he had a melon-shaped head. Jim told his story and handed him the shaved candidate counter and other significant documents in a manila envelope. "I want an investigation," Jim told him. "I'll look into it," Donsanto said. "Thanks for coming." Jim pushed for a more specific deadline, but Donsanto refused to give it. "These things take time," he said, smiling woodenly. And that was that. Back in Florida, we tried to pinpoint where we were. We put together packets of "evidence" in manila envelopes and gave them to the local press. We saw Jack Anderson, the columnist, at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbor. He took a packet and thanked us and we never heard from him again. Katharine Graham was at a meeting at the University of Miami when Jim handed the packet to her She took it and didn't say a word. And that was that. In May, Jim drove back to Washington. He took a shot and went unannounced to Jack Anderson's red brick townhouse on Vermont Avenue, but Anderson refused to see him. Then Jim walked through the glass doors into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Office Building. He found the office of Larry O'Brien, the head of the DNC, and left a Votescam packet on his desk.* * A few weeks later, on June 17, 1972, a second break-in by "plumbers" at the DNC resulted la their arrest for what Richard Nixon later called "a third-rate burglary." At this stage of the game, we hadn't the slightest inkling that what took place on June 17th could possibly relate to our investigation. Only Justice Department documents we found years later while rummaging through the system would suggest a connection between Watergate and Votescam. The off-year primary election rolled around in September and we decided to watch it closely on television at Jim's house As happened two years earlier, Channel 10 wasn't broadcasting returns but instead was running a movie. It was, in Yogi Berra's words, deja vu all over again, only there was an eerie feeling about it this time. Not long after the polls closed. Channels 7 and 4 put their commentators on the air. After a little while the anchor people came on and announced that the courthouse computer had broken down and instead of official results, the station would broadcast projections. "Who computed the program this time?" Ken asked. "Let's find out." The next day Jim called Channel 7 and asked the news director who programmed the computers. "Eastern Airlines," he said. The next call was to Eastern. "I'd like to talk to the computer programmer who did the election," Jim told the operator. "Oh, that's John," she said. She put Jim through. John was not happy about talking on the telephone to a reporter and when Jim asked the first question, "What was the program you used to call it so close?" the man hung up. At the Planet the editor, Buzz, called John, too. He wrote in the next edition: "Every time I asked the guy a question, the phone fell out of his hands." Judge Balaban's latest court order, denying us access to public records, was a definite setback. But it also proved to us that we were on the right track. Public documents relating to elections were singled out by Florida statute as being open to the public "without exception." The only recourse was to get a circuit court hearing where we could attempt to get Judge Balaban to reverse himself. That brought up the problem of whether or not to get a lawyer. We did have the option of petitioning the Court on our own, acting pro se, but we figured that we'd get whipped in court. Finally it dawned on us that the only sure way to maneuver ourselves into court, without paying any lawyer or being beholden to a partisan organization, was to call upon the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU was the perfect way to fight Balaban for denying us unrestricted access to public voting records. At the ACLU's next executive session in a big law firm's office with a lot of local lawyers around the table, we took turns telling how our constitutional rights had been violated by being kept away from public election documents, and we warned how the American vote was in danger. "I'll take the case," offered Shya Estrumpsa, a dark, quiet man. He said that he felt he was on solid legal ground in fighting the restraining order, and that he couldn't imagine what the counter argument might be. He planned to get Judge Balaban to lift his order in circuit court, and if that failed, to go into federal court for relief based on constitutional grounds. "We've got a lawyer now, and it's certified that we aren't paying him," Ken said. Our poetic limitation in Votescam was never to pay a lawyer. If you pay a lawyer, he's got to be your advocate, right or wrong. Just paying a lawyer doesn't make you right. If a lawyer takes your anti-Establishment case pro bono publico, he usually feels he's sticking his neck out but that he has a winnable case. We also asked Ellis Rubin what he thought, but we didn't ask him to take the case. Rubin assured us that he would help ferret out the truth. He thought we were doing something worthwhile and important, and we couldn't help liking him for that. At a hearing a week later in Balaban's chambers, the ACLU lawyer did his best. But instead of allowing us to dig deeper in the warehouse, the judge simply impounded all the evidence and refused to lift his order. We didn't want to bother with the long procedure of going through federal court to challenge Balaban's orders. Realizing that Balaban was not a man to be trusted, and that he kept a secret political agenda, we decided to take another tack. Jim left a message at Rubin's office that said: "We are going to ask Balaban to appoint you as Ombudsman for Vote Fraud in Dade County, and you can be the guardian for vote fraud evidence. Will you accept?" Ken called Judge Balaban's office at the courthouse and through his secretary left a message: "Will you appoint Ellis Rubin ombudsman for vote fraud in Dade County?" A few hours later, Balaban passed Rubin in the courthouse corridor and cryptically said: "You got it," and strided on. Rubin, totally puzzled, said to himself: "Got what?" When he returned to his office, he was able to put it together. Rubin was now an ombudsman. 5 A TANGLED WEB "The handwriting on the wall may well be a forgery" -- Hodgson When we found out that all the poll workers in Florida, and probably in other states, as well, submitted their true signatures two weeks in advance of the election to their "teachers" in the election school, it seemed to follow that anybody collecting those signatures would have a leg up on forging them. On a cold, rainy afternoon in the spring of 1973, Jim opened the door to his townhouse and there on the pool table were two piles of large paper. Ken was standing over them with a huge grin on his face. "Wait'll you see these," he said. "Where'd you get them?" "I ripped off the Dade County Courthouse." "You stole the canvass sheets?" "Yeah. I walked into the clerk's office where they keep them, and I saw these sheets here... sheets with blank backs." He grabbed the top sheet off the pile. "Look, there's no ink on it at all," he said, pointing from corner to corner. "No laws written on it. Blank." "Wow!" "There's no printing on these, nothing to certify." "This is fantastic," Jim whooped. "What made you take them?" "I realized once I found these with blank backs, that if I didn't take them they could destroy them, especially if we got a court order to look for them. So I took a whole armful of the blank backs and signature ones, and I walked out of the courthouse. Nobody said a word." "Nobody saw you?" "Just grab and walk, don't look around guiltily... just move on." Jim marveled at the gall of it. To go into the courthouse and steal public documents under the clerks' noses was a third degree felony. It was certainly the most radical thing that was done up-to-date in the whole investigation. Ken felt as if he had finally carpe'd the diem and made a move. "We have them by the balls with this," he said. "What races do they cover?" "It's the non partisan races in the 1972 election. There's a machine that stands over in the corner in all of the precincts. The election supervisor never tells you about it. They call it the non partisan machine. That's all the judges, the schoolboard and the state attorney." "What's it doing over on the side?" "They don't send anybody over there. Most people don't care about anything except the big races. They're satisfied and don't ask where the other little races are. So the non partisan machines don't get voted on unless somebody asks in particular. Nobody's in charge and nobody reads the numbers off after the election." "Then that means," Jim said, "that the judges and the state attorney are the two groups that prosecute vote fraud, yet their election is patently rigged and uncertified." "Still, they're the ones you have to go to if you claim there's fraud." "Only in America." "We're starting to get to the point where there are no benign explanations," Ken said. "This is vote fraud on a massive, arrogant, amazing scale. At least to me." "Me, too." "Do we have them now?" Ken asked. "Yeah. We've got 'em." "How are they going to get around no certification? It's one thing to confound people with the signatures, it's another to take those signatures away entirely." "We'll go to Rubin. Rubin can call a press conference, show these uncertified canvass sheets, and we won't be 'crazy' anymore," Jim said. "Then we'll go to the FBI." "If they printed one canvass sheet per machine," Ken calculated, "there'd be 1,648 canvass sheets. If we find out they printed more, that means there must be duplicates floating around somewhere. We've got to find out who ordered these canvass sheets printed, and who ordered that no certification be put on them. Right?" "Right!" Aclerk in the election division told Ken the name of the printer: Franklin Press in Miami, a big, rich printing company with many government contracts. Jim, who identified himself as a reporter, called Franklin Press' president and asked: "How many canvass sheets did you print for the election?" "We printed about 4,000." "Do they have certification on the back?" "Yes." "How about the non partisan race? Is there certification on the back of those, too?" "Yes." "We have sheets here that are blank on the back. Can we come down and show them to you?" The president left the line for a minute and then returned: "We didn't print certifications on some of those sheets on the instructions of William Miller, the elections supervisor," he said. "Thanks, we'll get back to you." "Iwant to try my hand at it," Jim said. "What?" "Stealing the canvass sheets." "Let's go." We drove to Ft. Lauderdale up U.S. 1, through Hollywood, past pistachio-green South Broward High School, which looked the same as when Jim was a Broward Bulldog and devoured the sloppy Joes in the cafeteria at lunch. We drove by the Ft. Lauderdale airport and the conch shell vendors and fruit shippers and orange juice sellers in their low white buildings. We passed "Bet-a-Million Gates" million-dollar banyan tree, which was lusciously green and shade-making. Mr. Bet-a-Million was a Detroiter who would bet on almost anything. In the 1930s, he bet a million dollars that nobody could move that particular banyan tree to his club in Chicago. Its roots spread out forty feet and into the pores of the coral substrata. And huge limbs reached out sixty feet, with dozens of roots falling from each limb and back into the soil. Nobody ever collected on the bet, but once they heard the banyan-tree story, people talked about it for days... the possibilities of how you'd move the damned thing anywhere, much less up North, and get it to live. For a million dollars people are willing to get creative. Into the Broward County courthouse we went, dressed in jeans. We walked into the clerk's office and asked to see the canvass sheets. "Of course," the clerk agreed. She brought them out in tall stacks. Jim looked around and saw that none of the clerks were paying them any attention. He took one stack, held it under his arm like laundry and walked out of the courthouse. Ken, unburdened by purloined documents, was right behind. We took off in the green Maverick, and headed back to Jim's townhouse where we dumped the load. Then we got back in the Maverick and drove to West Palm Beach. This time we passed Ft. Lauderdale and got to Deerfield Beach, a sleepy little town, and Boca Raton, small, undiscovered yet by the hoi-polloi. Then came West Palm Beach. This is not Palm Beach. This is middle to lower class folks who live on the wrong side of the Intercoastal Waterway. It's a bunch of squatty stucco buildings that look like architectural renegades from Los Angeles. They are inhabited by a volatile mixture of black people and rednecks, a lot of whom worked for the rich people on Palm Beach as bartenders, maids, gardeners, garbage collectors, small shopkeepers. The further west you went the swampier it got, until you hit the Everglades. Into the Palm Beach County courthouse. We ask for canvass sheets. They bring them. This time clerks were watching us. "Stare them down," Ken whispered. We each stared at whoever was looking at us until they looked away Then Ken grabbed a pile, and we walked out, got in the car and headed home. It was a long day. At home, we spread our loot out on the green felt. Jim studied the similarities among the different piles. "They look a lot like the ones in Dade County These are all sort of gray... the numbers are written in by hand... when you flip them, see... there's a consistent grayness... the handwriting has the same emotional level, it's all neat... no broken or thick pencil marks. Pencils wear down and break off... in a real sheet, you've got to see all those different strokes, but look at these, man... there's none of it. It's uniformly gray with thin lines, in all of the writing." "So what do you think?" Ken asked. "This is getting too big to handle. Nobody's going to believe this. We've got this huge fucker by the tail and nobody's going to believe it." "Is it possible that the people who fill out canvass sheets all over the state have identical handwriting?" Jim laughed as he walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out his frozen glass mug from the freezer. "Yeah, right. There must be some kind of kindred spirit that precinct workers share, they all got the same handwriting." He snapped the top off a can of root beer and poured it into the icy mug. "Now we've got three counties and all of the signatures look almost exactly the same in emotional content from morning until night, twelve hours later." "Yeah, I know. From morning when they signed them, while they were fresh, to night when the signatures all look just like they did in the morning," Ken counted off points: " no alteration of mood, no emotional content, no different slant, no extra pressure." Jim nodded. "And too much exactness as to where they sign on the line. If a signature is indented in the morning, it's indented almost exactly the same way at night. That's not the way it would be if something is human about it." "Remember those five messy canvass sheets we saw with Lynch?" "Yes." "They looked real, sloppy enough. There was a certain illiteracy about them. Some of the writing was heavy and black, and obviously made by pencils that were nubs. Not all crisp and sharp like these." Jim flipped through the stack. "This is forged, it's the same Stepford effect that we saw in Dade County." "But how the hell could Lynch, our friendly handwriting expert, say they weren't forged?" "It's a conundrum." About nine o'clock the next morning. Ken called the sheriff of Broward County. "I stole all the canvass sheets from the courthouse," Ken said in his coolest, matter-of-fact way "Arrest me." The sheriff laughed. "Keep me out of this," he said. "I don't want any part of it." Then he called the sheriff of Palm Beach County and told him the same thing. "Good luck," the sheriff said. Not only couldn't we garner any publicity, we literally couldn't get arrested. Next day we visited the FBI. We met with agent Ed Putz, a very Gary Cooperish guy. We showed him the canvass sheets. He spread them out on a table, shuffled them, looked at them from a standing position, and said: "These are forgeries." He gave them a dismissive push and disappeared behind a door. We made our statement to someone else, and left some canvass sheets as evidence. "How did Putz know they were forged?" Ken asked that night, while he racked the fifteen balls for a game of eight ball. We were at the Bingo Bar -- headquarters on the Beach for some of the nation's brightest pool shooters. "I don't know. He disappeared too fast to find out." The next day we took sample sheets over to the Organized Crime Bureau of Dade County. Sgt. Walter Blue, a crime lab technician, took us into a room lit by red lights. There were five or six different types of microscopes and lots of chemicals. He told us that he would put the canvass sheets under the microscope to examine the fibers and ink. "I'm going to look for broken fibers... "he explained. "All paper, when you magnify it, is made up of what appears to be thick threads, or fibers, criss-crossing each other. So when you write on it, you have to eventually break one of those fibers -- especially with all those signatures. Also, the pencils used by the county are those little hard sharp things, you know..." "The ones they use at race tracks?" Ken offered. He nodded. "And when most people press down on the paper they make pin point holes. They also indent the paper... so I'll be looking for ridge lines on the backside of the writing. You should be able to feel them with your finger, in some cases, but under a microscope, they'll look like the Grand Tetons." "How long is this going to take?" Jim asked. "I'll call you when I'm done." When we were in the suntan business everybody advised us as to the best way to promote Sunscrene. They always asked the same thing: "Have you ever thought of those little packages they give away when you fly to Florida? Get it on airplanes!" And in our Votescam investigation, the question almost everybody asked was: "Aren't you guys afraid of getting killed?" The second question was invariably: "Have you guys gone to '60 Minutes'?" No, "60 Minutes" came to us. One day we got a call from Florida State Senator Alan Becker. Becker was a lawyer known as "The Mink Cub." He wore exquisite European-styled vested suits, hankerchief [sic] in the pocket. He was perfect. But the "Mink Cub" moniker was due to his hair -- slicked back and jet black. "Mike Wallace is coming over to do a story on me being a condominium advocate," Becker told Jim. "You want to meet him?" An hour later we were in his office. Wallace was interviewing Becker, and when he finished he turned his attention to us. "What have you got?" he asked. We laid out four years of evidence for Wallace and his crew Wallace appeared flabbergasted, but he put nothing on tape. However, he said that he was headed right back to New York to get approval from his bosses to do our story. In fact, freelance investigative reporter Gaeton Fonzi, wrote a piece about Wallace having the Votescam story in his pocket. MIAMI MAGAZINE JULY, 1974 MIAMI, FLORIDA THE GREAT DADE ELECTION RIG CONTINUES by Gaeton Fonzi Just recently, Channel 7 television reporter Brian Ross happened to be returning to Miami from New York on the same plane as CBS-TV newsman Mike Wallace. With his number one network show, "60 Minutes", Wallace has earned a reputation as a top investigative journalist who goes after the big stories. Chatting with Ross, Wallace told him that he was coming back to Miami for two specific reasons: one of which was to film an interview with a show business personality appearing on Miami Beach. The other reason, he said, was much more important: to look into what he had been told might be the most shocking vote fraud scandal ever to rock the nation. And, confided Wallace, it involved a conspiracy between major local media and key figures in Miami's power structure. The Great Dade Election Rig continues. After four years. Four years! In spite of numerous interments, the amazing story has surfaced anew. Finally it appears to be in the sight of network television. It is the "Loch Ness Monster" of Miami journalism. For whatever reasons, what Mike Wallace did in Miami on that return trip, we never found out what it was. Most likely, he shot tape and interviewed some people. It appeared obvious from Fonzi's lead sentence that Wallace had gone back to New York, had discussions with associates, and was returning to Miami to follow up on the story. Nothing appeared on the air.* Meanwhile, while waiting for the handwriting analysis, life in the tropics returned to a steady hum. It was relieved only by trying to figure out our next strategy in the investigation. Rock was dying and disco was coming in. Disc jockeys played plastic records for people who shook their booty. These booty-shakers grew up to be yuppies. There were still some good drugs out there, mostly derivitives [sic] of nutmeg. They started with the initials DM, like DMA. It was a form of speed, with all the euphoria of cocaine but without the valley. It was the beginning of the designer drugs, and they were called "nice," because everybody who ever took them would say, "Oh, this is nice, man." "Hello." "Jim, this is Sgt. Walter Blue." Jim immediately motioned Ken to pick up the other phone. "These canvass sheets you brought me are forgeries. Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?" "I don't know, I'm doing my damndest to get somebody to do something" Jim said. "This is what I found. There are no fibers broken. That means that none of the people who wrote those signatures pressed hard enough to indent the paper or break the fiber. There's not a number big enough to tell you the odds against no breaks with hundreds of signatures involved. Plus the pencil lines all have a uniform flow without breaks in the flow. That's impossible if the signatures are genuine." "How can that be accomplished?" Jim asked, amazed. "I don't know, but it bothers me that this is going on. I'm concerned." "We're doing our best," Jim said. Now we were pissed. Lynch! Lynch was the handwriting expert who told us the canvass sheet signatures were genuine. We took him at his word. Now we had an FBI agent and a police specialist who swore they were forgeries. We called Lynch and told him that we had to see him immediately, and that we'd explain when we got there. He lived in Plantation, which is near the Everglades west of Ft. Lauderdale. It was open cattle and citrus land, with thick black soil, cockleburrs [sic], coral snakes and canals planted with mile-long borders of pine trees. Lynch lived in a stucco subdivision house with a Florida grass lawn, a palm tree, a carport. He met us at the door and led us into a well-equipped home laboratory in the back. "Let's see these under the microscope." Jim handed Lynch a single canvass sheet. "Okay." We waited. Lynch was peering into the eyepiece and seemed very calm. "These are not forgeries," he repeated. Jim took a look. Now he knew what to look for. He saw the letters "floating" on top of the paper fibers. There were no breaks, penpoints, smudges, nothing dissimilar. "Look," Jim stepped aside so that Ken could see, "not a fiber is broken." Ken looked, then erupted. "Hey, what are you saying?" he asked Lynch. 'The ink floats on the surface, there's no breaks, and we've been told twice now that these are forgeries." While Ken was talking, Jim walked out into the anteroom and examined the books on the shelves. He wanted an idea of who this man was. He saw that he had a technical book selection consistent with all that equipment. Then, on the coffee table, he spotted an opened magazine. It was on display the same way anyone would leave a "vanity piece" to be admired. Jim walked over and picked it up. It was turned to a page that had the headline: "How to Forge Documents with a Bank Rapidograph." Jim read it twice. He read it again and it said the same thing. He looked at who wrote it. It was by Robert Lynch! For the first time in this investigation, the hair on the back of Jim's neck stood up. He took the magazine to Ken and stuffed it in his hand. "Look, this guy's got a story in Police Magazine, May '72 about forging documents with a bank Rapidograph." Lynch stood quietly. Jim heard a rustling in the hall. A flash of paranoia swept over him. The scene rang through his mind of Lynch's wife, with a shotgun, shooting them as intruders. Nobody would have doubted it or cared less. "Let's get the fuck out of here," Jim said. In the car heading back home, Jim explained to Ken that he had only glanced at the article. "So what did you see?" "It's a thing called a bank Rapidograph. Apparently it's an instrument that you can trace a signature with. It copies the signature with one pencil and another pencil or pen is attached on some kind of a swing arm -- it traces the exact movement on another piece of paper." "So if Lynch used a Rapidograph on these canvass sheets he could trace it off the signatures he got at the schooling session two weeks in advance, and repeat them on unsigned canvass sheets." "Right." "Then there would be a set of canvass sheets that could be substituted for the originals and nobody would know the difference. Unless they happened, like we did, to stumble across those five, where the handwriting was real." Jim watched the heavy rain as it hammered the hood. "Well, I think that answers Henry King Stanford's question," he smiled. "We can't prove Lynch did it." "But we know how it's done, he wrote the article on how to do it, and now he denies that what he saw under the microscope was forgery when two experts say it is," Jim reasoned. "If the fucker quacks like a duck, shoot it." We headed for Rubin's office on Miami Beach. The office was in a wing of a baronial mansion from the 1930s with stained glass windows and exotic woods. It felt expensively medieval. Rubin listened to the story and read the material. He laughed. He loved this kind of intrigue, especially if it gave him a shot at the Democratic war lords who controlled the county. "Will you call a press conference?" Ken asked. "Yes." The next day all the media showed up at Rubin's office, as they always did, and still do. There was a lot of excitement in the air. Rubin had prepared himself for this conference with a singular focus. His plan was to follow up with a visit to the state attorney's office, to present the evidence and demand an investigation. At the appointed time, Rubin strode into the scene. "Ladies and Gentlemen of the press," his voice was compelling, "I've called you here today to offer you what I consider shocking and sickening, but undeniable, admissable and conclusive proof, that elections in this county have been massively tampered with for at least the last six years -- and probably well before that." Rubin held up the blank-backed canvass sheets and the forged certifications and told the press what it all meant. With that opener, he then began exhibiting examples of forgery on canvass sheets from Dade County to Palm Beach. He told the media that the Organized Crime Bureau had confirmed that signatures on every sample were not those of poll workers, but had been affixed by other means. "Desperate measures by desperate men," hissed a Channel 7 representative. He stalked out. The Miami News ran the story on the front page, with a photograph of Rubin holding up a forged canvass sheet. The Miami Herald ran a front-page photograph and a story inside. A few days later, William Miller, who took over when Braterman quit, also resigned as election supervisor. Two down. Joyce Deiffenderfer, the woman from the League of Women Voters who wept and cried that she did not want to "get caught in this thing," was named election supervisor. There was no followup in the press. And that was that. One day Jim got a call at The Planet from somebody at the Dade County election division. The hushed female voice said: "The Metro commission has voted millions of dollars to send all the voting machines up to the Carolinas to get them retrofitted with Printomatic devices. Meanwhile, they'll gut the machines and crush all the old parts. That gets rid of any evidence of shaved wheels." What's a Printomatic device? In early September 1974 the primaries arrived again. At 7 a.m. we drove to a precinct on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami. It was in Howard's Trailer Camp, four square blocks of mobile homes. What we found shocked and elated us at the same time. First, the keys to the backs of the new Printomatic-equipped voting machines, for the first time ever, had not been issued to the precinct captains. They could no longer open the backs and see the numbers inside. Instead, they were told to crank a handle that had been implanted into the back of the machine up there in Carolina. They were assured it would make a roller run across the paper, which had been treated so that numbers would appear when impressed by the raised counters. After the roller rumbled across the paper from left to right, one of two pieces of paper would slide out of a slot at the bottom. On it would be numbers. For a virgin, un-voted-on machine, it was supposed to show all zeroes. But none of the captains nor anyone else in the precinct actually got to look at the counters themselves. Jim called Joyce Dieffenderfer from a pay phone. "Where are the keys to these machines?" he asked. "They're locked in Jack Wert's desk. He's my assistant." "Okay." A call to Wert: "Yeah, they're locked in my desk because they've got the Printomatic, they don't need keys anymore." Jim hurried back to the precinct just in time to see two stocky men in dark suits opening the back of a machine. Ken motioned to Jim: "The roller system isn't working. It's jammed up. They called these guys the troubleshooters." Then he pointed outside to a white Cadillac with Kentucky plates. "That's theirs." "These guys are decidedly strangers," Jim said. We watched. They opened the back door of the machine with a key and took out the Printomatic paper. It was about two feet by three feet, as big as the back of the machine. When they pulled it out, you could see the piece of paper was bunched up in the middle where the roller had wrinkled it. Apparently, that's what had hung it up. The two guys tried to hustle the paper away quickly. One grabbed it to his chest and turned to walk out, calling over his shoulder: "The machine's out of order until further notice." In a flash Ken grabbed the paper and yanked it out of the guy's arms. The stranger was momentarily stunned. Then Ken whipped around and spread the paper on the nearest table, smoothing it out. At least ten precinct workers were bug-eyed as they watched. What we all saw was a wrinkled piece of paper with zeroes corresponding to the candidate counters filling the entire sheet -- even where the roller hadn't touched. "Hey, these have been preprinted." Jim said loudly "The pressure roller only went half-way across before it wrinkled the paper." A loud barnyard hubub went up from the workers. "It's fixed!" "We're not going to sign anything." The surprised troubleshooter lunged over to grab the paper off the table and walked quickly back to the Cadillac. The precinct workers were clearly angry. The newfangled crankhandle was actually a vote scam, a decoy. The Printomatic didn't do anything but make people think it imprinted true counter numbers. "I quit." A worker walked out. "They want us to certify that!" Another followed him. One by one, every worker walked out of the precinct until in ten minutes it was empty. The new crank handles and rollers didn't work in most of the other precincts across the county that day either, and the scam was also revealed to precinct workers when troubleshooters came to unstick the rollers. Many of the workers walked out. The next day. The Miami Herald, carried a story about the poll workers' walkout which said that, due to some "snafu," thousands of precinct workers throughout the county left their jobs and were replaced by Metro police and firemen. The story neglected to say what the snafu was, or why the workers had walked off. And that was that. A day later, in the black-soil "redlands" area south of Miami where they truck-farmed celery tomatoes, strawberries, limes and Ponderosa lemons, about 200 citizens from all over the county met near the settlement of Perrine on a moonless night. It was at Clark and Dotty Merrill's place. They were well-known civic activists. Clark worked for the City of Miami as an engineer, and he had a kind of tenure that made it difficult to fire him for voicing his opinions or making waves. Dotty was from Boston, and she was loud and funny, with a marked Bahston accent. They'd gotten the word out on radio and through fliers about the Printomatic fraud. A lot of precinct workers had called them when they realized nothing was going to be said about it in the newspapers. We called them, too. We parked among a lot of cars and went into the Merrill's lived-in stucco house. The house was filled to the gunwhales [sic] with people, mostly in their thirties and up, a lot of municipal employees, merchants and workers. Everybody but lawyers. You couldn't buy a lawyer in that house. Dotty led the town meeting. Clark was a big man who'd rather listen than talk. "We've seen it with our own eyes, now," a precinct worker said. "And it's a fraud. But the election came off on schedule." "You should have seen the hysteria when everyone left our precinct and people kept coming in to vote, but there was nobody to sign them in." "It took Joyce a couple of hours to round up the cops to fill in." "Why did the Herald lie that it was just a snafu? It was a downright rigging and they know it." Dottie motioned for them to quiet down. "According to the Colliers here," she said, "the media is involved in all this up to its cajones. We've got to put pressure on the Herald to print the truth." The group debated all night, and finally decided to send a mission to The Miami Herald and The Miami News to get them to do vote fraud stories. A delegation was also sent to the State Attorney. By the time the third meeting at the Merrill's house came around, there were reports that nobody was going to do anything. No exposes were going to appear in the News or the Herald. Editors told the delegation that it was a "non story." A "non issue." The charges were "impossible to prove," and so on. Editors routinely dismissed the messengers as crackpots. The State Attorney refused to investigate. And that was that. On September 9, Ellis Rubin held a standing-room-only press conference. He had gone to the trouble of having a blackboard set up in the conference room, and now he used it to describe in detail the "Missing Keys Scam." Then he walked over to a Printomatic voting machine set up in the corner He showed how the device denied poll workers their mandate to visually eyeball the zeroes in the backs of the machines by not giving them the keys to look inside and see the alignment of the counter wheels. Reporters took notes and video cameras hummed away. "What are you going to do about it, Ellis?" a reporter asked. "I intend to present this and other supporting evidence to the State Attorney's office." "Do you expect any prosecutions... and, if so, who would be the targets?" "It would be improper for me to speculate," Ellis replied calmly, "but I certainly expect the State Attorney's office to do its duty." The next day the major newspapers were awash in material about the press conference. Front page headline in the Miami News boomed: MASSIVE VOTE FRAUD CHARGED IN DADE ELECTIONS That afternoon Rubin went with Ken to the office of Janet Reno, the tall, rawboned daughter of big, rawboned Hank Reno, the best police reporter in Miami, bar none. Janet Reno was an assistant State Attorney. Rubin intended to ask Reno to accept the blank-backed canvass sheets, make a full investigation and go to the grand jury to have them indict somebody for tampering with the 1972 election. Ken and Rubin signed a waiver of immunity in order to make a statement about vote fraud for the record. The waiver meant they were entirely responsible for their testimony, even if it meant a lot of personal trouble. If they hadn't signed the waiver it would have looked suspicious. The press was waiting by the score outside Reno's office. We were sure that Rubin would come out and announce that Reno was going to take the evidence to the grand jury, or appoint a special prosecutor. Instead, when Rubin finally emerged from behind the closed doors of that inner sanctum, he was literally ashen-faced, downcast, and crestfallen all in one. We had never seen him like this. The lights and cameras all came on. Rubin walked to the bank of microphones. "Miss Reno has asked me to inform you that she has examined the evidence and as far as any prosecutions are concerned, the statute of limitations has expired." With that barebones statement still hanging in the air, Rubin bolted to a nearby escalator and charged down its stairs to avoid any questions from the press, or from us. We didn't let it go at that. In the extreme tension of the moment we saw four years of research trashed by Reno. We took the stairs three at a time and chased our former paladin out of the Metro Justice Building. We caught up with him just as his antique red convertible was pulling away from the curb. Ken jumped on the running board and leaned over. He looked into Rubin's eyes for a split second. Then he jumped off as Rubin gunned the motor and sped away. "What did he say?" Jim asked. "Nothing, he just stared straight ahead." "What was his expression?" "Fear." "No." Jim was dumbfounded. "Not Ellis Rubin... lawyer for the Watergate burglars... the man who visits Richard Nixon at his home... asshole buddies with the CIA and the FBI and and Naval Intelligence and probably the Mossad! So what the hell could Janet Reno have said to scare him?" We wouldn't know that answer until we met up with him in the future, eight years later. * Within a month of Fonzi's article appearing in Miami Magazine, Miami News editor, Sylvan Meyer, purchased that magazine and permanently stopped any followup articles from being written on the Votescam story. 6 HOUNDS OF HELL "The humblest citizen... when clad in the armour of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of Error." -- William Jennings Bryan As long as the Warren Report stays on the books as the officially recognized "truth" about the JFK case, there will be an open wound in the body politic that defies healing. Assassination researchers are so virulent in scavenging the field in search of any shred of evidence, they have come to be known as "The Hounds of Hell." But there's another public cause that has captured the imagination of the Hound mentality. Vote fraud. Consider the strong emotional values that we Americans attach to the sanctity of the U.S. ballot. The ballot is America's number one export. It is the hallowed ground and shed blood often generations of "those who made the supreme sacrifice." As with the JFK breed of Hound, vote fraud trackers have the gut feeling that some fundamental outrage has occurred and is being covered up in the highest levels of government. One never knows the exact moment of transition from common citizen to Hound. After the the Reno-Rubin confrontation, the investigation seemed pretty much over. Rubin wouldn't take our calls and there was no point in pursuing him any further. We figured that whatever Reno told him in her private chambers that day must have scared the hell out of him. Jim said: "I can't imagine him acting like that unless she had something on him." "Well, I doubt that it's political," Ken reflected. "Maybe she painted a really frightening scenario, possibly threatening to expose him somehow, to embarrass his kids and family you know what I mean? After all, we're not dealing in torts here. If Reno called for a full investigation the lid could blow off the Establishment. That's why Gerstein didn't want this case, so he gave it to Reno and she wasn't about to bite the hand that feeds her." "She must have torn into him something fierce," Jim speculated, "like 'Ellis, if you pursue this it could take down the entire structure, not only of the city, but possibly the state. Do you want to do this for the Collier brothers?'" "Sure," Ken nodded, "but that look on his face, that stark blank stare... it was eerie... I don't think just politics would do it. It had to be a personal threat." We were both in the midst of divorce proceedings. It seemed like something in the stars was breaking everything apart. The Daily Planet was going out of business. The public was more interested in the Bee Gees than in revolution. DC Comics was threatening to sue over what they claimed was the use of their Superman trademark, and The Underground Press Service was turning into High Times magazine. During the Sixties the suntan lotion business was the engine that drove our small financial empire, but it required a full time effort and we just didn't have it in us anymore. Politics is a strong drug and anger was replacing the drive we had to make money. Back when we started Sunscrene, Kennedy was in his second year as President, and the world seemed bright. Now it was the Nixon-Ford era; we were growing older and there wasn't much challenge left in selling suntan lotion to beach boys. The five-year renewable leases on our beach stores were coming due and without wives or kids to support, they just didn't seem important anymore. Ken's wife was a millionairess who didn't want child support, and she didn't want Ken around either, at least not as long as he was willing to pursue Votescam. Jim's wife was twelve years his junior, and after five years of a childless marriage and listening to Votescam, she wanted some fresh air in California. "If we give up Votescam," Jim told Ken, "when we're old men we're going to look back and ask why didn't we fight the bastards. We're going to add up the plus and minus columns and all we'll have is money. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with this seething anger because I know I let them get away with it without going the last fucking inch." "How are we going to live?" "Let's do a Siddhartha -- lets give it all up: the pool table, the cars, the townhouses, the business." Ken took a long toke on the pipe Jimi Hendrix had given him that night his concert got rained out at Gulfstream Race Track. It wasn't our concert, but the promoters, Michael Lang and Marshall Brevitz (Lang was a co-producer of Woodstock) had no way to refund the ticket money. So we invited Hendrix to Thee Image, where we would throw open the doors to anybody who wanted to walk in. Jim went on stage at Gulfstream and invited everybody to come to the club. It was now about 8 o'clock on a stormy tropical night. We called all of our concession people, the ice cream vendors, the chocolate cake sellers, hot dog guys, the body painters, and asked them to come right down. The body painters gave away Day-Glo paint that lit up under black light, which was the big deal in concert lighting at the time. Thee Image boasted a hundred blacklight bulbs. Hendrix and his roadies and his band turned up, as promised, for free, and started to set up on the stage. The club already had a wall of Ampeg speakers with enough amps to blow out a window. There were also the two giant strobe lights with a slow to fast speed dialer that made people look like they were moving very fast or very slow like a haywire silent film. Word had gotten out. Kids started calling kids. By nine o'clock the parking lot was packed. So was Collins Avenue, and there was a traffic jam down to Haulover Beach. Jimi started playing about nine. He began by using all of Thee Image's speakers and his own to produce wild feedback wailing. That got people's attention. Then he jammed with the house band, The Blues Image, (Ride, Captain, Ride) in a set that never stopped until after midnight. The audience, full of painted bodies, mostly sat on the floor and listened, in various states of high, higher and highest, while Jimi played rock guitar that was more dramatic than anything most of the audience had ever heard. His guitar solos melted down and re-formed, turned into vivid images and then into smoke. It was a wild night of cheering. Then the ice cream battle began. Somebody brought Jimi an ice cream cone with a ball of chocolate on it. Jimi threw the ice cream ball to somebody in the crowd. That somebody threw it back at Jimi. "Get me ten cones," Hendrix called. He passed them out to everyone in the band, and they began to throw ice cream balls at each other. Pretty soon hundreds of members of the audience raced to the concession stand to buy scoops of ice cream, forget the cone. In 15 minutes the air in the club, under the Day-Glo lights, was filled with flying ice cream balls. They hit the walls, the speakers, people's heads, hair and clothes. Then, when the ice cream ran out, they all began throwing chocolate cake. Meanwhile, Jimi and the band kept on jamming. Then Jimi says: "Let's go swimming." He left the stage without his guitar, walked through the crowd and out the front door. Like a Pied Piper he walked past the International House of Pancakes up to Collins Avenue, three to four thousand kids dancing insanely behind him. This was a few months before Jimi played his irreverant [sic] Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. All those memories were attached to Ken's pipe as he thought of leaving the security he'd always known. For a couple of guys who were raised middle class in the Middle West, giving up the easy life was truly radical. We'd seen Tom Hayden live out of a sleeping bag as he fought his battles for social equality in the Sixties, and we even housed him when he was worn out and bedraggled. One time Tom came to New York with his first wife Casey, and an old station wagon. He had the key to a friend's empty apartment, so Tom and Casey took an old mattress off the street and spread it on the floor. The next night they knocked on Jim's door on East 88th Street. "We got bedbugs," Tom said, lifting his pant leg and showing a track of bug bites. Jim paid for a hotel room on 86th Street. Now Ken pondered the idea of living out of sleeping bags on Miami Beach. "Where do we put the sleeping bags and how do we eat? And do we really want to do this?" "Well, it's that or give it all up and just be merchants. What's money gotten us but divorces and abject comfort?" "But what about Sunscrene, we can't just drop it." "Why not?" So we gave it all away to our top salesman in Daytona Beach, named Ron Rice, and he changed the name to Hawaiian Tropic. In the fall of 1974 we were living in the sea grapes near 86th and Collins Avenue on Miami Beach. It was less than two blocks from the Holiday Inn, but it was tropical and secluded. Sea grapes are trees that grow about 15 feet high with leaves like large green pancakes. The leaves formed a cathedral ceiling, screened the sun and provided some privacy from the public on the beach. Foreign tourists had heard about this wild stretch and although it was against the law to camp there, they had found the sea grape patch as inviting as we had. We often had to roust a sleeping German, Frenchman or Italian out of our favorite spot. There were freshwater showers nearby and a public bathroom. There was no place to cook, so we subsisted on fruit and cheese. A high grassy jungle-like area hid the sleeping bags. When it rained, which wasn't that often, we rolled up our bags, hid them, and ran for motel cover. From our refuge in the sea grapes, we wrote, with pen and pencil, a rock opera entitled "Year One." The title was based on John Lennon's concept, conceived at John and Yoko's bed-in in Toronto in 1970. John said that we should label all our correspondence Year One A.P. (After Peace), and that there should be a new beginning. So the story was about the Children-at-Arms, a rock group from the Center of the Galaxy, ordered to earth to reunite Sgt. Pepper's team. We wrote the basic book and lyrics and Gregory Scott Kimple wrote the music. Although the studio album wasn't bad (Lou O'Neil, Jr. of Circus Magazine called it "one of the top ten albums of the year"), we decided to re-record the album live and videotape the Year One band at the Grand Canyon. On 7/7/77 we produced the first free rock concert ever performed live in the Grand Canyon. Rolling Stone Magazine wrote ahead of time that six million people would turn up for the concert (to hear "The Year One Band"). The Interior Department, concerned for the ecosystem and crowd control, cancelled the event. Now for the first time in our lives we had no mama, no papa, no businesses, no money -- but we did have George. By the grace of George, our friend and chess master, Ken flew out to Arizona and talked the park ranger into letting us stage the show. To make it hard on whatever crowds might want to show up, the ranger restricted the concert to the West Rim, which is off limits to the general public. Nonetheless, about a thousand people hiked overland and got to the site to watch us film the sun coming up over the East Rim, an event almost never seen by anyone other than an American Indian. We shot through the day, catching the full sweep of the sun to the West. Songs were sung at different hours as the sun produced different moods. And as the sun was setting, we taped two lovers standing atop a mega wall of amplifiers against a purple haze. The band sang: "Champion, Where Are You?" After the concert we drove back to New York with Satan, who taught Kiss how to eat fire. For awhile we lived in a radio-TV commune on 14th Street and Second Avenue in a building called The U.S. Senate. The commune owned the old Second Avenue Yiddish Theater, then called The Phoenix, where Ann Corio held court while doing "This Was Burlesque." When she left, the theatre folded until two off-Broadway actors bought it. They fed and housed us in the U.S. Senate, while two blocks down on 12th street they were remodeling the theater. Because most of the people working on remodeling were performing artists and not real tradesmen, at least not the kind who should be reupholstering 499 seats, someone gave the order to unscrew every seat in the house and stack them up in the foyer. Then they had us rip all the staples out of all the seats, take off all the Naugahyde, and pull out all the stuffing. It was our job, that is, us and Satan, to put those seats back together, restuff them, recover them with Naugahyde, and use that plier device to stretch and restaple. The color was orange. The job tooks [sic] weeks, eight hours a day. Then the time came to put the seats back. We started with the first row, but none of the seats fit Nobody had bothered to mark the seats as to where their original places were. Thus we had 499 seats and not the foggiest idea where to put them. As we sat around with the rest of the crew, understanding what purgatory was, Satan, who had a rock band on Bourbon Street in the Sixties, started picking up the seats, studying them, and separating them into size piles. Some of the seats were minutely bigger than others. After the sorting he took the largest seat off the first pile and walked around looking for the largest empty hole. It took him four days, but he put every single seat back in its exact spot. We know that because when we got down on the floor we had to turn thousands of screws into thousands of holes. They all fit. The new theater with the bright orange seats opened with "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" in its off-Broadway debut. On June 23, 1978, Jim's 39th birthday, we raised the money to produce a live rock concert, called "Rock Wars," on the highest man-made stage in the world: the helicopter pad atop the South Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Every rock star who had nothing better to do that night was at the party. The Year One Band and For Shakes Sake from Brooklyn played from dusk until midnight. People brought their own everything, and down on the 107th floor the Trade Center opened a sumptuous bar and smorgasbord. It was an incredible, perfectly clear night with a full moon and a grand piano. People called the radio station that was broadcasting the live performance and said, "We can hear it over here in Staten Island," and somebody else said they could hear it all the way into New Jersey. The next day the New York Daily News said: "The World Trade Center was made for three things: The Wiz, King Kong, and the Rock Wars party held last night." Ken met an artist at the 14th Street commune who called herself Shakti. She was a medical doctor from Australia who was tall, blonde and beautiful. She had painted murals on the walls of the theater we worked in, so Ken asked her to illustrate the story we had written about rock and roll, where the Children-at-Arms come from the Center of the Galaxy to reunite the Beatles. For the next fourteen months we, including Satan, lived and worked together on the Rock Wars storyboard. It eventually turned into a 96-page, full-color Doubleday Dell trade paperback that sold 42,000 copies before John Lennon was shot and killed at The Dakota. Rock Wars died with the most intelligent man in rock. Ken wrote an epitaph for Lennon and it was reprinted in Billboard Magazine and in The Washington Post (see it in the back of this book). Yoko Ono wrote Ken a letter telling him that she had hung a copy on her wall. 7 THE PETERSEN MEMO "Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened" -- Hardy In the spring of 1979, Jim filed a Freedom of Information Act request for anything under his name at any government agency. A few months later, a file three inches thick came in the mail that included everything we had given to the FBI. There were also FBI memos about the stacks of evidence we had sent in. There was a notation in the folder that 37 pages of the file were sequestered "in another agency" We called an agent at the Miami field office of the FBI and asked: "What does that mean?" "The CIA," he said. We wondered why What does the CIA have to do with vote rigging? What has this to do with national security? And what the hell is on those 37 pages? We also found among the papers a memo of instructions from Henry E. Petersen, assistant U.S. Attorney General of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MEMORANDUM TO: Acting Director, DATE:: 5/16/72 Federal Bureau of Investigation FROM: Henry E. Petersen Assistant Attorney General Criminal Division SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECTS: KENNETH COLLIER -- VICTIM ELECTION LAWS This is to recommend that the Crime Records Division advise U.S. Representative Claude Pepper (Democrat-Florida) of institution of this investigation at the request of the Criminal Division Department, regarding a possible Election Laws violation. Investigation at this time is being limited to interviews of: (The names were blacked out) Background: James Collier and his brother Kenneth have furnished several statements concerning what they believe to be a violation of the Election Laws Statute. The violation allegedly occurred during the September 1970 Florida primary elections when Kenneth Collier was a candidate for U.S. Congressman running against the incumbent Claude Pepper on the Democratic ticket. The Colliers contend the elections were "rigged" because immediately after the polls closed, Miami television stations predicted the final vote percentages of each candidate and the projected vote totals. The television stations' predictions were allegedly 100% accurate. Professor Ross Beiler of the University of Miami and Mr. Elton Davis of the Cavanaugh Computer Corporation apparently programmed the computers for the Miami television stations which predicted the election outcome. The Colliers allege Beiler and Davis participated in a scheme to rig the above mentioned primary. Statements obtained from the Colliers regarding their allegations have been forwarded to the Criminal Division which has requested Beiler and Davis to be interviewed to ascertain their possible involvement in alleged scheme to rig this election. If either Professor Beiler or Mr. Davis acknowledges that he did particpate [sic] in rigging this election, the Bureau should attempt to ascertain the manner in which this rigging was effected, for what purpose it was effected, and who directed that the election be rigged. ACTION: Departmental Attorney Craig C. Donsanto was contacted and advised as a matter of courtesy It is recommended the Crime Records Division advise Congressman Pepper that at the specific request of Assistant Attorney General Henry E. Petersen, Criminal Division of the Department of Justice an investigation has been instituted. (End of memo) Henry Petersen was to become semi famous later on as the federal investigator in the case against the Watergate burglars. This was the first indication that Petersen was fully involved in the vote fraud investigation prior to his Watergate assignment. 8 VIDEO VIGILANTES "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." -- Thoreau A new decade, the 1980s, found us living up at a yoga ranch near South Fallsburg, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, studying karate, yoga and meditating. Shakti, whose real name was Elizabeth, was with Ken and they were married at the ranch by Swami Vishnu. Their daughter, Unity, was born there in November of 1980. One of the students at the ranch owned a bean sprout business which he wanted to sell. He taught us how to grow sprouts in bathtubs in dark rooms, harvest them, bag them and sell them by the pound. Sprouts brought in so much revenue that we decided to leave the ranch and start our own route in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. We made money instantly. Our "Heartland Sprouts" became the best-selling alfalfa and mung bean sprouts in the city. Winter came and Jim decided to go back to the warmth of Miami and leave the business to Ken and Shakti. He lived in the black belt quarters of Larry Pizzi's Shori Goju dojo, near the Lincoln Road Mall, and managed the karate school. In the summer of 1982, a revival was planned for the California rock group, Mamas and the Papas, with Spanky of Spanky and Our Gang playing the dead Mama Cass and McKenzie Phillips, the daughter of John and Michelle Phillips, playing her mother's part. Ken read about it in Billboard Magazine and invited John Phillips to do a show on top of the World Trade Center. They met on the helicopter pad on top of the Trade Center one cold day in February. An icy wind off New York harbor whipped around the two of them. John said no to the venue. A nice warm concert in Florida seemed a whole lot better to him. Ken called Jim: "John will play Florida if you can raise the money." "Hell, I don't have a penny." "That never stopped you before." So Jim raised twenty thousand dollars, found the auditorium, bought rock radio advertising, and had the tickets printed and distributed. Ken sold the sprout business to an organic food dealer in Queens and came down in time for the concert. The new Mamas and Papas did all the sentimental old hits, like California Dreamin, and Monday, Monday. They made the audience glow with nostalgia. The press loved them. But that same night a rock group called The B-52s opened at Pirates World about 20 miles away, and almost everybody who didn't remember the Sixties, which was everybody under 25 years old, went to listen to The B-52s. We had an artistic success and a financial flop. In 1982 we got back into the newspaper business. We had seen posters all over town with the banner, "The Fighting MacKenzies." The poster pictured a young, pretty blonde woman flanked by two men. It looked like an advertisement for a singing group out of the Forties. The poster said that Christina MacKenzie was running for a seat on the Metro Dade County Commission, and that her father Donald and his brother Douglas were running her campaign. After reading their literature, Jim figured her to be honest but naive. He saw "The Fighting MacKenzies" as either a crock or as a possibility to recruit professed fighters into the frey [sic]. He telephoned Christina to warn her about vote fraud in Dade County and to hear her reaction. Don MacKenzie got on the line. "Who are you?" he asked. Jim explained vote fraud in Dade County. Then Ken took the phone and got deeper into the discussion. After a while Ken's voice raised in tone as he got short of temper. It was the sound of two hardheads bashing. From the start MacKenzie made it clear that he wanted to take control of any future negotiations between us. But Ken couldn't possibly let someone he thought was an amateur, who didn't have a clue as to what was really happening, start dictating. It degenerated into a screaming match and we hadn't even met the guy. Suddenly MacKenzie shifted gears. "Meet me in my office at the Hialeah Home News and we'll talk about it," he said calmly. "What do you do at the Home News?" Ken asked. "I'm the managing editor." That afternoon we met MacKenzie. He was a Scotsman built like an Isuzu. He had a barrel chest on a frame that stood about five feet seven inches tall. His red hair was combed into a flattop pompadore [sic] and it was never messed up in public. He habitually wore a black suit, black vest, white shirt and dark necktie, even in the summertime. On less formal occasions he wore his Marine Corps major's camouflage jacket. MacKenzie was born in Detroit and he spoke in the unaccented way that Detroiters (who make good radio announcers) speak. He had been a legislative aide to Michigan Congressman Guy Vander-Jaght [sic] before abandoning politics to bring his family to Florida in the early Seventies. There were hundreds of "war stories" about MacKenzie as an FBI and CIA operative, but most of them shouldn't yet be told in print. Within a few weeks we were members of the Hialeah Home News staff, along with Bill Tucker, a rewrite man who was so fast and stylish that his talent was legendary in the Deep South. He looked like a wrinkled Chinese fighting dog with a fat black cigar sticking out of his grumpy jaws. The Hialeah Home News was a 40-year-old suburban newspaper that once served the community news to the crackers and horse people near the Miami Airport and the Hialeah Race Course. Now it was owned by an ex-FBI agent who had installed his buddy, MacKenzie, as managing editor. The paper had a tradition of looking into stories other county papers wouldn't investigate. It was the last bunker of independent journalism in Dade County. We now had a forum for the first time since we lost our Dell book contract and the Planet folded. And we had an editor who was on our side. "Are you one-story guys?" MacKenzie asked. "No, we'll do other stuff," Jim assured him, already feeling at home in the glass-walled city room. "We had a paper called The Daily Planet in the Seventies. What have you got in mind?" "They got a moratorium on building down on South Beach. Nobody's allowed to improve their property under penalty of arrest. You want to look into it?" We agreed as long as we could also crank up Votescam stories. The next day we found ourselves knee-deep in Miami Beach politics. It was October. For the "South Beach" section of Miami Beach, which is south of 16th Street and all the way down to Government Cut where the big boats and cruise ships come into Biscayne Bay, there was a moratorium, declared by the Miami Beach City Council, on any kind of home improvement or building. The property values of the old Art Deco hotels and apartment houses plunged. If you couldn't fix them up, you had to rent them to the most indigent of the Cuban exiles (the ones nobody else wanted). They trashed the buildings and rents hit bottom. Property owners lost their nest eggs. We wrote that this local depression was a vicious plot by the creators of the Dade County "master plan" to choke out the old owners and then buy up the land and the buildings for a fraction of their real value. It would take several years of crusading against this injustice before Miami Beach Mayor, Norman Ciment, ended the moratorium. The damage had already been lethal. One day in late October the Home News editor-in-chief, Elmer Rounds, a six foot plus, 250 pound Southerner with a droll sense of humor, handed us a press release from the Republican National Committee. The first word we saw was REWARD and the number $5,000. "What can you do with this?" We read the release signed by RNC chairman, Richard Richards: "It has saddened us to learn that vote fraud still exists in certain areas of this country," Richards said in a letter to fifty Secretaries of State. "Since the right to vote is the keystone of all other rights we cherish as Americans, any dilutions of the vote by fraud or error must be stopped." The RNC reward offer said that any citizen who gave information leading to the arrest and conviction of any official who violates state or federal laws against vote fraud would receive $5,000. It went on to say: "We have established telephone numbers that will be manned by attorneys who will assist in putting them in touch with the proper state and federal officials who will proceed with such complaint." "I can't believe it," Ken said. "Do you think someone in Washington has finally gotten off their ass?" "MacKenzie brought you guys in to deal with that story, so look into it," Rounds said. We hadn't gotten a major break in the Votescam story for eight years, but a day before the 1982 primary we received a pamphlet in the mail entitled Don't Get Punched Out, written by Robert Corcoran, a radio newsman from the West Coast. The point of it was that the card-counting computer is a "black box" operation that had been used to rig elections in California and other states. He warned that a very dangerous situation was developing in America. The vote, he warned, was being stolen in counties from Maine to California. He said that anyone using a punch card to vote with had no idea what was going to happen to their card after they punched it. There were no safeguards. In the California races Corcoran had studied, there was no way to verify a vote because fraud was so easy to perpetrate and so hard to detect. In Dade County we had also heard from "concerned citizens" who came to us after witnessing the new-fangled computer vote being counted. They told us that members of The League of Women Voters, a private political club, were sitting up there in the Data Processing Center on Galloway Road, punching holes in the vote cards. It was exactly that kind of fraud that Don't Get Punched Out warned about. It seems these "volunteers," were actually worth $15 an hour per head to the League's treasury. Their salaries were paid by the Dade elections division from taxpayer money directly to the League. We knew that if such an activity were taking place, it was expressly forbidden by state and federal law, which prohibits any "handling or piercing of the public's ballots by anyone except the voter." One of our early informants was an older, woman who entered the Data Center after getting her name pre-approved by the election supervisor. Without a security check, she said, she couldn't have gotten in. "You mean in order to see the vote counted the board of elections has to pass on you first?" Ken asked. "That's unconstitutional." "That's what they told me," she said. She reported seeing members of the League using little black pencils issued by the election division to punch out new holes in the vote cards. She explained that new holes could either become a new or different vote, or invalidate an existing vote by punching out both sides. "Are you sure?" "I saw it with my own eyes," she said. "Five thousand dollars per person arrested and convicted," Jim salivated. "How do we get it?" "Well, it seems to me that we need to get proof that they're punching holes in the ballot cards and bring it to the RNC." "How are we going to get in the building, it's a bunker And even if we got in, how do we prove it?" "Videotape." Ken suggested. "Great idea. But first let's call the elections supervisor and see what he has to say about the League punching holes." The new supervisor was David Leahy, a man in his thirties, with dark blonde hair done in a close bouffant. "We'd like to videotape the proceedings at the Data Processing Center," Jim said. "You haven't been issued credentials, Mr. Collier" he replied patronizingly. "What kind of credentials?" "Only candidates, and those with credentials, are allowed to be up there. And no cameras or video equipment is allowed." "That's patently unconstitutional, and illegal on top of it. People have a right to see their vote counted, David." Jim tried to level Leahy's attitude by using his first name. "You can have a secret ballot but you can't have a secret count. We're coming over to videotape." "If you try to come into the building you will be arrested by the guards at the gate." Leahy hung up. Jim turned to Ken: "We need a plan. We can't get in that building past the guards, past the video cameras, without getting busted. "We're going to need some kind of credentials." "We could say that we're Herald reporters." "But we need credentials." "No," Ken figured, "all we need is a Herald reporter covering us... in other words, we've got to get the Herald to take Leahy's arrest threat seriously and assign a reporter to cover it." "That's right. If we get in with a Herald reporter they can't stop us." We went to see Jim Savage, the editor in charge of investigative reporting for the Miami Herald. His office was a cubicle in the Herald city room overlooking Biscayne Bay. Savage was a testy guy in his fifties and he listened as we laid out the three different votescams we had investigated: The Blank-Backed Canvass Sheets; The Forgeries and The Printomatic. We put it all up on a blackboard. A reporter named Bob Lowe, a Hawaiian who had won two Pulitzers and wasn't yet thirty took notes. Savage assigned Lowe to go up to the Center and wait until we showed up with our video camera. The assumption was that he'd do the story about it if we got in, and maybe even if we got turned away. MacKenzie rented a color, sound, hand-held video camera. On election day November 2, at about 6 p.m., we drove to a precinct in a schoolhouse on Miami Beach and walked in with the video camera. MacKenzie, wearing his FBI-style dark suit, drove up behind us in his brown Buick Regal. We didn't take any pictures inside because it was too early. The polls didn't close until 7 p.m. But we told the precinct captain that we were going to videotape his precinct after 7 p.m.. Jim said: "We'll follow your precinct's cards from the time that they open the ballot box shortly after the polls close, until the votes are finally reported at the Data Processing Center. We just want to follow its route." "You can't stay in here after seven," the captain said. "We lock the doors." "You mean you lock the public out?" Ken asked. "Yes, so that nobody interferes with the counting process." "That is illegal, my friend." It was MacKenzies voice and it was firm. "Go call Leahy and tell him we're going to stay here because it's illegal to lock the doors against the public after seven." The captain's face was serious and red. He went into his office, we hoped, to call Leahy. As soon as he left, we disappeared down the road. We drove to a different precinct a mile away and at 7 p.m. we entered with the video camera and said that we were from the Herald. Nobody stopped us. Ken taped the precinct captain opening the voting box full of punchcard ballots that were stuffed inside their security envelopes. Several of these ballots fell to the floor and Ken shot the image of ballots under precinct workers' feet. They were busily taking the rectangular computer ballots out of their security envelopes, then stacking them in piles of 100 with the beveled edge to the upper left. "Madame, in the green pants," Ken said. "There is a ballot under your foot." She reached down and picked it up. MacKenzie noticed another ballot on the floor a few women down. He whispered to Ken. "Lady in the red pants, there's a ballot under your foot," Ken said. She apologized and picked it up. "Zoom in on the pencil in that lady's hand," Jim told Ken. There were ten workers in the schoolroom and each had been issued a black pencil by the precinct captain. Ken taped eight of the workers as they put the pencils in their pockets and two who held them, like a cigarette between their fingers. MacKenzie whispered to Jim: "Those pencils... don't say anything, but if we weren't here filming, they'd be having a hole-punching party right now. Those instruments are not supposed to be in their hands." The pencils were the first illegality caught on tape. The camera had recorded some pretty rough handling of the cards, but not a single piece of "chad" -- those little pieces of paper that get punched out of the holes -- was anywhere on the table. Yet, according to our informant, members of the League were in the Data Processing Center at that very moment for the expressed purpose of cleaning "tons of chad" off the backs of vote cards. The piles of cards were then placed in metal "security" boxes which were locked with a numbered plastic and wire seal, like the ones on an electric meter. At that point, the security boxes were thrown in the back seat of the precinct captain's car and driven, with MacKenzie and ourselves following, to the central collection point at Miami Beach High School. We all arrived at the high school at 7:35 p.m. and MacKenzie asked for a time check on camera. We followed the box and its attendants into the gymnasium, as about twenty other precinct captains were coming in with their boxes. The camera recorded a heavyweight guy with giant gold rings on his fingers put a white bag under the table between his legs. It was a Burger King hamburger sack. After a few minutes he took a handful of something out of the bag. The camera zoomed in as he placed it on the table. The something turned out to be about 20 red plastic numbered seals like the ones on the metal security boxes. A woman in her sixties examined a security box brought in by a precinct captain. "Your seal is broken," she said. "Yes, I know," the precinct captain replied. Ken focused on the male clerk who had brought the seals in the paper sack. "What are the extra seals for?" Ken asked. "These?" "Yes. Those." "Oh, they're just in case any come in broken or something." He shuffled them lightly about with his fingers. Ken panned to the woman. "May I ask how that seal could possibly have become broken on the short ride to the high school?" A long pause for thought. "Well, it's possible," she answered. "Can you tell us what purpose that seal serves if it can come in from the precinct broken?" She stopped, looked quizzically at the camera, and said: "Well, if it happens, we just put another one on." "And then you record the new seal number as if it never happened?" "That's right." There was the second crime caught on tape. With the registration procedure completed, two uniformed Metro cops put the boxes in the back seat of their squad car. They took off like a bat out of hell, ran lights, and we couldn't follow. "If we hadn't been there," MacKenzie said, gunning the engine of his Buick, "she would have put new seals on those security boxes that came in broken. But she couldn't commit a third-degree felony in front of the camera, so she let the box slide through with a broken seal." We drove up to the front of the Data Processing Center at about 8:45 p.m. The police cars were unloading the security boxes full of ballots onto four-wheeled dollies. We got out of the car and MacKenzie went to park. Ken turned the videocam on the police "Who you with?" one of the cops asked. "The boss sent me," Ken said casually We followed one of the four-wheeled dollies behind the workers who were pushing them into the front door. There was a security desk and video camera located in the lobby between us and the elevators. A woman behind the desk was issuing I.D. badges, while a uniformed guard stood next to a sign that read: "You must have I.D. to enter this building." "A New England town meeting, it isn't," Jim remarked. "Where are you guys from?" the guard asked. "The Herald," Ken deadpanned with his finger still on the video button. "Yeah, we're going up to see Bob Lowe," Jim added, seeing Lowe's name on the security list. The woman asked our names and we told her. Then the guard leaned over to a security helper and said out of the side of his mouth: "Call Leahy." The helper started to dial. Jim turned around and saw a blue suit, vest and dark sunglasses coming through the door. He turned to the woman with the badges and said, "He's from the FBI." She immediately issued the three of us building passes reserved for the Herald. We attached ourselves to another dolly full of boxes and headed for the elevators. The videocam caught the sound of a telephone ringing behind us, and a loudspeaker boomed: "Security chief to the lobby! Security chief to the lobby!" But the elevator doors closed and we were in. We got off on the third floor and followed the dolly into a well lighted room about the size of three tennis courts. A lot of people were working at tables. Young guys in T-shirts lifted the security boxes off the dollies and placed them on tables in front of women who would break the seals by twisting them or cutting them with heavy shears. They would then open the boxes and take out the stacks of ballots and place them in cardboard trays without tops. Ken asked of one of the women: "Where is the League of Women Voters?" "Through there," she pointed. 8:50 p.m. We entered a big, carpeted room. There were reels of computer tape in racks on our left. On our right were about twenty men and women dressed for business. They were recognizable as the county bigwigs: judges, members of the election division, the Mayor of Miami and others. In front of us was a row of seven machines about three and one-half feet high. These were called BMXs, or ballot multiplexers. The camera saw six empty machines. They were unlighted and appeared turned off. At the seventh machine was a heavyset young guy in a white shirt. His machine made a clacking noise. As we approached him, the camera recorded about 500 punchcards stacked in a hopper on the right top of the machine. A thick, black Magic Marker line was drawn across the top edges of the white cards. We were later to learn that only already counted punchcards were marked with a black line. We watched as the cards were sucked from that hopper past a photoelectric cell that shined a light through the punched-out holes and recorded the position of me holes on a tape. The camera rolled as the man took a card from the already counted side on the left and, in a sweeping arc, transferred it back to the uncounted side on the right. The machine was still clacking away. Then he looked up and saw the camera. Ken asked: "What are you doing?" He didn't answer. Instead he glanced over his shoulder with a "Do I Tell Them Anything?" look on his face. Ken swung the camera around and focused on a man with a goatee and eyeglasses. "Who are you?" he asked, like the Caterpillar asked Alice. "It's not important who we are. Who are you?" Jim looked at his badge "He's Joe Malone." "You're Joe Malone the computer chief who programmed this election?" Ken asked. "No, I'm not." "You mean you're denying who you are?" We knew Joe Malone from our research but had never met him. The Herald called Joe Malone the "God of Elections" because without him an election could not be programmed for counting. "You'll have to leave the room immediately; you're not allowed to be in here." Malone said. Another voice piped up: "You've got to get out of here." Ken turned the camera right into the face of David Leahy. With that, a burly, blond Metro police office grabbed Ken's arm. Ken whipped the camera around, got a picture of the policeman's head, badge and uniform, and asked: "Are we under arrest?" "Not if you leave peaceably right now." The policeman escorted us into a large room adjacent to the counting room. As we walked through the door, the first person we saw was Bob Lowe, with pen and paper in hand, grinning. "Oh, there's Bob Lowe" Ken tried to provoke a reaction. "Bob, did you get into the secret basement where they take the reel of tape to have it counted?" Lowe didn't bite but kept grinning. The policeman pointed to a glass window in the wall. "You can look in through this window here." The BMX room from which we had just been evicted could be seen in total through the window, but everything going on was much too far away and the view was blocked by people. That window was as close as the public was permitted to the counting process. Ken took a quick shot through the window. "Nah," he said, "this is no good." And he walked back to the door. Three uniformed policeman were blocking the doorway. At this point Ken got even more provocative as he kept shooting. "What have we got? Malaria? If the, police apparatus can be in there, why can't we? Have you been ordered by your bosses to keep us out? Do you take orders from them?" "Yeah, and I give orders, too," drawled one of the cops. "What happens if I try to come back in?" "You'll be arrested for trespass after warning. Read the statute and the process." Ken turned and panned the room. There was a purple velvet rope which kept the public from the rest of the room. And on the other side of the rope was a large area we hadn't even noticed. In it were about 70 men and women, casually dressed, seated at long tables. The camera focused on a woman with a box of ballots in front of her. "Are you from the League of Women Voters?" "Yes." We saw people riffling through stacks of beige vote cards. These were not the same as the white cards we had just witnessed being run through the BMX machine. Jim's attention was drawn to a woman sitting directly in front of him. She had a black pencil in her right hand and was busy poking a new hole in a card. Then she reached around the back side of the card and pulled away the piece of "chad" that dangled by a thread. Ken asked: "Why are you poking a hole in that card?" "Because it didn't go all the way through." Jim, acting as Ken's peripheral vision, told him to pan the room. "Get the chad all over the tables and on people's clothes." Ken began to videotape people holding the punchcard ballots up to the light and, using those black pencils, punching holes in them." "Get 'em outta here.!!" The security guard, who had been too late to catch us in the lobby, stuck his hand in front of the camera. Ken said: "Hey pal, get your hand off my lens." With that, four cops grabbed us, two on each, and force-walked us out the door and back to the elevator. "I'm not under arrest, am I?" Ken still had the camera rolling. Instead of the elevator, the police marched us down three flights of steps, and all the way back to Galloway Road into the dark night. "If you come back," one of them said, "you'll be arrested." As the cops walked away, Bob Lowe stuck his head into the frame. He had followed the action out to the street. "You've got to get into the basement to see what happens to the tape after it comes out of the BMX machines. We didn't get that far. Will you do it?" Ken asked. "Yes," Lowe promised. That night back at the Herald, Lowe wrote that there was "a blizzard of chad on the floor beneath the feet of the volunteers," indicating the massive extent of hole punching after we left. Lowe claimed that he named the League of Women Voters as the volunteers and that he wrote about us being dragged out. But the city desk, on Jim Savage's order, stopped it. MacKenzie's brown Buick loomed out of the darkness. We jumped in. We had gotten proof of election rigging on tape. We crowed. ____________ Remaining chapters and appendix available through the link at http://constitution.org/vote/votescam__.htm