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 prin