MASSIVE Ballot 'Irregularities' Found In Palm Beach By Independant Auditors

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Klayman: 'What a Mess'

Christopher Ruddy Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2000

"What a mess," Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, said after a day of reviewing thousands of ballots here in West Palm Beach.

Klayman’s public interest law firm has taken the baton and begun its own independent account of the Palm Beach vote.

Florida judge Jorge Labarga ordered Palm Beach county officials to open up the ballots for Judicial Watch’s inspection this past Monday. Election officials stymied Judicial Watch, but allowed the group on Tuesday to begin reviewing the ballots.

On Wednesday morning, Klayman returned to Labarga and asked the judge to hold the elections office in contempt for failing to allow his timely recount, and to waive undue expenses. Palm Beach is attempting to assess Klayman $1,152 an hour to do his recount.

Judicial Watch hired the Washington-based auditing firm of Johnson Lambert & Co. to review the counts. Johnson Lambert specializes in vote fraud.

After Tuesday’s count, Klayman joined NewsMax.com at its headquarters for an exclusive interview.

He detailed massive irregularities in the count. Klayman’s auditors have only reviewed a few thousand of the ballots, focusing their efforts on the disputed ballots that had been set aside by the canvassing board in its final recount.

These ballots were not included in the final count, because they had a single dimple for president. The canvassing board only accepted ballots with multiple dimples.

The Gore campaign is anxious to have these votes included. It believes it will have a net gain of 840 votes for Gore if these are included.

Klayman has not done a recount of these, but he said he observed a "lot of Gore votes. They have very discernible impressions, or dimples," he said.

"But it may be impossible to find out what really happened in the vote," Klayman said, expressing shock at the condition of the ballots. "These things look like they have been in World War II."

According to his independent auditors, Klayman said ballots reviewed so far show four areas of irregularities and possible fraud:

The hand counts do not reconcile with the machine counts.

Election officials used "pink ballots" – replacement ballots for paper ballots they said were destroyed by the machine. This allowed officials to fill out the ballots for the destroyed ballots.

The canvassing board had no clear methodology when conducting the recount.

Record keeping was so bad there is no record of who the canvassing committee awarded votes to from each of the questionable ballots.

Klayman said his organization plans to continue its efforts to identify vote fraud even if the Electoral College meets and declares a winner.

"We believe the American people need to know what happened here, and if vote fraud occurred, we need to hold those involved accountable," he said.

MASSIVE Ballot 'Irregularities' Found In Palm Beach

-- Ain't Gonna Happen (Not Here Not@ever.com), November 30, 2000


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