Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Bev Harris, again

My last post on this topic disappointed a few readers, and sent at least one correspondent into a fit of anger. To be frank, I partially regretted airing a critique of Bev Harris -- her work opened our eyes to the dangers of electronic voting.

But: I'm still waiting for an explanation of the story she told regarding the poll tapes in Florida. You remember: The "original" tapes that conflicted with the copies election officials tried to palm off on her. The conflicts all show changes favoring Bush.

Or so she has said. I suspect many donated to her organization because they hoped to hear more about that very incident.

Those tapes are public property, and we have a right to see the evidence. As you will recall, when she was asked to produce copies, her response was:

"OK. Please go ask Greg Palast to produce all his investigative material during the middle of his investigations. See what HE says."

I have just discovered an exactly parallel situation involving that very reporter, Greg Palast. He wrote a famous article titled "Jim Crow in Cyberspace," about the stolen election of 2000. In the middle of that investigation, Palast was contacted by a producer who worked for CBS:

The CBS hotshot was happy to pump me for information: names, phone numbers, all the items one needs for your typical quickie TV news report. I freely offered up to CBS this information: The office of the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, brother of the Republican presidential candidate, had illegally ordered the removal of the names of felons from voter rolls -- real felons who had served time but obtained clemency, with the right to vote under Florida law. As a result, another 40,000 legal voters (in addition to the 57,700 on the purge list), almost all of them Democrats, could not vote.

The only problem with this new hot info is that I was still in the midst of investigating it.
So now we know what Greg Palast would say: Here's the info; take the research forward.

Ms. Harris...? Look, I don't want to dislike you, and I don't necessarily want any of my readers to re-think making a contribution to your work. But you are the one who brought up Palast's methodology, and that analogy simply does not work in your favor. Can you give us another reason for keeping the evidence secret?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but maybe Bev's mistake was to use Greg Palast as an analogy. Even outside of my role as devil's advocate I think that is the case. Palast investigates to write about things, but Black Box Voting seems to be investigating in advance of legal actions. The correct analogy would be to a prosecutor, say Vincent Bugliosi or, egads, Rudolph Giuliani.

Leaving the role of devil's advocate for good, I think it's getting to be too late for a litigious approach. What we need is well timed exposures of information, to help get the people of the U.S. angry with the forces of Bushism.

-- chemoelectric.org

weezil said...

Joe, I also hate to go down the path of doubting St. Beverly, but I also am losing my religion. I am holding off making a donation to BBV until Harris decides to get her news on the table.

Time is of the essence here and I don't have any love lost whatsoever on anyone who wants to sit on the news until it is no longer newsworthy.

Bev, I'll give you one more chance. Please get on the bandwagon and be cooperative with other investigators. Sharing information is necessary here. Build your fiefdom on your own time and DON'T do it with information that is not owned by you, but rather by all American voters.

-weez

Anonymous said...

I agree with all of the above. The clock is ticking.

Anonymous said...

Hey Pomeroo, which exit polls are you refering to - the ones that Karen Hughes believed that showed Bush was going to lose, or the revised exit polls that whitewashed the previous exit polls?

You know what I mean, disinfo-man.

Anonymous said...

Here I thought we were all responding to the subject of thread, urging bev Harris to share her evidence. It sort of reminds me of a recent press conference - if you don't like the question, ignore it and ramble on about something else entirely.

Anonymous said...

I'm doing the unthinkable, following up my own comment. I said it was too late to litigate, but remember that Bev Harris claims to have no stake in who "wins" the election. Black Box Voting is non-partisan.

What I think is that it is too late to be non-partisan. Bush himself declared the Bushist definition of "partisanship": You are either with us or you are against us. By this definition, what the rest of us call "non-partisan" is, in Bushist terminology, not with Bushism, and therefore against Bushism.

It's simply too late not to take sides.