This is a follow up diary to one I wrote 3 days ago about what has all the appearances of a blatant case of ballot box stuffing by one or more GOP operatives in Maine last month. Please read that diary if you haven't already to get up to speed regarding this clear case of electoral fraud.
First, a correction: The Maine Legislature convenes this Wednesday, not today as I originally, mistakenly thought. So there's an extra two days for those of us who care about election integrity to change the course of events regarding the planned Maine Senate sham "hearing" about the issue which Senate President Thibodeau has informed us will be a rubber stampede designed to seat the GOP beneficiary of the ballot fraud. More on that later.
One thing I didn't get into in that last diary was the chain of custody that is required of all ballots in any statewide election in Maine. The drill is that the precinct election clerk, after tallying all the votes on all the ballots and verifying that the ballot count coincides with the number of voter who were recorded as having voted, he or she then puts the ballots and voter manifest into a ballot box, seals it, then gives it to a member of the State Police to deliver to a supposedly secure room in Augusta.
As noted at the beginning of the previous diary, that secure ballot storage area was once before violated by an aide to Democratic Speaker of the Maine House, John Martin. That guy (Ken Allen) was caught red handed in the act and was subsequently prosecuted and plead guilty to felony ballot tampering, and was sent to prison.
This time, however, nobody was caught in the act of stuffing the Long Island ballot box; but we do have a proverbial smoking gun in the form of a violated ballot box which contains 21 more ballots than the original ballot count and voter manifest agreed were sealed into the box on election night - 21 extra ballots that all happen to contain votes for the GOP candidate, Cathy Manchester, who lost the original tally on Nov 4 but who "won" the recount by 11 votes as a direct result of those 21 extra ballots - all marked for her.
Anyway, back to the chain of custody: on Sunday, Cynthia Dill posted an entry in her Bangor Daily News blog that raised the issue of the role of the State Police in this matter. Read that blog entry and then we'll go below the orange convolution to discuss it and other facets of this unfolding crime mystery.
