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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AmericanVoter who wrote (7995)	11/29/2000 9:18:05 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 10042

ELECTION 2000, Day 23 Palm Beach charges watchdog $1,152 an hour Klayman: 'They've set up roadblocks every step of the way' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Paul Sperry © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com Democratic elections officials in Palm Beach County haven't made it easy for a government watchdog group to examine presidential ballots for signs of tampering. Nor have they made it cheap. After Judicial Watch lawyer Larry Klayman wrapped up five hours of ballot-checking yesterday, he got an eye-popping bill. The county is charging him $1,152 an hour to review the ballots, he told WorldNetDaily. Klayman will have to cough up about $5,760 this morning before he can continue his audit, which he says has so far uncovered "sloppy" handling of ballots and "discrepancies." Klayman says the "unreasonable" charge, which he'll challenge in court, is part of an effort to block his probe into allegations of fraud committed by Al Gore supporters during the manual recount. "They've set up roadblocks every step of the way," he said. "First, they wouldn't give us access, so we had to sue them. Then they don't show up until Monday. Then they wouldn't let us count the votes and look at the disputed ballots. Now they say it's going to cost us $1,152 an hour." He says officials originally told him they would charge $500 an hour. Judicial Watch, along with voting-fraud experts from a Washington-based accounting firm, were able to inspect roughly 1,000 disputed ballots yesterday. Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore resisted their efforts from the start, Klayman says. "She was very snippy and very nasty," he said. "She tried to tell us we had no right to count votes." Judicial Watch requested the inspection under a Florida law that allows public access to ballots. Klayman said auditors for Johnson Lambert & Co. found that officials had "put ballots in the wrong piles." "Bush ballots were found in Gore piles," he said. "It was very sloppy." "They also had no methodology for counting the disputed ballots," Klayman said. "They couldn't tell us how they decided votes for Gore and Bush." Officials did not document how they arrived at their decisions. "There's no way to trace it back," he said. Klayman also says several of the paper ballots were destroyed in the machine counting process and were "recreated" by officials or volunteers. In addition, he says he came across a few ballots that had chads scotch-taped to the back of the cards. He plans to photograph the more suspicious ballots and post the photos on Judicial Watch's website. Klayman has also requested to review ballots in neighboring Broward County, another Democratic stronghold which agreed to conduct a hand recount of punch-card ballots at the urging of the Gore campaign. Observers have alleged that ballot-tampering was more rampant there. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily. worldnetdaily.com