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November 18, 1996 - By Charles Brink. There is ample evidence of tampering and irregularities in the Agua Dulce Town Council election. The primary evidence exists on the video tape of the counting of the ballots. I have made a request for a copy but have not received it to date. The events I witnessed are as follows, and I would swear in court under penalty of perjury if needed.
I arrived at the Womans Club just a few minutes after the ballot boxes had been opened. I observed the election committee sitting around the table with small fishing tackle boxes. The boxes were very full, showing on top a jumble of white water committee ballots and orange Town Council election ballots. These looked randomly inserted, as you would expect, if they had been placed into the slot cut in one end of the box.
The committee then proceeded to remove the ballots starting from the top. They removed the ballots, unfolded and separately stacked the white water ballots and the orange election ballots. Only the top one inch (less than 20 percent) were mixed white and orange randomly folded ballots.
What then remained was only orange Town Council election ballots, all neatly folded, stacked flat and placed in the box. This could be only done by hand they were stacked so neatly the only thing missing were rubber bands. There were no water ballots below that first one inch.
The box which Jane Bagby was counting, had all the ballots below the small mixed area, folded in half, half and half, (in eighths). She complained, and should be heard on the tape, that she asked people not to fold the ballots so many times because they were too hard to unfold. But every ballot below that top level was folded and stacked in an identical manner.
The box that Cindy Ziglemeyer had, below that top level had been folded in half and half (In quarters).
Cindy Ziglemeyer was sitting with her back to the public area. She was unfolding the ballots which were clearly visible to me. The top (mixed) group of votes were predominately for Howard Carlip and had write-ins. After she got down to the neatly folded and stacked ballots the vote became nearly 100% for Brewer, Sullivan and Sullivan. Further, the ballots appeared to be marked in the same manor with the same size and type of mark.
It is impossible for these orange Town Council ballots to have been stuffed in with white water ballots and then to magically separate. The water ballots climbed to the top and the Town Council ballots neatly arranged themselves, all folded exactly the same and stacked flat on the bottom. This is beyond credibility.
The separated water ballots looked to be less than 200. The water ballots were placed in a clear plastic box on the floor. If they had some 600+ votes as claimed, they should have had nearly 600 water ballots.
The evidence seems incontrovertible. What must have happened was that sometime during the day, persons unknown, removed all the ballots and replaced them with premarked Town Council ballots.
They were able to determine, by counting the mark-offs on the voter registration lists, the number of people who had voted.
At that point a confederate, inside the secrecy of their trailers opened the ballot box, dumped out all of the actual ballots.
They inserted the neatly folded pre-marked ballots for Brewer, Sullivan and Sullivan.
They locked the boxes back up and started inserting new ballots, through the slot, which made up the top layer.
This accounts for the fact that the top ballots were a mixture of white water ballots and orange Town Council ballots, and below that level they were all segregated, neatly folded, Town Council ballots. One conspirator folded the pre-marked ballots three times and one folded them two times.
Several persons in the community stated to me they wrote in specific names on the ballot. Some of these write-in votes were not tallied by the election committee. This seems to indicate these ballots were removed and thrown away.
A number of people stated they crossed out the water ballot and there were no reports of crossed out water ballots.
When Ziglemeyer was asked at the vote tally to count the number of water ballots. She refused and it looked obvious this was added evidence of the tampering. She stated that she would give the water ballots to Lillian Smith because "The water ballots were Lillian's". It is believed later Lillian Smith added back new forged water ballots to replace the ones that had been dumped earlier.
The video tape will clearly show that the boxes, after a certain point, contain only orange ballots, no white ones. This is the evidence of the fraud. These people are tampering with an election, but unfortunately no one is sure if tampering with a Town Council election is a crime.
It seems to be a civil fraud issue and if we cannot get criminal prosecution they should be prosecuted for civil fraud. It is fraud on the community and this information must be disseminated to the community by all possible means.
There is no other reasonable explanation, except fraud, as to how these events could have occurred.As a side bar, after the flap started, Cindy Ziglemeyer, in a letter to the Country Journal now admits opening the ballot box during the day and now admits removing "only the water ballots". It is unknown where these removed ballots were at the time of the public counting.
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