Liberty Lobby Visits Voter News Service

• Liberty Lobby dropped by the corporation in New York City that counts your votes during elections. What we found was terribly strange.

It is urgent for Americans to become involved in the upcoming election and vote-count as poll watchers, election judges, observers and reporters at every level and in every state to prevent massive vote fraud.

Citizens for a Fair Vote Count plans to conduct an independent tally of the election results based on reports provided by patriotic Americans from across the country in order to challenge the monopoly held by the major media networks on the national vote-counting process.

Despite the widespread belief that the government supervises the tally of the results on election night, the reality is entirely different: The vote is tallied by a little-known private corporation called Voter News Service (VNS), located in New York City.

Created in 1970 as News Election Service (NES), VNS has existed in near total secrecy for 30 years and may well be the most powerful corporation in the world.

VNS is a creature of the major networks, including Fox and CNN, the wire services, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

"The networks have total control of the vote-counting process in this country" is how James and Kenneth Collier des cribed the power of VNS in Votescam: The Stealing of America.*

VNS is run by Bill Headline, executive director, and a board of managers, which is comprised of a representative from each of the six major networks: Carolyn Smith from ABC; Tom Jory from AP; Kathy Frankovic from CBS; Tom Hannon from CNN; and Sheldon Gawiser from NBC.

Robert Zimmerman of Fox News re fused to provide the name of the Fox representative.

Liberty Lobby's legislative liaison Christopher Bollyn recently visited the office of VNS in New York City and al though Bill Headline was unwilling to be interviewed, Bollyn spoke with Lee C. Shapiro, director of media services.

When Bollyn asked Shapiro about allegations that VNS has co-opted the vote-counting process in America, Shapiro insisted that the results they disseminate are "unofficial."

"The office was surprisingly messy and unprofessional," Bollyn said. "There is a troubling atmosphere of secrecy and I wouldn't trust any data that these people provide."

When Bollyn asked Shapiro if she thought that the networks should be involved in counting the vote, she said that "there is no federal law mandating how votes are to be counted."

A VNS brochure provided by Shapiro states "Voter News Service is the only national news organization charged with tabulating election-night voting results."

The vote results are tabulated in each county, mainly by computer, and then transferred to VNS where they are tabulated in secret and disseminated to the public, which accepts them without question.

When Bollyn asked Tom Hannon, CNN representative at VNS, about the possibility of the election results being altered within the computer, by the internal computer code, which is secret, or by external "hacking," Hannon replied that he was "way off."

Hannon said that VNS does not "count the vote" but went on to say "I am confident that it is an accurate vote count. It reflects what we are being told by state and local officials."

However, computer tabulated votes at any level, precinct, county or state leave no paper trail -- they cannot be recounted or verified.

Only the person who wrote the program to count votes in each state knows if the results are fair or if fraud has been committed. The process is neither transparent nor verifiable. The software is not open to public scrutiny. Neither is VNS.

The brochure goes on to say "VNS is a member of the National Council of Public Polls (NCPP) and adheres to its standards."

However, when The SPOTLIGHT called the phone number for NCPP provided by Shapiro to ask about the standards, the phone was answered by the office of the Andrew Kohut at the Pew Trust.

Kohut's secretary told The SPOTLIGHT that NCPP "doesn't really exist anywhere" but that it has a web site, (www.ncpp.org).

From the web site all inquiries about NCPP are directed to Edward J. Efchak at (201) 646-4379, vice president of marketing and research at The Record, a newspaper in Hackensack, N.J.

When Efchak's office was called, the secretary said that she had never heard of NCPP.

deputized

The West Virginia Reform Party, by unanimous vote of the executive committee, has declared Citizens for a Fair Vote Count, an election watchdog group, a standing political committee so members can receive credentials as official ob servers at all precincts on election day.

The executive committee's resolution will be presented to the general membership for approval during a statewide meeting Sept. 30 at the Mid-Mountain Con ference Center at Flatwood.

Once approved, as party leaders ex pect, volunteers will begin receiving credentials to be present Nov. 7 for the counting of all ballots in West Virginia.

The West Virginia Reform Party is calling for use of paper ballots in all precincts to overcome fraud, citing the book Votescam by Jim and Ken Collier and Citizens for a Fair Vote Count, based in Cincinnati.