In the Aug. 14 Tucson Weekly, John Brakey wrote a letter to the editor in which he discussed the allegations of vote-flipping in the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election. We asked him for some documentation before running the letter, and he provided it.

Here is a PDF of said documentation.

This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2008.

12 replies on “John Brakey’s Mailbag Documentation”

  1. When John Brakey says they have more evidence, that’s a serious understatement. So, Mr. Boegle, do you continue to stand by your August 15 comment? “We’ve even said that, yes, it’s possible the election was flipped, even though there is not one shred of evidence it happened yet, and we refuse to make sure claims sans evidence.” I assume “sure” is a typo and should be “such” in the previous sentence. Doesn’t what John Brakey supplied you qualify as a shred? When I attempted to contact Mr. Nintzel and another writer for The Weekly on July 22, 2007, I was already aware of most of this information–and trying to pass it and other documents along. Are you saying your newspaper wasn’t previously unaware of this evidence? Or are you continuing to claim it’s not worthy of being described as evidence? I’m confused.

  2. And capable of a double negative typo of my very own. That should read, “Are you saying your newspaper wasn’t previously aware of this evidence?” I’m still confused.

  3. Mike: There’s still not a shred of evidence the election was actually flipped. I stand by what I said. And what I asked John for documentation on was that Crane bought a cropscanner and had it at the elections office; that Crane was reading the Access manual; and that the day’s scans were overwritten by Crane.

  4. Jimmy: How do you define a “shred of evidence”? Could you provide an example of what you would consider a shred of evidence to be?

    If this is a new legal standard, as someone with a juris doctorate, I’d like to know.

    Many criminal cases have been successfully prosecuted based on circumstantial evidence only. Circumstantial evidence is that which tends to prove a factual matter by proving other events or circumstances from which the occurrence of the matter at issue can be reasonably inferred.

    Let me give you an example. If you go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning to find snow on the ground, it is reasonable to infer that snow fell from the sky during the night. That is strong circumstantial evidence.

    Likewise, if a Cropscanner program was purchased by Bryan Crane 10 months prior to the RTA election and we know that this program has only two uses, one of which is as “an election burglary tool” according to experts, and the other is to analyze crops, that is circumstantial evidence that the program was used to illegally modify election results. It is not the only fact that may be inferred, of course. In court we heard testimony that the program was purchased to “see if it could work…for security reasons”. In a criminal trial, it is up to a jury to determine which whether Crane’s concern for security was consistent with Pima County’s practices at the time, or whether the more likely inference is that this program was used for changing election results.

    An even stronger piece of circumstantial evidence is the fact that RTA election data was overwritten and printout reports where generated moments after this overwrite took place. This is strong circumstantial evidence of election fraud because it is precisely what we would see if someone were to ‘fix’ the data. In addition, this particular activity is illegal in the first place.

    It is also illegal under state law for a Microsoft Access software to be used by the elections department since it is not certified by the Secretary of State. There is evidence of a Microsoft Access manual open and being referenced by Bryan Crane in the elections department. Because experts have testified that this manual can be used to bypass voting machine security measures, this is circumstantial evidence tending to prove election tampering by reasonable inference.

    The fact these last two occurrences were on their face violations of state law make them even more suspicious. Jimmy, how on earth could you say that any one of these three pieces of circumstantial evidence – and of course there are many more – constitutes, in your words, “not a shred of evidence”? Any judge in the land understands that this is evidence. Any first year law student with a Black’s Law Dictionary understands that this is evidence. But you do not.

    I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are not stupid. However, your continued denial that there is any evidence of election fraud is not consistent with logic. That leads me to conclude that you are being deliberately misleading. I can only wonder why.

  5. The points Alissa raise should convince any reasonable person, but the problem is that Jimmy Boegle is not one of those people.

    When Jimmy says: “There’s still not a shred of evidence the election was actually flipped. I stand by what I said.” he’s being diffidently Clintonesque in his use of the English language (ie, “I did not have sex with that woman. . . Ms Lewinsky”).

    Jimmy apparently has his own definition of “evidence”, just like Clinton had his own definition of “sex”. For Clinton oral sex was not sex and for Jimmy anything less than absolute proof is not evidence.

    It’s one thing for the president to lamely try to cover up an affair, it’s quite another for the editor of a newspaper to have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic principles of critical thinking. No wonder the media suck so bad.

  6. Thanks for the clarification. I, too, am surprised at how narrow your definition of evidence appears to be. And I’m surprised that you required John Brakey to supply this non-evidence before printing his letter. All his information has been common knowledge for some time, easily available to anyone willing to listen. I understand that The Weekly may be severely limited in its ability to conduct investigative journalism if for no other reason than budget constraints. Obviously, serious investigative journalism is now beyond the ability of Tucson’s dailies. Based on the overwhelming mass of circumstantial evidence I’ve seen, I think a good journalist might have found some significant awards, as well as a lot of corruption, with a bit of effort. And that’s beyond what might have been done for the good of our country.

  7. As I have said before: I think there should be a recount of the RTA ballots. I am grateful the Dems suit has brought all of this up. There were some idiot (at minimum) things done in the elections division that should result in people losing their jobs. I hope the state investigates. However, I have still yet to see any evidence that the election was ACTUALLY flipped. Period. Is it possible it was flipped? Yeah (although every poll I’d seen showed it passing, despite some of the claims made). I just think that before people start making claims that the election was ACTUALLY flipped–there should be some concrete evidence of this, and there is not. The purchase of cropscanners and the presence of manuals does not prove the election was actually flipped. It just doesn’t. Period. All of you are welcome to come on to the blog we’ve created and posted all sorts of RTA documents on for the public to peruse, and insult us and insinuate things all you want. But that does not concrete evidence make. Sorry. This is my last word on this for now, unless someone presents me with this concrete evidence. We’ll continue to follow this story, just like we have from the start, no matter how many mean things you say. Thank you.

  8. wow.
    kind of strange hearing this from someone rep. a newspaper.
    after reading all this i’m really not clear why someone needs a crop scanner not to mention all that other stuff.
    have the accussed explained this yet?
    has the weekly asked the hard questions of those being accussed?
    i mean what is the story on that crop thing or the excel data base?
    any election or govt. oversight groups that the weekly can quote on this?
    my grandma used to say: where there is smoke there is fire.
    hey by the way, i tried that cool statistic site you posted jimmy.
    man the weekly is really tanking according to those stats.
    is it really true?
    also i don’t think the weekly sucks at all.
    i just think you may need a bit of regime change :^)

  9. Well, Jimmy, it seems you and I are not so terribly far apart after all. I won’t claim concrete evidence. As an officer of the Campbell/Grant Northeast Neighborhood Association, I was certainly interested when the claim of a flipped election was raised. I didn’t believe it, but it so affects my life and the lives of my neighbors that I felt I had to learn everything I could. At this stage, that’s a massive amount of circumstantial evidence consistent with a stolen election. Some of it, like the crop scanner, can be explained away. Not that I’ve ever heard a rational explanation offered by the elections department. What finally tipped the scale for me was the size of the cover up. The Pima County Attorney’s Office had lawyers to spare to try to make sure the public never learned any of this. The County Manager and the Board of Supervisors directed them to withhold public records or delay their release until ample time passed for evidence to be hidden or altered. That doesn’t mean it was hidden or altered, it’s just another problem for me. If there was nothing to hide in the elections department, I have to believe there would have been a full and open investigation by now. I sat in court and listened to the countless illegal and improper acts of the department’s director and at least one of his employees. Both are still in place. They’ll be counting our votes in this presidential election. That’s wrong. Not proven, set in concrete felonious activities, I’ll grant you, but I can’t believe at least two people haven’t lost their jobs.

    If my comments came across as mean spirited, I apologize. I just want to know the truth, whatever it is. It boggles my mind that the average citizen in our county still doesn’t realize we may have a significant elections problem.

    I know you said that was your last word, but I’m curious about the polls. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one poll–the one Yes on 1 and 2 ran that Jim Nintzel reported on a couple of weeks ago. Are you aware of more? And have you seen that poll? Does it meet the same level of proof you’re asking of us? Are you certain beyond a reasonable doubt that it was produced before the election? I ask, because I never saw any polls. Those of us in the amateurish opposition supposedly had a spy in the enemies camp. They probably had one or more in ours. That person told us their poll showed them failing by 60-40. Our spy may have lied. But the first I ever heard of anyone in the media or the public seeing that poll after the election was Jim’s article about two weeks after I explained in a Star or Citizen comment that we never saw the poll. I know, paranoid. But the after watching so many officials hold back so much evidence and refuse to release public records, well, doubts enter the mind.

  10. Mike: The polls to which I refer are the Zimmerman ones, referred to by Jim Nintzel The Skinny a while back, which consistely showed the RTA questions ahead.

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