Forensic Destruction At The Delaware County Bureau Of Elections

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

The Delaware County Bureau of Elections is now at the center of a national controversy over allegations of voter fraud in the presidential election.

On Wednesday, Gregory Stenstrom, who identified himself as a Navy veteran, forensic computer scientist and GOP poll watcher, made national headlines when he told a Pennsylvania state Senate hearing in Gettysburg that the entire election process in Delaware County was "forensically destructive."

"In all cases the chain of custody was broken,"  Stenstrom said. "It was broken for the mail in ballots, the drop box ballots, the election day USB card flash drives."

As a result, Stenstrom testified, he believed it was "impossible to verify the validity of about 100,000 to 120,000 votes" of the total of 330,000 votes cast by Delaware County residents.

Stenstrom's testimony echoes complaints in two written statements from poll watchers obtained by Big Trial that outlined numerous breakdowns in the chain of custody as ballots made their way from the 428 registered polling places in Delaware County to the Bureau of Elections. 

It's a story of Election Day chaos, corralled poll watchers, suspicious goings on, and one security lapse after another. The story ends with reluctance on the part of Trump's lawyers to go forward with their own case, before a judge threw that case out of court. Then, the state of Pennsylvania certified the election results, and an alleged victory for Joe Biden.   

According to a signed affidavit from a temporary clerk who worked Election Day at the Delaware County Bureau of Elections, some 8,800 provisional ballots cast in Delaware County [show in the photo above] weren't properly segregated from mail-in ballots, or authenticated to preserve the legal chain of custody.

During the time that provisional ballots were being reviewed by poll workers, they were left unsecured in boxes, accessible to all temps making $13.50 an hour, as shown in the photo on the right.

In addition, anybody who was walking around could have gained access to boxes of additional blank provisional ballots that were also being stored in the same place.

In the seven-page affidavit, the clerk, who requested anonymity because she fears for her safety, described broken seals on boxes of ballots, and boxes of ballots that weren't sealed at all. She also stated that she saw ballots stuffed in clear bags, and even Dunkin' Donut bags, instead of the secured ballot boxes that they were supposed to be stored in.

The clerk also stated in her affidavit that a third of the blue canvas bags set aside for storing provisional ballots were returned without an 8 1/2 by 11-inch fluorescent pink sheet of paper that's supposed to identify what polling place the ballots came from, as well as display matching bar codes from each polling place.

In addition, the county lost 64 out of 428 "vDrives," a USB drive that attaches to a vote scanner to summarize election results. The vDrives were supposed to be turned over to the Bureau of Elections, to preserve the chain of custody, the clerk stated in her affidavit. 

The county sheriff and other county election officials were given the task of locating the missing vDrives and returning them to the Bureau of Elections. Most vDrives had to be recreated; some were never found. The missing vDrives were also cited by Stenstrom when he testified on Wednesday before the state Senate.

Another security problem: two poll watchers told Big Trial that they witnessed 54 ballot boxes containing at least 10,000 votes being brought into the Bureau of Elections that were unsecured, unsealed and without ID marks. The poll watchers said they protested, to no avail, after they watched election workers diving into the boxes, in search of provisional ballots. 

In her affidavit, the clerk described a chaotic election day where she observed many irregularities. Such as required signatures on provisional ballots that "clearly did not match what was stored in the Delaware county computer system," the clerk's affidavit says. 

"I personally reviewed such discrepancies with my own eyes," the clerk wrote. "I observed that the provisional ballots were counted notwithstanding this irregularity of signatures that did not match. I thought this could present a problem about possible violations of the elections laws."

The clerk was one of more than 100 temporary workers hired from Monarch Staffing of Springfield, PA

for $13.50 an hour to staff the Bureau of Elections for the presidential election.

In her affidavit, the clerk described the fluorescent pink paper that was supposed to be placed on the outside of each sealed ballot bag at the end of the night to identify polling places, along with a bar code.

"When a third of the ballot bags were returned, I learned that they never had that pink paper, which I observed. I and my team were unable to identify what voting location those particular ballot bags came back from."

On Election Day, Delaware County employed for the first time Hart Intercivic voting machines at all county polling places.

When the polls opened on Nov. 3rd at 7 a.m., the Bureau of Elections received hundreds of phone calls complaining about technical problems such as the wrong paper being used to record votes, which prevented voting machines from scanning bar codes.

The Election Day protocol called for provisional ballots to be stored in 428 blue canvas bags, and turned over to officials in authority at the Bureau of Elections. 

But the day after the election, the clerk wrote, "I discovered irregularities in these blue canvas ballot bags, but not limited to open and sealed ballots, ballots placed in Dunkin Donut bags, and other irregularities." She also mentioned ballots stored in clear bags that were supposed to be used to store election posters written in Spanish and English.  

Two poll watchers interviewed by Big Trial who sought anonymity described being held in a corral far from the vote counting at the Bureau of Elections. When they finally got close enough to see some of the ballots, for the purpose of challenging them, one poll watcher, a lawyer, noticed a vote cast by one of his own clients who was an undocumented alien from South America. The poll watcher complained that he was given less than a minute to scan each ballot for possible discrepancies. 

The problems in Delaware County started during early voting. In her affidavit, the clerk described how On Oct. 27th, some 800 people stood in line and waited four and five hours to obtain provisional ballots. Meanwhile, poll workers for Biden were given free reign to politic:

Most of the people in the line were Democrats. The lines were long and tempers were high. Many times the park police needed to be called to calm people down. There was a large presence of Biden people at the end of the line that just keep going up and down [to] tell the crowd how they needed to vote. They offered snacks and water and talked people back into the long lines when they got tired of waiting for their turn to come vote early. We were instructed that we could not talk to any Biden people for any reason and let them do their thing. The small group of Biden people were very aggressive and pushy.

The Bureau of Elections had printed forms for people to fill out that were numbered. The Biden people photocopied the same blank form and handed them out to people in line with their own clipboards and pens. Our people got upset because it messed up some order that we had."

Out of the 8,000 provisional ballots, the poll watchers identified some 1,750 for challenges. The biggest group of challenges, 1,045, involved ballots that did not include a date that the person signed the provisional ballot. Instead of writing down the date that they signed their application, many people wrote down their birthdays. 

Nearly 300 of these ballots had no judge of elections signature, or minority inspector signature. Twenty-seven of the forms requesting provisional ballots were not signed. Another 108 had discrepancies with addresses. Some 52 ballots were received after Nov. 3rd, but were counted anyway. 

But when it came time to press the challenges to 1,750 of those provisional ballots, the poll watchers said, Jonathan Goldstein, a Hatboro, PA lawyer hired by the Trump campaign, wasn't up for a fight. 

Goldstein was overheard complaining to his fellow lawyers about the "bad optics" of having a "tall, skinny Jewish lawyer with a bowtie" trying to invalidate votes cast by hundreds of minority voters. And then he withdrew all the challenges.

"They just betrayed Trump," one witness claimed about the lawyer for the Trump campaign. "It was embarrassing. This guy was supposed to be representing Trump and he was horrible. He didn't even put up a fight."

In an email, Goldstein denied waving the white flag of surrender. 

"On November 13, 2020, I appeared before the Delaware County Board of Elections to argue a variety of challenges made to provisional ballots," he wrote. "We maintained challenges that we believed were sustainable under the laws of Pennsylvania which govern such challenges. We abandoned challenges originally made by a variety of volunteers but that, in our view, may not have been sustainable under the applicable Pennsylvania statutes."

"We categorically deny any other characterization of the reasons why we maintained or abandoned any of the challenges made."

The two GOP poll watchers, however, said that Goldstein's efforts only served to cap a suspect Election Day that turned out to be a screw job for Republicans. 

"The fix was in from the start," one of the GOP poll watchers said. "The chain of custody was broken. They threw away the outside envelopes" on mail-in ballots, and the mail-in ballots were mixed in with provisional ballots. There were no inspections by minority poll watchers.

The clerk who spoke to Big Trial recalled some suspicious incidents. Such as the one tall young man who insisted to county election workers that he had the authority to go into Manor Care, a nursing home, and collect ballots from 15 people whom he said were on their death beds, and that it was their dying wish to vote in the presidential election. 

He came back with 15 ballots.

"I'm sure those people were comatose," a GOP poll watcher said. 

One of the GOP poll watchers has compiled a list of 200 people who had double registrations, or who were registered to vote twice, under the same address. It was more anecdotal evidence of irregularities with voting in Delaware County.  

When he testified before the state Senate, Stenstrom said that he and other Democratic poll watchers witnessed a person who showed up with bags of USB cards, and was seen uploading them into voting machines. 

"I personally observed USB cards being uploaded to voting machines by the voting machine warehouse supervisor on multiple occasions," Stenstrom told the state senate. "I brought it to the attention of the deputy sheriff who was there stationed, who was a senior law enforcement officer, and I brought to the attention of the clerk of elections," he said.

"I objected, and I said this person is not being observed," he continued. "He’s not part of the process that I can see, and he’s walking in with baggies — which we have pictures of and it was submitted in our affidavits — and he was sticking these USBs into the machines."

"So I personally witnessed that happen over 24 times," Stenstrom said. "We have multiple other witnesses who saw it, including Democrat poll watchers."

Stenstrom and a Democratic poll watcher also observed at least 60,000 unopened mail-in ballots in a locked room.

"They were in boxes of 500, stacked in neatly," Stenstrom told the state Senate. "The gentleman that came in with me is a Democrat poll watcher, is a forensic pathologist, a very detailed, very dedicated man and he took meticulous notes, as well. And I verified with him, 'Are you seeing what I’m seeing?'" he recalled.

"We both agreed — a GOP poll watcher and a Democrat poll watcher — that we had witnessed 60 to 70,000 [unopened mail-in ballots] . . ."

"The problem with that was by that time the mail-in ballots had already been counted. So 120,000 mail-in ballots had already been counted, posted, and done," he said. "So my question is, where do the 70,000 ballots go?"

"And nobody knows," he said. "We have a picture in here of a large number of boxes that I took that were filled with what appeared to be ballots sitting by the BlueCrest machine. They were there for about three hours and then they disappeared."

Stenstrom's testimony, however, wasn't the highlight of the 3 1/2-hour state Senate hearing.

The highlight came when Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel, testified about a suspicious spike in Pennsylvania that showed that over a period of 90 minutes, "one big batch of votes" came in carrying a windfall of 570,000 votes for Biden.

"And how much for Trump," Rudy Giuliani, the president's lawyer, asked.

"I think it was a little over 3,200," Waldron said, as the audience gasped. 

"How about that," somebody yelled.