Special Meeting Tonight Over Demand for Recount of Election Results at Carnegie

There will be a Special Meeting at 5:30 p.m. today in the Theatre of the Carnegie Center. Members will vote on whether to have a recount of the June 2008 election results. Members have been demanding a recount.

Board President Mathhew Mathhew has announced that at least 30 Carnegie members have to show up to make the election valid. But Carnegie member, B.B., alleges that number is "arbitrary". Sort of like the arbitrary 150 signatures, Mathhew said members had to get on a petition before the Board would consider a recount.

Even if a recount is granted, it is unlikely that the results will be trusted by members. The election was just too sloppy. One member has pointed out that the ballots are photocopied and that anybody could photocopy a few more, add some Xs, and substitute these ballots for others. This could have been done over the two months that have passed.

Some members such as B.B. say that the request for an election recount is actually pre-mature, that members should first demand that the Board release the results of June's election. To date, Carnegie Board of Directors and Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty (who is given an automatic seat at the Board) have avoided releasing the Teller's Report from the June election that would reveal how many votes each candidiate got. Members have been waiting for two months for this report. The Board is required by Roberts Rules, which was adopted by the Board, to make the Teller's Report public. But fair elections have never been a strong point of the Carnegie Board or Whitty; they after all colluded with the locking of an elected Board member out of the building for a year, denying him access to Board meetings.

Carnegie member, Jim A., who is usually not politically active, is one of several members asking about the Tellers Report. He asked Whitty why the Tellers Report was being concealed from voters. She responded that it was tradition not to release it.

Board President Mathhew Mathhew has told a different story than Whitty. According to B.B., Mathhew said the Teller's Report would be printed in the Carnegie Newsletter. Three Carnegie Newsletters have been published since that promise was allegedly made. No Teller's Report.

A primary reason behind the demand for a recount and for copies of the Teller's
Report is that Rachel Davis, a popular candidate amongst members who frequent Carnegie on a day to day basis, didn't get elected. Davis was the only incumbent who had spoken up -- and continued to speak up -- about the fact that homeless man, William Simpson, was banned from the building two weeks after Carnegie members elected him to the Board last year. Whitty told him he would not even be allowed into the building for Board meetings.

Paul Taylor, Editor of the Carnegie Newsletter who was forced to retract libelous commentary about the homeless Board member, and Jean Swanson, a paid organizer with the Carnegie Center Action Project on homelessness, stacked the election with pals who were instructed to vote for a slate which didn't include Davis. Low income Carnegie members who had not planned to run, report that they were instructed by Taylor or Swanson to show up at the election as they were going to be nominated. Taylor and Swanson were manipulating the poor.

Swanson's stacking, though, also involved bringing unfamiliar faces to the Carnegie election and getting some of them elected to the Board. These virtual strangers will now be making decisions affecting the lives of regular users of Carnegie. So much effort expended by homeless advocate Swanson so that incumbent Rachel Davis, who was speaking up about the banning of an elected homeless man and the banning of other members without just cause, would not get re-elected. Here is one of the few election results clearly revealed: Jean Swanson is not an anti-poverty activist, she is an anti-democracy activist.