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Exclusive Internet expose: Mounting evidence that America's high tech capital got 'taken' for $100,000,000 by a very old fashioned scam.

Disappearing ballot boxes. Thugs inside polling areas asking people how they plan to vote. The mayor orders the voting records closed while the DAs office looks the other way.

El Salvador? North Korea? Chicago in the '20s? No. San Francisco 1997.  The stakes: a $100,000,000 stadium building grant to one of the leading financial backers of an aggressive nationwide campaign to legalize gambling in the U.S.

San Francisco's mayor Willie Brown, a major recipient of gambling industry contributions while Speaker of the California State Assembly, personally took charge of the stadium bond campaign.

San Francisco residents who were outspoken in their opposition to the ballot measure (experienced pollsters pegged the "No" votes at 60%, with women voters 2 to 1 against) were shocked when a "last minute", "miraculous surge" of "Yes" votes appeared nearly four hours after the polls closed giving the widely unpopular issue a razor-thin margin of victory. Now dozens of eye witnesses are coming forward with stories of electioneering in polling places, intimidation by ex-gang members hired as "poll observers", and mysterious blue vans that picked up ballot boxes and then disappeared for hours before delivering them to the election office.

All this hasn't sat well with Ken McCarthy, founder of E-Media, one of the Bay Area's key web pioneers. McCarthy's company sponsored the first conference devoted exclusively to the subject of business opportunities on the web back in 1994 featuring a then, little-known Marc Andreessen and others. "When I started hearing reports that our June stadium election may have been tainted, I looked into it. When I saw the evidence for myself and observed the casual approach the newspapers and television stations were taking towards the story, I went ballistic." "Going ballistic" in McCarthy's case means taking the story to the web at [ http://www.e-media.com/stadium ] and launching a fast-growing e-mail list of citizens, investigators and journalists who receive regular news bulletins on details in the unfolding case.

Keeping up with the mounting piles of evidence has not been easy, but McCarthy says the web is the perfect medium for reporting material like this to the public. "Apparently, the people behind this didn't miss a trick. If it's in the voter fraud play book, they used it. There are "smoking guns" lying all over the streets of San Francisco. Unfortunately, the local media has a very short attention span and, in the rare instances when they've reported something substantial, they've presented it in a piecemeal, sound-bite fashion that almost insures that people will to fail to see the larger pattern." "The web is the perfect antidote to combat this 'short attention span theater-style' of reporting. Our site lets you examine the evidence for yourself all in one place. When you can do that, the obvious patterns jump right out at you."

Some of the exhibits available at the site which you won't find in local San Francisco newspapers:

1) Photos of a "Vote Yes" campaign precinct captain arrested for voting twice and impersonating a police officer. (The DA's office tried to block the release of his photo to the web site.)

2) A canceled check showing that federal housing funds were used to open "special" early polling places which coincidentally voted 90% "Yes."

3) Eye witness accounts from several dozen people who were hassled when they tried to cast their ballots.

What does McCarthy hope the site will accomplish?

"The primary purpose of the site is to raise awareness that election fraud is not a problem of the past. It's with us right now: north, south, east, and west and both major parties are involved. It can even happen in a supposedly 'sophisticated' city like San Francisco." "Second, we want to give journalists, especially those who may not have experience with the intricacies of election fraud cases, a live example of how to investigate these stories in their own communities." more...