Huntington County Clerk’s office election filing controversy

[3/6/2010 - Follow up article posted here.]

[Editor's Note: We want HuntingtonDaily.com to be a non-biased news  website.  We want to investigate the facts and report what we find.  We do not want to create controversy.  However, in the course of investigating a story, if we find something controversial, we feel we need to report the facts that we do find.  The hope of investigating this article was to uncover the facts of what we believed to be an error of a mechanical device that turned an innocent situation into a question of integrity.  Unfortunately, we didn't uncover the questionable mechanical device that would have cleared up this whole situation, but rather a lot of questionable evidence that shows something is definitely going on.

The (99:99)-type references throughout the story are the times on a recording device in case someone questions anything quoted in this story.]

Over the weekend a question was raised by Ken Zuk at HuntingtonPolitics.com regarding a questionable looking date/time stamp on a filing form for Kristopher Underwood as a candidate for Huntington Township Board. The date appeared to have been changed from the 20th to the 19th.  Today, HuntingtonDaily.com investigated the situation behind the date change on the form.

Kristopher Underwood's candidate filing form with a changed date on the time/date stamp

Fran Felts admitted that the date had been changed.  She stated that the issue was due to a malfunction of the date/time stamper in the County Clerk’s Office.  She stated that Kristopher Underwood was the first person to file that morning and that when the stamp was made, the device had malfunctioned and stamped the wrong date.

[Editor's Note: No one in the Clerk's Office suggested the time stamp was incorrect. It was listed as 7:35 a.m. - 25 minutes before the courthouse opened and before 9 a.m. when Kristopher Underwood says he filed.]

Fran stated that she immediately noticed the error of the date, corrected the it on the form and fixed the issue on the date/time stamp machine.

“Why would I risk my whole career to do that?” she asked. (11:15)

Fran also said that she was at the Republican breakfast at 7:35 a.m.  on Feb. 20, the time and date stamped on Kristopher Underwood’s form, so she couldn’t have stamped it then. (6:35)

“Should I have re-stamped it, absolutely! But we’re all human,” Fran said of the way the situation was handled that day. “I didn’t do anything wrong, this is garbage, and I get tired of the slander.” (9:15)  As Fran finished her explanation she stated, “That is my explanation.  There was no impropriety at any time.” (12:20)

Fran also showed HuntingtonDaily.com that both of Kris Underwood’s forms were notarized on Feb. 18, suggesting he at least had the intention of filing for two candidate positions.

[Editor's Note: A notarized date on the forms does not qualify them as being filed, but instead indicates only when they were filled out.]

Fran also said, “There is no wrong doing by the clerk’s office.  Bottom line.” (14:08)

When the other ladies in the Clerk’s Office were asked if the date/time stamper has ever messed up before, they said that on the first of the month it will often read the 32nd instead of the 1st and needs to be changed.  When the ladies in the office were asked if the machine ever skips a day during the month they said, “It’s never gone from the 1st to the 3rd, or the 5th to the 7th or anything like that.” (16:24)

Fran provided evidence that she was at the County Courthouse on Saturday the 20th in the form of the security entry records which showed that Fran had entered the Courthouse at 11:13 a.m.  The record backs Fran’s statement that she wasn’t there at 7:35 a.m. when the stamp in question was timed and dated.

Security records showing Fran Felts was at the courthouse on Saturday, February 20th, entering at 11:13 A.M.

In an e-mail to HuntingtonDaily.com, Kristopher Underwood said that he had turned in both forms at the same time.

“I don’t know who the gal was that handled it,” Kristopher said. (Fran stated she handled it and she and Kristopher do know each other.)

Throughout the investigation, many of the things Fran stated were contradicted by other pieces of evidence.

HuntingtonDaily.com discovered Kristopher Underwood was not the first person to file that day as Fran had stated.  In fact, the handwritten log shows that Michael Wayne Clift was the first to file on Feb. 19, and also shows Kristopher Underwood’s name entered with only one position listed for candidacy.  Other Candidates that filed for two positions listed each position they were seeking office for individually.

Candidate order filing sheet showing Kristopher Underwood was not the first candidate that filed on February 19th.

Further, Michael Wayne Clift’s filing forms show a clear stamp for Feb. 19 at 8:05 a.m.

Michael Wayne Clift's filing forms

Kristopher Underwood’s other candidacy form, the one that appears to have been filed properly and on time without question, was stamped and dated Feb. 19 at 8:08 a.m.

Kristopher Underwood's properly dated Republican state convention delegate candidate form

The stamps on these forms suggest that the date/time stamper was working properly.  Additional forms inspected throughout the day from other candidates also showed a proper date/time stamp.

In an e-mail from Kristopher Underwood he stated, “Nothing happened … there was a stamp mistake and it was fixed immediately.  The election board even approved the file.  People can question it, but everything was filed in due time.  By going to the Clerk’s Office they can get the answers they want.”

Another statement from an e-mail from Kristopher said, “Both forms were turned in at the exact same time on Friday morning Feb. 19 and early in the 8 a.m. hour. There are also witnesses who watched me hand in both forms that morning.”

In a phone conversation that HuntingtonDaily.com had with Kristopher, he said that he didn’t watch Fran stamp the file because he was talking to Edmond Asher about sports. Kristopher said Edmond Asher now has a sworn affidavit that he was there that morning and saw him submit both forms.

[Editor's Note: 3/30/2010 12:25 a.m.: Source indicate Edmond Asher will only swear to the fact that Kristopher was there on Friday morning, and not that he saw him submit two forms.]

The problem that HuntingtonDaily.com has with this statement is that Fran Felts said she stamped the first form with the wrong date, fixed the date and changed the time on the date/time stamper, then stamped Kristopher’s second form.  Besides Kristopher’s forms not being submitted first as Fran stated, it seems that by needing to open the machine and change the date it would have created some kind of commotion that Kristopher would have seen.

Further, HuntingtonDaily.com spoke with Cindy Klepper at the Huntington County Tab about an article that was ran on the Tab’s website on Friday, Feb. 19 shortly after the end of the filing deadline of noon that day.  Cindy said that she had gone through the basket of candidate filings that afternoon and had written down the names of the candidates in her handwritten notes to use for her article.  The information she had was not from the forms provided by the Clerk’s office, but rather her own account of the actual forms that had been filed.  In Cindy’s article (posted here), Kristopher Underwood is listed only as a candidate for Republican State Convention Delegate and not as a candidate for Huntington Township Board.

The evidence suggests that sometime after Cindy Klepper’s article at 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 19 and Monday, Feb. 22  when the election board certified the results, an additional candidate, Kristopher Underwood, appeared.

The copy of the candidate list provided to Ken Zuk and posted at HuntingtonPolitics.com (HERE) has an EXIF data time stamp of 12:34 p.m, Feb. 19 (created 34 minutes after the filing deadline) and also shows that the file was updated by Pam Fowler, the Clerk’s Office employee who should have created the file, according to Fran.

However, when looking at the version on the City-County Website (HERE), the EXIF data time stamp is different. It shows that file was created later in the day at 4:23 p.m. Regarding the file version on HuntingtonPolitics.com, Fran stated, “They got an old list and they only publish what looks good for them.” (7:12)

[Editor's Note: Just in case these files move or change, HuntingtonDaily.com has downloaded copies and saved them to our servers HERE for the 12:34 version and HERE for the 4:23 p.m. version. To see the EXIF data's time stamp, save the files, open in Adobe and then go to file, properties.]

The candidate list file from 12:34 p.m. matches Cindy Klepper’s self-created list and only has 107 candidates.  The 4:23 p.m. version adds Kris Underwood’s second candidacy filing and has 108 candidates.

This all raises questions as to the legitimacy of Kris Underwood’s filing and furthermore raises questions about the Clerk’s Office’s actions in this matter.

Sometime between 12:34 and 4:23 p.m., on Friday, Feb. 19, after the filing deadline had closed, Kris Underwood’s name appeared on the candidate list PDF file.  His filing form for that position had the date changed and the time was listed at 7:35 a.m., 25 minutes before the Clerk’s Office opens.

Cindy Klepper’s article has no listing of Kristopher’s Huntington Township Board candidacy.  In the numerical log form, Kristopher’s name is only listed for one position, although other candidates who filed for multiple positions had listed each position on separate lines. His form was not the first form stamped that day and there was a three-minute gap between Edmond Asher’s filing and Kristopher’s legitimate filing – an amount of time that would have required the date/time stamper to change forward by one day and backwards by nearly 30 minutes after stamping Edmond’s paperwork – something which the ladies in the office say had never happened to the date/time stamper. (16:24)

The election filings also were not certified until the following Monday, Feb. 22, providing plenty of time between then and the noon deadline on Friday for the second name to have been added.

So, was the form filed on Friday after the noon deadline and an attempt made to change the date/time stamper time to an earlier hour which unknowingly resulted in the date rolling forward? Or was the decision to add his name made shortly before 4:23 p.m. when the PDF list of candidates was updated and then the file stamped the next morning after the Republican breakfast (when Fran and Kristopher would have seen each other) and then Fran went to the courthouse at 11:13 a.m.? Could the time on that Saturday have been moved back four hours and the date forgotten to be changed?  Could it have been as simple as Kris Underwood intending to file for both offices and forgetting the paperwork for one at home and then someone at the Clerk’s office “helping” him out?  We’re not sure, but something definitely happened. Unfortunately the people who know what happened aren’t telling the truth.  And the biggest question that remains is why?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: As a citizen of Huntington, I (Seth Anderson) really started the day out thinking this would be an article that said the date/time stamp was a non-issue and I set out to restore the public's faith in our elected, appointed, and/or hired city officials.  Throughout this investigation I lost all faith in many of the people I talked to about this issue.  I started the day believing them.  As more and more things they said didn't seem right, I started looking deeper.  The deeper I got into this issue, the bigger the holes in the stories I was hearing began to become.  My worry is that this issue goes deeper than Fran and Kristopher. ]