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 all? Did you get any advice from the secretary of state's office or from Clay
 Roberts?

M: It seems to me that the Democrats did present this letter from Mr. Roberts;
 however, we took the radical step [of] reading the statute. We said, with all
 respect to Mr. Roberts, we do not think the statute requires what he says it does.
 It was the equivalent of an opinion of the attorney general [in that] it's not legally
 binding authority. The legally binding authority is, of course, the statute, and any
 appellate cases construing the statute. This one comes under the heading
 generally referred to as persuasive authority, which is a bad name because
 persuasive authority may or may not be persuasive.

P: Once you have done this automatic recount, what transpired at this juncture to
 ultimately persuade you to do a full hand recount?

M: Well, there was one bizarre incident that occurred, it seems to me it was [during]
 our meeting of [November] 8. In the middle of the meeting this elderly gentleman
 came in, talking mainly to himself, and he walked up to the counter and slammed
 down a bag full of ballots. He said, my wife was one of the poll workers and she
 told me to take it back to headquarters election night and I forgot all about it. I
 just realized now that these were in my car, so here they are. Of course, I'm
 sitting there saying to myself, I cannot believe this is happening. It sounds like a
 sitcom, something you'd see on television, but this was happening for real.
 Obviously a lot of people were unsettled by that; I was very unsettled by that
 because I'm saying to myself, I wonder if there are any more ballots out there
 that should have been returned election night.

P: Although, it turns out those ballots had actually been counted, is that correct?

M: Yes, they had been counted because the memory card for that precinct had
 downloaded and then uploaded into the main computer, so they'd been counted,
 but of course they should have been physically returned to election central [on]
 election night. So, it was in the eyes of some people a red herring; however,
 there was yet something else that should not have happened that caused people
 to be ill at ease about the reliability of the results.

P: There was another occasion of a woman who left with two bags, and people
 thought that maybe she had taken ballots. I believe maybe you, or somebody,
 got the Sheriff's office to go and actually, I wouldn't say apprehend, but discover
 what was in her bags.

M: Well, here's what happened. I left election central [at] roughly three o'clock in the
 morning on Wednesday, November 8, thinking that we'd finally got it right, and
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