Posted on 02/04/2004 11:05:58 PM PST by Jean S
There are still nine months to go before the South Dakota Senate election between Minority Leader Tom Daschle and his Republican challenger, former Rep. John Thune.
The campaign hasn’t really started yet, but you might as well get ready now for the post-election investigation into voting irregularities. It’s a sure thing.
And while you’re at it, you might as well prepare for a murky end to that investigation. There might be clear evidence of wrongdoing, but no one will be found guilty of doing anything wrong. And then it will be on to the next election.
Last week, we saw the latest murky ending to the last South Dakota election scandal, the race in which Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson beat Thune by 524 votes.
You may remember that a woman named Becky Red Earth-Villeda, also known as Maka Duta, was accused of forging names on voter-registration applications. The state Democratic party paid Red Earth-Villeda $2 for every new application, which she gathered on the state’s Indian reservations. It’s not clear how many she signed up, but Red Earth-Villeda was paid $12,867 for her work in the summer of 2002.
A number of the signatures were apparently phony. After the election, investigators interviewed 381 people who had been recruited by Red Earth-Villeda and found that the great majority of them, 277 in all, said their signatures had been forged.
Prosecutors winnowed that number down to the strongest cases, and in December 2002 charged Red Earth-Villeda with 19 counts of forgery.
But when law-enforcement officers tried to serve subpoenas to residents of the reservation where Red Earth-Villeda had done her work, they were stopped by officials of the Crow Creek tribe.
The charges were dropped, and after a lot of legal wrangling, the tribe allowed some subpoenas, and Red Earth-Villeda was recharged, this time with eight counts of forgery.
Last week, the case fell apart — again.
The reason? Even though the people whose “signatures” were on the registration applications in question have sworn under oath that they did not sign the documents, the handwriting expert hired by the prosecution now says the applications were not forged.
Prosecutors say they are baffled. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” state Deputy Attorney General Mark Barnett said after the decision. “We are at a loss how the expert witness could be so diametrically opposed to what these people swore to.”
The expert witness’s judgment was made not in open court but rather before trial, which had been scheduled for next week. Barnett would not tell reporters who the expert witness was.
It’s not the first frustrating result from the Johnson-Thune race.
After the election, dozens of South Dakotans signed affidavits describing how Democratic poll workers — mostly attorneys brought in by the party from out of state — engaged in illegal electioneering, intimidated poll workers and coached voters.
People were allowed to vote with no identification. Incorrectly marked ballots were counted as Democratic votes.
The Democratic lawyers even set up get-out-the-vote offices in the middle of polling places. Witnesses swore they saw some of the lawyers handing wads of cash to the van drivers who then went out trolling for Democratic voters.
Three people signed affidavits swearing that “Tim Johnson for Senate” van drivers offered them $10 to vote.
It all came to nothing. Officials declined to prosecute any of the well-documented polling-place abuses, and of the three people who said they were offered money to vote, one later said he lied about it, another said his signature on the affidavit was forged and the third couldn’t be found.
So in the end, it was all murky, just like the case of Becky Red Earth-Villeda and the forged — or not forged — voter-registration applications.
It seems unlikely that the Daschle-Thune race, whoever wins, will be as close as the Johnson-Thune contest. But it seems very likely that the race will be marred by the same type of voter irregularities that occurred in 2002.
For their part, Republicans should have learned a valuable lesson from that race. And the lesson is: Cheating works.
Bring in lots of lawyers from Washington, New York and Los Angeles. Intimidate the honest, well-meaning elderly ladies who work at the polling places. Observe the rules governing polling-place behavior when those rules work in your favor. Break them when they don’t. If your candidate wins, ignore the inevitable charges of misconduct from the other side.
If authorities treat the loser’s evidence as they treated the Republican case in 2002, the whole thing will end up a murky mess, which you can then claim as total exoneration.
And the best thing is, while the other side complains, you’ll have your man in the Senate.
So it seems this single Dem recruiter gathered roughly 6,400 voting applications, and roughly 4,600 of those were forgeries! And since those people did not know they had been signed up, SOMEONE ELSE did their voting for them! ...explains why that election turned on a dime on those half-dozen final precincts!
It is SOOOO criminal not to do anything about this!!
Reminds me of Floriduh. Why of COURSE if they were incorrectly marked they automatically belong to Democrats, sorry lot that they are.
People were allowed to vote with no identification. Incorrectly marked ballots were counted as Democratic votes.
833/844 Precincts done. 11 to go. TOTAL PERCENT PRECINCTS TOTAL VOTES OF VOTE REPORTING PRECINCTS U S SENATE (L) EVANS KURT 3045 1% 833 844 (D) JOHNSON TIM 164609 49% 833 844 (R) THUNE JOHN 166114 50% 833 844 58 posted on 11/06/2002 5:00:33 AM CST by CoolCD [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 57 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]
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