Posted on 10/29/2004 7:19:11 AM PDT by hripka
Racine, Kenosha voter application fraud alleged
2 charged, including a candidate
By TOM KERTSCHER
tkertscher@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 28, 2004
Racine - Authorities Thursday filed felony election fraud charges against two Milwaukee men accused of falsifying voter applications in Racine and Kenosha.
With fears of voter fraud on the rise, the charges are the first in the area filed in connection with Tuesday's election, but prosecutors are also probing voter registration irregularities in Milwaukee.
Michael Nieskes, the deputy district attorney in Racine County, said his investigation of the work of Project Vote in Racine did not indicate a coordinated effort to commit voting fraud at the polls. Project Vote's bonus pay for meeting quotas likely motivated the two men to falsify voter registration applications, he said.
Nieskes warned, however, "that if other individuals were going to take advantage" of phony registrations in the voting booths, they should be aware that officials will be watching.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the Journal Sentinel reviewed some of the 2,700 addresses of people who have been added to Racine's list of registered voters since June 1 and found 25 that do not exist. It could not be determined whether Project Vote submitted any of those voter registration applications.
Project Vote, a national non-profit group headed by the former head of the Ohio Democratic Party, is among several non-profit groups that have run large-scale voter registration drives in southeastern Wisconsin.
The group filed about 1,900 voter registration applications in Racine - though some were rejected as incomplete - and says it has registered 30,000 voters in Racine, Milwaukee and Kenosha.
Last week, the Journal Sentinel reported that two of Project Vote's workers in Milwaukee are felons on probation, which makes it illegal for them to register voters.
Project Vote's Racine-Kenosha voter registration drives were led by Damien Jones until last month, when he was fired after irregularities in voter registration applications found by the Racine city clerk's office.
Jones, 24, a former Racine resident, is the Green Party's candidate running Tuesday against state Rep. Annette Polly Williams (D-Milwaukee) in the 10th Assembly District.
Both Jones and Project Vote worker Robert Marquise Blakely, 23, of the 4200 block of W. Highland Ave., are charged with four counts of felony election fraud, each of which carries a maximum prison term of 31/2 years, and five misdemeanor counts of misconduct in public office.
The misdemeanors were filed because both men were certified by Racine as deputy registrars, swearing an oath to work honestly as they registered people to vote.
Deputy registrars, who get some training from local election clerks, are important in the process of registering voters because election clerks generally process applications submitted by registrars without seeing any proof of identification from the person being registered.
By contrast, the election clerks must obtain proof of identification from people whose registration applications are submitted by people who are not deputy registrars. Workers had a quota
According to the criminal complaint filed in Racine County Circuit Court:
Blakely and three other Project Vote workers who were certified by Racine as deputy registrars told a sheriff's investigator that Jones told them to sign voter registration applications that had been filled out by Project Vote workers who were not deputy registrars.
State law prohibits deputy registrars from signing voter registration applications unless they personally filled them out or witnessed them being filled out.
The workers also told the investigator that Jones had pressured them to meet a quota of completing at least 25 voter registration applications per day. The workers were paid $49 per day plus $1.50 for each application beyond the quota.
Blakely also told the investigator that, to meet the quota, he completed voter registration applications by taking names from a phone book.
Project Vote's Milwaukee office referred calls to West Bend lawyer Waring Fincke, who said he could not comment because he had not seen the charges.
Also Thursday, the Racine County district attorney's office said it has had difficulty proving allegations by a Michigan organization that Racine members of Voces de la Frontera, a group that aids migrant workers, committed any violations in registering voters.
The Federation for Immigration Reform alleged that two of its members posed as people who are not eligible to vote who then worked through Voces de la Frontera to register voters in Racine and Milwaukee.
The district attorney's office said in a statement that an audiotape from FAIR purporting to document the violations is difficult to hear and contains "no clear evidence that a crime was committed."
Erica Maley of the Journal Sentinel staff, and Journal Sentinel correspondents Mary Jo Diem and Andy Turner contributed to this report.
From the Oct. 29, 2004, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
How Democrats Steal Elections - Top 10 Methods of Liberal Vote Fraud
1. Over-Voting. In Democrat strongholds like St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit, some precincts had 100% of their registered voters voting, with 99% of the ballots going to Gore. Clearly, multiple voting resulted in extra tallies for Gore in the 2000 election. (New York Post, 12/09/00).
2. Dead Voters. This classic Democratic method of vote fraud goes all the way back to 1960 in Chicago and Dallas. The 2000 election was no exception. In Miami-Dade County, for example, some of the 144 ineligible votes (those which officials actually admitted to) were cast by dead people, including a Haitian-American who's been deceased since 1977 (Miami-Herald, 12/24/00).
3. Mystery Voters. These "voters" cast votes anyway but are not even registered to vote. In heavily Democratic Broward County, for example, more than 400 ballots were cast by non-registered voters. (Miami-Herald 1/09/01)
4. Military ballots. Many of these votes were disqualified for the most mundane and trivial reasons. At least 1,527 valid military ballots were discarded in Florida by Democratic vote counters (Drudge Report, 11/19/00).
5. Criminals. Felons are a natural Democratic voter and they're protected on voter rolls across the country. In Florida at least 445 ex-convicts - including rapists and murderers -- voted illegally on November 7th. Nearly all of them were registered Democrats. (Miami-Herald 12/01/00)
6. Illegal aliens. These voters have long been a core liberal constituency, especially in California. In Orange County in 1996, Rep. Bob Dornan had his congressional seat stolen from him when thousands of illegal aliens voted for Loretta Sanchez (Christian Science Monitor, 9/2/97).
7. Vote-buying. Purchasing votes has long been a traditional scheme by Democrats, and not just with money. In the 2000 election in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Democratic workers initiate a "smokes-for-votes" campaign in which they paid dozens of homeless men with cigarettes if they cast ballots for Al Gore (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 11/14/00).
8. Phantom Voters. These voters don't really exist, but their ballots do. In the 1996 Lousiana Senate race, GOP candidate Woody Jenkins had the election stolen from him when he discovered that 7,454 actual votes were cast but had no paper trail to authenticate them (Behind the Headlines, F.R. Duplantier, 4/27/97).
9. Dimpled chads. Those infamous punch-cards were a ballot bonanza for Al Gore. Democratic poll workers in Palm Beach, Dade and Broward counties tampered and manipulated thousands of ineligible ballots and counted them for Gore, even though no clear vote could be discerned. (NewsMax.com 11/27, 12/22, 11/18, 11/19/00).
10. Absentee ballots. Normally it's assumed that Republicans benefit from absentee ballots. But in the case of Miami's 1997 mayoral election, hundreds of absentee ballots were made for sale or sent out to non-Miami residents. Fraud was so extensive in the race that the final results were overturned in court (FL Dept. of Law Enforcement Report, 1/5/98)."
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WE MUST FIGHT VOTE FRAUD!
We are at a ground war in this state and we are at least getting the attention of the RATS. Keep calling officials and elections boards with your concerns over fraud in this state. Let them know you are wary of their old ways. I know that people in Wisconsin have too long associated vote fraud with our neighbor to the south and thought that we were above that. But it is Wisconsin officials allowing them to come here and vote.
Suggestion: Everyone should take one of those cheap throwaway cameras with them to the polls and actually take or pretend to take pictures of the commies standing around with demonrat signs. Then inform them you're turning their picture over to your State Attorney General. Should be great fun! Get em all lathered up.
Sounds like fun, but the Wisconsin Attorney General is a female king Rat and not interested in voter integrity. She sues electric companies for burning fossil fuel to make necessary electricity as it creates CO2. She is a demented greenie.
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