Posted on 12/11/2005 8:02:47 AM PST by Sybeck1
The concrete steps lead from the street up a terrace to where a house once stood, where rolling brown grass now covers an empty lot.
This was the North Memphis home of Joe L. Light, a renowned folk artist who lost the property in foreclosure five years ago and wound up in a nursing home.
Yet someone claiming to be Light gave this address -- 607 Looney Avenue -- and voted in the September special election that put Ophelia Ford in the state Senate by a razor-thin margin.
There's an even bigger problem -- Light died on Aug. 6, six weeks before the election.
Somehow, records show, someone signed his name the day of the Sept. 15 election in the poll book at the North Memphis precinct where Light was registered to vote.
As a Senate committee prepares for a hearing Monday in Memphis to review challenger Terry Roland's bid to overturn the election because of alleged voting irregularities, the case has taken a new tone.
"There's so much question as to the whole process (of the special election), the feds should step in and look at it,'' said John Harvey, a volunteer who's heading the Roland campaign's investigation of the returns.
Roland, a Republican, lost the Dist. 29 senate seat by 13 votes in a race in which 8,750 ballots were cast.
Election officials already have conceded that three convicted felons and a voter registered outside Dist. 29 improperly voted in the contest.
Harvey said he's found as many as 69 people, including Light, who cast ballots that shouldn't count. Most are people who don't live at addresses given in voter registration records, he said.
Reviewing Harvey's list, The Commercial Appeal discovered that Light had died weeks before the election, yet his signature showed up in the poll book at Precinct 27-1 near his old home on Looney.
The poll book is the official record that voters sign when they show up at a polling place to cast a ballot on Election Day.
Harvey said he now suspects election fraud.
Shelby County Election Commission Chairman Greg Duckett agreed the development is serious.
"If (a dead person voted), then we have a major issue that we need to turn over to the District Attorney,'' Duckett said. As the commission did when it learned that three felons had voted, this matter will be referred for a criminal investigation, he said.
Still, Duckett said he believes the incident to be isolated and said he doesn't see grounds for overturning the election.
"You'd have to have a conspiracy the size of JFK'' to have widespread fraud, he said.
Duckett was one of three Democratic election commissioners who, overriding objectsions from two Republican commissioners, voted to certify Ford's 13-vote victory on Sept. 26.
Three days later, Ford, 55, took the oath of office, minutes after state election officials also certified the results.
Then in October, Senate Speaker John Wilder, a Democrat, appointed a six-member committee -- three Democrats and three Republicans -- to investigate continuing GOP complaints of voting irregularities.
Any finding by the committee is crucial because the full Senate must vote whether to seat Ford or Roland, 44. They're vying for the seat vacated by Ford's brother John Ford, who resigned in May after his indictment on bribery charges.
As Roland has pressed his election contest -- in a Chancery Court suit, in a pitch to the commission, and now before the Senate -- Duckett has grown increasingly impatient.
Elections auditors found no substantial irregularities, Duckett said, and state law limits the time and way in which a voter's residence can be challenged.
The accepted practice is to do it on election night, and that's why political parties typically deploy poll watchers to polling sites, Duckett said.
"They're trying to rewrite the processes,'' he said.
Harvey, who works as a lieutenant for the Sheriff's Office, said it's impractical to challenge residency solely on election night. He said he's logged countless hours on numbers of search engines and databases to tabulate his findings.
One of those searches led him to Joe Light.
A review by the newspaper found that Light, a painter whose works are in the Smithsonian Institution and in private collections of celebrities Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, lost his home at 607 Looney in a 2000 foreclosure.
Light later spent time in a nursing home before dying of colon cancer. He was 70.
After the foreclosure the house eventually was condemned and razed in an urban renewal effort.
Light drifted through the community, and after his wife, Rosie Lee, died in 2003, he spent time in a nursing home, said art collector Craig Wiener, a friend.
Relatives listed in Lights' Aug. 9 obituary couldn't be reached.
A pleading filed last week with the Senate by Roland attorneys Lang Wiseman and Richard Fields contends that state law requires voters to live not just in the district but in the precinct where they are registered in order for their vote to count.
The pleading alleges that improper votes cast in the special election include one by Ms. Ford's nephew, Isaac Ford, who keeps a home in East Memphis, miles outside Dist. 29.
Citing improper residence, unsigned ballot applications and other irregularities, the pleading contends that at least 59 votes were improperly cast. The Senate should nullify the election and, at a minimum, call for a new election, the pleading says.
By Friday, Harvey said that number had grown to 69 and includes local radio talk show host and sometimes political candidate Jennings Bernard.
Reached by phone, Bernard conceded he's lived for years in Parkway Village outside Dist. 29, but said he lists his home in voter registration records inside the district in North Memphis, where he grew up, owns property and identifies with its people and concerns.
Regardless, Bernard said his vote wouldn't affect the race's outcome because he voted for eccentric businessman Robert 'Prince Mongo' Hodges, who says he's from the planet Zambodia. "He was the better candidate,'' Bernard said.
-- Marc Perrusquia: 529-2545
Copyright 2005, commercialappeal.com - Memphis, TN. All Rights Reserved.
Gee, ya think?
...and more than once.
What a shock. The sibling of a known crook turns out to be crooked. While you get the occassional republican bad apple, democrats tend to come in rotten barrels.
"I think you can add to this mess the fact that ALL college students attending school out of their home town are ripe for double voting. Once at school- absentee at their home address."
Don't know about anyplace else, but IIRC, to vote here, college students have to declare residency, and pay taxes, etc. Then they still aren't eligible for residential tuition rates if they became residents to attend school. For most of them, it isn't worth it.
This is news? The dead vote all the time in Philly, which is why we have Democrat Ed Rendell as governor and Kerry carried the state.
So true. Dems control the election commission...need I say more?
Dead Democrats in Starr Co., Texas, voted LBJ into the US Senate...and they even voted in alphabetical order. The ballot box, #13 of course, was discovered two days after the election. This is the traditional Democrat way of winning elections in TX, IL, LA, NJ, WA etc.
607 Looney Avenue
That should have been their first clue!
Wrong!
On Dec 12 ex-President Bill Clinton helped Harold Ford Jr raise more than $300,000 at an event held in NYC. Ford has raised more than $2 million mostly from out-of-state sources.
Then he didn't tick off Hillary, but someone in the democratic party does not like him.
And he ticked someone off, because they have been trying to screw with him lately.
You are right. The San Francisco crowd is annoyed because of Ford's prior vote regarding marriage.
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