OK. I'll bite. What did he do?
It’s a she. She is Connie Cochran, the sister-in-law of Thad Cochran and she just happens to be the election commissioner for Hinds County and Perry County, two counties that are at the heart of the scandal.
It’s a long read but very worth it. It was published last Friday by Matthew Boyle in Breitbart News and somehow got on the short attention span of FR maybe because it is so long and involved. But it is chock loaded with information on the ground. And it’s a different level of scandal, one that explains how all the illegal votes were allowed in the first place. We’ve heard of the illegal vote buying, but the followup question is how many of bought votes were there and if they were not eligible to vote, how in hell did they get counted. How they got counted is answered by this piece in Breitbart News:
It’s important to grasp what it means when they say there was a failure to ‘switch the books’. Here I include a pertinent section which is still long:
In an interview with Breitbart News on Thursday, McInnis—the Hinds County Democrats’ top official—said that Perry asked Democrats to help him “break the law” by working together to accept Democratic voters who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary and in Tuesday’s GOP runoff.
Charging that Perry “has never ran a legal election in this state” because “he was never qualified by the Secretary of State’s office,” McInnis alleged that Perry asked him and county Democrats not to share records of who voted in each primary on June 3. The practice—called “switching the books”—is where, heading into a runoff, Democrats and Republicans swap poll books that list which voters voted in the respective parties’ recent primaries.
To start a primary, since Mississippi doesn’t technically have party registration, Democrats and Republicans each begin with their own lists of all registered voters. As voters cast ballots, poll workers write “VOTED” next to the names of people who vote in their primaries. If the process heads to a runoff in either or both parties’ primaries, the Democrats switch their books with Republicans and vice versa so poll workers in the runoffs can ensure nobody who voted in the Democratic primary votes in the GOP runoff and vice versa.
“The Democrats get the Republican book and the Republicans get the Democrat book to protect against crossover voting,” McInnis said. “In Mississippi and a lot of other states, if you voted in the Republican primary, you must only vote in the Republican runoff; you can’t switch.”
McInnis alleged in an interview with Breitbart News that Connie Cochran, Sen. Cochran’s sister-in-law and the Perry and Hinds County election commissioner, asked local Democrats not to switch the poll books.
“In the state of Mississippi, you have to take steps to prevent crossover voting,” McInnis said. “If you voted Democrat in the Democratic primary, you can’t vote in the Republican runoff. The way we protect that is we switch the poll books. Pete Perry and Connie Cochran, who’s the chair of the election commission, called us and asked us not to switch the books—which is a clear violation of the law.”
McInnis told Breitbart News he personally witnessed at least one Hinds County precinct—Precinct 16—where the books had not been switched during the runoff day. “I went out to a precinct to make sure the laws were being followed, and I got there at about 4 o’clock p.m.,” McInnis said. “They had not switched the books, under the influence of the young Republican and Democratic workers there. I demanded that they switch these books immediately. The Democratic poll manager there switched the books at 4 o’clock that evening.”
McInnis said he thinks Perry engaged in this practice throughout the entire county, but he can’t be sure because Democrats were only allowed inside 15 of the county’s 109 precincts on election day. Two Democrat candidates for the U.S. House third congressional district in Mississippi headed to a runoff, and while Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) represents most of Hinds County, the third congressional district has 15 precincts inside Hinds County.
“I think this was county-wide, but we only had 15 precincts because we only had a small runoff in a very small part of the county; we only had 15 precincts in the eastern part of the county,” McInnis said. “The rest of the county had only the Republican runoff, so we had no authority to go to Republican polling places and do anything about it. But in the places we could, we did—because we did not want to be accused of anything with the Republican Party.”
When asked how Perry could have succeeded in not switching the books—since he and other Democrats refused to cooperate with his request on the grounds that they believed it was illegal—McInnis replied that he worked with Sen. Cochran’s sister-in-law—the election commissioner in Hinds County—to get the job done. “Connie Cochran is the election commissioner,” McInnis said.
“I can’t tell you if he did this at all the precincts, but I can tell you at the precincts I went to, they didn’t switch the books. I know one woman at one precinct where she had voted in the Democratic primary, but she also was allowed to vote in the Republican runoff. It happened at more than one precinct.”
McInnis and his fellow Hinds County Democratic Executive Committee member, Chairwoman Jacqueline Amos-Norris, provided Breitbart News with email evidence that Perry and Connie Cochran were trying to not “switch the books” on runoff day. “Connie, unless I send you something in writing, it does not exist,” Norris wrote to Connie Cochran in the email dated June 18, six days before the runoff. “Claude informed me of what Pete said to you about the Poll Books and that’s not true and not legal. If I need to come down, please let me know.”
What supposedly happened, according to McInnis and Norris, is that Perry told Connie Cochran that McInnis agreed to not switch the books. McInnis and Norris both said that isn’t and wasn’t true, which was why Norris sent that email to Connie Cochran to inform her that it was not true.
“She stated that she told him it wasn’t going to happen, and that was the end of it,” Norris told Breitbart News.
Before this email exchange and this interview with McInnis was published, Perry told local news outlet MS News Now that he did switch the books. “It’s the easiest way for a poll worker to be able to look and see,” explained Perry. “Instead of printing out a list that you’ve got to work from the list, when I look up your name I can look right there and tell if you voted in the Democratic primary.”
In his statement, Perry reiterated that Hinds County had switched the poll books:
To help prevent mistakes, the Republican and Democrat parties switch the poll books for each precinct for a run-off. Since we don’t register by political party in Mississippi, the poll books list all voters. The theory of switching the poll books is that if a Republican poll worker is using the book that was used by the Democrats in the first election, then when a voter comes to vote in the Republican run-off, the poll worker can quickly see if the voter’s name is checked as having voted in the first Democrat primary.
Cole, the state Democrats’ chairman, said it really wasn’t the end of it because Perry somehow managed not to switch the books in several precincts across the county. “We have no way of knowing how many it happened at because we didn’t have the authority to go into most of the precincts in Hinds County,” Cole said, noting that because of the fact that the third congressional district was happening in just 15 Hinds County precincts, the Democrats only saw what happened there.
Cole also said that he thinks not switching the books could “absolutely” have happened in scores of Mississippi’s 82 counties and more than 1,800 precincts. “This process had to be honored in every precinct in Mississippi, all more than 1,800 precincts”:
If I were doing the inquiry into this election, I would want to compare the June 3 Democratic poll books in every precinct with the June 24 Republican poll books in every precinct. That’s the only way to know whether there was any crossover or not. None of this is done electronically. This is all on paper. We don’t have electronic poll books yet in any county in Mississippi. So if any Republican runoff poll workers either didn’t have the Democratic poll books from June 3, or didn’t use the Democratic poll books from June 3, there would have been no way for them to have known whether a voter voted in the first Democratic primary or not.
McInnis also alleged that Perry personally illicitly decided which absentee ballots in Hinds County would be allowed and which ones would not: “This is a thing that’s supposed to happen at the precincts. But we watched him decide which absentees would be voted and which absentees were not going to be voted. He also decided which affidavits would be voted and which ones would not. We watched him do that. We watched them break the law.”