Vote Early, Vote Often

While voter fraud is not new in this nation, it seems to be gathering steam in recent years with the absentee voting explosion, loosened voting registration requirements and fewer controls, not to mention the enormous incentives for successful practitioners.

A scant 87 votes changed the course of world history in 1948. Out of one million votes cast, an 87-vote margin caused a young Texas congressman named Lyndon Baines Johnson to become a United States senator. What the history books neglect to tell us is that, but for widespread vote buying and shameless ballot box stuffing in the corrupt barrios of South Texas, LBJ would not have become a senator, then vice president and ultimately president. The rest is history.

In the fall of 1948, my grandfather, J.K. Ray, was working at the San Antonio office of the Alcohol Tax Unit when he received a phone call from Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. My grandfather and Hamer had worked on the infamous Bonnie and Clyde case years earlier and trusted each other implicitly.

My grandfather joined Hamer on a mission that took them to Alice, Texas, to look into reports of voter fraud that marked the famed Senate race between former Gov. Coke Stevenson and LBJ. The corruption and voter fraud they witnessed is well documented in Robert Caro's award winning biography entitled Means of Ascent.

When they arrived at a bank in Alice, my grandfather and Hamer found it surrounded by armed pistoleros, thugs, and other assorted henchmen committed to an LBJ victory. With guns brandished, Hamer and my grandfather, who were not small men, made their way through the crowd and into the building. They discovered men burning ballots and altering the voter rolls. According to my grandfather, he witnessed the crux of the scam that permitted sympathetic sheriff's deputies and election officials to steal the election for LBJ.

Even direct vote buying reared its ugly head that year when LBJ allies at the government-contract dependent Brown and Root construction firm spread a bundle of money across South Texas. To hear my grandfather tell it, Hispanics in selected South Texas precincts were paid $5 each for their votes.

While pages out of history like these may make for great family lore and political intrigue, sadly, the plague of voter fraud is very much alive and well. Indeed, it still thrives to this day.

One favorite example took place during John F. Kennedy's pivotal victory in the 1960 presidential primary in West Virginia. No less an authority than former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, D-Mass., recalls that one of Daddy Joe Kennedy's bagmen went through West Virginia with pockets stuffed with cash. He would visit sheriffs doling out thousands of dollars with the promise of more money should the county end up in Kennedy's column.

Then, of course, there are the mafia-union payoffs that led to the unprecedented ballot box stuffing in Mayor Daley's Chicago giving JFK his razor thin, winning margin over Nixon in 1960's general election. The scandal is so infamous that there is now a standard joke on the rubber chicken circuit for candidates that goes, "I want to be buried in Chicago so that I can stay politically active after I die."

While motor voter programs, early voting schedules, and Internet voting plans offer convenience for today's busy, on-the-go voter, the increased opportunity for fraud is undeniable. Currently, 47 states do not require any form of identification to vote. It practically takes an act of Congress and a blood sample to write a check these days, but voting on Election Day requires only the utterance or mere presentation of a name and address, any name and address will do, to cast a ballot.

To be sure, modern day election rigging takes all forms from the absurd to the sublime.

North Carolina, for example, has been the locale for a variety of unscrupulous games in recent years. A 1996 state senate race and a 1998 state house race actually had to be redone with special elections when egregious irregularities could no longer be ignored. Several board of elections supervisors have been forced to resign, fired, indicted and even imprisoned. Just last week, a Democrat city councilman in Dunn was indicted on 11 counts of election fraud.

Consider the 1990 U.S. Senate race between Senator Jesse Helms, Republican-North Carolina, and Democrat Harvey Gantt. Democrat lawyers went so far as to find a liberal, black Democrat Superior Court Judge who ordered predominantly black precincts in Greensboro and Durham to be held open for several hours after all the other polls closed. After church buses bearing the words A.M.E. Zion on their sides delivered full loads of voters, Gantt still couldn't muster the votes he needed to win. But the damage was done. Two Republican statewide judicial candidates narrowly lost their races because of the illegal votes that were thrown in the mix.

Also in North Carolina, Cleveland County election officials only recently discovered that a 14-year-old chocolate Labrador has been on the voter rolls for over a decade. He's even gotten votes in his two candidacies for mayor of Kings Mountain. Perhaps he would have fared better had he run for dogcatcher instead.

The Democrat party of North Carolina has not quite cornered the market on voter fraud, however. In 1990, the North Carolina legislature made it a crime to intimidate voters after the North Carolina GOP mailed postcards to hundreds of thousands of black voters telling them they would go to prison if they voted improperly. Indeed, to this day, the Republican Party of North Carolina continues the shameful tradition of the poll tax by illegally charging for convention participation via registration fees.

Bogus absentee ballots became commonplace in Miami's municipal races. In 1998, the abuses caused the Florida Court of Appeals to take the extraordinary step of removing the Republican mayor and installing his opponent. In this case, 46 people were indicted, 12 were convicted. Incidents of fraud included forged signatures, voting more than once, and fictitious names and addresses on absentee ballots.

In the 1996 race for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, Democrat Mary Landrieu beat Republican Louis "Woody" Jenkins amidst charges of vote purchasing, multiple voting and the casting of fraudulent votes. An investigation revealed that "large-scale violations of federal and state election law have occurred."

Attorneys for Woody Jenkins put together more than 8,000 pages of affidavits and exhibits, alleging 7,454 illegal or "phantom" votes. Although the effort was impressive, Jenkins still lost the election by 5,788 votes out of more than 1.7 million votes cast.

In the 1994 Maryland gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Ellen R. Sauerbrey lost a very tight race against Democrat Parris N. Glendening. Interestingly, Sauerbrey lost by exactly 6,000 votes. The Sauerbrey campaign cited numerous cases of substantial voter fraud, but fell short in their challenge.

This year's election cycle is no different. Evidence of widespread irregularities and abuses continues to pour in from across the nation.

Vote selling on the Internet became a hot commodity this year. "Nader-Traders" sought to pledge their votes for Gore in competitive states in exchange for Gore supporters casting their votes for Nader in states Gore would almost certainly win. Voteauction.com ran into legal troubles when it provided a forum for more than 15,000 people to sell their votes to the highest bidder. It truly boggles the mind to imagine that the direct purchase of voting rights is still with us today.

Democrat backed "motor voter" legislation has given rise to the appearance of millions of phantom voters on the voter rolls across the country. The prohibition of periodic voter purges means dead people, convicted felons and people who have moved pollute the pool of genuine eligible voters.

Consider what happened in St. Louis this past Tuesday. Taking a page out of Harvey Gantt's playbook, Congressman Dick Gephardt's former chief of staff-turned-judge pulled off a fantastic stunt. The judge kept the polls open until midnight Tuesday night so that Democrat-heavy precincts could turn out the vote. Voila! Senator John Ashcroft and gubernatorial nominee Jim Talent came up a little short when all the votes were tallied. Can litigation be far away?

In New Jersey, the pay was better for the homeless. In a stunning new twist in electioneering, Senator-elect Jon Corzine invented a new jobs program even before he's sworn in. In a $2 million effort to "get out the vote," Corzine "hired" numerous homeless individuals and drug addicts.

In Broward County, Fla., several ballot boxes "disappeared." Just disappeared. Unlike 1948, the ballot boxes reappeared.

Numerous reports from across the country reveal an all out effort to register convicts to vote. In a particularly innovative twist, even those not yet convicted of felonies, but incarcerated and awaiting trial dates were registered in droves.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service in Florida conveniently established a program entitled the "Backlog Reduction Program" in which INS examiners were given an extra 40 hours paid time off and other bonuses for expediting the naturalization process for illegal aliens and reaching specified numeric goals. The "goals" of the program had to be met between October 1, 1999, and October 1, 2000. In Florida, a new citizen can register to vote up to October 10. Thousands of aliens, many with criminal backgrounds, were rushed through the citizenship process and registered to vote. The list goes on.

The ramification of election irregularities and outright voter fraud is an increasingly cynical voting public. As noble and lovely as it may sound, campaign finance reform is not going to fix this part of the system. The liberal media continues to stop the presses over the mere mention of campaign finance reform by Bradley, McCain and Nader. They would be well served instead, to focus the public's attention on the most dangerous threat to the very essence of democracy. Voter fraud poses a far greater threat to the republic than people exercising free speech with their own money.

We send armies of election watchers across the globe to Third World countries and feel superior in our democratic evolution. But we would be better served to take a close look at our own election shenanigans lest we become a banana republic. If professional poll watcher Jimmy Carter is really looking for election fraud, he need not buy a plane ticket abroad. We have plenty right here at home.

http://thnt.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051027/NEWS/510270431/1001
Absentee votes encouraged

Home News Tribune Online 10/27/05

(snip)

With a new state law essentially allowing any registered voter to make choices using an absentee ballot, the campaigns for both U.S. Sen. Jon S. Corzine, D-N.J., and Republican Doug Forrester have pushed to get out the vote early.

Absentee ballots can be mailed in before Election Day and can help the candidates compile votes without even making their supporters head to the polls Nov. 8.

(snip)

Corzine has talked about absentee voting on the campaign trail, and his campaign has used phone banks, direct mail and his Web site to encourage absentee voters.

"It's definitely a key effort for us," said Corzine spokeswoman Ivette Mendez. "We're looking for folks that we think would support Jon Corzine, and our support is not only coming from the Democratic Party."

(snip)

Absentee Ballots:

Report On The April 1, 2003, Mail In Election, Colorado Springs, Colorado
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-59.htm#springs

Problem summary

An election run by city officials who can't even add is a mockery of liberty.

• Claims by the Colorado Springs City Clerk that mail in elections would increase voter turnout were based on bogus arithmetic and phony statistics.

• According to the El Paso County Clerk's office 138,473 electors voted in the November 2002 election and were therefore counted as "active" by the standard used in this election. The City of Colorado Springs Canvass Board memorandum gives a value of 141,614 active voters. Only "active" voters were mailed ballots. It is unknown why at least 3,141 additional ballots were mailed to apparently "inactive" voters, or who those individuals are. More than three thousand ballots mailed to selected voters might easily sway any election.

• According to the El Paso County Clerk's office there were 222,691 registered voters in the City of Colorado Springs at the time of the election but the Canvass Board memorandum indicates 141,614 active registered electors were mailed ballots. Therefore, 81,077 citizens, or more than one-third of the registered voters, were effectively disenfranchised, and this is permitted by current state law.

• According to the Canvass Board Memorandum there were a total of 142,194 ballots issued. However, the Election Verification Totals indicates there were 148,609 ballots issued (88,879 processed plus 59,730 unreturned).

• According to the Election Verification Totals Report 82,463 ballots were scanned. Yet the Daily Totals show 97,620 ballots scanned, a difference of 15,157 ballots. Which number is correct?

• In proposing a mail in election to the city council the city clerk claimed that such an election would save $100,000. In the event it was shown that projected cost saving was based on not mailing some 81,000 ballots to registered voters. However, actual cost accounting for the election is not yet available. A false promise of cost saving was also made in the November 2001 mail in election in El Paso County that did not materialize due to "unanticipated expenses."

• Ballot secrecy was compromised by opening ballot envelopes and examining ballots at the same table by two election judges. All election procedures were directed by the City Clerk and election judges "interpreted" the voter's intent on an unknown number of ballots and "duplicated" those ballots out of sight of poll watchers before the remarked replacement ballot was counted.

• According to the Election Verification Totals Report no challenged ballot was counted. In a mail in election a voter has no recourse when their ballot is challenged and no way to know if their vote was counted. The problem is exacerbated because the judges knew who cast the ballot they challenged.

• At least 53,254 ballots simply disappeared, though the Election Verification Totals report states the number as 59,730. One is left guessing as to the fate of thousands of ballots.

• A pre-election press demonstration revealed a serious programming error by Diebold Election Systems, whom the city clerk contracted to run the election, that didn't count the votes on the tax issue. No known tests or checks were made for other possible computer errors.

• Even the simplest election arithmetic contains inexplicable errors, many of which are tabulated here.

More On 'Mail In Elections'
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-59.htm#shouldbe

Ballot tracking

A fundamental requirement for stuffing a ballot box is to have a ballot. As a consequence election officials have long had established practices for tracking every ballot from the time it was printed until a specified period, usually at least twenty-two months, after an election. 2

A mail in election makes ballot tracking impossible and from the Election Verification Totals report we learn that 59,730 ballots were mailed that were not returned. So tens of thousands of ballots simply disappeared.

But there remains the problem that the election Canvass Board states on their memorandum of April 8 th that a total of 142, 194 ballots were issued. Clearly, the number of Total Processed Ballots (88,879), plus the Unreturned Ballots (59,730) on the EVT (total 148,609) should add up to the Total Ballots Issued (142,194) on the Canvass Board Memorandum, but they do not.

Since it is claimed on the EVT that 6,416 ballots were returned by the US Post Office as undeliverable (at a cost of $0.57 each), and 82,479 3 ballots were counted (81,709), challenged (668), or denied (102), then perhaps only 53,299 ballots disappeared (142,194 - 82,479 - 6,416 = 53,299)? Therefore, should the 59,730 value give on the EVT for Unreturned Ballots include the 6,000+ ballots that the post office did return?

It is also reasonable to question whether these 59,730, or 53,000-odd unreturned ballots were discarded by the voter or whoever received them? Did the voter never receive them, and if so why? Were any of these ballots voted and subsequently lost in the mail? Were any ballots intentionally intercepted as has been documented elsewhere? If they were intentionally intercepted, where and when: (a) before they were placed in the mail, (b) during their time in custody of the US Post Office, (c) after they were delivered to the City but before they were entered into the pollbook? I am deeply concerned about what evidence is available to prove what happened to these missing ballots?

In the end one is left guessing as to the fate of thousands of ballots! Are we supposed to believe that no election fraud is possible with such sloppy bookkeeping?

Further, no information is presently available on the total number of ballots printed, how many were not issued, how many replacement ballots were issued (though it is noted on the CBM that some were), or how many ballots were "duplicated" by election judges who were instructed to "interpret" the voter's intent.

2. The city clerk was obviously remiss in keeping track of ballots in this election as fourteen ballots that apparently had not been counted, or possibly they were, were found in a tray a couple of weeks after the election and after the election had been verified. However, the clerk delayed reporting these ballots for another couple of weeks to the city council and press.

3. The number of Total Scanned Ballots given as 82,463 on the EVT is obviously in error and probably should be 82,479, a difference of 16 ballots. However, there are so many other arithmetic errors that one has no idea which numbers are valid.

http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-7.htm#pgfId-1429718

How to steal an election
Vote early and vote often

Our election get-out-the-vote effort was pioneered by Mayor Richard Daley in 1960 when he stole the election from Richard Nixon.

1. Cemetery Voters: Read the obituaries every day. One must keep track of everyone who dies, so that they can be registered in the appropriate cemetery precinct. We have voters in the Mt. Olive Cemetery who have been voting for 100 years. Relatives will often assist as keeping the dead voter on the rolls also keeps the Social Security checks coming in. If you know of someone who used to live in Chicago and who died, they are still eligible to vote.

2. Homeless Voters: Register the homeless at the Cook County Courthouse instead of General Delivery. All they have to do is hang out at the courthouse one day a year to claim residency. Then round them up and give them free cigarettes to vote. We used to give them bottles of wine, but they couldn't remember to vote our way.

3. Nursing Home Voters: Early (or absentee) voting has greatly expanded our capabilities of increasing the turnout. Take bags full of early ballots to nursing homes, and get everyone in the home to vote...especially the Alzheimer's cases.

4. College Students: College kids like to screw the system, and they'll vote more than once just for the sheer pleasure of it.

5. Voters Who Have Moved: Voters who have moved often can vote in the precinct where they used to live, and then in their new precinct. They will not be on the rolls in the new precinct, so they'll vote a "Questioned Ballot". Not to worry. When the ballot is questioned after the election, we will have our political hacks permit the votes to be counted.

6. Voters Passing Through O'Hare: Many votes can be obtained by soliciting voter registration at our airports. They are legally residents of Chicago, at least for a few minutes.

7. Motor Voters: Take license plate numbers of out-of-state cars passing through on the freeways, run them through DMV to get their addresses, and automatically register them in Chicago. Then vote them. They won't know, since they actually live in Wyoming.

8. Illegal Aliens: Some of our most reliable voters are the thousands of illegal aliens we have in the city. In exchange for not telling INS where they live or work, one can get a solid block of votes.

9. Newborns: Our children are more and more precocious, so we register them at birth. Maternity wards are some of our best precincts.

10. Recount The Votes: In the unlikely event our candidates don't win the first count, then demand a recount. Fill the recount room with loyal supporters, and tow away the cars belonging to the enemy. If you can't win a recount, then you are not a Chicago Democrat.

Variants for the new millennium

As computer voting machines become more common with the new millennium there are naturally new ways being invented to manipulate elections.

• Don't give them machines: In the 2004 presidential race in the critical state of Ohio voters were required to vote on machines. However, very few voting machines were deployed in heavily Democratic black precincts. Thus, these voters had a choice of waiting in line for up to 8 hours, often in the rain, or not voting. Of course precincts in affluent neighborhoods had an overabundance of voting machines. The use of paper ballots would have obviated this problem but where is the profit in that?

• Default votes: Computer voting machines can be programmed in a manner such that if a voter doesn't choose a candidate or a position on an issue, i.e., undervotes, the computer gives their vote to a "default" candidate or issue of the programmer's choice. Since even in presidential races the undervote runs around 2%, such "default" votes can be enough to swing the race for a few bucks on the side to the programmer.

• Phantom voters: With Motor Voter and mail in registration forms it has become increasingly popular to submit as many voter registration forms as possible. Since there is no real need for these "voters" to actually exist except in the computer, anyone can vote as many of their alter egos as they would like.

• Forget the ballot box, stuff the central computer: It used to be that one had to go to considerable effort to get ballots, fill them out, and get them in the ballot box. But life with computers is much simpler. Go to the central computer and change the vote totals for a candidate to anything you want for the whole county in a couple of minutes

Introductory Comments On Voting Problems
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-3.htm#pgfId-1416370

Chapter 8 — Voting Problems In The 2002 Elections

There is nothing like a few real life examples of American voting to make you want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head. Largely ignoring the extensively documented problems of the 2000 presidential election, I've picked a few examples from 2002.

For starters, the Arkansas Secretary of State pled guilty, http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-80.htm#snippets , to taking bribes, evading taxes, and accepting kickbacks from what is now part of ES&S. Arkansas officials said the scheme involved...then-BRC employee Tom Eschberger...Eschberger got immunity from prosecution for his cooperation. Today, he's a top executive of Election Systems & Software, http://www.essvote.com/HTML/home.html .

There were the usual peccadilloes with electronic voting machines, which seem to repeat the same errors year-after-year as even known bugs aren't fixed. Of course, the problem is always with a faceless "technician," never the county clerk or, heaven forbid, the manufacturer bloated with the billions of taxpayer dollars being paid for these Game Boy voting machines.

The re-election of Jim Crow, http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-79.htm#felons , and problems in addition to those above, are reviewed in five essays in this chapter.

Milwaukee was the site of an interesting exercise in democracy. Gore campaign volunteers were caught on video distributing packs of cigarettes to homeless people after they'd been given rides to the polling places. Maybe Gore is getting his tobacco allotment back after all. The local district attorney is already conducting a criminal investigation as a result.

Tip of the iceberg! Our Governor Jim Doyle (WEAC-WI) had staffers go to nursing homes, adult care facilities, etc., so they could play bingo with the patients (Down's Syndrome, Alzheimers -- it just didn't matter!). The patients won shiny, cheap baubles. Baubles with a string attached: they had to vote for Governor shiny, cheap "Diamond" Jim. See, wasn't that easy?

Well, this next one was caught in time (Nov. 1, 2004). It isn't really "voter fraud," more like hi-jinx by spirited, fun-loving KIDS, silly! All they did is sneak into a secured parking lot *snicker* and slash a few dozen tires *giggle* so that the vehicles couldn't be used the next day to transport REPUBLICANS to vote. *chortle*

The problem here was that these "kids" ranged in age from 20 to 35. The problem here was that these "kids" were, for the most part, offspring of local Dimocrat elected officials.

The problem here is that I still haven't read of any prosecution of these "kids." Maybe they printed something and I missed it. (No, YOU check Sandy Burglar's pants for the documentation.)

Did I mention the purchasing done by the Teachers' Union (WEAC)? They bought themselves a shiny, cheap Governor.

Well, 2000 was just practice. Peanuts! Gov. "Bingo" Jim has been (or been having his staff) negotiate with Indian tribes. Never mind that it was supposed to be overseen by a state board that does that. But no! Millions of dollars were at stake. So much money that they have to go to the East Coast tribes to contribute to the DNC so that the money can be sent back to Wisconsin. So much money that the jackass DA in Texas should be ashamed for making such a big to-do over Tom Delay.

I could go on, but I won't....
*sigh*

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--officialcharged1110nov10,0,1666141.story?coll=ny-region-apnewjersey

Councilman indicted for tampering with absentee ballots

November 10, 2005, 7:39 PM EST

TRENTON, N.J. -- The state Attorney General's Office on Thursday announced the indictment of an Atlantic City councilman on charges of tampering with absentee ballots before the city's June 7 primary election for mayor and city council.

Marty L. Small, 31, has been charged with 10 counts of tampering with public records and one count of hindering or preventing voting.

(snip)

Small is accused of filing absentee ballot applications for 10 people. He represented himself as their "authorized messenger," when he had no such designation from the voters.

A registered voter in New Jersey has the option of having a person pick up their absentee ballot if they are unable to file for the ballot themselves.

Small faces a maximum of 55{ years in prison and $160,000 in fines if convicted, though such offenses often do not result in incarceration. Small would also have to forfeit his position on the city council and his job with the Atlantic City public schools.

(snip)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.