Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy ~ John Fund

The Florida Fiasco of 2000, with hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, forced Americans to confront an ugly reality. The U.S. has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.

In Stealing Elections, John Fund takes the reader on a national tour of voter fraud scandals ranging from rural states like Texas and Mississippi to big cities such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He explores dark episodes such as the way "vote brokers" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how, in the aftermath of the Motor Voter Law of 1993, Californians used mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets, while in St. Louis it was discovered that voter rolls included 13,000 more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of adults in the city.

Election officials try to reassure voters by turning to computerized voting machines. But Fund shows that with the new technology come even greater concerns. Early in 2004, for instance, the state of Maryland, which has 16,000 new Diebold machines, commissioned a security expert to try to rig a practice election. He and his team broke into the computer at the State Board of Elections, completely changed the outcome of the election, left, and erased their electronic trail—all in under five minutes.

Stealing Elections gives us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability—in the 2004 presidential election and on into the future. Writing with urgency and authority, John Fund shows how a lethal combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging have put our democracy at risk.

John Fund is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board and writes the paper's daily Political Diary. He has written on voter fraud and election irregularities for the last decade in the Wall Street Journal, New Republic, American Spectator and other publications. In the past year, Fund has made over 90 appearances on Fox News, MSNBC, C-Span, and CNBC.

After finally getting a Republican into our Attorney General's office here in Alabama, AG (now federal Judge) Pryor sent postcards to every registered voter (they had a brief message on them to the effect of "Mrs. So n So is a Registered Voter at this address, please call xxx-xxxx if she is no longer living there").

You see, where you *live* matters. You vote in your precinct, for your state. You have to be a resident in both your precinct and your state.

Well, thousands upon thousands of those postcards came back with phony addresses or that no one by that name lived there. The postman had just done our voter validation for us.

We then purged our voter registration rolls of everyone whose postcard came back with an invalid address.

Republicans have owned this state ever since.

All for the price of sending out postcards. Oh, and last year we started requiring photo ID's to vote.

So it's safe to say that Alabama will go Republican again this year. We've killed voter fraud.

You can too. Hey, everyone can be as savvy as Alabamaians, right?!

5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

Several years ago, brothers James and Kenneth Collier published a book name VoteScam - The Stealing of America. before these two guys were lefties until they started their investigation. I remember a story where they found pre-printed ballots in a warehouse rented by a Miami, Florida political candidate. The Colliers made the mistake of reporting this case to the authorities. Guess who the local State's Attorney was - Janet Reno. She had them thrown in jail and investigated. Their web site can be found at www.votescam.com.

An interesting summary of the Colliers brothers' crusade was written by their daughter/niece Victoria Collier and can be found here.

Yes, that's true about most absentee ballots...but that's not where the major voting fraud occurs. After all, unless the election is close, absentee ballots aren't even counted.

The #1 area for fraud is auto-voting. That's where someone else votes for you. You know, like when you don't bother to vote in an election. Lots of people don't vote, so just after the polls close you'll sometimes have corrupt poll watchers filling out a huge stack of ballots. They can do this for as many people as there were who didn't show up that day. They then mark the polling records to show that you and everyone else who didn't show up...voted.

So if there are 550 registered voters in a given precinct who didn't show up to vote, the corrupt poll watchers can fill out up to 550 ballots and then mark each of you as having voted. In this manner someone votes for you if you didn't bother to show up to vote. This grows more pronounced as more people in said precinct move away or die, since they aren't going to show up to vote there ever again. Ditto for having bogus voters registered in that precinct.

Even the most corrupt precinct is limited in how many fraudulent ballots can be cast. This number can't exceed the number of registered voters on the rolls for that precinct, minus the number of people who actually *did* show up to vote (at least, they can't do it without inviting suspicion and official inquiries).

So for that reason alone it makes sense to clean and verify your voting registration rolls often. A simple postcard goes a great distance to that end, too. Such non-forwardable postcards filter out people who have moved, and the postman often catches mail to multiple voters at one residence, dead recipients, and bogus addresses. It isn't foolproof, but it cuts down on the limits of voter fraud.

Requiring a picture ID cuts out ghost-voting, where 1 person pretends to be several other registered "voters," but that's a very small part of overall voter fraud...although it does reduce the amount of illegal alien voting, which might be substantial in some areas.

Combine three things: reliable poll watchers who remain vigilant near the ballot boxes until the bitter end, postcards mailed to all registered voters to clean up the voter registration rolls, and picture id's at the polling booth and you've cut down on the major areas of traditional voter fraud.

How the new computerized voting factors in to this business is yet to be seen, however. Perhaps we'll automate the sending of checksum verifiable voting reciepts to each person who votes such that your vote is still private but that fraud can still be detected.

5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires

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Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy

By John Fund