Fraud alleged

Republican Party officials accused Democrats of violating election rules at scattered sites around Colorado today, raising the specter of fraud in a hotly contested presidential state hours after the polls opened.

Dana Williams, administration director in the secretary of state's office, said there were no widespread reports of balloting problems or wrongdoing. Colorado has been closely watched by the national parties because the race between Kerry and President Bush has been unusually tight in this GOP-leaning state.

State GOP spokesman Peter DeMarco said a lawyer for the Democratic Party showed up at an Eagle County precinct with a list of registered Republican voters and a plan to challenge all of them. Democrats admitted it was true.

"There was one of our members of our voter protection team who, unbeknown to us, did file a blanket challenge," said Steve Haro, spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. "It ended up failing immediately. No voter was turned away. That attorney has been taken off our team."

Pete Maysmith of Colorado Common Cause said the organization had "received dozens and dozens of calls" from people who were not being allowed to vote because the addresses on their driver's licenses did not match the addresses on the voter rolls. He said as many as 1,000 voters may be involved, though he did not immediately have specific details.

Secretary of state spokeswoman Lisa Doran said election judges should issue provisional ballots in such cases, with those ballots to be counted later.

Officials with Election Protection, a voters' rights group, also said voters in a predominantly black neighborhood north of Denver found papers on their doorsteps giving them the wrong address for their precinct.

"They looked like they were done on a small computer; typical of your average voter suppression flier," spokeswoman Priscilla Ring said.

Diane Henry, a 45-year-old single mother and cook in Denver, complained she was not on the rolls at her polling place, even though she registered at a motor vehicle office. She said a few poll workers started arguing with one another when they were supposed to be helping her.

"I started to just leave the paper and walk out the door. See, that's why a lot of people don't bother because of all the changes you have to go through. And that's crazy. Do they really want you to vote? Or do they just want to make you think you're going to vote?"

Henry ended up casting a provisional ballot, used when eligibility is in question and verified later. Officials have warned that an undetermined number of provisional ballots in Colorado could hold up the results of races from president to Senate.

"All these years, they should be able to come up with a better system," Henry said. "As long as you have an ID stating that you live here, if you show up then — I mean, it's hard to get people to vote."

The Republican Party said Denver election judges weren't certifying GOP poll monitors or allowing their monitors access to information. At two polling places in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, election judges and one Republican poll monitor reported no problems.

"There was an issue with looking over people's shoulder, but we fixed that pretty quickly," GOP monitor Chris Gierach said.

Republican officials accused MoveOn.org, a group that supports Democrats, of electioneering too close to some polls. After the GOP complained, the secretary of state's office sent a notice to all 64 counties saying "election-related activity" is barred within 100 feet of polling stations.

"We believe we have been singled out as the bogeyman to help create a phony story to help the Republicans challenge the election if it is close," said Eli Pariser, national executive director of MoveOn.org. "We have instructed our volunteers exactly on how to act."

The GOP complained their judges were not being certified in several precincts in several counties, including Denver. Alan McBeth, Denver election spokesman, said his office had certified GOP poll watchers and that he would ask the city attorney's office to investigate.

SOURCE: http://www.conservativeaction.org/resources.php3?nameid=votefraud

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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