Provisional Ballots: How To Steal An Election

New federal regulations allow anyone — felons, fugitives, even foreign nationals — to vote anywhere unchallenged, with their votes subject only to post-election review by local authorities. But never fear: For your protection, 30,000 pro-Kerry trial lawyers have volunteered to monitor polling in every KEY state!

The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same. Just as New York’s Tammany Hall or Chicago’s Daley machine did decades ago, it now appears that legions of political hacks and big-city ward heelers are lining up to try to steal this year’s elections.

Except now, for the first time, they have a new law to help them. And thousands of self-serving partisan attorneys are volunteering to help them use that law to maximum advantage.

“For gun owners who want to keep their freedoms, this could be the crisis hour,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. “With thousands of anti-gun trial attorneys investing their time and treasure in this effort, their motives — and the consequences if they succeed — couldn’t be clearer.”

If freedom falls as a result of the elections this year, it could very well perish — not on Nov. 2 behind the closed curtains of voting booths across America, but in the tortuous wilderness of legal challenges, attorneys’ briefs, affidavits, appeals and judges’ injunctions that could drag on for weeks, if not months ad infinitum.

In other words, if our freedom dies in this election, it’s likely to go down not in a straightforward defeat — but through larceny, litigation and good old Boss Tweed voter fraud.

After the debacle of Florida’s 2000 contested election, with its “pregnant” punch cards and hanging chads, federal authorities set out to “fix” the voting system in Florida and nationwide.

They assembled a National Commission on Federal Election Reform — with former President Jimmy Carter as an honorary co-chair and former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta as a member — to study voting practices and policies around the country.

From their findings they proposed a laundry list of supposed “solutions,” which were then compiled into legislation, the Help Americans Vote Act (HAVA), which became law in October 2002.

“Indeed, instead of preventing the kind of nightmare legal wrangling that we saw during the 2000 Florida recounts and re-recounts, one of HAVA’s ‘reforms’ could open a Pandora’s box of litigation, endless challenges and appeals over the validity of millions of votes,” LaPierre said.

Here’s the nightmare punch line: This new law also opens the door for crooked political machines to try to steal the presidential election.

One of the requirements of the new Help Americans Vote Act is that every one of the 193,000 election polling stations in America must now allow anyone to cast a “vote” — whether or not they’re registered, whether or not they’re eligible — so that no potentially legitimate voter will ever be turned away.

Under the law, would-be voters who show up at polling places but whose names can’t be found on the lists of registered eligible voters must now be allowed to cast so-called “provisional ballots.”

“They might be felons ineligible to vote,” LaPierre said. “They might be fugitives. They might be frauds. They might have just voted in 15 other polling precincts. They might be proverbial ‘dead voters.’ So while we want every lawful, registered voter to cast a ballot, we don’t want to see these elections or our election system flaunted and abused by criminal acts.”

Whatever the case, under the new law, all must be afforded provisional ballots so that no one is “disenfranchised.”

Then, after the polls close, state and local election officials are expected to sift through all those provisional ballots to try to sort out which are valid and which are not.

Historically, most provisional ballots are bogus. According to The New York Times, in a March 2004 Chicago election — where provisional ballots were actually cast in the names of “Ben Affleck” and “Pancho Villa” — fully 93 percent of the provisional ballots were disqualified.

But this year, in the first presidential election in which provisional ballots are mandatory nationwide, separating the wheat from the chaff could be a Herculean task.

According to the Associated Press, a primary election last March brought in 44,000 provisional ballots in Los Angeles County alone. Nationally, the numbers could be staggering.

According to a study conducted at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, approximately 4 to 6 million attempted votes were discounted due to a variety of reasons — or about 4 percent to 6 percent of the total vote.

So if you thought waiting for the outcome of the 2000 elections was like Chinese water torture, wait until John Kerry, John Edwards and their contingency-fee trial-attorney backers sink their teeth into the prospect of grabbing 3 to 6 million provisional votes.

Right now, lawyers are volunteering by the thousands to assemble “Election Protection Attorney Networks” to assist provisional voters in casting their ballots.

Spearheading the effort is a group known as the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has joined together with the pro-Kerry group People for the American Way Foundation and a coalition of other groups known as Unity ’04.

Unity ’04, by the way, is co-chaired by Marc Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who triggered the avalanche of politically motivated litigation against lawful firearm manufacturers when he filed the nation’s first such suit in 1998.

By Election Day, according to abcnews.com, this so-called Election Protection Coalition will have nearly 30,000 lawyers deployed across the country.

What’s more, the pro-Kerry AFL-CIO has launched its own similar effort, dubbed “My Right, My Vote,” that plans to send “voter protection advocacy teams to 12 key battle-ground states.” The AFL-CIO Web site for the effort urges readers, “Don’t Let Them Steal It Again.”

For his part, John Kerry vows to send “swat teams” to polling places and has assembled thousands of lawyers to “challenge anyplace in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes.”

Matthew Miller, a Kerry campaign spokesman, said, “We’re putting in place a team of lawyers who will monitor every facet of the election, and if we see anything we’ll challenge it.”

The first rule of journalism is to “follow the money.” Anyone who’s ever hired a lawyer might wonder why thousands of trial attorneys are suddenly volunteering their time — at hundreds of dollars per hour — to this effort.

Call it a tax write-off. Call it an in-kind contribution. Whatever you call it, the fact is trial attorneys have their fortunes invested in this election — literally as well as figuratively.

“Trial attorneys are among the biggest contributors of cash for the Kerry-Edwards ticket,” LaPierre said. “Trial attorneys are the richest beneficiaries of the party’s persistent refusal to curb the kind of personal-injury lawsuits that turned John Edwards into a millionaire — and that threatens the American firearms industry with bankruptcy.”

Boss Tweed, the corrupt politician who lorded over New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine, once said that it’s not the voter who counts, but he who counts the votes. Those thousands of trial attorneys across the country now want to be America’s authoritative “vote counters-in-chief.”

Imagine the logjam in America’s electoral system when 5 to 10 million provisional votes are represented by thousands of attorneys in every local, state and federal courthouse across the nation.

Imagine the possibilities for voter fraud when election officials — who are often political appointees — are allowed to give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to this or that particular vote.

“The potential for a skewed election outcome is enormous when provisional votes are evaluated and tallied by 193,000 polling precincts in 50 states with 50 different sets of rules and criteria, and 50 different legislatures, 50 different state supreme courts and 50 different governors to thrash the whole mess out,” LaPierre points out.

If you compare and contrast states’ voting policies, you see a confusing, inconsistent and inequitable patchwork.

Four years ago, roughly half of the states allowed provisional ballots. Now they all must — yet each state is allowed to decide for itself whether and how to count them.

According to the League of Women Voters’ smartwomenvote.com Web site, California polling officials have four weeks to certify and count provisional ballots. In Illinois, it’s two weeks. Florida and Georgia allow two days. Virginia allows only one day.

Several cities, including New York City; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco and Los Angeles, have considered proposals allowing non-citizens — and in the case of San Francisco, even illegal aliens — to vote in school board and local elections. Once those non-citizen voters are allowed to vote locally, what’s to stop them from voting in federal elections?

According to VotersUnite.org, 39 states don’t require even a photo ID from voters before they cast their ballots. Incredibly, 36 states now allow felons to vote.

On the other hand, many of America’s most deserving citizens — active-duty servicemen and women — don’t get to cast their ballots. According to the Associated Press, almost 30 percent of the military voters who requested ballots in the 2000 election didn’t receive them in time to vote.

Worse yet, while servicemen are silenced and felons are re-enfranchised, many people seem to be following the advice of Chicago’s Daley machine to “vote early and vote often.”

An investigation by the New York Daily News found that 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both New York and Florida. What’s more, between 400 and 1,000 of them had voted twice in at least one election.

In a universe of 100 million voters, that might not sound like much — until you consider that in Florida, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by just 537 votes.

Just a few hundred more double-voting New Yorkers could have turned the 2000 presidential election!

As LaPierre pointed out, the threat of lawsuit liability reform gives trial attorneys a motive. HAVA’s new provisional balloting law gives them the means. And Election Day, Nov. 2, gives them the opportunity.

According to LaPierre, the NRA will fight in coming months to level the playing field and eliminate the inconsistencies and loopholes in the Help Americans Vote Act.

“With so much of our freedom at stake in these elections, and with so much incentive and opportunity for unscrupulous politicians to aid in voter fraud, no gun owner in America can sit this one out,” LaPierre said. “If they’re going to try to steal this election, we need every single possible gun owner in America to get registered, go to the polls and vote freedom first.”

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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