GOP demands new election as disputed votes emerge

Washington state Republicans yesterday filed a lawsuit calling for a revote in the tight 2004 gubernatorial contest that saw Democrat Christine Gregoire top Republican Dino Rossi after two recounts by 129 votes. "Most Washingtonians don't believe this has been a valid election," said Mr. Rossi, who filed the Election Contest Petition along with the state Republican Party in Chelan County Superior Court. "They want a revote to make sure our state has a legitimate governor," he said. "We've gathered strong evidence that shows many of the votes in this election were improperly cast. I believe a revote is the only good solution."

The postelection fracas, complete with the specter of voters rising from the grave, has stunned those who associate such Election Day shenanigans with the machine-style politics of old Chicago, not a good-government state like Washington.

Another discrepancy lies in the King County vote total, where about 3,500 more votes were cast than there are registered voters. Election officials had pared the number down to 1,200 yesterday after reviewing registration documents, but Republicans noted that the figure was still high enough to reverse the outcome.

"[Mrs. Gregoire] wants to sweep us under the carpet and hold on to what she's got," said Miss Lane. "The fact is, there are many more improperly cast ballots than her margin of victory."

Mrs. Gregoire is scheduled to be certified by the Democratic-majority Legislature Wednesday, although Republican legislators plan to push to have her inauguration postponed until the legal challenge is decided.

And get rid of so-called provisional ballots. We have this law enforcement code which states that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Being too lazy to register, developing an inability to figure out how to read the slip of paper telling you where your voting district is or being too dumb to call and ASK should be no excuse for screwing up the works by voting in the wrong disrrict, unregistered, etc.

Provisional ballots are necessary to ensure that voters have a an effective remedy if someone jinxes their registration. Otherwise, if an election worker were to somehow 'misplace' the registration forms for people who were registered Republicans, such people would have no recourse.

That having been said, provisional ballots should only be counted if it can be demonstrated that the voter did everything necessary and proper for voting. A voter should only be able to submit a provision ballot at a precinct other than the correct one if the voter can demonstrate that he was instructed to show up at the "wrong" one (e.g. he received a registration card with incorrect directions). Even in that case, no provisional ballot should be counted in a "wrong" precinct; all provisional ballots should be forwarded to the precincts where they belong.

If reasonable steps were taken to ensure that provisional ballots are handled properly (e.g. using different ballot forms incompatible with "normal" ones), I would see no reason they'd have to pose any particular fraud risk. The problems with provisionals occur in places where they're accepted without good cause (e.g. voter is too lazy to go to the precinct on his registration card), and where there are inadequate checks to prevent them from being merged with the normal ballot stream. If those issues are fixed, I provisions should still form an important part of the election process.

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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