Posted on 09/18/2002 7:42:36 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
The Miami Herald reported Saturday, "In an increasingly eerie replay of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, former attorney general Janet Reno today demanded a statewide, manual recount of the votes in Tuesday's Democratic gubernatorial primary." By Sunday, Janet Reno was denied a recount, since McBride won by at least 8000 votes.
This seems to be a replay of the 2000-voting debacle in Florida. There, if you remember, a "butterfly ballot," created by a Democrat, was the fault somehow of Governor Jeb Bush.
Now, we hear, from the Reno camp that the newest voting debacle in Florida "could be used as a weapon against Bush." They will claim that it was all Governor Jeb Bush´s fault because he signed the election reform law, which authorized the spending of $32 million dollars for new Touch-Screen Voting Machines, because a sizeable number of Democrat voters in Broward and Miami-Dade counties found it too complex to punch a hole next to the name of the candidate you want in office, like the Republicans do without difficulty.
Another difficulty in the latest Miami-Dade and Broward County debacle, according to the Miami Herald, "The directions were written only in English, and the elections office didn't check poll workers' ability to read in English." Of course, Democrats control those county election boards, and managed, somehow, to hire illiterate poll officials who could not understand the words "on" and "off" so they could turn on the new machines, in spite of 4 hours of prior training and the fact they had all been tested prior to election day. ( !!! )
The new Ivotronic machines were used in eleven counties in Florida, but the Herald reported: "only Miami-Dade and Broward had serious problems. The election supervisors in the four counties with systems identical to those in Miami-Dade and Broward told The Herald that their elections went smoothly. In fact, the company said, the machines "accurately captured 100 percent of the votes which were cast and "No votes were lost or not counted." In Lee County, which includes Fort Myers, Supervisor of Elections Philinda Young, said: "Overall, 95 percent has been nothing but praise about how easy it was to use.'' Of Florida´s 67 counties, 55 of them voted for McBride in the Democratic Primary and 12 voted for Reno.
This does not deter Janet Reno from trying somehow, to make her defeat the fault of Republican Governor Jeb Bush. In hopes of resurrecting the controversy in the 2000 election, instead of "chad build-up" we now have "smudge build-up" on the Touch Screen machines. Of course, this seems to occur only in Democratic strongholds in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Instead of "hanging chads" we now have "inadequate calibration" to blame Reno´s defeat on.
We are also being told that, somehow, only in the Miami-Dade precincts, there are "hundreds and perhaps thousands of votes" that were not counted. Broward officials have begun a similar review. "Together," the Reno campaign believes, "the two counties may contain enough uncounted votes to close McBride's 8,100-vote lead."
Of course, the "uncounted votes" which somehow always are found in boxes, or in this case, machines, that were "sitting in a warehouse uncounted" have also been unsupervised by poll watchers.
In both Chicago and in Miami-Dade, this problem only seems to afflict Democratic Precincts in close elections. For example, Reno is now arguing that vote fraud and other irregularities helped her opponent win, and she says that just four of 81 disputed precincts turned up 1,818 uncounted votes.
However, investigative reporters James and Ken Collier, authors of Votescam which was published in 1992 while Reno was Florida´s attorney general, have a different scenario. In 1992 they uncovered preprinted voter ballots in a warehouse rented by a Miami political candidate.
Following the advice of their editor, the reporters seized the evidence and took the illegal ballots to Janet Reno who promptly had the JOURNALISTS arrested, rather than to investigate how a candidate had preprinted ballots in his possession!
The scam works as follows: somehow boxes of "uncounted" ballots end up in the warehouse. It just so happens that the warehouse also contains blank, pre-printed ballots. The boxes are "found" and counted and show, surprise, surprise, that they have enough ballots for the trailing candidate to reverse the election. In the olden days, it was called "Ballot Box stuffing."
In the year 2000, when this was going on, some of the Democrat "undercounted" precincts ended up with 98% of the registered voters having "voted" – compared with 67-73% in the highest voting counties in Florida. Later, it turned out, that many of those votes came from "voters" who were either dead or in prison. However, they are to this day part of the count in the 2000 Presidential election.
The Colliers observed, "When we saw in this past primary that McBride was leading Reno by 100,000 votes statewide, with 60 percent of precincts reporting, and Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach not reporting even hours after the close of balloting, and after almost every other county had reported, we knew exactly what was happening.
"It is a time-honored tradition, perhaps refined by the Daley machine of Chicago, to hold vote counts until the last minute. This way, the (political) machine could figure out just how many votes it needed to come up with to close the gap and ‘win.´
"We knew this was taking place in these three counties on Election Night 2000, when the three Florida counties took so long to report – and then conveniently closed the gap between Bush and Gore.
At this point it appears that, either Miami-Dade and Broward County Democrats are just too stupid to vote, regardless of how brainless you make the system or, as the Colliers claim, decades of ballot box stuffing cannot keep up with voter rejection of Democrat candidates.
Finger Puppets??? Geezzzz...
One of the beneficiaries of this policy of malign neglect was a former Congressman and impeached judge, Alcee Hastings, who has never, to the best of anyone's recollection, met up with any sort of political corruptions he did not immediately embrace. Not content to be merely an outspoken member of the Black Caucus, and an avowed Marxist, he also believes the problem is entirely the fault of the Republican Governor and Legislature of Florida, not just as a political posture, but as an article of faith. The question is, How? There are not that many Republican operatives in either Palm Beach or Miami-Dade county government, and they surely don't have the keys to the back rooms there. Systems that work perfectly well elsewhere, somehow fail in those jurisdictions. Truth is, there is no incentive for WANTING the unbiased polling of the public to be effectively recorded, as this would end the domination by the very small clique of power brokers in those localities. Accountability is such a ß¡+ç#.
Have you seen the Alabama quarter?
It's a nickel and two dimes taped together.
My thought exactly, plus...
Stupidity is actually a requirement.
Dan
How should we know? They're all still in the dark.
Well, Democrats ARE more slimy.
I'll get back to you in a couple hours with 6806
Help me out here. When I took "civics" in high school, I was taught that naturalized citizens HAD TO pass English tests and other subjects. If they cannot pass the English tests then how did they become citizens? If they are not citizens, how are they voting? What has changed? (or what am I missing?)
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