Posted on 10/18/2002 11:47:13 AM PDT by jpthomas
A KOTA Territory man is the first person to be charged with voter fraud this election.
Police say Lyle Nichols is charged with five counts of forgery of voter registration cards. Nichols is one of two brothers hired by the Native American Voter Registration Project.
They collected and submitted 226 registration cards. The Pennington County Auditor's office found that two of those newly registered voters were dead.
If convicted, Nichols could be sentenced to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine for each of the five felony counts.
Last week, accusations of voter registration fraud began to surface in several counties. Dead people had been registered, people were registered in counties other than where they live, and names were misspelled, signatures didnt match.
Throughout the state, there are massive voter registration drives being conducted by both political parties, tribal governments and national organizations. Nichols currently is the only person charged.
There is another voter fraud investigation involving a woman paid by the South Dakota Democratic Party to register people. Becky Red-Earth Villeda says she is innocent, that the accusations against her are an attempt to stop the registration of Native Americans. Red-Earth Villeda was fired after discrepancies were found in two applications she collected.
I agree both parties need to have voter registration drives. What I was trying to point out was that the way the story was written, the implication is that both voter registration drives were fraudulant but only the dems had been caught.
I don't accept this assumption that these drives are by definition fraudulant.
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