Posted on 11/03/2002 11:07:26 AM PST by Dubya
EDINBURG, Texas - The Hidalgo County Republican Party wants to create a bipartisan voter roll task force following a study indicating that 16,000 of the county's registered voters are ineligible or dead.
Hollis Rutledge, chairman for the party, released the study's findings during a news conference Oct. 22. He had withheld release of the full report to the county election commission because he said its release needed to be approved by executive Republican party members, who paid for the study.
Republican committee members unanimously voted to create the task force. Rutledge said in a story in Sunday's editions of The (McAllen) Monitor that he would send a proposal on the task force to the election commission Monday.
Elections Administrator Teresa Navarro said she was disappointed the party decided not to share the information.
"I would think that they would want to work with us at least on the deceased (voter names) part and I'm disappointed that they wouldn't at least agree to that part, especially when they made allegations with it," she said.
"We were waiting to see what was going to happen today and now we know what we need to do to proceed. On Monday, I will request to the secretary of state, attorney general and the district attorney's office that they issue a grand jury subpoena for the deceased (names)."
"I don't think the party has denied anybody anything," Rutledge said. "The party's position today (Saturday) was we would offer the information, but the party's position was that they would like to offer it by way of a task force that was completely bipartisan in nature."
The study indicates that 4,223 people on the county's voter rolls - including 227 who are shown to have voted in the March primary - are probably dead. Navarro said she cannot begin to remove these names until she has seen the list and the sources used to confirm each death.
Rutledge said the study began in May and was done through Voter Views Information Systems, an Austin-based company that the county Republican Party contracts to run its primary elections. Party members were shocked when they received the study's findings and did not time the information's release in an attempt to affect voter turnout, Rutledge added.
"We found that there were dead people in the report dating back to 1982," he said. "It's absolutely ludicrous. This is absolute blatant incompetence on the part of the elections department. It's absolutely incredible."
Navarro said determining whether a voter is dead is much more complicated than the study indicates and said Rutledge intended to cast doubt on the elections department.
"It's to smear the integrity of the elections department, but they're not only doing that," she said. "They're smearing the integrity of the secretary of state's office and if they're trying to intimidate the voters. That is wrong."
How do you intimidate dead or ineligible voters?
Also in many of the border counties, the identification documents of a dead person are often being used by a live illegal who will show up to vote if they feel like it. One very easy way they obtain birth certificates is by going through old obituaries and then taking out that person's birth certificate.
I agree in principle, but we need to make it more stringent. The tax return should have to show that they actually paid taxes. Because of the "earned income credit" the IRS has become an arm of the welfare department giving out refunds that are larger than taxes withheld. Last I looked, they would even parcel it out in convenient monthly installments, just like the welfare check it is.
Criteria to vote should be either "paid taxes" or "active duty military".
Only a true Democrat could come up with something like that.
Actually it's a complicated issue with Democrats because too many of their breathing voters are brain dead.
Ummm...if they've got a death certificate and have been buried for ten years, that's usually a pretty good indication they're dead.
For some reason, that commercial parody on Rush, "Night of the Voting Dead" comes to mind...
I guess this headline isn't redundant, because there are voters who vote by absentee ballot but die before election day. So they are dead yet eligible to vote. A little known fact with which to dazzle your friends and win bar bets.
Oh - Yeah.
Repeat after me:
Democratic key words: "Republicans are trying to intimidate the voters" Let us repeat this [hrase endlessly every time so the media repeats it every time.
Republican key word: "Let's all just get along. We want a (Another) "bipartisan" investigation into (democratic) voter fraud."
We will not publicize this (latest) case of democratic voter fraud.
Or we might be accused of intimidting illegal/imooral/cheating/dead/un-registered/felons/multiple-democratic voters...
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