|
Serve cheese
BUSINESS WEEK - In Philadelphia they're calling it "The
Cheese Caper." A Deputy City Commissioner asked the District
Attorney's office to investigate who passed out flyers on primary
election day -- May 17 -- promising free cheese to voters for
particular candidates. The flyers are topped by a handwritten
scrawl, "Come Out + Vote," adding below, "For
Who Ever." In type, they say "Free Cheese." The
flyers list two candidates, both Democrats, running in an area
dominated by the 300-plus-unit Hill Creek housing project. "This
guy comes to the polls, votes, and asks us for his free cheese,"
says Eileen Kleindienst, a Republican judge of elections. Geraldine
Hacker, the Republican official who sent Kleindienst's complaint
to the DA, thought the food might be from a government nutrition
program.
The woman who wrote the
flyers, Hill Creek tenant council President Gerri Robinson, doesn't
think she did anything wrong. "The people around here, you
can't get them to come out and do nothing unless you're giving
them something," she says. Besides, she adds, the flyers
worked: The two cases of cottage cheese were gone by day's end.
Change the names of
the parties
DAILY TIMES, PAKISTAN -
Indonesia's official elections website showed election successes
for the unlikely "Pink Grandfather Party" and the "Party
of Bottled Mineral Water" after interference by hackers
at the weekend, reports said. The Indonesian General Election
Commission had to shut down its website for four hours Saturday
after hackers changed the names of some of the 24 political parties
that contested the April 5 vote, the Jakarta Post said. The names
of the top three political parties were unchanged. . . The People's
Mandate Party, in sixth, became the "Party that must repair
its website first", while 13 others were just changed to
"Pink Party", regardless of their party colors. The
Crescent and Star Party was named after a singing bird, the Freedom
Party took the name of a character in a popular television series,
and the New Indonesian Association Party became "Party of
Midwives", for no apparent reason. The website was back
on line
Steal voting booths,
snatch ballots and -if that doesn't work -fire on voters
TIMES OF INDIA - Use of electronic voting machines
has failed to instill the confidence in political parties that
there would be no booth grabbing in the coming Lok Sabha polls.
"You never know. The booth grabbers may develop a new technique
of capturing booths. That's why we have asked the Election Commission
to ensure the presence of central paramilitary forces at polling
booths," said state CPI secretary Jamaluddin Ansari.
Bihar has long been known
for booth grabbing, terrorizing of voters, tearing of ballot
papers and pouring of ink into ballot boxes. Political observers
point out that in the last Lok Sabha elections, polling at about
500 booths was cancelled and repolling held due to electoral
malpractice. A majority of them had been grabbed. In 1998, the
polling in entire Patna parliamentary constituency was cancelled
and repolling ordered.
For the first time in Bihar
all the 49,000 odd polling booths will have EVMs. Till now, EVMs
have been used in the state in by-polls. chief electoral officer
K C Saha has recently ordered that personnel to be deployed for
polling work be trained how to use EVMs. "The gangs of professional
booth grabbers will also be undergoing training as to how to
manage the situation," remarked a politician sarcastically.
TRIBUNE, INDIA - Seven booth-grabbers, three security
personnel and Janata Dal (United) leader Ghulam Rasool were among
the 17 persons killed in Bihar and Manipur today in the final
phase of the poll for four state legislative assemblies.
EXPRESS, INDIA - While three persons, including
a booth-grabber, were killed at Runni Saidpur in Sitamarhi, a
CPI (ML) leader was shot dead at Dhanarua in Barh, a booth-grabber
was beaten to death at Chak Kasturi village in Hajipur, one at
Salakhuadih in Saharsa and one at Yadavpur in Motihari constituency.
A series of bomb explosions ripped through Hajipur where the
railway minister Ramvilas Paswan, is in fray, resulting in shrapnel
injuries to 15 persons, official sources said.
Exchange of fire, snatching
of ballots and ballot boxes, and intimidation of voters, were
reported from several places. . . Two booth-grabbers were injured
in police firing at Siswar village in Jhanjharpur constituency,
three in exchange of fire between supporters of rivalparties
at Goriakothi in Siwan, two at Banipur in Maharajgunj and one
at Bhagwanpur in Muzafferpur.
Use paperclips, pen
caps, pennies
MARIO F. CATTABIANI, PHILA INQUIRER - On the day Gov. Rendell unveiled
his budget to a packed House chamber, Rep. William Rieger voted
in favor of all six bills that came up. But Rieger wasn't there.
The Democrat was home on Feb. 3, 100 miles away in Philadelphia.
A wad of paper shoved into his electronic "yea" button
atop his desk did the work for him. Similar sights are in plain
view on any given session day in the cavernous lower chamber
where so-called ghost voting is a tolerated bipartisan tradition.
But, like most state legislatures, rules in the Pennsylvania
House explicitly bar it.
Paper clips, pen caps,
pennies. These things and others are routinely wedged into voting
machines - a low-tech attempt to mask the fact that lawmakers
have either left the floor momentarily or haven't made the trip
to Harrisburg at all. In other cases, lawmakers cover for absent
colleagues by reaching across desks and voting for them. Critics
say it skews the legislative record, gives some lawmakers the
ability to wrongly brag of their stellar attendance, and, in
some cases, costs taxpayers.
The wad of paper recorded
Rieger, a North Philadelphia Democrat, as being present on the
Master Roll Call - the House's attendance sheet - on Feb. 3.
And, as a result, he claimed a per diem for that day, fetching
him an additional $126 meant to reimburse him for food and lodging.
But Rieger answered the
phone at his Philadelphia home that day, as his colleagues were
voting on a series of bills - including one that restructured
the Pennsylvania Convention Center board
Vote post-mortem
GREG PIERCE, WASHINGTON
TIMES: In Philadelphia, "people apparently take their civic
responsibilities seriously," Stephen Bronar and John R.
Lott Jr. write in the New York Post. "In that city, 1,025,259
are registered voters out of 1,065,455 residents aged 18 and
over. As a number of adults are ineligible to vote (e.g., felons
and non-citizens), the number of registered voters clearly exceeds
the number of eligible people," writes Mr. Bronar, chairman
of the University of Texas Economics Department, and Mr. Lott,
a senior research scholar at the Yale University Law School.
"These numbers cannot be explained simply by voters being
left on the rolls after they have moved or died. Preliminary
numbers show some precincts had 100 percent of the registered
voters voting, with 99 percent of their votes going for Gore.
There is no obvious explanation for how this is possible."
WASHINGTON
TIMES
Use pliers, screwdrivers
and Q-tips
* New York City voters
use metal lever-action machines so old they are no longer made,
each with 27,000 parts. Similar machines in Louisiana are vulnerable
to rigging with pliers, a screwdriver, a cigarette lighter and
a Q-Tip.
* In Texas, "vote
whores" do favors for people in return for their absentee
ballots. Sometimes the canvassers or consultants, as they prefer
to be called, simply buy the ballots. Failing all else, they
steal them from mailboxes.
* Alaska has more registered
voters than voting-age people. Indiana, which encourages voting
with sign-ups by mail and at driver's license bureaus, has jammed
its registration lists with hundreds of thousands of people who
should not be on them. They include felons, the dead and many
who have registered repeatedly.
* Some students in Wisconsin
say they voted as many as four times.
* Louisiana's former election
commissioner, Jerry Fowler, pleaded guilty 14 days ago to a kickback
scheme with a voting machine dealer. Even when relationships
are legal, lines of authority blur. In the state of Washington,
dealers program vote counters. In Arizona, they go as far as
to help feed in the ballots.
* Rebecca Mercuri, a computer
scientist at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and Curtis Gans,
director of the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American
Electorate, estimate that at least 2 million ballots did not
get counted this year across the country. But these estimates
include deliberate race skipping, when voters do not like any
of their choices. Experts do not know how much of that goes on.
* The only mistakes that
can be estimated with any confidence are those committed by vote-counting
machines. Providers say the machines have error rates of 0.01%
to 0.1%. If that is true, counting machines alone could have
made as many as 100,000 mistakes this year -- an average of 2,000
votes per state. But machine counts do not differentiate race
skipping, either, and that makes it impossible, even in the case
of machines, to know with any certainty how many voters get robbed.
LA
TIMES
|
The
case of the doubtful dimple. . . .
Peter
Sheerin's experiments
|
 |
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A REAL DIMPLE,
COMPLETE WITH PIN PRICKS AND VERTICAL CREASE
|
FAKE DIMPLE MADE
WITH STYLUS BUT ON A TABLE RATHER THAN IN MACHINE. NOTE LACK
OF VERTICAL CREASE
|
FAKE DIMPLE MADE
WITH A FINGERNAIL. NOTE ABSENCE OF PRICK AND CREASE
|
Everyone has been too polite
to point out that the real reason Florida vote canvassers had
to examine dimpled and chad-challenged ballots so carefully was
in order to figure out which ones had been punched by actual
voters and which by someone else. In short, they were trying
to determine which ballots were honestly cast and which were
frauds or once-good ballots fraudulently altered.
The Review has suspected
this from the start, but lacking a research lab we were unable
to test our hypothesis. Comes now Peter Sheerin, the technical
editor of a computer magazine, who went out and bought an Intel
Play QX3 Microscope&8212 on sale at Zany Brainy for $70 and
got hold of some sample Votomatic ballots. Here is a summary
of what he found:
- Real Dimples
1. A real dimple will always
have a pinprick, and it will be at the center of any circular
depression . . . 2. If the stylus was pressed with anything more
than very light pressure, a circular or semi-circular depression
will be visible . . . 3. Because the pin-like tip of the stylus
hits the paper before the rod part of the tip, a linear crease
will almost always be formed. This crease is much sharper than
that created by an improvised stylus without a pin-like center.
Out of more than a dozen dimples on one card, the two on the
top of the left image were the only ones that didn't display
a clear crease, but they do clearly show both the pinprick and
the circular edge of the stylus.
- Fake Dimpled Chad
Sheerin created a set of
dimpled chads with a Votomatic stylus, but with the card on the
hard surface of a table instead of in the machine. The pinprick,
and sometimes the semi-circular edge, of the stylus was visible,
there was no indication of the vertical crease created when the
card comes from the machine. Sheerin "then created some
dimples of my own, using my fingernail (cut down to produce my
own, organic "stylus"), and also with a plastic PDA
stylus (the pen-like device used to write on a Palm Pilot). The
dimpled chads created with my fingernail don't exhibit the vertical
crease created by the real stylus. And although the PDA stylus
did create a crease, there is no pinprick in the chad as the
real stylus would have created, nor is the crease a clearly defined
vertical mark, and there is a complete absence of any circular
mark that a real stylus would most likely have created. I also
took a stack of five punch cards and used my PDA stylus to punch
several of the chads. With firm pressure of the stylus it was
very easy to punch out all five chads (leaving most of them hanging),
but with just moderate pressure all five were created as dimpled
chads. All of these chads lacked the pinprick and after the second
chad all lacked any crease at all. If this is what is meant by
a 'pregnant' chad, than any such chad on a ballot is quite clearly
not a vote of any kind, shape, or form . . .
"My conclusion, based
on these limited tests, is that any chad (hanging or otherwise)
that is missing both the pinprick and the vertical crease is
likely a fraudulent vote, or quite possibly an indication that
the voter started to vote, but had a second thought and decided
not to vote for any presidential candidate, as a small percentage
of people in all presidential elections do." PUSHBACK
CREATE PAPER FELONS
GREGORY PALAST, OBSERVER,
LONDON: This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland
known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and
found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared'
from the vote rolls. About half of those named are African-Americans.
They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting
booths. [Previously] the Observer discovered that Harris's office
had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds
that they had committed felonies in other states. None had. Harris
bought the bum list from a company called Choice Point, a firm
whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican
funders. Choice Point, we have learned, picked up the list of
faux felons from state officials in - ahem - Texas. In fact,
it was a roster of people who, like their Governor, George W,
had committed nothing more than misdemeanors. For Harris, Florida
Governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the Texas blacklist was a
mistake made in Heaven. Most of those targeted to have their
names 'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans,
Hispanics and poor white folk, likely voters for Vice President
Gore. We don't know how many voters lost their citizenship rights
before the error was discovered by a few skeptical county officials,
before Choice Point, which has gamely 'fessed-up to the Texas-sized
error, produced a new list of 58,000 felons. In May, Harris sent
on the new, improved scrub sheets to the county election boards.
Maybe it's my bad attitude, but I thought it worthwhile to check
out the new list. Sleuthing around county offices with a team
of researchers from internet newspaper Salon.com, we discovered
that the 'correct' list wasn't so correct. One elections supervisor,
Linda Howell of Madison County, was so upset by the errors that
she refused to use the Harris/Choice Point list. How could she
be so sure the new list identified innocent people as felons?
Because her own name was on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a
felon.' Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent misidentification
rate. That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused of crimes
and stripped of their citizenship rights in the run-up to the
presidential race. And not just any 7,000 people. Hillsborough
(Tampa) county statisticians found that 54 per cent of the names
on the scrub list belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93
per cent for Gore. OBSERVER
VOTE THE FELONS
THE MIAMI HERALD: At least
445 Florida felons voted illegally on Nov. 7, casting another
cloud over a disputed presidential election already mired in
legal challenges, a Herald investigation has found. The tainted
votes -- found in a review of nearly half a million votes cast
in 12 Florida counties -- provide evidence that the presidential
race was influenced by thousands of ineligible voters . . . The
majority of the illegal votes -- 330 -- were cast in Palm Beach
and Duval counties, which decided not to participate in the statewide
effort this year to purge felons, dead people and double registrants
from the rolls . . . The lapses in Palm Beach and Duval counties
could become significant if Democrats win any of their legal
challenges and take the narrow lead away from Republican Texas
Gov. George W. Bush. Nearly 75 percent of the illegal ballots
discovered by The Herald were cast by registered Democrats.
GET RID OF FELONS AND
THEN SOME
GREGORY PALAST, GUARDIAN,
LONDON: Vice-President Al Gore would have strolled to victory
in Florida if the state hadn't kicked 12,000 citizens off the
voters' registers five month ago as former felons. In fact, only
a fraction were ex-cons. Most were simply guilty of being African-American.
While 8,000 of those disenfranchised went through the legal rigmarole
of getting on to the voting list, the rest - enough to have won
the state for Gore - did not . . . The source of this poisonous
blacklist: Database Technologies, a division of ChoicePoint,
and hired by Governor Jeb Bush's frothingly partisan Secretary
of State, Katherine Harris. My thanks to investigator Solomon
Hughes for informing me that DBT is a division of ChoicePoint.
Under fire for misuse of personal data in state computers, ChoicePoint
founder Rick Rozar made a strategic six-figure soft cash donation
to the Republican Party. - GUARDIAN
STAY IN THE SUN TOO
LONG
POLITICAL ACTIVIST CAROL
MOORE says research shows people are more likely to question
the government and act out in protest during periods of high
sunspot activity. Moore estimates the solar activity, which began
late last year and is expected to continue until 2002, is responsible
for stirring up two-to-three times as many political protesters
as normal. She says sunspots may rev up folks by blasting the
body with negative ions, which cause humans to become quick-
tempered. CAROL MOORE:(202) 635-3739
BRING SCOTCH TAPE TO
THE POLLS
JULIE FOSTER, WORLD NET
DAILY: David Anderson ~ volunteered to help count ballots manually.
Given a stack of absentee ballots, he came across three that
had carefully cut tape either covering a punched-out hole in
the ballot or holding a chad in place. Anderson says he questioned
the all-Democrat canvassing board about the phenomenon, which
told him "we were counting the absentee ballots and most
likely the voter punched the wrong hole and used tape to put
the chad back in and vote for another." - WORLD
NET DAILY
HELP INSTRUCTION IMPAIRED
REPUBLICANS
THE ELECTION SUPERVISOR
in Seminole County, Sandra Gourd, goes on trial November 29 in
Florida circuit court for inviting GOP workers to fill in 4,700
incomplete GOP absentee ballot requests while rejecting incomplete
Democratic absentee ballot requests. A similar absentee ballot
fraud case in 1997 resulted in the ouster of Miami Mayor Xavier
Saurez, who admitted this month handling GOP absentee ballot
forms in the 2000 election. - CAMPAIGN
WATCH
HELP YOURSELF TO BALLOTS
NEWSMAX: Ballot observers
have found one outrageous case after another of tampered ballots,
miscounts and bias in the recount in Democrat-dominated Broward
County, NewsMax.com learned in exclusive interviews over the
holiday weekend . . . Among the questionable and outright fraudulent
practices that witnesses noted in the recount of presidential
votes:
- Numerous absentee ballots
had the chad for George W. Bush Scotch-taped back in and the
chad for Al Gore punched out.
- Chads were dislodged
from ballots shaken by county workers during the counting.
- One Republican observer
collected more than 75 chads from the table and floor in the
area where ballots were being inspected and counted. While that
observer was trying to collect the chads from the table before
a lunch break, the counting supervisor ordered him to leave the
chads and leave the room . . .
- During the final counting,
four stacks of 25 ballots each were supposed to be stacked crossways
into stacks of 100 votes. But on at least one instance, four
stacks containing only 75 Gore votes each were originally counted
as if they were four stacks of 100 ballots, a miscount of 100
votes in favor of Gore. The Republican ballot observer who saw
and objected to this error leading to its correction was then
kicked out of the room at the Broward County Emergency Operations
Center. - NEWSMAX
HOLD A TURKEY RAFFLE
CLEA BENSON, PHILADELPHIA
INQUIRER: [Turkey raffles] actually became an issue in the race
between Democratic US Rep. Robert A. Brady and his Republican
challenger Steve Kush, manager of a center city mattress store.
Kush's campaign workers complained in court that Democratic voters
in the Seventh Ward, 14th Division, had been given flyers promising
free coffee and doughnuts and a chance at a turkey if they voted.
Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Alan Teresko issued an immediate
order commanding the illegal turkey giveaway to stop.
MAKE
THE CANDIDATES DANCE
  
CORRECT THE COUNT
The myth will undoubtedly
live on that there was some way to get an accurate manual recount
in Florida. In truth, however, the most accurate count -- within
the margins of statistical error -- was a tie. Any recount would
have merely produced a different sort of miscalculation. Dubious
dimples, bureaucratic foul-ups, deliberate but (over the near
term) indeterminable voter suppression among blacks and military
personnel, faulty disqualification of absentee ballots, post-election
ballot alteration both by accident and fraud, as well as 100,000
suspicious over-votes made a fair recount impossible. One may
not like the solution to such problems contained in the law and
Constitution, but it's hard to criticize the Supreme Court for
observing it. Besides, attempting to deal with errors and fraud
after an election but before a winner is named rarely works.
The solution is generally not to be found in recounting after
the precinct doors are closed but in reforming things before
they open again.
This is not as much fun
for Jesse Jackson as going on TV and claiming that the Supreme
Court had issued the Dred Scott decision of the 20th century,
but the fact of the matter is that these problems didn't just
crop up at this election. They have been standard operating procedure
in various parts of the country for a long time, not infrequently
thanks to Democratic politicians. Until now, however, they just
never made it to the top of the ever migratory Jackson agenda.
It is a complicated business,
in no small part because all politics is local. For example,
Al Gore may need a certain county's black vote but the Democratic
leadership there may, for its own reasons, want to keep this
vote down. Elsewhere, a precinct may be Democratic but the poll
workers are assigned by the Republican county machine. And so
forth.
Dealing with all this is
tedious and difficult. It may involve criminal investigations
and it may require new laws. Sometimes, stories that appear to
be true won't check out. One things for sure: you don't find
the answers yammering on cable TV about racism. You will find
them the way 1960s civil rights attorneys did, with hard-won
and sustainable facts.
The election has also created
new opposition to the electoral college. This opposition is based
on the illusion that the only real democracy is one in which
the winner takes all -- even if the winner (as has happened repeatedly
in American history including this time) doesn't represent a
majority of the voters, let alone anywhere near a majority of
eligible citizens. There are, in fact, other forms of democracy.
Quakers, for example, practice consensual democracy. The democracy
of a congressional veto required a two-thirds vote and constitutional
amendments also demand super majorities. The electoral college
is a similar check on what is often only a pseudo-majority opinion.
It demands, among other things, that the president represent
not only the interests of those most numbers in the least space,
but those throughout what are still, under the Constitution,
considered united states. It also encourages candidates to seek
out constituencies that are geographically confined. Perhaps
the most important statistically insignificant constituency of
this sort is the farmer. Do away with the electoral college and
farm policy will disappear from campaigns even more than it already
has.
The happiest reform would
be to retain the electoral college, but for states to adopt preferential
(or instant runoff) voting for president. Thus, in each state,
a clear consensus choice would be obtained, avoiding totally
the sort of crisis that developed in Florida.
Finally, voting machines
need to be improved in many places, bearing in mind that computer
voting is in itself no guarantee of honesty absent a program
code available for public inspection.
In short, the way to correct
the count is to improve the machines, introduce preferential
voting, and do what is necessary to eliminate specific forms
of fraud. It won't make good TV, but it will sure make a better
country.
RUN PLAY #245
[We previously reported
how a Democratic recount drive in California six years ago so
impressed its Republican targets that they asked the lawyer involved
to teach them how to make recounts work for them. Three suggested
rules:
1. Keep recounting until
you're ahead
2. Keeping handling the right ballots until the chads fall out.
3. The minute you're ahead, stop and declare yourself the winner.
"What my lawyers soon
discovered was that the opposition would eyeball a disputed ballot
before picking it up to officially inspect it. If the hanging
chad indicated a vote for Fiedler, the lawyer for the other side
picked up the ballot ever so carefully, so he could argue that
the voter really never intended to vote for Fiedler. If the hanging
chad was a Corman vote, the lawyer picked up the ballot quite
vigorously, so that the chad soon was no longer hanging. "'You
see,' their guy would declare, 'that voter obviously intended
to vote for Corman.'" -
WORLD NET DAILY
TOSS A COIN
SUSAN GREENE, DENVER POST:
Third-party presidential wannabe Ralph Nader has a simple solution
to the stalemate in Florida: Toss a coin. He's not being flip.
"It sounds kind of arbitrary. But I'm not joking,"
the Green Party candidate told The Denver Post. "There's
really no other way to end this. At this point, no one's ever
going to know who really won Florida."
MAKE A DEAL
A CONCERNED FLORIDIAN:
OK, here's the deal. We here in Florida have all gotten together
and decided to hold the rest of the country hostage with the
election results until you come here and take your parents back
home with you. That's right, we're tired of hearing how good
it was back home, and how beautiful your children are. We can't
stand it any longer . . .
BRING IN THE CHAD BUSTERS
JON DOUGHERTY AND DAVID
KUPELIAN IN WORLD NET DAILY report that former California Assemblyman
Pat Nolan says he hired a Democratic lawyer, Tim Downs, to teach
his staff how to do recounts after Downs led a successful recount
effort against the Republicans. According to Nolan, Downs said
there were three rules: "The first rule is, you keep counting
until you're ahead. And if that doesn't put you ahead, you recount,
re-recount -- you keep counting until you're ahead. If you're
behind, then you've got nothing to lose." Second, Nolan
said, "the more times those ballots are handled, the more
chance there is that chads will break loose" and hence disqualify
the ballot. Third, he said, "the minute you're ahead, you
stop and declare yourself the victor." "After that,
you don't want the ballots handled any more," Nolan said,
"because some of the chads for your candidate might break
loose. While you're behind it doesn't matter, but if you're ahead
and more break off or become disqualified for your candidate,
that's a bad thing." A favorite tactic, said Nolan, is to
ask election officials for ballots, "allegedly so they can
look at it more closely." When operatives do, often they
will bend or crinkle ballots covertly in an effort to break another
chad loose and thus have the ballot thrown out. "This whole
process sounds like exactly what is going on in Florida,"
Nolan said. "And the more times those ballots are handled,
the more chances are you'll break some of them [chads] loose."
WORLD
NET DAILY
DISCOURAGE THE BLACK
VOTE
--Charles Weaver, publisher
of Community Voice, a Fort Myers African American weekly paper,
witnessed "intimidation, harassment and apparent illegal
activity" at a polling place he visited. "There were
illegal poll watchers, threatening people, telling them, 'I know
where you work. You're going to get fired,'" Weaver told
the Inter Press Service. The same article reported that Tallahassee
police set up traffic checks at the entrance to a polling place
in a black neighborhood; that police in Newport News, Va. stopped
people at checkpoints; and some black voters were turned away
from polls in St. Louis for not having voter registration cards,
even though registration cards were not required from white voters.
--In an NAACP public hearing
held in Miami, Stacy Powers, a former police officer who currently
serves as news director for Tampa radio station WTMP, spoke of
witnessing numerous voting irregularities in her election day
travels through city neighborhoods. Powers testified that she
saw people being turned away from several polling places in the
black community after being told their names were not on voting
lists. When Powers reminded poll workers that an individual can
legally sign an affidavit and vote even if their name isn't on
an official list, she said, she was ejected from several polling
places (
-- Miami's Donnise DeSouza
testified that she was denied the right to vote after being shuttled
to several polling places and told her name was not on the list.
When she checked with the elections board the next day, she said,
she found her name was in fact on the list. Many other voters
were told they'd been dropped from the rolls as convicted felons,
even though they had never been arrested, and that names of black
college students who registered this summer never showed up on
voter lists, according to the NAACP hearings
--According to the New
York Times, more than 26,000 ballots were disqualified in the
largely Republican area of Duval County-- four times the total
in 1996. The Times notes that nearly 9,000 of these ballots were
cast in predominately African-American communities around Jacksonville,
which registered support for Al Gore over George Bush at a ten-to-one
ratio.
--Derek Drake, an editor
of the black weekly newspaper Central Florida Advocate, told
the London Financial Times that Haitian Americans and Hispanics,
unlike whites, were often asked for two forms of identification.
"There was either something of a conspiratorial nature going
on or there was mass incompetence," Drake said. In a recent
column for the Los Angeles Syndicate (11/12/00), the Reverend
Jesse Jackson noted that ballot boxes in black communities went
uncounted, voters were turned away after being told there were
no ballots left, and Creole speakers were not allowed to assist
Haitian immigrants voting for the first time.
-- In New York City, Columbia
University journalism students reported that citywide voting
irregularities included broken ballot booths, the denial of translation
assistance and insufficient instructions given to first-time
Russian voters hoping to support a write-in candidate, and the
transposing of the Chinese characters for "Republican"
and "Democrat" on wall posters at polling places and
on columns in ballot machines
CHAD TRICKS AND MORE
Montana Gov. Mark Racicot
claims that
- Chads have been taped
to the backs of cards to hide votes for Gov. Bush.
- Ballots with votes for
Bush were put in stacks of Gore votes.
- A Democratic observer
admitted that the piles had been "sabotaged" overnight.
- Post-it notes are being
used on the cards to distort the votes.
- Exhausted and elderly
counters have been used to do the recount.
- The recount room is poorly
lit and some counters have resorted to using flashlights.
- Twenty to 60 ballots
were dropped on the floor and staff were seen walking over ballots.
- Two precincts had to
be manually recounted twice.
- Ballots are being moved
from table to table without direction.
IMPERSONATE A SERVICEMAN
In 'Rascal King,"
Jack Beatty tells how in 1942, when James Michael Curley ran
against Thomas Hopkinson Eliot for Congress, Eliot was approached
by an alleged defector from the Curley camp claiming to have
a list of voters serving in the military overseas. All he had
to do was use some of his supporters to pretend they were the
soldiers at the polls. Eliot-- grandson of a Harvard president
-- recognized a set-up and immediately sent the woman away. He
knew the papers would have the story the next day if he had fallen
for it. Come election day, Eliot checked out each precinct in
his district. Everywhere he went he saw the same six men get
out of the same car and go to vote. They turned out to be the
missing servicemen who were now adding to Curley's total. Curley
won handily.
TAKE A SURVEY
GREG PIERCE, WASHINGTON
TIMES: Two Republican members of the Electoral College from Colorado
have accused ABC News of trying to pressure them into voting
for Democrat Al Gore, the Rocky Mountain News reported. ABC News
denied the charges. Mary Hergert, a Colorado elector for George
W. Bush, told the newspaper that she felt intimidated by the
caller from ABC. "Hergert said the caller said he was 'Ed
from ABC News' and asked if she would ever consider voting for
Al Gore, then said it is unconstitutional for her to be bound
by state law to follow Colorado voters' preference for Bush,"
the newspaper reported. "It was bothersome," said Miss
Hergert, who served as Mr. Bush's Weld County campaign chairman.
A second Colorado elector, Rob Dieter, also mentioned a call
from ABC News when the Rocky Mountain News asked if anyone had
tried to influence his vote. ABC News spokeswoman Su-Lin Nichols
apologized for any confusion caused when a group of staffers
called electors across the country with a series of identical
questions in preparation of a possible story on the Electoral
College vote.
WASHINGTON TIMES
USE THE 'BB' TRICK
Party hacks would place
a BB in the hole under the place where their opponent's voters
would be punching their ballots. This would prevent the card
from being punched properly. The trick would soon be discovered,
but with enough BBs on enough machines, the work would be done.
BLAME IT ON THE HUMIDITY
As late as the 1980s, Cook
County Clerk Stanley Kusper was blaming a delay in vote counting
on high humidity that prevented the proper counting of the ballots.
The longer the wait, the more chance for party intervention.
OVERDO IT
Then there was the political
ward heeler who delivered the perfect result: a zero precinct
for his opponent. The proud man expected praise from the ward
committeeman but instead was sent back to steal a few votes for
the other side so the extraordinary results would not attract
public attention.
WATCH THE DANCING
When the Democrats were
on one side of a machine and the Republicans at the other, party
poll watchers could figure out how people were voting by watching
their feet under the curtain. Among the warning signs was "the
dance," a sign that voters were splitting their ballots.
HARASS THE ELECTORS
LEE BANDY, THE STATE, COLUMBIA,
SC: Two South Carolina Republican electors say they have been
approached about changing their votes to Democrat Al Gore. Both
said they would not go back on their pledge to support George
W. Bush . . . Under state law, an elector could face possible
criminal prosecution if he violates his signed pledge. Also,
if word were to leak out that a member was going to change his
vote, the state GOP could replace the elector. [Dan] Richardson
said he has received about a half-a-dozen calls. But he never
asked the callers to identify themselves . . . [Cecil] Windham
said he had received about three calls, "all asking the
same thing. Would I change my vote?" Again, the callers
refused to identify themselves.
THE STATE
LOSE THE OVERSEAS BALLOTS
MICHAEL VAN SICKLER, PALM
BEACH POST: Checks with elections officials in 66 of 67 Florida
counties Tuesday found at least 10,102 overseas ballots had not
been counted from a total of 21,047 mailed out. But unless return
rates increase dramatically, most of ballots that have not been
received will never be counted. The US Postal Service said it
has received 447 ballots from military personnel since Nov. 8,
casting doubt that a majority of the ballots still missing from
military personnel will be returned by Friday's deadline. At
the current rate of 75 ballots arriving each day, military personnel
will account for 750 ballots by Friday. The Pentagon estimates
that 24,000 people from Florida -- members of the military and
their family members -- received absentee ballots this year,
although it is unclear how many ballots that represents . . .
All military mail delivered to Florida is sent through the Air
Mail Center at Miami International Airport, which has sophisticated
equipment designed to sort overseas mail . . . The Panhandle
county of Okaloosa -- which has a total of 100,000 voters and
three prominent military bases -- has received only 56 overseas
absentee ballots, while about 1,500 have not been returned. One
of every two Okaloosa voters are in the military or are related
to members of the military, said Supervisor of Elections Pat
Hollarn. And about 70 percent of military personnel are Republican,
she said. If they all come in, Okaloosa's overseas votes -- the
most of any county in Florida -- could have a huge impact on
the final tally. Hollarn said she has filed a complaint against
the post office with the Department of Defense's Federal Voting
Assistance Program, which oversees the voting rights of military
personnel. She said she has received 50 complaints from military
personnel who said they received their overseas ballots late
or not at all . . .
WORLD NET DAILY: WorldNet
Daily reported yesterday that a source on the USS Tarawa, a US
Navy destroyer near Yemen, said that "thousands" of
absentee ballots were languishing onboard. The Navy has now confirmed
bundles of overseas ballots left behind -- not on one, but three
ships in the Persian Gulf region. According to a New York Post
account, Comdr. Greg Smith, a Navy spokesman, said the ballots
of some 3,000 sailors and Marines on the USS Tarawa, USS Deleuth
and USS Anchorage would be flown back to the United States "expeditiously."
Before the discovery of missing Navy ballots, Defense Department
spokesman Kenneth Bacon and Navy Lt. Dave Gai had both criticized
WorldNet Daily -- Bacon publicly at a press briefing -- for its
reporting on this issue. Bacon referred to WND's initial story
as "ludicrous" for reporting that some servicemen and
women suspect the Clinton administration may have somehow purposely
delayed sending absentee ballots to military personnel overseas
because most historically vote Republican . . . A United Press
International account reported comments from a Marine Corps captain
from the Tarawa who helped evacuate the dead and injured from
the USS Cole after it was attacked by terrorists on Oct. 12.
Capt. Van P. Brinson, who did not receive his absentee ballot,
wrote in a Nov. 8 e-mail: "I cannot speak for the remainder
of the crew of the Tarawa, but I do know that the majority of
the Marines and sailors that I have spoken with are in the same
boat. What is distressing about the situation," he added,
"is that a majority of the pilots aboard are registered
voters in Florida."
VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN
CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS:
A Wisconsin district attorney is investigating a student newspaper's
report that scores of college students may have cast more than
one presidential ballot. The Marquette Tribune, Marquette University's
student newspaper, surveyed 1,000 students and said it found
that 174 admitted voting more than once. The newspaper conducted
the survey after state Republicans on Friday alleged voting irregularities,
including claims that students at Marquette and the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee voted more than once . . . According to
unofficial results, Al Gore defeated George W. Bush by about
6,000 votes . . . Of the 174 Marquette students who said they
voted more than once, 95 said they cast absentee ballots from
their home state and in Wisconsin, the Tribune said. The 79 others
told the Tribune they voted more than once in Wisconsin. Those
students included 13 who claimed they voted four or more times.
SEND ABSENTEE BALLOTS
AS PART OF YOUR PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS: New evidence
that not every US vote is properly counted surfaced this weekend
when a Danish couple found two absentee ballots from the US presidential
election in their mail. Brian Kain, a 33-year-old accountant
and sailing enthusiast, eagerly opened a large envelope when
it arrived Saturday. He had ordered information about navigation
charts from a company based in Washington state. He assumed that
two extra sealed yellow envelopes inside the package were ads
and planned to throw them away until his wife, Helle, opened
one to discover the absentee ballot of Steven H. Forrest of Bellevue,
Wash. The Kains didn't open the second envelope but assumed it
also was a ballot because both were marked with the words "Official
ballot--do not delay."
PLAY A HAND OF POKER
REUTERS: If the final state-certified
result on Nov. 28 yields a tie, New Mexico statutes require that
"the determination as to which of the candidates shall be
declared to have been nominated or elected shall be decided by
lot." In practice, the usual method for this rare event
has been to play one hand of five-card poker. "That's what's
been done in the past. Not even a whole game of poker, but just
one hand, and that takes dumb luck," state Republican Party
chairman John Dendahl told Reuters. The last time this happened
was in December 1999, when Republican Jim Blanq and Democrat
Lena Milligan tied at 798 votes each in a local race for magistrate
judge. They played one hand of poker in a courthouse with dozens
of people watching, and Blanq won. But the law leaves it to the
parties to decide what game or method of drawing lots they use,
state elections director Denise Lamb said. `Whether they want
to draw straws, play a hand of five-card stud (poker), or draw
a high card, that is totally up to the participants," Lamb
said.
SAN JOSE MERCURY
MISLABEL CHINESE BALLOTS
VILLAGE VOICE: Some Chinese
Americans may have inadvertently voted for the wrong candidate
because the ballots were translated incorrectly. At six voting
sites in Flushing, Queens, where there are large Chinese American
populations, the party headings for all state races were wrong.
The "Democratic" label was translated as "Republican,"
and "Republican" was rendered as "Democratic."
"I just don't understand why they can't get the Chinese
ballots right," says Chinatown voter Stephanie Woo. "It
just shows how little they care."
VILLAGE VOICE
DEMAND A PHOTO ID
SALON: Stacy Powers, a
news director at Tampa's WTMP, discussed her Election Day experiences
rallying voters. She told the audience that she drove around
a predominantly black Tampa neighborhood in the station's van
on Election Day and encountered voters who had been turned away
from the polls because they lacked a photo ID After Powers challenged
the poll manager to justify the decision to keep them from voting,
"She told me not to get snippy with her." Powers said
she was eventually kicked out of the polling place. She also
shared the story of an elderly black man whom she met at another
polling precinct near Tampa. He had told Powers that it was his
first time voting, and proudly pointed out the "I Voted"
sticker on his collar. Just as Powers was about to leave, a police
car approached the man. "They pulled up on the grass, two
deputies stepped out and they started asking the man, 'What are
you doing in this area? What exactly are you doing?'" Powers
said. "He pointed to his collar and said, 'I just voted.'
And they said, 'We want to see ID and we want to see it now!'"
At this point in her testimony, Powers paused for a moment and
started to cry. "Then [the police officer] turned to me
and said, 'What are you sitting here for?'" She then sped
off in fear, she said.
SALON
BE A SORE WINNER
Can anyone point to another
example in history where a county's winner by 140,000 votes successfully
got a recount based on the alleged inaccuracy of less than one
percent of the vote? That is what happened in Palm Beach County.
USE A TIME SAVING BALLOT
DANIEL MCCGRORY, LONDON
TIMES: The FBI is being asked to investigate how thousands of
mainly black supporters of Al Gore were given ballot papers that
had allegedly already been marked for rival candidates. Yesterday
Democrat officials were examining claims that up to 17,000 ballot
papers in the Miami area had been tampered with in what they
described as "organized corruption."
LONDON TIMES
GIVE IT TO THE LAWYERS
JULIAN BORGER, GUARDIAN,
LONDON: One thing was clear in the Florida state capital yesterday.
The confusion over the election results has paved the way for
a stealthy and rapid seizure of power in the US. The lawyers
have truly taken over. They were everywhere in Tallahassee, patrolling
the normally sleepy streets in uniform charcoal suits and colorful
ties for the men, the women in earth tones. They huddled in hotel
lobbies or on street corners, and marched in and out of the courthouse
with the heady sense of purpose of people who had been waiting
all their careers for just such a moment.
GUARDIAN
THINGS REPUBLICANS SAY
WENT WRONG IN MILAUKEE
- Marquette students were
seen taking 10 or more ballots at a time.
- Ballots were taken out
of the polling place.
- Individuals entered the
voting place with more than one addressed envelope and asked
which one would allow them to vote in that location.
- A voter was asked by
another voter to vouch for her residence in the ward. He said
he wouldn't, and the woman appealed to another person in line.
The other person claimed to poll workers that she is his roommate.
- Polling place had a "help
yourself" pile of ballots.
- Ballots were left sitting
on a chair prior to being fed through the machine. Poll workers
were seen looking through them.
- UWM student voted on
campus. Another voter showed his off campus address to a poll
worker. The poll worker told him, "you can't vote here,
put down (address of dorm) instead." Same student said friends
were bragging about having voted for Gore five or six times.
- Voter was told that his
marks on the ballot were too dark, and asked to re-do the ballot.
The voter did not see the other ballot destroyed.
- Ballot machine was not
operating. The ballots were being stacked in a pile for workers
to run through later.
- Two ballots were given
to a man wearing a Milwaukee County Public Schools jacket. When
he tried to return a ballot, he was told that he should have
two.
- Poll workers told a voter
to "vote Democrat".
- A voter tried to register
to vote at the 4th Precinct in the 72nd Ward of Milwaukee. He
was not asked for identification or proof of address. Poll workers
tried to prevent him from filling out a registration card. Registration
cards that he observed only had a signature, no address.
- A voter was given three
different ballots due to mistakes he made on them. The two previous
ballots were not seen destroyed.
- Ballot machine in Wauwatosa
was broken, and until the machine was fixed, ballots were stacked
next to the machine.
DOUBLE PUNCHING
- Take stacks of ballots,
lining them up carefully
- Insert a long, thin rod through the Buchanan part of the ballot
- If it were a Buchanan vote, nothing would happen
- If it were a Gore or Bush vote, it would appear the voter was
confused and voted twice. You now have a bunch of invalidated
votes apparently caused by a bad ballot design.
- Total time needed; five minutes
BRASSCHECK
THE SYNERGRY OF INCOMPETENCE
AND FRAUD
An activist who has investigated
vote fraud in San Francisco ays, "The incompetence is built
into the system so if fraud is needed is it easy to pull off.
That's how elections work."
UPGRADE YOUR SOFTWARE
HOWARD STRAUSS, A PRINCETON
COMPUTER SCIENCES PROFESSOR: The presidential election of 1992,
without too much difficulty and with little chance of the felons
getting caught, could be stolen by computers for one candidate
or another. The candidate who can win by computer has worked
far enough ahead to rig the election by getting his 'consultants'
to write the software that runs thousands of vote-counting computers
from coast to coast. There are so many computers that use the
same software now that a presidential election can be tampered
with - in fact, may already be tampered with. Because of the
trade secrecy, nobody can be the wiser.
USE GRAPHITE UNDER YOUR
THUMBNAIL
How to eliminate a paper
ballot during a recount: place some graphite (as used in pencils)
under your thumbnail and when the ballot of an opponent appears,
simply smear graphite on the box of another candidate. The ballot
is now invalid.
REDESIGN THE BALLOT
This technique, tried out
this year in Palm County, Florida, produced a surprisingly high
vote for Pat Buchanan's whose checkbox was suspiciously near
that of Al Gore. On the other hand, the ballot was approved by
a Democrat and was published in the newspapers without a single
complaint.
SPEED UP CITIZENSHIP
According to former impeachment
counsel David Schippers, the White House put pressure on the
INS to clear tens of thousands of immigrants in time for the
1996 election. Among the beneficiaries: 75,000 new citizens who
had arrest records when they applied, 115,000 whose fingerprint
records had proven unclassifiable, and another 61,000 who never
got fingerprinted. One applicant was actually in jail when he
was naturalized. Further, Schippers learned that the scam was
to continue: "Our sources inside the INS revealed that,
in preparation for the 2000 elections, INS agents in district
offices were directed to relax the testing for English, complete
every interview in twenty minutes, and insure that all applicants
pass the civics test by continuing to ask questions until an
applicant got a sufficient number right. Sometimes it was necessary
to ask twenty or twenty-five questions before four or five were
answered correctly."
DON'T DELIVER ALL ABSENTEE
BALLOTS
Worldnet Daily has reported
that an unknown number of absentee ballots failed to reach service
people abroad.The Pentagon has denied the story.
DECLARE A "GLITCH"
IN THE DATABASE
In New Mexico, where the
presidential count is still not decided, nearly 60,000 absentee
ballots have been withdrawn because of database problems.
MOVE TO THE RIGHT ON
CRIME
The most ironic factor
in the Florida election was the fact that over 400,000 largely
black ex-offenders -- 31% of black men in the state -- have been
permanently barred from voting thanks to the authoritarian justice
and prison policies backed to the hilt by Bill Clinton and Al
Gore.
BLAME RALPH NADER
This technique, popular
among liberals, suffers from the faulty premise that the most
recent in a chain of events is necessarily the most important.
It is like blaming one's last child for the world population
explosion or the last batter's third strike for a 15-0 defeat
in baseball. In fact, Gore got into trouble for a variety of
more substantial reasons including the fact that he doesn't tell
the truth, was involved in illegal fundraising, declined to break
with a criminally corrupt president, is a lousy debater, wears
about as well on TV as a $19.95 gadget salesman, and despite
such liabilities ran for president. Ralph Nader had no impact
on these problems. Neither did John Hagelin, who also got enough
votes to change the outcome but so far has been exempt from the
tirades by Democrats angry that 95,000 Floridians dared not to
vote for one of the two major parties.
TELL PEOPLE THAT THE
POLLS ARE CLOSED
OR THAT THERE ARE NO MORE BALLOTS
Reported by the Rev. Jesse
Jackson
SET UP A POLICE CHECKPOINT
NEAR A POLLING PLACE
This happened in southern
Leon County, FL. The Florida Highway Patrol says it didn't know
there was a polling booth nearby but black voters think otherwise.
INTRODUCE ELECTORAL
REFORM
WALL STREET JOURNAL Motor
voter has helped fuel an explosion of phantom voters. Between
1994 and 1998, nearly 26 million names have been added to the
voter rolls nationwide, a nearly 20% increase. The bipartisan
polling team of Ed Goeas and Celinda Lake says that perhaps only
5% of those who register when they get licenses routinely vote,
which artificially drives down voter turnout. Curtis Gans, director
of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, supports
national voter registration, but says voter lists from around
the country "are virtually unusable" and "more
inaccurate than they have ever been." These suspect lists
are an open invitation to voter fraud . . . CBS's "60 Minutes"
created a stir last year when it found people using mail-in forms
to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee
ballots in their names. An investigation by Bill Theobald of
the Indianapolis Star found that in Indiana "hundreds of
thousand of names, as many as one in five statewide" on
voter registration rolls, "are bogus since the people behind
those names have moved, died or gone to prison."
CENSOR A POLITICAL WEB
SITE
Peacelink found the leading
anti-democratic web censors such as Cyber Patrol, Surfwatch,
AOL, Bess, and Safe Server, were extending their blacklisting
to political sites including campaign finance reform links, a
site that explains how a bill gets through Congress, the Traditional
Values Coalition (which supports net censorship), the Pennsylvania
Rules of Criminal Procedure, a course on American politics at
St. John's University, the War Resisters League, an essay on
Memorial Day, and the Hillary for President site. Numerous candidate
sites have also been blocked. Incidentally, the Progressive Review
is also blocked by Bess as unfit for decent Americans to read.
BUY IT
New Jersey's new senator,
Jon Corzine, spent more money on his campaign than Kenneth Starr
did investigating Bill Clinton. With an abandon more suitable
to an IPO for corzine.com, the senator-elect spent $20 per voter
and $448 per dollar of salary he will receive next year.
THE SOCIAL WORKER TECHNIQUE
We thought we knew most
of the tricks of politics until an evening a few years ago when
we attended the Ward One Democratic Hall of Fame Dinner in DC.
One of the recipients was a social worker not long out of the
Dominican Republic. She was moved by her honor and told how when
she had come to the US she knew little of American politics but
she did understand that Abraham Lincoln had freed the slaves
and so she became a Republican. Later, she said, she discovered
that the Republicans weren't like Lincoln anymore and so she
became a Democrat. Such an enthused Democrat, in fact, that she
kept a stack of registration forms in her desk. Whenever a new
client would come in, she would explain that the first step to
mental health and happiness was registering as a Democrat . .
. and then she would hand them a form.
THE FIRST SHALL BE FIRST
OHIO STATE RESEARCH NEWS:
In a study of Ohio elections published in 1998, researchers found
that candidates received an average of 2.33 percent more votes
when their names appeared first on the ballots, rather than when
their names were listed last, said Jon Krosnick, co-author of
the study and professor of psychology and political science at
Ohio State University. However, in some races, candidates received
as much as 6 percent more votes when listed first compared to
being listed last. "Bush's placement at the top of all Florida
ballots almost certainly allowed him to win that state, given
the closeness of the contest," Krosnick said. By Florida
law, the party that controls the governor's office has all of
its candidates listed first on ballots in the state. "George
W. received an electoral boost by the fact that a Republican
- his brother Jeb - is governor," Krosnick said. Some states
- including Ohio - have laws that mandate that candidates' names
be rotated in different precincts to eliminate the candidate
name order bias.
OHIO STATE RESEARCH NEWS
THROW MONEY AT IT
WASHINGTON TIMES: In the
overwhelming majority of this week's Senate and House races,
candidates with the biggest war chests were victorious. In the
Senate, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reveals,
a whopping 85 percent of candidates who spent the most money
proved winners at the polls.
GET YOURSELF AN FBI
AGENT
WASHINGTON TIMES: The Justice
Department dispatched an FBI agent to work with the NAACP on
Election Day to make sure there were no roadblocks to a huge
black turnout for Democrat Al Gore, according to USA Today columnist
DeWayne Wickham . . . Mr. Wickham writes. "A FBI agent was
on stand-by in the room to serve as a liaison between the civil
rights organization and the Justice Department if reports of
voting irregularities occurred."
WASHINGTON TIMES
KEEP DOING IT
98% of incumbents won their
House seats again. |