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FUN WAYS TO WIN ELECTIONS
AN EVER-EXPANDING
GUIDE TO VOTE FRAUD
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
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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. |