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John Fund: Voter Fraud Common
Paige McKenzie
Monday, Oct. 4, 2004
No, we are not talking about a banana republic south of the border.
We are talking about states like California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas and – of course – Florida.
According to Wall Street Journal writer John Fund, they are among the states where voter fraud is commonplace.
For the first time, John Fund exposes how vote fraud is stealing America’s democracy in his new book “Stealing Elections – How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.� [NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election� – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.]
Not only does Fund unfold just how easy it is to steal an election in America, he also reveals the damaging unintended consequences of continued so-called election reform laws.
According to Fund, “At least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.�
Just 57 percent of Americans – according to a Rasmussen poll - still believe America’s elections are fair even in light of the November 2000 election debacle.
But Fund cites John Zogby polls that show while three percent of the people believed their ballots would not be counted fairly or accurately in 2000, that number has grown to nine percent in 2004.
Even though voter fraud swept Lyndon B. Johnson into the Senate and John F. Kennedy into the White House, public mistrust of the vote process has never been so high.
In an interview with NewsMax, Fund explained, “Basically one out of every 10 Americans don’t believe their vote will be counted, and that’s a high percentage.�
They have reason to worry.
Fund continued, “ People have long thought that voter fraud was confided to local elections, but it’s leached over now into presidential elections. Now we have a very loosey goosey system and the elections are so close that a lot of people are cutting corners on the national races.�
Even for those who have followed the ongoing documentation of November 2000’s aftermath with near religious dedication, Fund’s facts will leave many slackjawed and still some, no doubt, unbelieving.
Most of the vote Fraud, Fund says, seems tied to Democratic party and their local political machines.
Today, when people think of vote fraud, the image of Florida with its pesky chads – hanging, pregnant and dimpled – come to mind.
But Florida is not alone in enduring election fraud shenanigans. And, unfortunately, the state has had much company since.
Fund notes ongoing and recent election scandals in rural South Dakota and Texas, and in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Milwaukee.
Though most of these - as Fund documents - involve Democrats, he is quick to point out that he tends to vote Libertarian or Independent.
And he also maintains that he doesn’t believe Republicans are inherently more honest.
“Voter fraud occurs in both Republican strongholds such as Kentucky hollows and Democratic bastions such as New Orleans,� Fund writes. “When Republicans operated political machines such as Philadelphia’s Meehan dynasty up until 1951 or the patronage mill of Nassau County, New York, until the 1990s, they were fully capable of bending – and breaking – the rules.�
Fund also concurs with Democrats – at least in some instances – who claim that Republicans routinely engage methods of intimidation to discourage certain groups of voters.
“In the 1980s, the Republican National Committee hired off-duty policemen to monitor polling places in New Jersey and Louisiana in the neighborhoods of minority voters, until the outcry forced them to sign a consent decree forswearing all such ‘ballot security’ programs in the future,� Fund writes.
He notes other examples:
In 1990, the North Carolina Republican Party mailed postcards to hundreds of thousands of black voters telling them they would go to prison if they voted improperly.
In 1988, California Republicans in one assembly district hired “poll guards� to carry signs in Spanish and English that read: “noncitizens can’t vote.�
“[T]he most embarrassing incident involving what Democrats claimed was an effort to suppress minority turnout occurred in 1986 when the Republican National committee agreed to end a ballot security program in Louisiana. It had sent letters to voters in precincts where Republicans had gotten less than 20 percent of the vote in the 1984 election to see if they actually lived at the address shown on their registration. If the letters were returned by the post office – as 31,000 were – the names were handed over to voter registrars with a request that they be purged. a judge found that the precincts were GOP support was below 20 percent coincided almost exactly with precincts where blacks were a clear majority.�
And though Democrats in 2000 were found to have traded “smokes-for-votes� on behalf Gore-Lieberman, Fund says some Republicans in Kentucky have been known to engage in similar efforts in local races with pints of Jack Daniels.
Apparently they haven’t been too successful, as Kentucky for the most part has traditionally remained just as many of its poverty-ridden state peers – controlled by Democrats.
However, it seems to be fairly widely acknowledged - even by some Democrats - that the problem of voter fraud is more prevalent within their own party.
Democrats’ Dirty Little Secret
Fund quotes political analyst Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson from their book, Dirty Little Secrets: “Republican base voters are middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic.�
Amazingly, others even justify this fact. It seems there is no end to the lengths many Democrats will go to perpetuate class warfare in promoting socialism.
Fund writes that a former Democratic congressman had this to say about “why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard: ‘When man Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.’�
Fund cited to NewsMax the recent example of Republican Gary Horrocks being convicted of voter fraud in Nevada. “Ironically,� said Fund, “he was committing the fraud on behalf of a Democrat� – Marcus Conklin.
Democrats who are outraged by voter fraud even when it is within their own party should beware. “In 1998, a former Democratic congressman named Austin Murphy was convicted in Pennsylvania of absentee ballot fraud. The Democratic county supervisor who uncovered this scandal, Sean Cavanaugh, was so ostracized by his party that he re-registered as an independent,� writes Fund.
Perhaps the clearest example in the difference in attitudes toward the widespread problem of voter fraud in America is illustrated in the following exchange between the chairmen of the two major political parties. [NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election� – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.]
Writes Fund:
In June 2004, Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent a letter to Terry McAuliffe, his Democratic counterpart, suggesting that they find ways the two parties could work together to protect the integrity of the election process. One of his ideas was that in close battleground states, each party identify precincts where it fears there might be problems on Election Day. “Each of us would be responsible for recruiting a volunteer for each named precinct,� Gillespie wrote. ‘Similarly bipartisan teams would be assigned to cover multiple precincts to respond to and investigate reports of problems. “The teams would agree on avenues of appeals that could be taken to the courts, if needed.� Journalists could be embedded with the teams, a la the Iraq war, to report on developments...McAuliffe wrote back to say that while he “strongly opposed any fraudulent behavior or activity at poling places,� the real issue was having the Justice Department ensure that no voter was harassed or intimidated. He dismissed Gillespie’s idea of a joint task force to police polling places as “a public relations gambit.�
If you’re looking to commit election fraud, there are innumerable and fairly easy ways to do it, the most common of which include:
Vote buying or swapping – Get your hands on a large stash of Marlboros
Absentee and provisional ballots – Call your county clerk and request absentee ballots for all of your extended family and have each one sent to the address of your two-bedroom apartment or house.
Felons, Illegal Aliens, pets, the dead and other non-registered people voting. Felons and the dead are likely still on the voter rolls, thanks to the Clinton Adminstration’s Motor Voter law. As Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, dismissively responded after Margaret Mekler’s dog, Ritzy, was found to be registered to vote, “no law Congress could pass would prevent all dogs from voting.� And you know how dear departed Aunt Edna or Uncle Charley would vote today. But you can send mail-in registrations for all the rest, or just sign onto the Internet and save yourself some postage.
Disqualifying military ballots - You’ll have to volunteer as a poll worker for this one. Or check the party affiliation of your county clerk’s office staff.
Over voting – Vote early and vote often. Volunteer as a poll worker and mark the other candidate in each race where someone hasn’t voted for the candidate of your choice. This is especially easy if your county uses punch cards, as many in Florida did in 2000. More on this in Part II.
And who before the passage of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform could have foreseen the glut of the so-called 527s, blatantly sending in thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms to county clerks across the nation, as reports continue to document. These operatives send their thanks to John McCain and Russ Feingold.
Motor Voter
In 1992 those who desire to commit election fraud got a great big slap on the back from our newly elected President, in the form of the notorious Motor Voter law. Otherwise known as the National Voter Registration Act, it was the first law to be signed by Bill Clinton when he became president.
According to Clinton, 1992’s largest increase in voter turnout in a generation was a “crisis� in civic participation. So he immediately launched Motor Voter to alleviate this troublesome roadblock.
As Fund writes, “Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the ‘incentivizing’ of fraud and the clash of conflicting visions about the priorities of our election system than the 1993 debate in Congress over the National Voter Registration Act…�
Motor Voter allowed anyone and everyone applying for a driver’s license to register to vote. In addition, the law:
Offered mail-in registration with no identification required and no questions asked.
Forbade “government workers ask for identification or proof of citizenship
Made it difficult to purge “deadwood� voters - people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes – from their rolls. Now, people who didn’t vote would be kept on the registration rolls for at least eight years before anyone could remove them.
Imposed an unfounded mandate on the states by requiring that anyone entering a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment compensation would be offered the chance to register on the spot to vote.
Fund continues, “In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age 18. Philadelphia’s voter rolls, for instance have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time that the city’s population has declined by13 percent. CBS’s 60 minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California – twice.�
Compounding these examples is the fact that some states – New Mexico, for example – have passed laws that would easily allow illegal aliens to apply for state driver’s licenses with little to no differential between those of the state’s citizens. Governor Bill Richardson signed such a law within his first three months as governor.
One of the worst effects of Motor Voter has been to artificially inflate voter registration. This, writes Fund, has “clearly misled Americans about the state of their democracy by giving a false measure of voting turnout as a proportion of registered voters. Rather than a decline, we may have seen an increase in voting as a percentage of legitimately registered voters; but because of Motor Voter, we just don’t know.� [NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election� – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.]
Absentee and Provisional Ballots
This time around, we have HAVA – the Help America Vote Act - created to try to alleviate the problems encountered in the November, 2000 election. HAVA allows anyone who asks for one to be given a provisional paper ballot, in order to prevent anyone from being disenfranchised. Election officials are instructed to count the paper ballots only if they can verify each voter as being legitimately registered.
In addition to HAVA, absentee voting continues to rise, with voters seeking the convenience of not have to drive to their polling location and stand in line on Election Day.
“Between 15 and 20 percent of voters in 2000 cast their ballots before Election Day,� reports Marshall Lewin in America’s 1st Freedom. And several states have already started their early/absentee voting periods.
Fund documents massive abuses with absentee and provisional ballots, as well as the problems created by their ever-greater acceptance.
KCNC-TV in Denver reported (in November 2001) that thousands of ballots were mailed to incorrect addresses, to residents how had moved away and even to the dead.
In Ohio, a worker at the Lucas County Board of elections (Toledo) found three hundred completed absentee ballots in a storage room more than a month after the March 2004 primary. At least half had not been counted and they ended up affecting the final results of at least one local election.
And another California avalanche occurred in the state’s March primary, when 44,000 provisional ballots poured into Los Angeles County, the Associated Press reported.
From one day in Virginia to four weeks in California, election officials don’t have an unlimited amount of time to count paper ballots. And the onslaught takes a toll on election workers.
Fund writes of pollster John Zogby, “He remembers doing a study of local election practices for the League of Women Voters in the 1980s and visiting a precinct in his hometown of Utica, New York. After the polls closed at 9:00 p.m., workers spent seven minutes noting down the tallies from the lever machines. “Then one of the workers brought out this big cardboard box filled with absentee ballots,� Zogby recalls. “the chief worker said, “To hell with the absentee ballots, we’ve been working for 15 hours straight Let’s go home.’ They then called in the final results to the elections office and left.�
American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein writes in Roll Call, “But with absentee balloting, ballots come in and are held in partisan local election officials offices for days, weeks or months, without round-the-clock supervision, and opportunities for the destruction, alteration or interference of some ballots.�
For many voters, a paper ballot is comforting – alleviating their fears about electronic voting technology they do not trust. But as Iowa voter Sarah Reschy wrote in to NewsMax, “[T]he Democratic Party’s well organized campaign to collect absentee ballots is suspect at best and is fraudulent at worst. Unfortunately, the situation is not new. My grandmother was in a nursing home when she cast an absentee ballot for Bob Dole. A volunteer from the Democratic Party picked her ballot up. A query to the county courthouse after the election showed that my grandmother’s vote was not recorded.�
And Judith Bradley, of Wisconsin, informed us “I am very concerned about the blatant voter fraud occurring in Wisconsin. One of our local radio shows (Mark Belling) has uncovered groups registering college kids in their classes and on campus not requiring ID. Counties are reporting a glut of absentee ballots, many suspicious. The woman running it had to drop out of a race in Madison, accused of fraud.�
Of course, ACT – one of the infamous 527s – cropped up when Ohio voter Judity Ery wrote to us, “My husband received an “Application for Absent Voter’s Ballot/Administration’s Medicare Policy� brochure. This targets senior citizens with scare tactics warning of the direct consequences to Social Security that will result if he votes Republican in the Nov. election. The brochure is published by ACT – Americans Coming Together. I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to contact their Web site to express my outrage....I hope they will be ousted as Democratic operatives rather than a non-partisan group encouraging seniors to register and vote at home.�
Lewin writes “Historically most provisional ballots are bogus. According to The New York Times, in a March 2004 Chicago election...fully 93 percent of the provisional ballots were disqualified.�
Many of the voters that 527s like ACT have been targeting weren’t around yet for the election when Chicago became a “crime scene� – to use a favorite term of the so-called Reverend Jesse Jackson and son. And John Kerry’s hero – John F. Kennedy – became president of the United States.
But then, there are numerous newly registered “voters� who haven’t been around for many of the past several elections – like the 13-year-old boy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who recently received a voter registration card from the Bernalillo County clerk’s office.
Fund notes, “Earl Mazo, the journalist who exhaustively documented the election fraud in Richard Daley’s Chicago that may have handed Illinois to John F. Kennedy in the photo-finish 1960 election, says there was also ‘definitely fraud’ in downstate Republican counties, ‘but they didn’t have the votes to counterbalance Chicago.’�
Many Republicans failed to see the humor in the fact that Daley’s son was one of Al Gore’s chief lawyers in his fight for Florida’s electoral votes in 2000.
With the passage of HAVA, buckets of provisional ballots may become the trial lawyers’ playground this time around. Armies of them are already lining up to volunteer their services and continual chants of “Count Every Vote.� By the time these 30,000 attorneys – according to ABCNews.com – finish forming “Election Protection Attorney Networks,� - every polling location in America is likely to have its very own Daley-in-the-alley. With hundreds of dollars per hour in tax write-offs, every ballot has a dollar sign attached.
Not surprisingly, trial lawyers comprise the largest contributing group to the Kerry-Edwards campaign, which has been warning for months of their plan to launch another election legal battle in the 2004 presidential contest – tying up election results from sea to shining sea.
Will 2004 Be 2000 All Over Again?
Paige McKenzie
Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2004
This is Part II of NewsMax’s special coverage of John Fund’s new book. Read Part I.
Florida 2000. It’s been hashed and rehashed. “George Bush stole the election.�
Michael Moore asserts that “under every scenario Gore would have won,� John Fund writes in his new book, “Stealing Elections.� And Vanity Fair also jumped onto the “stolen election� bandwagon recently with an article that asks “Could it happen again?�
As John Fund unravels the facts, however, the opposite is true.
In fact, numerous media outlets, including the New York Times and several others in the liberal media establishment, have found that under “every scenario� Bush legitimately won – and would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had not intervened.
The 2000 Florida race is important this election year because it has been cited so often as an example of how Republicans steal elections.
Michael Moore and his crew apparently somehow missed the following sampling of details given by Fund:
The Civil Rights Commission was unable to come up with a “consistent, statistically significant relationship between the share of voters who were African-American and the ballot spoilage rate.� And “among the 25 Florida counties with the greatest rate of vote spoilage, 24 had Democratic election officers in charge of counting the votes.�
The liberal Palm Beach Post found that “a review of state records, internal emails of employees and testimony before the civil rights commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted.�
Indeed, the application of the law against felons voting in 2000 skewed against whites, making them the most likely to be excluded erroneously from voter rolls. The error rate was 9.9 percent for whites, 8.7 percent for Hispanics and only 5.1 percent for African Americans.
Both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to vote, and this largely benefited Al Gore. The Post reported: “These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election. It’s likely they benefited Democratic candidate Al Gore: Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrats.�
Many of some 1,420 ballots from America’s military servicemen and women – the majority of whom vote Republican – were clearly received on or before Election Day but were disqualified at the behest of Democratic lawyers because they didn’t technically comply with Florida’s law requiring a foreign postmark.
CBS declared Florida’s polls closed 33 times during the hour before the polls actually closed at 8:00 p.m. – prematurely declaring Gore the winner at 7:48 p.m. and thereby suppressing the Republican vote, for a loss of approximately 11,500 votes. Even Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded that Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the western Panhandle as a result of confusion sown by the networks. Other turnout drop-off numbers suggested a net loss of 30,000 votes for Bush.
San Diego, Calif., a county with more seniors, minorities and new immigrants in its population mix than Palm Beach County – had an overvote rate of 0.5 percent. Palm Beach had an overvote of 5 percent. Palm Beach County also had the lowest rate of votes for Bush per registered Republican voters of any county in Florida and was in the lowest 10 percent in the country for counties with party registration.
Perhaps political shenanigans were at work well before the polls closed that evening.
As Fund explains, even before the polls closed, the national Democratic Party had hired a Texas telemarketing firm to send out calls urging citizens to say that the butterfly ballot, designed and approved by Democrats, had confused them.
Fund writes that Democrats knew Palm Beach’s election returns were going to push Florida into Bush’s column of electoral votes.
Indeed, some Republican National Committee regional directors were stunned to hear the media call Florida for Gore as they tracked the returns through computer software and knew that Bush was ahead in the state.
And that’s just a sampling of what happened in Florida. It doesn’t begin to cover the funny business occurring simultaneously in other states.
In Wisconsin, officials convicted a New York heiress working for Al Gore of giving homeless people cigarettes if they rode in a van to the polls and voted.
In South Dakota, Lyle Nichols – on work release from jail – racked up five counts of forgery after accepting bounties from Democrats for registering voters who turned out to be dead. In another case, the Democratic Party paid Becky Red Earth Villeda $13,000 for turning in hundreds of illegal registrations, and she was linked to thousands of questionable absentee ballot applications and voter registrations forms that were pre-marked “Democrat.�
St Louis: Fund writes, “If Florida had not dominated all the headlines after the 2000 election and if Missouri had been a little closer, the nation’s attention might have been riveted on St. Louis, where abandoned voting machines, unguarded ballot boxes, confusion over poll closing times, and a suspicious phone-bank message by Jesse Jackson threw the entire city’s election into chaos.�
In the race for governor, U.S. Rep. Jim Talent was defeated by Democratic State Treasurer Bob Holden by just 21,000 votes, or less than 1 percent. No one knows exactly how much of a role fraud played in these results, but the Missouri secretary of state later found that 56,000 St. Louis-area voters held multiple voter registrations.
Between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. residents all over St. Louis picked up their phones and heard this recorded message from Jesse Jackson:
“This is Reverend Jesse Jackson. Tonight the polls in St. Louis are staying open late until 10:00 p.m. in your neighborhood and until midnight downtown. Until 10 p.m. in your neighborhood and midnight downtown, at the Board of Elections. Keep the faith. Vote with a passion. Keep hope alive.�
In New Mexico, Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron – the woman who runs the elections for the entire state – sent out this recorded message before Election Day: “This is your Democrat secretary of state … urging you to vote for Al Gore and our other Democrat candidates.�
While Katherine Harris went on to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Vigil-Giron went on to become the current president of the National Association of Secretaries of State. In 2004 she ordered all New Mexico county clerks to ignore a state law passed in 2003 requiring identification for all first-time registrants to vote, and state Attorney General Patricia Madrid is backing that decree.
South Dakota: In Davison County, election officials improperly counted overvotes. On ballots where two Senate candidates had been marked, the election officials decided to block out the mark given to the candidate with the “lighter� mark. These marks were covered with small, round, white stickers. Election officials were videotaped blocking votes for Congressman John Thune.
Concerns also were raised in Davison County because operatives working for Sen. Tim Johnson’s office were initially granted access to the Democratic auditor’s office and the computers without the consideration of opposing parties.
In Hawaii, Gov. Ben Cayetano named former University of Hawaii law school students to positions in his administration after they were convicted of illegally registering voters for a Democratic candidate for the state house, Ross Segawa.
While 36 states now allow felons to vote, according to VotersUnite.org, the Associated Press reported that nearly 30 percent of America’s military service men and women who requested ballots in the 2000 election never got them before the election.
William Lacy Clay, the Democratic candidate for Congress running to succeed his father, retiring incumbent Bill Clay, attended a Gore-Lieberman rally at the America’s Center in St. Louis. In his speech to the crowd, the younger Clay said it was his intention to have the polls held open beyond the legal closing time. The next morning’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted him as saying, “If it [getting out the African American vote] requires leaving the polls open a little longer, we’re going to get a court order to do it.�
Back to Florida Again
John Fund’s opus on vote fraud may be prophetic.
On April 19, 2004, Sen. John Kerry campaigned in Florida with Sen. Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate, and vowed – six months before a single ballot was cast, counted or disputed – that he was ready to take the election to court.
“We are going to bring legal challenge to those districts that make it difficult for people to register. We’re going to bring challenge to those people that dis-enroll people,� he told a rally. “And we’re going to challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes of Americans, period!�
Paige McKenzie
Monday, Oct. 4, 2004
No, we are not talking about a banana republic south of the border.
We are talking about states like California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas and – of course – Florida.
According to Wall Street Journal writer John Fund, they are among the states where voter fraud is commonplace.
For the first time, John Fund exposes how vote fraud is stealing America’s democracy in his new book “Stealing Elections – How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.� [NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election� – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.]
Not only does Fund unfold just how easy it is to steal an election in America, he also reveals the damaging unintended consequences of continued so-called election reform laws.
According to Fund, “At least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.�
Just 57 percent of Americans – according to a Rasmussen poll - still believe America’s elections are fair even in light of the November 2000 election debacle.
But Fund cites John Zogby polls that show while three percent of the people believed their ballots would not be counted fairly or accurately in 2000, that number has grown to nine percent in 2004.
Even though voter fraud swept Lyndon B. Johnson into the Senate and John F. Kennedy into the White House, public mistrust of the vote process has never been so high.
In an interview with NewsMax, Fund explained, “Basically one out of every 10 Americans don’t believe their vote will be counted, and that’s a high percentage.�
They have reason to worry.
Fund continued, “ People have long thought that voter fraud was confided to local elections, but it’s leached over now into presidential elections. Now we have a very loosey goosey system and the elections are so close that a lot of people are cutting corners on the national races.�
Even for those who have followed the ongoing documentation of November 2000’s aftermath with near religious dedication, Fund’s facts will leave many slackjawed and still some, no doubt, unbelieving.
Most of the vote Fraud, Fund says, seems tied to Democratic party and their local political machines.
Today, when people think of vote fraud, the image of Florida with its pesky chads – hanging, pregnant and dimpled – come to mind.
But Florida is not alone in enduring election fraud shenanigans. And, unfortunately, the state has had much company since.
Fund notes ongoing and recent election scandals in rural South Dakota and Texas, and in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Milwaukee.
Though most of these - as Fund documents - involve Democrats, he is quick to point out that he tends to vote Libertarian or Independent.
And he also maintains that he doesn’t believe Republicans are inherently more honest.
“Voter fraud occurs in both Republican strongholds such as Kentucky hollows and Democratic bastions such as New Orleans,� Fund writes. “When Republicans operated political machines such as Philadelphia’s Meehan dynasty up until 1951 or the patronage mill of Nassau County, New York, until the 1990s, they were fully capable of bending – and breaking – the rules.�
Fund also concurs with Democrats – at least in some instances – who claim that Republicans routinely engage methods of intimidation to discourage certain groups of voters.
“In the 1980s, the Republican National Committee hired off-duty policemen to monitor polling places in New Jersey and Louisiana in the neighborhoods of minority voters, until the outcry forced them to sign a consent decree forswearing all such ‘ballot security’ programs in the future,� Fund writes.
He notes other examples:
In 1990, the North Carolina Republican Party mailed postcards to hundreds of thousands of black voters telling them they would go to prison if they voted improperly.
In 1988, California Republicans in one assembly district hired “poll guards� to carry signs in Spanish and English that read: “noncitizens can’t vote.�
“[T]he most embarrassing incident involving what Democrats claimed was an effort to suppress minority turnout occurred in 1986 when the Republican National committee agreed to end a ballot security program in Louisiana. It had sent letters to voters in precincts where Republicans had gotten less than 20 percent of the vote in the 1984 election to see if they actually lived at the address shown on their registration. If the letters were returned by the post office – as 31,000 were – the names were handed over to voter registrars with a request that they be purged. a judge found that the precincts were GOP support was below 20 percent coincided almost exactly with precincts where blacks were a clear majority.�
And though Democrats in 2000 were found to have traded “smokes-for-votes� on behalf Gore-Lieberman, Fund says some Republicans in Kentucky have been known to engage in similar efforts in local races with pints of Jack Daniels.
Apparently they haven’t been too successful, as Kentucky for the most part has traditionally remained just as many of its poverty-ridden state peers – controlled by Democrats.
However, it seems to be fairly widely acknowledged - even by some Democrats - that the problem of voter fraud is more prevalent within their own party.
Democrats’ Dirty Little Secret
Fund quotes political analyst Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson from their book, Dirty Little Secrets: “Republican base voters are middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic.�
Amazingly, others even justify this fact. It seems there is no end to the lengths many Democrats will go to perpetuate class warfare in promoting socialism.
Fund writes that a former Democratic congressman had this to say about “why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard: ‘When man Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.’�
Fund cited to NewsMax the recent example of Republican Gary Horrocks being convicted of voter fraud in Nevada. “Ironically,� said Fund, “he was committing the fraud on behalf of a Democrat� – Marcus Conklin.
Democrats who are outraged by voter fraud even when it is within their own party should beware. “In 1998, a former Democratic congressman named Austin Murphy was convicted in Pennsylvania of absentee ballot fraud. The Democratic county supervisor who uncovered this scandal, Sean Cavanaugh, was so ostracized by his party that he re-registered as an independent,� writes Fund.
Perhaps the clearest example in the difference in attitudes toward the widespread problem of voter fraud in America is illustrated in the following exchange between the chairmen of the two major political parties. [NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election� – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.]
Writes Fund:
In June 2004, Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent a letter to Terry McAuliffe, his Democratic counterpart, suggesting that they find ways the two parties could work together to protect the integrity of the election process. One of his ideas was that in close battleground states, each party identify precincts where it fears there might be problems on Election Day. “Each of us would be responsible for recruiting a volunteer for each named precinct,� Gillespie wrote. ‘Similarly bipartisan teams would be assigned to cover multiple precincts to respond to and investigate reports of problems. “The teams would agree on avenues of appeals that could be taken to the courts, if needed.� Journalists could be embedded with the teams, a la the Iraq war, to report on developments...McAuliffe wrote back to say that while he “strongly opposed any fraudulent behavior or activity at poling places,� the real issue was having the Justice Department ensure that no voter was harassed or intimidated. He dismissed Gillespie’s idea of a joint task force to police polling places as “a public relations gambit.�
If you’re looking to commit election fraud, there are innumerable and fairly easy ways to do it, the most common of which include:
Vote buying or swapping – Get your hands on a large stash of Marlboros
Absentee and provisional ballots – Call your county clerk and request absentee ballots for all of your extended family and have each one sent to the address of your two-bedroom apartment or house.
Felons, Illegal Aliens, pets, the dead and other non-registered people voting. Felons and the dead are likely still on the voter rolls, thanks to the Clinton Adminstration’s Motor Voter law. As Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, dismissively responded after Margaret Mekler’s dog, Ritzy, was found to be registered to vote, “no law Congress could pass would prevent all dogs from voting.� And you know how dear departed Aunt Edna or Uncle Charley would vote today. But you can send mail-in registrations for all the rest, or just sign onto the Internet and save yourself some postage.
Disqualifying military ballots - You’ll have to volunteer as a poll worker for this one. Or check the party affiliation of your county clerk’s office staff.
Over voting – Vote early and vote often. Volunteer as a poll worker and mark the other candidate in each race where someone hasn’t voted for the candidate of your choice. This is especially easy if your county uses punch cards, as many in Florida did in 2000. More on this in Part II.
And who before the passage of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform could have foreseen the glut of the so-called 527s, blatantly sending in thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms to county clerks across the nation, as reports continue to document. These operatives send their thanks to John McCain and Russ Feingold.
Motor Voter
In 1992 those who desire to commit election fraud got a great big slap on the back from our newly elected President, in the form of the notorious Motor Voter law. Otherwise known as the National Voter Registration Act, it was the first law to be signed by Bill Clinton when he became president.
According to Clinton, 1992’s largest increase in voter turnout in a generation was a “crisis� in civic participation. So he immediately launched Motor Voter to alleviate this troublesome roadblock.
As Fund writes, “Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the ‘incentivizing’ of fraud and the clash of conflicting visions about the priorities of our election system than the 1993 debate in Congress over the National Voter Registration Act…�
Motor Voter allowed anyone and everyone applying for a driver’s license to register to vote. In addition, the law:
Offered mail-in registration with no identification required and no questions asked.
Forbade “government workers ask for identification or proof of citizenship
Made it difficult to purge “deadwood� voters - people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes – from their rolls. Now, people who didn’t vote would be kept on the registration rolls for at least eight years before anyone could remove them.
Imposed an unfounded mandate on the states by requiring that anyone entering a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment compensation would be offered the chance to register on the spot to vote.
Fund continues, “In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age 18. Philadelphia’s voter rolls, for instance have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time that the city’s population has declined by13 percent. CBS’s 60 minutes created a stir in 1999 when it found people in California using mail-in forms to register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee ballots in their names. By this means, for example, the illegal alien who assassinated the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was registered to vote in San Pedro, California – twice.�
Compounding these examples is the fact that some states – New Mexico, for example – have passed laws that would easily allow illegal aliens to apply for state driver’s licenses with little to no differential between those of the state’s citizens. Governor Bill Richardson signed such a law within his first three months as governor.
One of the worst effects of Motor Voter has been to artificially inflate voter registration. This, writes Fund, has “clearly misled Americans about the state of their democracy by giving a false measure of voting turnout as a proportion of registered voters. Rather than a decline, we may have seen an increase in voting as a percentage of legitimately registered voters; but because of Motor Voter, we just don’t know.� [NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election� – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.]
Absentee and Provisional Ballots
This time around, we have HAVA – the Help America Vote Act - created to try to alleviate the problems encountered in the November, 2000 election. HAVA allows anyone who asks for one to be given a provisional paper ballot, in order to prevent anyone from being disenfranchised. Election officials are instructed to count the paper ballots only if they can verify each voter as being legitimately registered.
In addition to HAVA, absentee voting continues to rise, with voters seeking the convenience of not have to drive to their polling location and stand in line on Election Day.
“Between 15 and 20 percent of voters in 2000 cast their ballots before Election Day,� reports Marshall Lewin in America’s 1st Freedom. And several states have already started their early/absentee voting periods.
Fund documents massive abuses with absentee and provisional ballots, as well as the problems created by their ever-greater acceptance.
KCNC-TV in Denver reported (in November 2001) that thousands of ballots were mailed to incorrect addresses, to residents how had moved away and even to the dead.
In Ohio, a worker at the Lucas County Board of elections (Toledo) found three hundred completed absentee ballots in a storage room more than a month after the March 2004 primary. At least half had not been counted and they ended up affecting the final results of at least one local election.
And another California avalanche occurred in the state’s March primary, when 44,000 provisional ballots poured into Los Angeles County, the Associated Press reported.
From one day in Virginia to four weeks in California, election officials don’t have an unlimited amount of time to count paper ballots. And the onslaught takes a toll on election workers.
Fund writes of pollster John Zogby, “He remembers doing a study of local election practices for the League of Women Voters in the 1980s and visiting a precinct in his hometown of Utica, New York. After the polls closed at 9:00 p.m., workers spent seven minutes noting down the tallies from the lever machines. “Then one of the workers brought out this big cardboard box filled with absentee ballots,� Zogby recalls. “the chief worker said, “To hell with the absentee ballots, we’ve been working for 15 hours straight Let’s go home.’ They then called in the final results to the elections office and left.�
American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein writes in Roll Call, “But with absentee balloting, ballots come in and are held in partisan local election officials offices for days, weeks or months, without round-the-clock supervision, and opportunities for the destruction, alteration or interference of some ballots.�
For many voters, a paper ballot is comforting – alleviating their fears about electronic voting technology they do not trust. But as Iowa voter Sarah Reschy wrote in to NewsMax, “[T]he Democratic Party’s well organized campaign to collect absentee ballots is suspect at best and is fraudulent at worst. Unfortunately, the situation is not new. My grandmother was in a nursing home when she cast an absentee ballot for Bob Dole. A volunteer from the Democratic Party picked her ballot up. A query to the county courthouse after the election showed that my grandmother’s vote was not recorded.�
And Judith Bradley, of Wisconsin, informed us “I am very concerned about the blatant voter fraud occurring in Wisconsin. One of our local radio shows (Mark Belling) has uncovered groups registering college kids in their classes and on campus not requiring ID. Counties are reporting a glut of absentee ballots, many suspicious. The woman running it had to drop out of a race in Madison, accused of fraud.�
Of course, ACT – one of the infamous 527s – cropped up when Ohio voter Judity Ery wrote to us, “My husband received an “Application for Absent Voter’s Ballot/Administration’s Medicare Policy� brochure. This targets senior citizens with scare tactics warning of the direct consequences to Social Security that will result if he votes Republican in the Nov. election. The brochure is published by ACT – Americans Coming Together. I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to contact their Web site to express my outrage....I hope they will be ousted as Democratic operatives rather than a non-partisan group encouraging seniors to register and vote at home.�
Lewin writes “Historically most provisional ballots are bogus. According to The New York Times, in a March 2004 Chicago election...fully 93 percent of the provisional ballots were disqualified.�
Many of the voters that 527s like ACT have been targeting weren’t around yet for the election when Chicago became a “crime scene� – to use a favorite term of the so-called Reverend Jesse Jackson and son. And John Kerry’s hero – John F. Kennedy – became president of the United States.
But then, there are numerous newly registered “voters� who haven’t been around for many of the past several elections – like the 13-year-old boy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who recently received a voter registration card from the Bernalillo County clerk’s office.
Fund notes, “Earl Mazo, the journalist who exhaustively documented the election fraud in Richard Daley’s Chicago that may have handed Illinois to John F. Kennedy in the photo-finish 1960 election, says there was also ‘definitely fraud’ in downstate Republican counties, ‘but they didn’t have the votes to counterbalance Chicago.’�
Many Republicans failed to see the humor in the fact that Daley’s son was one of Al Gore’s chief lawyers in his fight for Florida’s electoral votes in 2000.
With the passage of HAVA, buckets of provisional ballots may become the trial lawyers’ playground this time around. Armies of them are already lining up to volunteer their services and continual chants of “Count Every Vote.� By the time these 30,000 attorneys – according to ABCNews.com – finish forming “Election Protection Attorney Networks,� - every polling location in America is likely to have its very own Daley-in-the-alley. With hundreds of dollars per hour in tax write-offs, every ballot has a dollar sign attached.
Not surprisingly, trial lawyers comprise the largest contributing group to the Kerry-Edwards campaign, which has been warning for months of their plan to launch another election legal battle in the 2004 presidential contest – tying up election results from sea to shining sea.
Will 2004 Be 2000 All Over Again?
Paige McKenzie
Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2004
This is Part II of NewsMax’s special coverage of John Fund’s new book. Read Part I.
Florida 2000. It’s been hashed and rehashed. “George Bush stole the election.�
Michael Moore asserts that “under every scenario Gore would have won,� John Fund writes in his new book, “Stealing Elections.� And Vanity Fair also jumped onto the “stolen election� bandwagon recently with an article that asks “Could it happen again?�
As John Fund unravels the facts, however, the opposite is true.
In fact, numerous media outlets, including the New York Times and several others in the liberal media establishment, have found that under “every scenario� Bush legitimately won – and would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had not intervened.
The 2000 Florida race is important this election year because it has been cited so often as an example of how Republicans steal elections.
Michael Moore and his crew apparently somehow missed the following sampling of details given by Fund:
The Civil Rights Commission was unable to come up with a “consistent, statistically significant relationship between the share of voters who were African-American and the ballot spoilage rate.� And “among the 25 Florida counties with the greatest rate of vote spoilage, 24 had Democratic election officers in charge of counting the votes.�
The liberal Palm Beach Post found that “a review of state records, internal emails of employees and testimony before the civil rights commission and an elections task force showed no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted.�
Indeed, the application of the law against felons voting in 2000 skewed against whites, making them the most likely to be excluded erroneously from voter rolls. The error rate was 9.9 percent for whites, 8.7 percent for Hispanics and only 5.1 percent for African Americans.
Both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to vote, and this largely benefited Al Gore. The Post reported: “These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election. It’s likely they benefited Democratic candidate Al Gore: Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrats.�
Many of some 1,420 ballots from America’s military servicemen and women – the majority of whom vote Republican – were clearly received on or before Election Day but were disqualified at the behest of Democratic lawyers because they didn’t technically comply with Florida’s law requiring a foreign postmark.
CBS declared Florida’s polls closed 33 times during the hour before the polls actually closed at 8:00 p.m. – prematurely declaring Gore the winner at 7:48 p.m. and thereby suppressing the Republican vote, for a loss of approximately 11,500 votes. Even Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded that Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the western Panhandle as a result of confusion sown by the networks. Other turnout drop-off numbers suggested a net loss of 30,000 votes for Bush.
San Diego, Calif., a county with more seniors, minorities and new immigrants in its population mix than Palm Beach County – had an overvote rate of 0.5 percent. Palm Beach had an overvote of 5 percent. Palm Beach County also had the lowest rate of votes for Bush per registered Republican voters of any county in Florida and was in the lowest 10 percent in the country for counties with party registration.
Perhaps political shenanigans were at work well before the polls closed that evening.
As Fund explains, even before the polls closed, the national Democratic Party had hired a Texas telemarketing firm to send out calls urging citizens to say that the butterfly ballot, designed and approved by Democrats, had confused them.
Fund writes that Democrats knew Palm Beach’s election returns were going to push Florida into Bush’s column of electoral votes.
Indeed, some Republican National Committee regional directors were stunned to hear the media call Florida for Gore as they tracked the returns through computer software and knew that Bush was ahead in the state.
And that’s just a sampling of what happened in Florida. It doesn’t begin to cover the funny business occurring simultaneously in other states.
In Wisconsin, officials convicted a New York heiress working for Al Gore of giving homeless people cigarettes if they rode in a van to the polls and voted.
In South Dakota, Lyle Nichols – on work release from jail – racked up five counts of forgery after accepting bounties from Democrats for registering voters who turned out to be dead. In another case, the Democratic Party paid Becky Red Earth Villeda $13,000 for turning in hundreds of illegal registrations, and she was linked to thousands of questionable absentee ballot applications and voter registrations forms that were pre-marked “Democrat.�
St Louis: Fund writes, “If Florida had not dominated all the headlines after the 2000 election and if Missouri had been a little closer, the nation’s attention might have been riveted on St. Louis, where abandoned voting machines, unguarded ballot boxes, confusion over poll closing times, and a suspicious phone-bank message by Jesse Jackson threw the entire city’s election into chaos.�
In the race for governor, U.S. Rep. Jim Talent was defeated by Democratic State Treasurer Bob Holden by just 21,000 votes, or less than 1 percent. No one knows exactly how much of a role fraud played in these results, but the Missouri secretary of state later found that 56,000 St. Louis-area voters held multiple voter registrations.
Between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. residents all over St. Louis picked up their phones and heard this recorded message from Jesse Jackson:
“This is Reverend Jesse Jackson. Tonight the polls in St. Louis are staying open late until 10:00 p.m. in your neighborhood and until midnight downtown. Until 10 p.m. in your neighborhood and midnight downtown, at the Board of Elections. Keep the faith. Vote with a passion. Keep hope alive.�
In New Mexico, Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron – the woman who runs the elections for the entire state – sent out this recorded message before Election Day: “This is your Democrat secretary of state … urging you to vote for Al Gore and our other Democrat candidates.�
While Katherine Harris went on to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Vigil-Giron went on to become the current president of the National Association of Secretaries of State. In 2004 she ordered all New Mexico county clerks to ignore a state law passed in 2003 requiring identification for all first-time registrants to vote, and state Attorney General Patricia Madrid is backing that decree.
South Dakota: In Davison County, election officials improperly counted overvotes. On ballots where two Senate candidates had been marked, the election officials decided to block out the mark given to the candidate with the “lighter� mark. These marks were covered with small, round, white stickers. Election officials were videotaped blocking votes for Congressman John Thune.
Concerns also were raised in Davison County because operatives working for Sen. Tim Johnson’s office were initially granted access to the Democratic auditor’s office and the computers without the consideration of opposing parties.
In Hawaii, Gov. Ben Cayetano named former University of Hawaii law school students to positions in his administration after they were convicted of illegally registering voters for a Democratic candidate for the state house, Ross Segawa.
While 36 states now allow felons to vote, according to VotersUnite.org, the Associated Press reported that nearly 30 percent of America’s military service men and women who requested ballots in the 2000 election never got them before the election.
William Lacy Clay, the Democratic candidate for Congress running to succeed his father, retiring incumbent Bill Clay, attended a Gore-Lieberman rally at the America’s Center in St. Louis. In his speech to the crowd, the younger Clay said it was his intention to have the polls held open beyond the legal closing time. The next morning’s edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted him as saying, “If it [getting out the African American vote] requires leaving the polls open a little longer, we’re going to get a court order to do it.�
Back to Florida Again
John Fund’s opus on vote fraud may be prophetic.
On April 19, 2004, Sen. John Kerry campaigned in Florida with Sen. Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate, and vowed – six months before a single ballot was cast, counted or disputed – that he was ready to take the election to court.
“We are going to bring legal challenge to those districts that make it difficult for people to register. We’re going to bring challenge to those people that dis-enroll people,� he told a rally. “And we’re going to challenge any place in America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes of Americans, period!�
