John Fund: Voter Fraud Common

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.

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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.

NewsMax has copies of “Stealing Election” – get this important book before Election Day -- Click Here.