Should We Take Voter Fraud as Seriously as Business Fraud?

November 11, 2002

by Mary Mostert, Analyst - Banner of Liberty

For weeks before the election Terry McAuliffe, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was really warning Democrats about the new factor in the election which spelled trouble for Democrats: the determination of the U.S. Justice Department under the direction of John Ashcroft to eliminate voter fraud.

While he never complained about it, it was the massive voter fraud in Missouri in the 2000 election that apparently defeated Ashcroft’s bid for re-election to the Senate, and in effect was the cause of the Democrats being able to seize control of the Senate.

Columnist George Will revealed that the night before the 2000 election, Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri told a Gore-Lieberman rally that a lawsuit would be filed to force the polls to stay open longer than Missouri law allowed. Such a suit was filed claiming that minorities were having trouble voting.

Although the person filing the claim in 200 had died in 1999, a judge ordered the polls to stay open, while a prerecorded telephone message from Jesse Jackson was already telling prospective voters that poll hours were extended. Some have charged that the claim that minorities were having “problems” actually was merely a cover that enabled Democrats to move groups of illegal or duplicate voters to different polling places.

Missouri’s secretary of state reported that among 1,384 ballots illegally cast, 62 belonged to felons, 79 were from vacant lot registrations, 86 voted twice, and 14 votes were in the names of dead persons. Of 1,268 applications for court ordered permission to vote, 1,233 were improperly granted to people who had never registered, but gave excuses that allowed them to vote.

In the 2000 election, there were 14,000 voters in New York that had dual registrations, and in June of this year, the Washington Post reported, duplicate voter registration and other voter fraud in 11 states after the 2000 election where over 140,000 persons had been eligible to vote in at least 2 jurisdictions.

In 2000 I reported a statistical analysis made by (Robert Cook, PE, a nuclear engineer, (http://www.bannerofliberty.com/OS11-00HL/11-15-2000.1.html) with an MS in statistical quality control, on the voter fraud techniques employed in the “re-count” of ballots cast in Palm Beach, Florida to try to give that state to Al Gore. He said in “the controversial 19,120 Presidential race ballots at issue there were ‘destroyed by deliberate double-punching ballots in Palm Beach County FL with a ’second punch’ for Al Gore or Pat Buchanan. (In 1996, an additional 15,000 Dole and Perot ballots were destroyed by double-punching presidential ballots in Palm Beach County, FL.’”

The battle in 2001 by Democrats in the Senate to kill Bush’s nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General was partly an effort to keep him from being in the position to do what he did on Tuesday. He made prevention of voter fraud (http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2002/November/02_crt_640.htm) in the 2002 election a priority. In fact, 2000 election laws were passed in Missouri that requires voters to produce state-issued identification at the polls, unless they are known by two election officials.

On November 2nd, the Justice Department announced that it had sent “324 federal observers and 108 Justice Department personnel to 26 counties in 14 states to monitor the general election on Tuesday, November 5, 2002.” On election day last Tuesday, Poll watchers were everywhere. Terry McAuliffe complained (http://www.democrats.org/news/200211050001.html) that a Republican plan for “deploying off-duty police officers as poll watchers on Election Day” was “voter intimidation.”

For many, the Senate election in South Dakota, home of Senate Democrat Majority Leader Tom Daschle, is a burning issue. Democrat Senator Tim Johnson has been declared winner of that race with 528 votes more than Republican challenger John Thune. Prior to the election the Washington Times reported (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021031-30356402.htm) “Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Republicans had targeted minority groups for intimidation. ‘In my state of South Dakota, we are now seeing a concerted Republican effort to make allegations and launch initiatives intended to suppress Native American voting.’"

McAuliffe and Daschle’s definition of “voter harassment” is requiring voters to provide proof of their identity. Apparently Daschle was alluding to the county auditor in Shannon County, where Pine Ridge Reservation is located. Finding that some addresses were incorrect, birth dates were not accurate, signatures looked similar and some cards were returned with an incomplete address, the auditor sent more than 100 registration cards to be investigated.

The investigation in South Dakota was prompted by reports that one Democrat operative, Becky Red Earth-Villeda, (http://www.argusleader.com/news/Fridayarticle2.shtml) who was paid more than $12,000 in three months, had turned in 1750 applications for absentee ballots, many of which she apparently signed herself.

In the 2000 only 1068 people voted in predominately Republican Jackson County South Dakota. In the 2002 election, 1202 people voted in Jackson country, an increase of 134 votes or a 12.4% increase in voting over the Presidential race.

Jackson County Auditor Vickie Wilson said she turned over seven absentee ballot requests to local authorities. "I was fairly certain that someone other than the voter could have signed them," Wilson said. She said she also provided the FBI with a total of 20 absentee ballot requests for investigation. Jackson County Sheriff Bruce Madsen said three people have advised him that they did not sign the requests, and two others didn’t remember signing them. Madsen said he only found one person so far who had confirmed signing a request.

In a repeat of a technique used in 2000 in heavily Democrat precincts in St. Louis, Missouri, some polling places in Todd and Mellette counties were kept open Tuesday an extra hour. In predominately Democrat Todd County, where Rosebud Indian Reservation is located, in the 2000 Presidential election, 1546 people voted. In 2002, on the other hand, 2529 people voted, an increase of 983 or 63.5% over the Presidential race.

There are only 322,159 registered voters in all of South Dakota and only 189, 822| voted Tuesday. A switch of only 265 or 1.4% of the votes cast statewide would give the election to John Thune. A switch of 15 votes in Jackson County’s 1202 ballots is 1.4% of the entire county vote.

In Palm Beach, Florida in 2000, a 1.4% switch of that county’s 462,588 voters would have given President Bush an additional 6,476 votes which would have given Bush a commanding lead statewide.

Democrat Tim Johnson leads Republican John Thune by less than 1% of the South Dakota vote. Keeping the Democrat precincts open an extra hour, or a small percentage of illegal ballots could easily have given the race to Johnson.

While we’ve heard a lot from the media of late about the seriousness of financial fraud, we’ve heard almost nothing about voter fraud and its impact on Democracy. Perhaps it is time to handcuff and jail those committing voter fraud as well as those who commit business fraud.

To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com

Links:

http://www.bannerofliberty.com/OS11-00HL/11-15-2000.1.html - Banner of Liberty - November 15, 2002 "Explicit statistical evidence of massive ballot tampering in Palm Beach, Fl"

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2002/November/02_crt_640.htm - Department of Justice - November 2, 2002 – Federal Observers and Justice Department Personnel to Monitor General Election in States Across the Nation

http://www.democrats.org/news/200211050001.html) - Democratic National Committee – November 5, 2002 – Terry McAuliffe - DNC Chairman McAuliffe Statement on Continued Tactics of Voter Intimidation and Suppression

http://www.argusleader.com/news/Thursdayfeature.shtml - Argus Leader - Sioux Falls, S.D. – Voter Fraud Charges in South Dakota

http://www.argusleader.com/news/Fridayarticle2.shtml - Argus Leader - Sioux Falls, S.D. – November 1, 2002 – Woman tried to destroy originals

_____________________________________

Mary Mostert was writing professionally on political issues as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she wrote a weekly column for the Rochester Times Union, a Gannett paper and was one of 52 American women who attended the 17 Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland to ban testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. She was a licensed building contractor for 29 years, as she raised her six children. She served an 18 month mission as Public Affairs Director for the Africa Area for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1990-91. In the 1990s she wrote a book, Coming Home, Families Can Stop the Unraveling of America, edited the Reagan Monthly Monitor and talk show host Michael Reagan’s Information Interchange for seven years. She now operates the website, Banner of Liberty.

Send the author an E mail at Mostert@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Mary's articles, visit her archives.