voter fraud

Its been said that Democrats have two growing electoral bases: trial lawyers and voter fraud.

Republican candidates who get screwed in elections by Democrat / Leftist / ACORN voter fraud is so common that its deserving of its own Wylie Coyote routine.

This year, its time we stand up and fight.

We can send Jon Corzine packing this year if we prevent him & the New Jersey political machine from stealing yet another election.

The same goes for a myriad of other races today.

So, today we fight back.

And we fight back with Web 2.0.

Here are four simple ways to report voter fraud:

Twitter | use #votefraud hashtag

YouTube | visit http://www.youtube.com/group/votefraud09

Flickr | visit: http://www.flickr.com/groups/votefraud

Facebook | visit: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=214486540096

 [UPDATE: 3:23 PST 11/3/09]:  John Henke requested that we add links to "prove" that vote fraud was occurring.  Or had occurred. 

I can't speak for this year's election (yet).  Hopefully as a result of Web 2.0, we won't have to.

But as for past instances of vote fraud, my definition of vote fraud INCLUDES vote registration fraud (some people differ).  Check these links out.  Also, John Fund has an excellent book that i highly recommend reading.

From the Columbus Dispatch, three staffers for Vote Today Ohio have plead guilty to illegally registering and voting in Columbus during the so-called Golden Week - a seven day period when Ohio residents could register to vote and cast a ballot at the same time.

This will likely be a footnote it what was a monumental disaster perpetrated by the Ohio Secretary of State and supporters of Barack Obama.  But it highlights three important realities:

• The extreme vulnerability of Election Day Registration
• The enormous influence one highly partisan election official can have on the process
• The need to invest in ballot security programs

For those who have forgotten, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner unilaterally re-interpreted Ohio Election statutes governing the overlap of the voter registration deadline and the start of early vote to create a de-facto seven day window of Election Day Registration whereby residents could fill out an application and immediately cast a vote.

She ordered the unprepared and understaffed County Election Boards to set-up voting centers that would ensure a massive turnout. Then Brunner amazingly banned all pollwatchers from the vote centers.  Chaos without witnesses.

Many County Election Boards balked and the Ohio Republican Party unsuccessfully sued to stop her, but it was too late.

From the beginning, stories of fraud and misconduct were widely reported.  The Obama Campaign, ACORN, Vote Today Ohio, and Vote From Home were all linked to voter fraud during Golden Week. See here, here, here, here here here here here here here here 

But, as is the case when elections aren’t close, Obama’s victory overshadowed the widespread fraud of Election 2008.  But it happened in Ohio and it happened on a much larger scale then what is being reflected by three guilty pleas.  It will be interesting to see if any of the other groups named above will face similar charges.

This should be a wake up call to any state that is considering EDR without significant safeguards in place,  any political party that isn’t heavily investing in Secretary of State races, and any campaign that doesn’t have a ballot security program. 

The three who plead guilty are:

Amy Little, 50, of New York. (Ms. Little was a consultant for Congressman John Hall (D-NY) until news broke in October that she illegally voted).

Daniel Hausman, 32, of New York.

Yolanda Hipplesteele, 30, of California.

crossposted at www.electionjournal.org

I don't think we can say that things are over yet in Minnesota, but we could be inching closer to another confirmation of the GOP's rock bottom status. If Al Franken is elected a Senator, I think we can officially say that things can't possibly get any worse.

What are the broader lessons here? One of the big problems it seems we face is that we keep losing votes after Election Day. On the day after the election, Obama's Presidential margin stood at under 6 points. Now, it's 7.3 according to RealClearPolitics. A lot of this is West Coast absentees and provisionals. But the reality is that it's going to be very, very difficult to succeed in recounts if we tolerate 1 to 1.5 points of slippage in overall vote counts after Election Day, usually in their direction. And MN-SEN isn't even the worst. Remember when we suddenly lost OH-15 by more than 2,000 votes when they decided to count 26,000 Franklin County provisionals a month after the election? And I don't even need to remind you about WA-GOV in 2004, when a governor was elected courtesy of votes found in closets.

Even if some of these votes are counted legitimately (the Ohio provisions example), we are inviting a crisis of confidence in our election system if it looks like the winner is dependent on the time we count ballots: usually a Republican on the day of the election when standard procedures are followed, and then a Democrat after protracted recounts and court battles.

We must insist on basic good government reforms to increase confidence in election results. Some of these might be done federally (as amendments to HAVA) and others will need to go state by state.

• Full electronic voting with a paper trail audit. There's a reason Paul Carmouche didn't challenge a 356-vote margin in LA-4: because the voting was 100% electronic. Critics have made good points about the lack of a paper trail on many of these machines. But MN-SEN shows that optical scan ballots, preferable only to hanging chads, are not fulproof. While plenty of bugs have been demonstrated on e-voting machines, there's no evidence (to date) of actual votes being mis-counted or lost -- and a paper trail should greatly improve the detection and resolution of these issues in real time.
• All ballots counted within 72 hours. It shouldn't take weeks to count absentees and provisionals. Let's set a reasonable window for counting every vote -- like 72 or 96 hours -- understanding that this might be different in states that are largely vote-by-mail.
• Zero tolerance for lost-and-found votes. Negligence in handling voted ballots should be made a misdemeanor offense at a minimum. Election officials should pay heavy fines and face removal for incidents like the 133 "lost" Minneapolis ballots. Heavy legal penalties should be a deterrent to "losing" ballots that are then "found" at conveninent points in a recount. 
• An open election results standard. I want this for other reasons, but a bunch of tech people should get together to formulate a standard for the reporting of real-time precinct election results in XML that also covers 1) reporting status of absentees and provisionals, and 2) historical precinct data, including notional numbers from census block counts for re-precincted areas. For all precincts, we should know how many voters are registered to get a real sense of voter turnout as well as how many people voted in this precinct in the last few elections. Practically, this means that the spotting of anomalies can be crowdsourced to the online community. If turnout seems abnormally high or low for a precinct, we can know in real time.

The GOP, with the help of sites like Election Journal, has made it a priority to detect and prevent voter fraud before and during elections -- but we lack a similarly systematic approach to prevent the stealing of elections after the fact. (Arguably, such a strategy would have more of an impact.) More than a handful of races this year were in recounts or in limbo until after Election Day, and at the Senate level, all have been decided for the Democrat or are trending that way (Alaska, Oregon, and now possibly Minnesota).

the NH GOP has gone to court to stop possible voter fraud. It seems that Republican poll watchers are being kept up to 40 feet away (can't read or hear stuff from that distance) from the Registration areas at the poll locations - THIS IS ILLEGAL!

VIDEO

More later!

Sheridan Folger,

Philly Man Tells CNN He Voted "A Couple Times"

By Amanda Carpenter

Townhall

November 4, 2008 1:58 PM

http://townhall.com/blog/g/80c1054c-7d79-4b39-839c-944e8024d1d6

Ron Jones of Philadelphia told CNN's Brian Todd he was so inspired to vote he voted more than once.

"It's time for change, man," Jones said. He complained about the long lines and said that "I decided to come back and vote a couple times"

Reporter Todd didn't seem to mind. In fact, he didn't even blink.

"I think that's against the law, but it's okay, all right. Thanks, Ron," Todd said. Then, the camera conveniently cut away.

VIDEO

H/T Election Journal.

Cross-posted from Election Journal.

Election Journal is working with a large number of activists around the country, tracking election fraud and other irregularities. Check out this video of some of our greatest hits from monitoring elections in the primary:

If you see anything at the polling place that raises a question, take a picture and send it to us — even from your camera phone — to votefraud@gmail.com or email us at electionjournal@gmail.com.

A number of former DoJ officials have sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasy asking why the DoJ is not enforcing the law and correcting the record regarding a previous letter sent by another set of former attorneys. The key passages seem to be:

As these cases show, in more than four decades of operation, the Civil Rights Division has never hesitated to fulfill its responsibilities by filing lawsuits to enforce federal voting rights laws that govern access to the polls and the administration of elections even on the very eve of Election Day. Against this backdrop, the Division’s recent failure to act in the case filed by a private party against the Ohio Secretary of State in which two federal courts, including the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, have specifically found that the Secretary of State is not complying with the verification requirements of Section 303 of HAVA, is difficult to fathom. Its similar lack of action in Wisconsin, where the state election board has also admitted that it is not complying with this provision of HAVA, is equally perplexing. This appears to be a dereliction of the Department’s obligations to enforce federal law.

Full letter after jump

A bunch of election fraud blogs have popped up in individual states. Here's a great one from Iowa with a great story. In this case, fraudulent voter registration led to an absentee ballot being sent to one of the fake people ... in Rome:

A concerned citizen from Sioux City, IA made a trip to her auditor's office last week to inquire into some political mailings her family kept receiving. She discovered that several individuals unknown to her or her family had registered to vote using their address in 2004. Even more concerning is the fact that one of these folks, (Iowans love this word) Mr. David Loepp, had already requested and recieved his 2008 absentee ballot via international mail in ROME. Voter fraud in Iowa? Never!

Note that this fake person who doesn't exist signed an request form for the ballot. Click through to see the application and see the signature.

Yesterday, Ralph Nader set a Guinness world record by giving 21 different political speeches in 21 different Massachusetts towns in one day.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/10/26/nader_speaking_tour_sets_record/

Congratulations, Ralph!

Now, this points to what's wrong with ACORN's tactics.

Had Nader had a list of fake names, he could have walked into 21 different polling places, adopted whatever identity he needed to , and cast what on their face what would be lawful ballots.

Anyone who doesn;t see the obvious problem with padding the voter rolls with fake names is simply in the tank for the folks doing it.  And in case someone comes here to allege I'm inventing a scenario that can;t happen, please review what happened in Milwaukee http://www2.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=324933 and Seattle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_gubernatorial_election,_2004#Discovered_ballots in 2004