Make Way for Election Month The FIoridafication of our political waters continues unabated
Fund, John H.
Make Way for Election Month The Floridafication of our political waters continues unabated. BY JOHN H. FUND ORGET ELECTION DAY. If the legal maneuverings by the Kerry and Bush campaigns are any...
...Louis Election Board reports that about three-quarters of ACT's registrations were valid, but trusting any numbers they report is a perilous exercise...
...In New Mexico, which Al Gore carried by only 366 votes in 2000, Rebecca Vigil- Giron, the Democratic secretary of state, ordered county clerks not to obey a new federally mandated law requiring that first-time voters who registered outside an election office must show a form of ID to vote...
...Missouri Democrats sued to allow St...
...Voters should expect to see troops of attorneys from both parties monitoring the polls this fall...
...cities, anging from Philadelphia to Miami, also need a complete house-cleaning...
...four felons it hired in Missouri have already gone back to prison, including one for endangering the welfare of a minor...
...John Kerry has announced the creation of a nationwide SWAT team of election lawyers who will take "tough action" against the voter "intimidation and harassment" he claims "stole" the votes of 57,000 African Americans in Florida in 2000...
...He has joined a suit to enforce the law the state legislature passed in January mandating that first-time voters show identification...
...In 2002, ATLA became the largest single contributor to federal candidates, almost all of its money flowing to Democrats...
...A judge threw the case out, ruling that the state legislature had announced plans for early voting systems, but had not implemented any...
...State Auditor Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, issued a scathing report on the Election Board's procedures in June...
...Matthew Henderson, the head of the local ACORN drive, says that ID requirements are "no different than what was going on in the civil rights movement of the '60s...
...But Vigil- Giron says the law does not apply to first-time registrations that are filled out in the presence of a third party, such as an ACORN worker...
...Kunko, a Republican, added: "It would take our office no more than a few days to flag voters for identification...
...JOHN H . FUND and then paid 75 canvassers between $8 and $12 an hour to go door-to-door to sign up new voters...
...Since GOP counties would not be holding early voting, such a move would clearly advantage Democrats...
...The group sent in another batch of 500 voter-registration cards that also were suspect, Keena Carter, the election board's deputy director and a Democrat, told the St...
...RE EFORM MAY FINALLY BE IN THE CARDS in St...
...The fact that his campaign has failed to identify any of these countless victims is a sign that his new legal brigade may be more about bending the rules in his favor than it is about righting any voting wrongs...
...At least 935 of the felons, or some 40 percent, had apparently cast a ballot in a recent election...
...The mess in St...
...America Coming Together (ACT), an anti-Bush group funded by $5 million from financier George Soros, hired dozens of felons to go door-to-door to register voters in Florida, Missouri, and Ohio...
...We now send teams of election observers to countries such as Venezuela, Cambodia, and Albania, where fraud has been rampant...
...The 57,000 figure comes from the controversial U.S...
...Its roster of staffers is chock-full of Democratic operatives with close ties to Sen...
...In 2001, the Palm Beach Post concluded that more than 5,600 people voted in Florida who appeared to perfectly match names on a list of suspected felons who were barred from voting...
...That's one reason the Missouri Department of Corrections banned ACT from its list of potential employers for parolees in halfway houses...
...Louis is one of several American cities in which registered voters outnumber residents of voting age...
...To his credit, David Iglesias, the local U.S...
...It found that nearly 10 percent, or 24,000, of the city's voters were "questionable...
...Louis, ut at least a dozen other major U.S...
...ACT also denied that it is violating federal election laws which prohibit it from engaging in partisan activity on behalf of the Kerry campaign, even though its website says it is "laying the groundwork to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats...
...After Florida in 2000, Election night is not necessarily the finish line anymore," says Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project...
...She says it needs "local control and direct accountability" and suggests control of it be transferred directly to the mayor...
...Louis on the grounds people had been denied the right to vote...
...Kit Bond, who co-authored the 2002 Help America Vote Act to start the process of cleaning up the nation's voter rolls...
...Recently, ACT staffer Rodney Shelton left to join the Kerry campaign as its Arkansas state director...
...A smaller number of people were also mistakenly listed on voter rolls as being felons when they were not...
...The fear now is that impostors will find it easy to vote...
...From now on, candidates will have to hope their vote totals are beyond the "margin of litigation...
...Its "plaintiff," Robert D. Odom, turned out to be dead...
...Nor is ACORN the only liberal group that appears to be engaged in a wholesale con of the election system...
...If the legal maneuverings by the Kerry and Bush campaigns are any measure, America may soon face an Election Month...
...In a country of 170,000 polling places, it's a given that at least some ballot boxes will be subject to mistakes or chicanery...
...Fred Baron, one-time president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) and a leading asbestos plaintiffs' lawyer, is a top fundraiser for the Kerry-Edwards ticket...
...Now that our elections are being scrutinized the way the U.S...
...Bob Holden, a fellow Democrat, agrees...
...Many other voters will have to rely on the same punch-card voting machines that resulted in so much confusion in Florida's 2000 election...
...While Judge Thompson ruled in early September that the state law, which was passed by a Democratic legislature, was "clear on its face," he ruled that requiring all new registrants to show ID would be disruptive so close to the election...
...But anyone who combats vote fraud or questions the accuracy of voter rolls is likely to come in for abuse...
...Henderson also claimed in court that ACORN does not pay bounties or bonuses to its employees and that their only compensation is an $8 an hour wage...
...Does this mean if it's inconvenient to follow a law, we don't have to follow it...
...At that hearing, Henderson invoked his Fifth Amendment protections and refused to say whether his organization illegally copies voter registration cards...
...In 1998, the mayor of Miami was removed from office after it was learned 56 absentee-ballot "vote brokers" had forged ballots...
...A St...
...But in light of the felon scandal, ACT's activities now merit closer scrutiny, because they may be making the problem of our sloppy voter rolls worse...
...It's no surprise that many rolls remain clogged with voter deadwood...
...In St...
...Surely the right to vote includes an equal right not to have that ballot diluted by nonexistent or ineligible voters...
...The St...
...A generation ago, the existence of insidious poll taxes and other forms of voter intimidation represented a real threat to free and fair elections...
...You have felons registering felons who then commit another felony by casting an illegal vote," says Missouri's Sen...
...Louis alone...
...Without an ID requirement for first-time voters, his office may have a lot of work on its hands after Election Night...
...Henderson has been largely silent since a court hearing on the case in early September before state Judge Robert L. Thompson...
...Chaves County Clerk Dave Kunko called the judge's ruling to waive the ID requirement for newly-registered voters "puzzling...
...It also promised to fire anyone guilty of "violent or other serious offenses...
...At the same time, former Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan has joined ACT...
...Since January, they have signed up 12,000 new voter registrations in St...
...8.= John H. Fund's new book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, is just out from Encounter Books...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...But those problems have receded, only to be replaced by old-fashioned ballot rigging...
...If you think of election problems as akin to forest fires, the woods are no drier than they were in 2000, but many more people have matches...
...looks at developing countries, who will monitor the lawyers as they turn American politics into another breeding ground for endless litigation...
...Louis and other cities should prompt us to consider having some election observers in our own backyard...
...Louis City, a Democratic stronghold, to be the only jurisdiction in the state to allow early voting, in which citizens can cast their ballots weeks in advance at government buildings...
...Some even plan to wear identifying signs around their neck so that voters with a problem can procure legal representation on the spot...
...But ACORN crew leaders OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15 MAKE WAY FOR ELECTION MONTH told reporters that anyone who turned in more than 24 cards a day got a $50 bonus—a sum almost equal to their $64 pay for an 8-hour day...
...The warring political camps have already sent out clear signs that they intend to see each other in court...
...Vigil- Giron, who stepped out of her official capacity as an election officer to make automated campaign phone calls on behalf of Al Gore in 2000, says the law shouldn't apply to the thousands of new voters signed up by political parties or liberal activist groups such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—also known as ACORN...
...The case is being appealed to the state supreme court, a solidly liberal body that is unlikely to overrule the judge...
...The report tabulated 4,405 dead people, 2,242 felons, 1,453 people voting from vacant lots and 15,963 also registered somewhere else in Missouri or Illinois...
...The Federal Election Commission found in 2002 that 12 percent of all registered voters nationally were "inactive voters," and thus subject to possible misuse by having someone else vote in their name...
...They also fear Democratic lawyers will take advantage of a flood of provisional ballots cast by people who aren't on the voter registration rolls and demand that all of them be counted...
...This is about a set of people trying to stop another set of people from voting...
...Since ACORN is paying workers a bounty if they register more than 24 people a day, there are natural concerns about fraud...
...At least3,000 voter registrations in Albuquerque's Bernalillo County are suspect...
...attorney to investigate reports that people were registering multiple times and that a 13-year-old boy along with his 15-year-old friend had been signed up to vote...
...Louis, the local election board has discovered more than 1,000 suspicious new voter registrations from a pile of more than 5,000 turned in by a local ACORN chapter...
...In some cases it won't have to...
...However, he had previously admitted to the practice when he told the Albuquerque Tribune that ACORN "made photocopies of all the cards it delivered to the county...
...An aide to a Democratic congressman with the same last name was then substituted as the plaintiff, but it was discovered that he had successfully voted earlier that day...
...Ellen Malcolm, ACT's president, says the attacks on her group represent an attempt "to distort and play politics with this situation, to attempt to disrupt ACT and our grassroots activities...
...If the number of provisional ballots exceed the margin of victory in any state, you can bet a lawyer will echo the Florida 2000 argument that "every vote must count," regardless of eligibility...
...Glen Stout, the father of the 13-year-old boy, says his son Kevin never filled out a voter registration card...
...In Columbus, Ohio, ACORN was forced to fire two workers after several "blatantly false" voter registration forms were filed with election officials...
...It shouldn't surprise anyone then that in the 2002 election Miami election officials hired the Center for Democracy, which normally observes elections in places like Guatemala and Russia, to send 20 election monitors to south Florida...
...Then, when the AP reported that ACT employees included people convicted of assault and sex offenses, the group admitted it might also have hired felons in 14 other battleground states...
...Local officials in several states who've tried to purge voter rolls of felons and noncitizens have been hit with nuisance lawsuits alleging civil-rights abuse...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004 JOHN H. FUND But when it comes to the legal arms race this fall, Democrats have the big guns...
...THIS YEAR, the lawsuits started early...
...OCTOBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 Federal law forbids any coordination between ACT and the Kerry campaign, but the law is impossible to enforce...
...McCaskill, the state auditor, has concluded the St...
...A new federal law is sending states money for better election systems and training, but at the state level we badly need clearer laws and better protections against fraud if we are to avoid the further Floridafication of our politics...
...One of the plaintiffs demanding that Secretary of State VigilGiron obey the law is Toby Gutierrez, who responded to Henderson by saying, "I am Hispanic, a former Army Ranger and disgusted by the Democrats' fear tactics...
...Hispanics ought to be outraged at the Democratic Party's contention that we are so uninformed and so uneducated that we are incapable of showing the type of ID required to rent a movie...
...When the Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the rampant absentee ballot fraud in that city's 1998 mayoral election, the Pulitzer jury noted it had been subject to "a public campaign accusing the paper of ethnic bias and attempted intimidation...
...Commission on Civil Rights, which issued an election report sorely lacking in specifics or detail...
...The League of Women Voters testified it had not received "any evidence of race-based problems...
...Louis judge nonetheless ordered the polls kept open, and they were for 45 minutes until a higher court overruled her...
...E-mails have already gone out to trial lawyers requesting they help prepare cookie-cutter lawsuits to be filed before the election...
...Many were filled out by people who gave addresses in Illinois or elsewhere in Missouri...
...Federal law forbids any coordination between ACT and the Kerry campaign, but the law is impossible to enforce...
...Louis Election Board is beyond fixing...
...THE LAND of Enchantment isn't the only state that's been despoiled by ACORN's bad seeds...
...Republicans, meanwhile, are conducting training sessions to respond to complaints of absentee ballot fraud, duplicate registrations, and elderly residents in nursing homes being overly "assisted" in marking their ballot...
...Last month, Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White asked the local U.S...
...Louis, the local election board has discovered more than 1,000 suspicious new voter registrations from a pile of more than 5,000 turned in by a local ACORN chapter...
...First, ACT claimed it hadn't employed violent felons...
...Every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of an honest New Mexican," he says...
...About 25 percent of Americans will be using new controversial electronic voting machines sure to become a magnet for lawsuits...
...He was motivated by the chaotic Election Day of 2000 in which the Gore campaign sued to keep the polls open in St...
...The outcome is important because one out of nine registered voters in New Mexico has been signed up just in the last year, an astonishing 115,000 people...
...Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth—a Democrat—testified that of the 2,600 complaints he received on Election Day, only three were about racial discrimination...
...Noting that the felons would have to handle driver's license information and telephone numbers as part of the voter-registration process, the department concluded that "from a public safety standpoint, we didn't want offenders to be in a situation where they would be handling that information...
...attorney, is forming a task force to probe charges of voter fraud...
...New Mexico officials have been alerted to stories from neighboring Colorado, where the Denver Post reports that "ACORN has already admitted to Colorado law enforcement officials it may have turned in fraudulent voter registration cards in Denver...
...In Missouri, a swing state George W. Bush narrowly won in 2000, ACT bought at least $40,000 worth of voter lists from the state's Democratic Party In St...
...It doesn't hurt that John Edwards, a former trial lawyer, is now on the Democratic ticket...
...ACT's counteroffensive on the charges was swift 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2004 and predictable...
Vol. 37 • October 2004 • No. 8
