ELECTION 2000
Congress to establish
voter-fraud task force
Nationwide investigation will 'put
people in jail,' says top GOP leader
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
� 2000 Western Journalism Center
House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert is putting together a task
force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the Nov. 7
election that will be nationwide in scope and will "put people in
jail," according to a top member of the Republican leadership.
Hastert initially asked outgoing Judiciary Committee
Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill, to chair the task force, but Hyde
says he turned it down. Hyde is the leading candidate to become
the new chairman of the House International Relations Committee,
in front of two moderate Republicans, Jim Leach and Doug
Bereuter.
Republicans will be looking at allegations of voter fraud
from across the country, not just in Florida.
"In Madison, Wisconsin, we had homeless shelters with 20
beds where 200 people voted," said a top member of the
leadership, who asked to remain unnamed for this report. "In
Wisconsin, you can just show up at the polls on election day and
vote without being registered by saying that you have just moved
into the precinct. In some predominantly Democratic precincts in
Texas, we had 125 percent of registered voters cast ballots."
The voter-fraud task force will also examine allegations
that the Department of Defense shut down mail call for U.S.
military vessels on overseas deployment two weeks before the
election, to prevent absentee ballots from being delivered to
U.S. Navy personnel or returned by them to their home districts.
Sam Wright, a retired U.S. Navy captain and lawyer who
advocates a major overhaul of the military voting system,
believes that 200,000 members of the military and their family
get systematically disenfranchised.
"That's based on the survey that DoD does after every
presidential election," said Wright. "I am now coming to believe
that the 200,000 figure is a gross understatement. The DoD survey
only shows what military members know."
Motor voters
And in Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles, allegations are
surfacing of roving bands of voters who were taken in buses from
precinct to precinct to vote in place of registered voters who
had moved away or who had never voted before.
"We are relatively certain people were being taken from
polling place to polling place and allowed to vote," said
Republican national committeewoman from Maryland, Ellen
Sauerbrey.
How can someone vote in place of another? Actually, it's
fairly simple -- for the fraudulently inclined.
In many states, including Maryland, it is illegal to ask
voters to present identification, on the pretext that would be
construed as voter intimidation. Election officials in Maryland
and in many other states are allowed to ascertain a voter's true
identity by asking only for their name, address and date of
birth.
"But in practice, there's no check whatsoever," Sauerbrey
said. "The election judge will prompt you by asking if you live
at such and such address, if you were born at such and such date.
This makes it easier for one person to vote in the name of
another, simply by mimicking the signature on the voter card."
Repeated attempts by Republicans in Maryland to pass
legislation that would require voters to present identification
at the polls have been blocked by the Democratic majority in the
state's House of Delegates.
No citizenship checks
The motor voter rules (known officially as the National
Voter Registration Act of 1993) went into effect in January 1995,
and required states to allow anyone applying for a drivers
license to register to vote at the same time.
The problem, admitted board of election officials in
several Maryland counties, is that no proof of citizenship is
required, thus inviting non-citizens to vote by fraud.
An elections-board official in Montgomery County, Md., who
declined to be identified, acknowledged there was "no
cross-checking" to see if people who registered to vote at the
Motor Vehicle Agency are U.S. citizens. "We don't require them to
present ID to vote."
When individuals register to vote at the Motor Vehicle
Agency, they are required to sign a form stating they are U.S.
citizens "under penalty of perjury." However, those forms are
only delivered to the MVA in English, whereas many non-English
speakers regularly apply for drivers licenses and, by extension,
register to vote.
Spanish-language voter registration forms are sent out with
state recruiters, who sign up new voters through a wide variety
of state welfare agencies, the official added. She could not
explain why Spanish-language voter registration forms would be
needed for naturalized U.S. citizens, who are required to pass an
English-language test as part of their naturalization
examination.
Maryland has "no way to check" if non-citizens are voting,
state supervisor of elections Linda Lamone said. "We approached
the Immigration and Naturalization Service at one point and asked
if we could collaborate on this, so people wouldn't get in
trouble, but they said no."
About the only way the county or state board of election
discovers that a non-citizen has made the voter rolls is when
they are called for jury duty.
Montgomery County Jury Commissioner Nancy Galvin said her
office sends out 10,000 to 12,000 questionnaires every other
month to prospective jurors, asking whether they are U.S.
citizens. Non-citizens are not allowed to sit on juries.
"We've had many of them returned asking to be excused from
jury duty because they are not U.S. citizens," she said. However,
she said her office "keeps no records" of these replies, and
takes no further action. A spokesperson for Montgomery County
State's Attorney Doug Gansler said it was "not an offense" to do
jury duty as a non-citizen and that his office "has not
prosecuted anyone for this" or for perjury on the motor voter
forms.
In Prince George's County, a heavily Democratic county
bordering Washington, D.C., election board official Harold Reston
said the board reviews each case individually that is sent over
by the jury commissioner.
"If we find that they registered by accident and never
voted, we call the individual and ask them to request that they
be removed from the voter rolls," he said. "But if they actually
voted, we might forward the case to the state prosecutor."
Mike Mcdonough, an assistant to state prosecutor Stephen
Montanarelli, said his office has had several hundred
election-law cases since motor voter went into effect in January
1995, but had conducted no prosecutions over the past six or
eight months.
"Prosecution is not the standard thing that happens in this
sort of case," he said. "We try to dispose of it short of
prosecution."
A silver lining
U.S. Rep. Bob Stump, R-Ariz., has twice introduced a bill
to repeal motor voter in the U.S. Congress, only to have it
vetoed by President Clinton. He recently vowed to reintroduce the
legislation in the 107th Congress next year.
But not everyone believes that motor voter is all bad.
Maryland Republican activist and statistician Henry C. Marshall
has done a comprehensive analysis of new registrations in
Maryland over the past five years and found that motor voter has
actually reduced the Democrats' share from 61.2 percent of total
voters to 57.1 percent.
Part of the shift has been a surge in new voters
registering as Independents. But it has also resulted from
cleansing the voter rolls of the estimated 17-20 percent of
voters who leave the state every year. Under motor voter rules,
the state board of elections may use change-of-address forms
filed with the MVA to purge former residents from the rolls.
Marshall believes the biggest problem is not motor voter
itself, but the failure to require new voters to provide proof of
citizenship when they sign up to vote.
"In 1996, 11 percent of the people voting in Maryland were
non-citizens," Marshall believes. Out of the 1,793,991 votes
officially cast, that amounts to 197,339 illegal votes.
While it's virtually impossible to verify such figures,
they suggest the potential scope of the problem nationwide,
especially in states with close elections.
The midnight coup
Ellen Sauerbrey became an unwilling expert on election
fraud following her 1994 bid to become Maryland's governor, which
she lost to Democrat Parris Glendening. All during election night
as precincts reported in, Sauerbrey remained ahead. Then, close
to midnight, results started pouring in from precincts in
Baltimore City, giving Glendening a 5,993-vote victory. It was
the closest race in Maryland in 70 years.
To this day, Sauerbrey and her running mate, former Howard
County police chief Paul Rappaport, believe the election was
stolen by Democratic party operatives who stuffed ballot boxes
and altered voting machines after the polls were closed.
Sauerbrey's failed challenge of the 1994 election results
dragged through the courts for more than six months, and her
opponents accused her of being a sore loser.
Drake Ferguson, a private investigator who headed a
volunteer group that helped document Sauerbrey's allegations of
voter fraud, found that 75 percent of Baltimore City's 408
precincts had "severe flaws" in election-day records, including
election cards that were either unsigned or had names different
from the printed name on them.
The group also claimed that 5,832 more votes were tallied
in Baltimore City than there were voters who checked in at
precincts or cast absentee ballots -- mirroring Glendening's
election margin almost exactly. They found that keys to voting
machines had been duplicated, and that some people had voted more
than once. Sauerbrey even remembers investigators reporting back
to her that they had traced the addresses listed by scores of
Baltimore City voters to boarded-up houses and to vacant lots.
But Glendening's appointee to head the state board of
elections, Linda Lamone, rejected Sauerbrey's allegations of
fraud, noting that a Democratic trial court judge and the state
attorney general, also a Democrat, had found they had "no merit."
Asked whether Maryland had a problem with voter fraud,
Lamone said, "No, I do not think there is a problem."
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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