-Caveat Lector-
http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/osul27.html
Chicago Sun-Times
February 27, 2001
Smell of vote fraud lingers
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
`Legitimate at last--Mother will be pleased," wrote Noel Coward
to Gertrude Lawrence when the musical comedy star made her first
Broadway appearance in a serious drama. And Karen Hughes, the
president's press secretary, might be forgiven if she had
attached a similar note to President Bush's morning press digest
Monday, directing him to the Miami Herald's story on the results
of its own recount of last November's "undervotes" in Florida.
This showed that Al Gore would have gained only 49 net votes in
Miami-Dade County even if a very liberal interpretation of voting
intentions had been in force--far short of the 600 votes that the
Gore camp had estimated in the post-election skirmishing. When
added to similarly modest gains for Gore in the three other
counties where his team had requested recounts, the former vice
president still would have lagged 140 votes behind Bush in
Florida's total vote.
All in all, the president would be fully justified in demanding
that Terry MacAuliffe, the new Democratic National Committee
chairman; the Rev. Jesse Jackson; U.S. Civil Rights Commission;
its chairman, Mary Berry, and assorted liberal pundits and
political consultants should add their concession speeches to
Gore's and grudgingly concede that Bush is the legitimate
president.
They are unlikely to do so, however. The U.S. Civil Rights
Commission still is trying to uncover evidence that minority
voters were either discouraged from voting or saw their votes for
Gore discarded. Democrats seemingly believe that they have a
potent electoral issue in such voter "intimidation."
So it is hard to understand the GOP silence over another aspect
of the recent election that disadvantages the GOP--namely,
deliberate voter fraud. Yet as the Miami Herald carried out its
investigations into ballot inefficiency, it also uncovered more
and more evidence that votes were cast illegally in numbers that
overwhelm "undervotes."
On Jan. 22, the Herald reported that at the very least 2,000
illegal votes had been cast in about a third of Florida's
counties--very roughly 6,000 for the state as a whole. On Jan. 9,
it revealed that 452 felons had voted unlawfully in Broward
County alone. Election officials cheerfully admitted ignoring the
electoral rules, allowing people to vote without evidence of
identity, registration, domicile, citizenship or even breath in
their bodies. Most of these votes seem to have gone to Gore.
If this had been confined to Florida, it would have been scandal
enough. But as Karen Saranita of the California-based Institute
for Fair Elections points out, electoral fraud is found across
the United States, usually in the large urban areas but not
confined to them. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Los
Angeles and Miami all have had voter fraud scandals in recent
years.
The drift of current policy is toward making such theft easier.
As National Review's Rich Lowry pointed out in a 1996 article,
the Motor Voter Law imposes fraud-friendly rules on the states--
it permits mail-in registration, forbids government workers to
challenge new registrants, makes it exceedingly difficult to
purge "deadwood" voters (i.e. those who have died or moved away),
and so on. This permits such absurdities as the fact that the
1994 assassin of the Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo
Colosio was illegally registered to vote in San Pedro, Calif.--
twice!
If the GOP has any survival instinct, however, it will actively
campaign to halt voter fraud--and the rules that make it easy.
Otherwise it will earn the contemptuous obituary given to the
high-minded British political failure Austen Chamberlain by one
of his more vigorous colleagues: "Poor Austen. He always played
the game--and he always lost it."
=================================================================
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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