THE DIRTY 30 OF ELECTION FRAUD
30 WAYS TO STEAL AN ELECTION AND DESTROY DEMOCRACY
(1) Voter Fraud vs. Election Fraud: New Poll Taxes
Election fraud ,
is fraud perpetrated by political candidates, parties or others
with a vested interest in the election outcome.
Tactics employed in election fraud include voter supression and
disenfranchisement, stuffing of ballot boxes, and manipulation of the
election results. Such tactics can often be done on a massive scale.
(2) 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
On Oct. 29, 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act.
The stated intent of HAVA was to correct many of the problems that
occurred in the 2000 election. In the 2004 election, people felt calmed
by the illusion that the problems of the 2000 election were being corrected —
while in fact the opposite was happening. Touch screen voting machines were
touted by the industry and their lobbyists as making voting as easy and reliable
as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, swiftly authorized $3.9 million to
upgrade the nation's election systems, with much of the money devoted to
installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts.
But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines
are making things worse instead of better.
(3) Voting Machine Vendors Policing Themselves
(4) Sproul Registration Drives
(5) Voter Rolls Purged I
(6) Voter Rolls Purged II - Accenture
(7) New Laws Discouraging Voter Registration Drives
(8) Secret Software Programs - I
(9) Secret Software Programs - II (Chuck Hagel)
(10) Paperless E-voting Machines (Ney & Abramoff)
(11) Partisan SOS 2000 - Katherine Harris
(12) Partisan SOS 2004 - J. Kenneth Blackwell
In 2004, J. Kenneth Blackwell was not only Ohio's SoS, but a leader in the Bush reelection campaign.
Under Blackwell’s guidance, Ohio experienced some of the most egregious and un-addressed election
process failures seen to date in the age of computerized voting. Democratic precincts were severely
underserved by voting machinery, forcing voters to wait in lines of up to 10 hours or more simply
to cast their vote. Adjacent precincts of primarily Republican voters were well served, with
sufficient machinery and no waiting. Blackwell is currently a Republican gubernatorial candidate
and, as Secretary of State, in charge of running elections in Ohio.
(13) Absentee Ballots
Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law—absentee ballots are not.
According to Palast, the number of absentee ballots has quintupled in many states,
with the number rejected on technical grounds rising to over a half a million (526,420)
in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic. Absentee Ballots explained
(14) Diebold Felons
According to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country's largest voting equipment vendors, include a convicted cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions, and a softwareprogrammer convicted of falsifying computer records.
(15) Provisional Ballots Rejected
(16) Caging Lists
This particularly mean-spirited practice is designed to eliminate specific segments of the population from the voting roles. A classic example was during the 2004 presidential election when the Republican National Committee took the time and expense to send registered mailings to the soldier residents of an entire military base, Jacksonville Navel Air Station, in Florida. Not surprisingly, the mailings were returned to the RNC, unsigned by the addressees, since the base’s soldiers had been deployed overseas. RNC officials marched to election offices and challenged the validity of the soldiers’ voter registrations. En masse, the names of the soldiers were dropped from the voting roles. They were only allowed to vote via provisional ballots.... which would ultimately not be counted.
(17) Expatriate Americans
Expatriate America—a global bloc some have called the 51st State—includes up to 7 million voters. In 2002, HAVA instructed the Department of Defense to amplify a federal website (fvap.gov) to serve as a comprehensive nonpartisan clearinghouse of voting information. On August 23, 2004, the website suddenly went down just when the requests to register for the Presidential election were at their highest.
(18) Sleepovers
The concept of the “sleepover “ first received widespread national attention after the CA House District (HD)
50 special election in July 2006. The term “sleepover” actually refers to the act of pollworkers taking the
election machinery home with them prior to the election, in some cases for longer than a week.
In the close HD 50 race, in which Francine Busby lost to Brian Bilbrary, Diebold voting machines
were taken home by pollworkers. San Diego County Registrar Mike Haas defended the process, noting
that taking machinery home had been typical procedure for almost 40 years. Watch some video here.
(19) Mighty Texas Strike Force
In 2004, the Mighty Texas Strike Force, an off-shoot of the RNC, dispersed about 1,500 volunteers to key battleground states to make phone calls to people recently released from prison, threatening them with being reported to the FBI and returning to jail if they voted.
(20) Phone Jamming
On Election Day in November, 2002, the New Hampshire Democratic Party found itself suddenly unable to operate its phone lines in its GOTV efforts for the close Senate race between Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John Sununu. It was later discovered that the phone lines were maliciously jammed by operatives connected to the Republican Party. Although the perpetrators of the jamming were convicted of their crimes, their goal was attained. The Democrat’s later inability to contact their voters during the critical GOTV effort had an impact on the election; Shaheen lost a close election. Civil suits continue regarding this case, and disclosures reveal a close connection between the perpetrators and the White House.
(21) Voting While Black
Almost 40 years after enactment of the historic Voting Rights Act, many Americans are still subjected to threats and intimidation when they try to exercise their right to vote. Although voter intimidation is a federal crime, most violators are never punished because federal prosecutors do not pursue these cases.
(22) Machine Shortages
Unequal distribution of voting machines has allowed partisan election officials to effectively deny people the right to vote. Voters in heavily Democratic districts faced massive lines due to insufficient machines, requiring voters to stand in line for hours before being able to cast their vote. In addition, these locations were often supplied with older, malfunctioning machines.
(23) Spoiled Ballots
The nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage—over a million of them. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, "as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled [in the 2004 election] by faulty voting equipment – roughly one for every 100 cast."
(24) Exit Polls
Historically, exit polls have proven to be very accurate, often to within ½ of 1% (0.005). Discrepancies between exit polls and the final vote counts is solid evidence that something in the election results is wrong. According to computer security expert Chuck Herrin, “the sudden unreliability of exit polls in the U.S. coincides with the use of paperless electronic voting machines.”
(25) Premature Calling of Election Winners
In the early morning hours of November 8, Fox News Channel declared that the pivotal state of Florida had
gone for George W. Bush. At 2:16 a.m. Fox announced that the Texas governor had won the state, thus securing
the 271 electoral votes needed to win the presidential election. The other television networks followed suit
in a matter of minutes. The call was subsequently withdrawn.The individual responsible for recommending that
Fox call Florida for Bush was John Ellis, who led the network's decision desk. Ellis was not a disinterested
party in the presidential election, but the first cousin of the Republican candidate and his brother, Florida
Governor Jeb Bush. In response to the call by the networks Al Gore telephoned Bush to concede the election.
But as Gore was on his way to deliver his concession speech, the vice president's advisors urged him to turn
back, telling him Bush's lead had dropped to only several thousand votes. Gore phoned Bush rescinding his
concession after the networks reversed their call, putting Florida back in the undecided category.
(26) Rigged Recounts
Sherole Eaton, Deputy Director of Elections for Hocking County, Ohio testified in a signed and notarized affidavit regarding the 2004 presidential election recount that: A Michael Barbian, Jr., a representative of the voting machine company Triad GSI, unilaterally sought and obtained access to the voting machinery and records in Hocking County Ohio, modified the computer tabulator, learned which precinct was planned to be the subject of the initial test recount and made further alterations based on that information, and advised the election officials how to manipulate the machinery so that the preliminary hand recount matched the original machine count.
(27) Judicial Decisions - I (2000 - Supreme Court)
The Supreme Court's ruling in Bush vs. Gore, which stopped the Florida recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush, was one of most controversial rulings in the court's history. According to Alan Dershowitz, "The decision may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history, because it is the only one that I know of where the majority justices decided as they did because of the personal identity and political affiliation of the litigants ... No honest person can any longer trust them to do justice, as distinguished from politics."
(28) Judicial Decisions - II (Bilbray/Busby; Washoe Co., NV)
In the CA House District (HD) 50 July 2006 Special Election, Republican Brian Bilbray won a close victory over Democrat Francine Busby. But the issue of “sleepovers” prompted local election reform activist, to file a citizen’s challenge to the election, citing the violation of CA certification rules. Immediately after the election, and before the election was certified, Brian Bilbray was whisked off to Washington, D.C. and sworn into the office by Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. The San Diego District Court Judge declined to hear the citizen’s case, citing that the court lacked jurisdiction, since Bilbray was already sworn in as a U.S. Representative.
(29) Media Blackout
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 makes it possible for one company to dominate 35% of a national TV market and on the local level to own 40% of radio stations. As a result, media corporations are gobbling up smaller and independent stations. The result is censorship by omission as commercial and partisan concerns overwhelm democratic values. The mainstream media’s response to any request to cover election fraud stories is to shut up and get over it.
(30) Election Day