Voter Fraud

Surely, this is an issue that BOTH parties should be interested in stopping.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_R-l1iejogZw/SOd9jEM5H9I/AAAAAAAABBQ/wd2a_wjM0dk/s1600-h/Voter+Fraud.jpg

Post articles with links, by state. With hope that it will make people aware of what is happening, in order to get involved.

Ohio

State: OHIO
Boon for Voter Fraud, Bust for Democracy
(FROM: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/381501_murdockonline03.html?source=mypi

In Ohio, where President George W. Bush prevailed over Sen. John Kerry and sealed the 2004 presidential election by only approximately 120,000 votes, voter fraud is running rampant. For a one week time frame beginning on September 30 and ending October 6, the state is actually permitting same-day registration and absentee voting, which means that you or I could walk into a polling place, register to vote with any address, cast our vote via absentee ballot without giving good reason as to why, and by the time the fraudulent registration is processed and the problem discovered, the votes will have been counted and the point-of-no-return surpassed. Furthermore, activists from so-called "non-partisan" organizations are trolling homeless shelters and bus stations in vans and buses, transporting people to election offices to take advantage of the one-week free-for-all on voter fraud.

Washington

Washington
July 26, 2007,Seattle Times

Felony charges filed against 7 in state's biggest case of voter-registration fraud. The defendants, who were paid employees and supervisors of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Michigan

Michigan
September 14, 2008, Detroit Free Press

Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Florida

Florida
Oct. 13, 2007, PRNewswire

A Florida state attorney is investigating thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations associated with the leading organizer of Florida's Amendment 5 ballot initiative. But this is just the tip of an iceberg of illegalities, fraud and contradictions connected to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) ... Former ACORN Miami-Dade field director Mac Stuart has declared an intent to sue ACORN and has made charges of rampant voter fraud operations. Stuart was employed and specifically tasked by ACORN to generate 103,000 new voter registrations from Dade County. He reports that ACORN threw out Republican registrations while paying for Democratic ones. Stuart also charges that ACORN targeted ex-cons and that he personally set up registration tables outside the Miami police department and Dade County jail.

New Mexico

New Mexico
Sept. 18, 2008, Judicial Watch Blog

This week officials in New Mexico's most populous county (Bernalillo) notified federal authorities that more than 1,000 fraudulent voter registration cards were submitted to the clerk's office. ACORN, which pays workers for each registration, is the prime suspect since it has handled thousands of new voter registrations in New Mexico since January. County workers subsequently discovered that at least 1,100 new registrations list Social Security numbers for people already in the county's database of registered voters, names of registered voters with different birth dates and addresses that don't exist.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin
Aug. 6, 2008, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Criminal investigations could be launched against at least six voter registration workers who tried to add dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to the voter rolls, according to the Milwaukee Election Commission and the organization that employed them. "One woman called us to complain because her husband has been dead for 10 years and a voter registration was submitted," Edman said. In about 12 cases, deputy registrars paid by ACORN were "making people up or registering people that were still in prison," said Carolyn Castore, ACORN's state political director. And in other cases, workers used the same address for numerous voters or used driver's license numbers that did not fit the voters' birth dates, Edman said. But most of the fraud involved submitting duplicate cards for voters who were already registered, and forging the voters' signatures, Castore said.

More Ohio

Ohio
August 27, 2008, The Plain Dealer

A national organization that conducts voter registration drives for low-income people has curtailed its push in Cuyahoga County after the Board of Elections accused its workers of submitting fraudulent registration cards. Board employees said ACORN workers often handed in the same name on a number of voter registration cards, but showing that person living at different addresses. Other times, cards had the same name listed, but a different date of birth. Still another sign of possible fraud showed a number of people living at an address that turned out to be a restaurant. ACORN has submitted about 75,000 voter registration cards to the Cuyahoga board this year.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania
Sept. 18, 2008, The Bulletin: Philadelphia's Family Newspaper

A community organization, with longstanding ties to Barack Obama, has, according to numerous reports, repeatedly run afoul of voter registration laws both locally and nationally. Philadelphia election officials recently accused ACORN, of filing multiple fraudulent voter registrations during the 2008 Pennsylvania primary. The case has been referred to the U.S. Attorney's office, according to Philadelphia Deputy Election Commissioner Fred Voight. Delaware County election officials have made similar allegations against the group, and criminal indictments are pending. This past July 24, Dauphin County detectives offered a $2,000 reward for information about the whereabouts of Luis R. Torres-Serrano, an ACORN worker, who was accused of submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registrations.

Nevada

Nevada
July 7,2008, Las Vegas Review Journal
ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, claims to have collected 60,000 new voter registrations in Clark County since February ... Lomax said while he supports the goal of getting more people registered to vote, he sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.

MeeMie said:

State: OHIO
Boon for Voter Fraud, Bust for Democracy
(FROM: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/381501_murdockonline03.html?source=mypi

In Ohio, where President George W. Bush prevailed over Sen. John Kerry and sealed the 2004 presidential election by only approximately 120,000 votes, voter fraud is running rampant. For a one week time frame beginning on September 30 and ending October 6, the state is actually permitting same-day registration and absentee voting, which means that you or I could walk into a polling place, register to vote with any address, cast our vote via absentee ballot without giving good reason as to why, and by the time the fraudulent registration is processed and the problem discovered, the votes will have been counted and the point-of-no-return surpassed. Furthermore, activists from so-called "non-partisan" organizations are trolling homeless shelters and bus stations in vans and buses, transporting people to election offices to take advantage of the one-week free-for-all on voter fraud.

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like any of the lit libs are gonna give a fuck about this..."the ends justify the means"...they'll be popping champagne corks if Jenny Brunner is able to hand Ohio to Obama for her shenanigans...and that's exactly why this fraud was created and perpetuated..."by any means necessary"

semen4her said:

like any of the lit libs are gonna give a fuck about this..."the ends justify the means"...they'll be popping champagne corks if Jenny Brunner is able to hand Ohio to Obama for her shenanigans...and that's exactly why this fraud was created and perpetuated..."by any means necessary"

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Then they deserve the notoriety and shame that the middle of the road Americans will shun them for.

We all know that neither party firm supporters will change their minds, regardless of what they read. But, it's that middle of the road American threads like this would appeal to.

What is the other solution? Roll over and play dead?

semen4her said:

like any of the lit libs are gonna give a fuck about this...

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Of course I'm opposed to voter fraud. Show me a case of it, and I'll be happy to denounce it. But this thread is all a list of things that could happen, in a bizarro America where there are millions of people risking criminal prosecution and making an effort to vote multiple times--all of whom, apparently, belong to just one political party.

I suppose I'm more upset about eligible voters who find themselves purged from the rolls, which unlike your completely hypothetical voter fraud is something with actual names and incidents attached to it.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire

http://nyletterpress.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/voter-fraud-against-paul-in-new-hampshire/

Update 1.15.08: They need another $5,000 to move forward with the NH recount. Donate at Granny Warriors chip-in site.
This is something I didn’t want to have to make a post about, but I’ve found too much evidence to completely ignore or say that voter fraud isn’t or couldn’t be taking place.
From the Ron Paul War Room:
According to a post this evening on the Ron Paul Forums, vote fraud occurred in Sutton, New Hampshire:
Sutton with 100% reporting reported 0 votes for paul but poster in Sutton posted:
My mom, aunt, and dad all voted for RP today in my hometown, My mom and aunt both work passing out ballots, and checking them off. I just looked at the politico map and it says their town has ZERO votes for Ron. Now i know that there isn’t corruption on voting in that little town, so where they reported it must be. What do I do, anyone know???

From Black Box Voting.com:
PDATE JAN 9 9am PST: TOWN OF SUTTON CONFIRMS RON PAUL TOTALS WERE 31, NOT ZERO.
I just got off the phone with Jennifer Call, Town Clerk for Sutton. She confirmed that the Ron Paul totals in Sutton were actually 31, and said that they were “left off the tally sheet” and it was human error.
This is not an acceptable answer, especially because one of the most common forms of fraud in a hand count system is to alter or omit results on the reporting sheet. Hand count is lovely, transparent. They then fill out another reconciliation sheet, often in front of witnesses, and it looks fine. Then they provide a summary or media sheet with the incorrect results.
A Web site here: http://www.wheresthepaper.org has more on fraud techniques with hand counted paper ballots. You’ll have to dig for it — or Google, and the excellent research on this is Theresa Hommel from the state of New York.
Another blogger reported this discrepancy:
In a straw poll conducted in Strafford County, New Hampshire on Aug 18th, Ron Paul won in a landslide with 73% (208 votes).
Last night in the NH primaries, he came in fourth with 11% (96 votes) in Strafford County.
I have a hard time believing that Ron Paul supporters are that fickle (changing their vote to a different candidate), or that they wouldn’t show up for the primaries but that they got people out to the straw poll. Or was the straw poll somehow stacked by Paul supporters? I doubt it. Whatever the deal is, it doesn’t add up.
The bottom line is that there seems to be something fishy going on with the New Hampshire results. I can basically understand 10% in Iowa, but only 7.5% in NH? The “live free or die state”? They’re all about freedom and they love Dr. Paul there.
This whole thing needs to be examined very carefully. Here’s the town by town numbers in NH, although the columns aren’t matched up properly right now.

Brad Blog is questioning the democratic side of the NH primary, noting the pre-election polls were “wildly different” than the final results announced for Clinton and Obama.

Those Diebold op-scan machines are the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy. See the previous report, as I recommend, which also includes a video of that hack, and footage of the guy who runs LHS Associates.

That said, the the pre-election pollster’s numbers (NOTE: that’s not Exit Polls, but Pre-Election Polls!) were dead-on, for the most part, on the Republican side, as well as on the Democratic side. Except in the do-or-die (for Hillary) Clinton v. Obama race. I’m watching MSNBC right now, and they all seem to agree that the results, for the moment, defy explanation.

Exit polls had Obama with a victory over Hillary.

Here CNN mentions the possibility of Voter Fraud Causing the high Hillary numbers:

Paul Joseph Watson reported earlier today about the hackability of New Hampshire’s LHS/Diebold vote counting machines:

LHS is owned by John Silvestro, who has been at the center of a long-running public dispute in trying to deflect accusations made by hacker Harri Hursti that the machines can easily be rigged. . .In this You Tube video, Silvestro constantly interrupts Hursti’s testimony in front of the New Hampshire legislature.



Princeton University Exposes Diebold Flaws
Here are some other websites with more information:

ronpaulvotecount.com
blackboxvoting.org

There were some data in the paper this morning about our early voting. So far in my county, there have been a little over 4000 votes cast, 668 of them by people who registered and voted at the same time. My county has just about 10% of Ohio's population, so do the math: since even the most paranoid would have to admit that there are some people doing same-day registering and voting who are legit, so clearly there's no widespread effort at fraud going on. If there were, you'd sure as hell see more than 600 people involved in it.

Wrong Element said:

There were some data in the paper this morning about our early voting. So far in my county, there have been a little over 4000 votes cast, 668 of them by people who registered and voted at the same time. My county has just about 10% of Ohio's population, so do the math: since even the most paranoid would have to admit that there are some people doing same-day registering and voting who are legit, so clearly there's no widespread effort at fraud going on. If there were, you'd sure as hell see more than 600 people involved in it.

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Did you see this post?

http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=28872128&postcount=8

I recall hearing that ACORN themselves claim to have registered more than a million voters throughtout the country for the 2008 election.

You don't doubt the legitimacy of same day registration/absentee ballot voting?

To me, that just begs for fraud.

It's so curious to me that Democrats always try to get more people to vote, and Republicans always try to get less people to vote. Isn't the point of democracy making sure that every American votes?

Mr. Show said:

It's so curious to me that Democrats always try to get more people to vote, and Republicans always try to get less people to vote. Isn't the point of democracy making sure that every American votes?

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the DEMS are trying to get other DEMS who are too lazy to register or get to the booth on their own out to get the DEM elected.all those "new names" on the register are very often fictitious.The DEMS don't care about legitimacy.Vote Obama any way...vote early/vote often...which is what's going on in Ohio as I rant.

Reps are trying to keep "dead people" from voting.Dead people historically don't vote R.Democracy allows one the opportunity and guarantees the right to vote.
If one is too lazy,uninformed,etc.,to take that priviledge then fuck'em.If you can't be bothered to register why should I give a flyin F if that person didn't vote?DEMS are very very interested in getting unmotivated people to the polls for some reason...and giving felons the right to vote again...interesting.

Voter fraud is itself a fraud.

Let's say you implement policies that stop 100 illegitimate votes from being cast. On the surface one might say "great".

But if those same policies prevented 1000 legitimate votes from being cast it is a bad way to go.

Policies that invalidate many more legitimate votes than illegitimate votes is very bad law.

Some of Obamas buddies are getting busted for voter fraud.

I wonder how many states obama really has....hmmm

Cleveland, Ohio

A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

"Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up," said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

"The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, 'You are?' I say, 'Yup,' and then they say, 'Can you just sign up again?' " he said.

Johnson used the same information on all of his registration cards, and officials say they usually catch and toss out duplicate registrations. But the practice sparks fear that some multiple registrants could provide different information and vote more than once by absentee ballot.

ACORN is under investigation in Ohio and at least eight other states - including Missouri, where the FBI said it's planning to look into potential voter fraud - for over-the-top efforts to get as many names as possible on the voter rolls regardless of whether a person is registered or eligible.

It's even under investigation in Bridgeport, Conn., for allegedly registering a 7-year-old girl to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.

Meanwhile, a federal judge yesterday ordered Ohio's Secretary of State to verify the identity of newly registered voters by matching them with other government documents. The order was in response to a Republican lawsuit unrelated to the ACORN probe in Cuyahoga County, in which at least three people, including Johnson, have been subpoenaed.

Bribing citizens with gifts, property or anything of value is a fourth-degree felony in Ohio, punishable by up to 18 months in prison. And it's a fifth-degree felony - punishable by 12 months in jail - for a person to pay "compensation on a fee-per-registration" system when signing up someone to vote.

Johnson, who works at a cellphone kiosk in downtown Cleveland, said he was a sitting duck for the signature hunters, but was always happy to help them out in exchange for a smoke or a little scratch. He'd collected 10 to 20 cigarettes and anywhere from $10 to $15, he said.

The Cleveland voting probe, first reported by The Post yesterday, also focused on Lateala Goins, who said she put her name on multiple voter registrations. She guessed ACORN canvassers then put fake addresses on them. "You can tell them you're registered as many times as you want - they do not care," she said.

ACORN spokesman Kris Harsh said the group does not tolerate its workers paying people to sign the voter-registration cards.

ACORN's political wing has endorsed Barack Obama for president, but Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign in Ohio, said ACORN has no role in its get-out-the-vote drive.

During the primary season, however, the Obama camp paid another group, Citizen Service Inc., $832,598 for various political services, according to Federal Elections Commission filings. That group and ACORN share the same board of directors.

In Wisconsin yesterday, John McCain blasted ACORN.

"No one should be corrupting the most precious right we have, that is the right to vote," he said.

It's a right Johnson will exercise. "Yeah, I've registered enough - I might as well vote."

KANSAS CITY, Mo.

Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.
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Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.

Jess Ordower, Midwest director of ACORN, said his group hasn't done any registrations in Kansas City since late August. He said he was told three weeks ago by election officials that there were only about 135 questionable cards — 85 of them duplicates.

"They keep telling different people different things," he said. "They gave us a list of 130, then told someone else it was 1,000."

FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency has been in contact with elections officials about potential voter fraud and plans to investigate.

"It's a matter we take very seriously," Patton said. "It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely."

On Tuesday, authorities in Nevada seized records from ACORN after finding fraudulent registration forms that included the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

Ordower said Wednesday that ACORN registered about 53,500 people in Missouri this year. He believes his group is being targeted because some politicians don't want that many low-income people having a voice.

"It's par for the course," he said. "When you're doing more registrations than anyone else in the country, some don't want low-income people being empowered to vote. There are pretty targeted attacks on us, but we're proud to be out there doing the patriotic thing getting people registered to vote."

Republicans are among ACORN's loudest critics. At a campaign stop in Bethlehem, Pa., supporters of John McCain interrupted his remarks Wednesday by shouting, "No more ACORN."

Debbie Mesloh, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Missouri, said in an e-mailed statement that the campaign supported any investigation of possible fraud.

According to its national Web site, the group has registered 1.3 million people nationwide for the Nov. 4 election. It also has encountered complaints of fraud stemming from registration efforts in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, where new voter registrations have favored Democrats nearly 4 to 1 since the beginning of this year.

Missouri offers 11 electoral votes; the presidential candidates need at least 270 to win the election.

HOUSTON, Texas

The push to register voters for this year's presidential election is breaking records.

More than 1.9 million people are registered to vote in Harris County alone.

But how many of the people listed on the voter roll are actually eligible to cast a ballot?

Investigative reporter Amy Davis shows you how hundreds of voters could sway this year's election -- voters who are not even alive. They are called "dead voters".

"All-in-all, a great person, a great woman, just a wonderful person" is how Alexis Guidry described her mother to Local 2 Investigates.

"As far back as I can remember, they've always voted in the election," Guidry said of her parents.

The March 2008 Primary was no exception. Voting records show Alexis' mom, Gloria Guidry, cast her ballot in person near her South Houston home.

"It was just very shocking, a little unsettling," said Alexis Guidry.

It's unsettling because Gloria Guidry died of cancer 10 months before the March Primary.

"She'd be very upset," Guidry said when asked what her mom would think.

Trent Seibert, of Texas Watchdog, says you should be too.

"This is really disquieting. It's concerning. It's worrisome," said Seibert.

He heads up the non-partisan news group on the web.

Texas Watchdog compared Harris County's voter registration roll with the Social Security death index and found more than 4,000 matches -- registered voters that, it appears, are already dead.

Some of them, like Henderson Hill's late wife Linda, voted postmortem.

"I would like to know who did it, myself," Hill told Davis.

We don't know who used Linda Hill's or Gloria Guidry's IDs to vote, but we do know if their names had been purged from voter rolls after they died, using their IDs wouldn't have worked.

"This is a red flag. No matter where you are, this should set off alarm bells," Seibert said. "Someone needs to take a look at this."

Local 2 Investigates took the information to the Harris County Voter Registrar.

"We just kind of work with the systems that we're allowed to," explained George Hammerlein, the director of Harris County Voter Registration.

The county's system for culling deceased voters from the roll seems painfully primitive.

We watched employees clip obituaries from the newspaper and sort through probate records for names matching those on the roll. But, Hammerlein says while fraud is a concern, for his office, disenfranchising voters is a bigger one.

"We do all we can, but you know we'd rather err on the side of leaving people on the roll instead of taking them off inadvertently," he said.

But could that cautious "better safe than sorry" standard sway an election some say will be a close one?

Texas Watchdog found 4,462 registered voters who appear to be deceased.

In 2000, George Bush won the presidential election by a mere 537 votes in Florida.

"We've never had any evidence there's a concerted attempt at fraud," Hammerlein told Local 2.

But there is evidence the state agency in charge of ensuring only eligible voters can vote is not.

The State Auditor's Office conducted an audit of the voter registration system at the Secretary of State's Office last November.

Auditors identified 49,049 registered voters state-wide who may have been ineligible to vote. Approximately 23,576 may have been deceased and another 23,114 were possible felons. And they found more than 2,359 duplicate records.

The auditor did not find any instances in which potentially ineligible voters actually voted, but they wrote, "Although the Secretary of State's office has processes to identify many ineligible voters and remove them from the State's voter registration list, improvements can be made."

Almost a year after this audit, we wanted to know if the Secretary of State has made any improvements. Have they added any safeguards to the process?

No one from that office would talk to us on camera, but the Director of Elections told us, "We'd rather err in leaving someone on the roll than taking someone off."

"If there's something wrong here, if there's something amiss, this is the worst election to have that happen, "Seibert warned.

And Guidry agrees.

"I don't think it's a matter that she would take lightly," she said of her mom.

In what she calls an historic election, Guidry says her mother wouldn't want anyone speaking for her.

"I think she would definitely do all that she could just to make sure things were on the up and up."

We sent the information we showed you to the Director of Elections in Austin. She said her office refers any credible allegation of election fraud to the Attorney General for investigation.

She said the cases we presented would be felony violations.

LETTER FROM CONGRESS TO U.S. Attorney General:
INVESTIGATE ACORN!


Members of Congress Urge Justice Department to Investigate Alleged ACORN Voter Fraud

WASHINGTON – Six former state Secretaries of State currently serving in Congress today sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requesting the Department of Justice ensure that the actions of ACORN did not violate federal laws or harm the validity of our elections.

The letter signed by Reps. Roy Blunt (Mo.), Tom Cole (Okla.), Vern Ehlers (Mich.), Dean Heller (Nev.), Candice Miller (Mich.), Lamar Smith (Texas) requests the Department of Justice to take “appropriate measures to ensure that both the Civil Rights Division and the Criminal Division look into the actions of ACORN, including any violations of the federal law, and including but not limited to the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act or any other civil or criminal laws covered by their alleged fraudulent activities.”

This week alone, ACORN officials admitted to submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in Ohio and press reports confirmed that ACORN submitted hundreds of fraudulent voter registration forms in Kansas City, Mo., forcing local officials to wade through fraudulent voter registrations, potentially disenfranchising legitimate voters.


October 10, 2008

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20530

Dear Attorney General Mukasey,

As former Secretaries of State in charge of operating and enforcing state and federal election laws, and the Ranking Members on the Congressional committees of jurisdiction, we are acutely aware of the need to encourage voter participation while demonstrating to the American public that the electoral process is secure and reliable. It is therefore with deep concern and a sense of urgency that we ask that the Department of Justice take all active and appropriate measures nationwide to preserve the integrity of our upcoming elections and the voter confidence in the election system by protecting the public’s confidence in the electoral process and ensuring that efforts to defraud the process are thwarted and legally pursued.

President Abraham Lincoln said that “elections belong to the people. It is their decision.” President Lyndon Johnson called voting “the first duty of democracy.” Our courts have affirmed the primacy and necessity of all Americans to participate in the election process when it stated in 1886 that voting is “a fundamental political right, because it is preservative of all rights.” Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356.

However, as the Report from the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform entitled “Building Confidence in U. S. Elections,” and better known as the Carter-Baker Report, noted “Americans are losing confidence in the fairness of elections” and that “building confidence in U.S. elections is central to our nation’s democracy.” The Report also observed that the “electoral system can not inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.” The Commission went on to explain that “democracy is endangered when people believe that their votes do not matter or are not counted correctly.” Most recently the Supreme Court noted that “public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citi zen participation in the democratic process.” Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd., 553 U. S. ____ (2008).

Voter registration fraud is a serious problem that endangers the security of our elections and puts legitimate voters at risk of having their ballots devalued or stolen. To combat this issue, Congress made such fraud a serious federal crime. It is therefore deeply troubling to read continued reports of alleged voter registration fraud in many of the states that are considered to be “battleground states” and where the margin of victory or loss could be small. Even the bipartisan Commission noted there is no doubt that voter fraud occurs and that “in close or disputed elections, and there are many, a small amount of fraud could make the margin of difference.”

Specifically, we bring to your attention one organization – the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now or ACORN – that had their offices raided in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 7, 2008, and admitted on October 8, 2008, to submitting fraudulent voter registrations among the 65,000 forms it submitted in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

Unfortunately this particular organization has a long history of such behavior with its employees having been convicted of voter registration fraud in past elections and current state-level investigations of its activities ongoing in more than a dozen states in this election cycle. The concerns raised in states such as Nevada and Ohio demonstrate clearly the administrative problems this type of voter fraud causes for local election officials. These local officials are forced to wade through hundreds, if not thousands, of fraudulent voter registrations submitted by organizations such as ACORN, which in turn slows the processing of legitimate registrations from other citizens, potentially disenfranchising legitimate voters whose registrations cannot be processed in time for their names to correctly appear on the voter rolls before election day.

The submission of fraudulent voter registrations was something that Congress expressly intended to address in the Help America Vote Act by requiring that States verify voter information con tained in a voter registration application using either an applicant’s state-issued driver’s license or the last 4 digits of the applicant’s social security number. In fact, in a letter dated September 8, 2003, to the State of Maryland, your Department specifically addressed this issue and reminded the States that under HAVA “a State must set up a verification system that enables it to determine whether the information provided by a registrant is accurate by comparing it to its own state motor vehicle driver’s license records or federal social security records.”

In light of the admissions by Ohio ACORN employees, the recent letters and press release from the Commissioner of Social Security questioning the high usage of the verification process in six states, including Ohio, is extremely disconcerting. Your Department and the Social Security Administration should be commending these states for actually following the law and deploying the resources of both agencies to assist them in complying with HAVA rather than attempting to manufacture allegations of impropriety. Indeed, your Department has an enforcement obligation to ensure that States are complying with the HAVA verification requirement. We urge you to ensure that the diligence of these states is not chilled as some try to intimidate them into not following the law.

At the juncture of this critical election, it is imperative that you do all that you can to assure Americans that their votes will not only count but that the votes of ineligible or fraudulent voters will not serve to cancel out or disenfranchise them. Given the breadth of the current investigations of ACORN, the history of such practices by this organization, and a failure of this organization to change its methods or processes to prevent voter registration fraud, what once may have been a single state or regional issue is now obviously a national problem that requires the resources of a federal law enforcement agency. We urge you to take all active and appropriate measure to ensure that both the Civil Rights Division and the Criminal Division look into the actions of ACORN, including any violations of the federal law, and including but not limited to the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act or any other civil or criminal laws covered by their alleged fraudulent activities. However, we do not want this request to be construed as a limitation to just this organization or as a political endeavor, and we would also encourage you to diligently and expeditiously take actions and measures against any other organizations with a similar track record or whose actions serve to perpetuate as opposed to prevent voter fraud. Americans who come out to vote deserve to have confidence in the electoral system and to know that their vote will be counted.

We would greatly appreciate you timely response to this request, given the short time until the national election. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

semen4her said:

...Dead people historically don't vote...

Click to expand...

This part of the post really made sense with me.