Wisconsin Students Voted Early and Often
NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2000
MILWAUKEE – Uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin was compounded Tuesday when the student newspaper at Marquette University reported that some students had admitted to voting more than once Nov. 7.
Some said they voted four times because no one checked their identity.
Unofficial tabulation of Wisconsin's votes showed Vice President Al Gore ahead of Texas Gov. George W. Bush by a slim 6,099 votes, with about 2.5 million, or 66 percent – the third-highest rate in the nation – of the eligible voters having cast ballots.
Milwaukee District Attorney E. Michael McCann said his office has investigated the reports by the Marquette Tribune and found that some Marquette, and also some University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee students, had voted more than once at what he described as "chaotic" polling places. There were no estimates of the number of votes illegally cast.
The unidentified Marquette student who apparently spearheaded the multiple vote movement said he did it because he wanted to show how vulnerable the Wisconsin voting system is to fraud. He said he simply went to a polling place at a middle school in the university neighborhood and signed a registration card with his own name, swearing he was the person named on the card.
He said he was not asked for identification.
The law permits polling place registration, and large numbers of Wisconsin citizens did so Nov. 7. But the applicant is supposed to provide identification in the form of a driver's license or utility bill. The student said it proved so easy he voted three more times.
He said he voted for himself for president each time because none of the official candidates represented his ideas.
Multiple voting is punishable under Wisconsin law by a maximum 4 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The newspaper quoted the student as saying he wanted to remain anonymous but really didn't think anyone would prosecute him because it would expose the weakness of the system.
Republicans had been discussing the possibility of a recount before the university case was revealed. There had been a number of complaints about polling place "irregularities" and a Milwaukee television station had broadcast pictures of what appeared to be a Democratic Party volunteer handing out free cigarettes to get 15 to 25 homeless men to vote on absentee ballots.
Both the state GOP and the district attorney had set up telephone hotlines to receive such complaints.
There were demonstrations in Madison and Milwaukee during the weekend, but the protests drew few participants and the talk was mainly about reform of the Electoral College rather than demands for recounts.
The Bush campaign has until next Wednesday – three days after Friday's official state canvass – to petition for a recount. State election officials said they doubted a recount would change Wisconsin's 11 electoral votes for Gore or shift the lead in the national popular vote.
Christine Sinicki, a Democrat who represents a Milwaukee district in the legislature and is one of the state's 270 electors who will meet Dec. 18, criticized the Republicans for trying to rush the election process. She said she was not committed to the abolition of the Electoral College but believes a fairer system would be to allow the states' electors to represent the split of the popular vote rather than giving all the votes to the winner. Unofficial totals gave Gore 47.9 percent of the vote to 47.7 percent for Bush.
Eighty percent of Wisconsin voters used optical scanner ballots in the Nov. 7 election. In this system, the voter simply fills in the middle of an arrow beside the name of the chosen candidate, using a provided felt-tip pen.
Only about 7 percent of the state's votes used punch cards and about 1,000 communities still used hand-counted paper ballots, Wisconsin has been converting to scanners because there were a number of disputed elections in the past involving punch cards.
Florida Officials Use Telepathy in Prez Ballot Hand Count
Deroy Murdock
Monday, Nov. 13, 2000
NEW YORK – Just days after Missouri voters elected a dead man to the Senate, the American presidency is being decided on the basis of telepathy. No word better describes the way some Florida officials are hand counting ballots in the Sunshine State's deadlocked presidential tally.
In Gadsden County, near Tallahassee, witnesses say that Democratic county judge Richard Hood and two other Democrats on the canvassing commission reviewed 187 ballots last Wednesday that had been rejected by a tabulation machine. They "interpreted" ballots on which there was "more than 1 candidate's bubble selected" as well as some with "no candidate properly selected” but with "markings that indicated the voter's intent."
Hood and his helpers then ascertained precisely what voters meant when they chose more than one candidate – or none at all. Would, for instance, a straight Democratic party-line ballot with no presidential vote suggest a Gore supporter who simply forgot to punch the hole beside the vice president's name? Or was this a potential Nader voter who wanted to stick it to Gore but couldn't stick it to his ballot card? Maybe someone agreed with the Democrats on domestic issues but wanted George W. Bush to handle defense matters – and then got last-minute cold feet. Or perhaps one of America's great undecided voters simply remained undecided and didn't vote for president.
Even the Psychic Friends Network would struggle to untangle all this. But not the Gadsden County Canvassing Commission. Of the 187 ballots disqualified on Election Night, they ruled that Gore won 170 while 17 went to Bush.
Meanwhile, Ken Sukhia – a former U.S. attorney based in Tallahassee who is assisting the Bush campaign – tried to observe the recount. He says he was barred from the counting room but invited to watch ... through a window.
"I was told that I could not come in," he told Erin Hayes of ABC News. "I was prohibited from going into that room, and I was flabbergasted to hear that that was the position they were taking."
While he – like all observers – was kept outside, Democrat Jeff DiSantis said Gadsden officials attempted to be "as accurate, as fair and as within the law as they possibly could."
But Sukhia would beg to differ. "I couldn't believe they were doing this," he said. "They had been asked to do a recount and a recount only. They took it upon themselves to examine ballots which had been rejected the night before."
This is precisely the kind of mischief that the Bush-Cheney team is trying to block in federal court today. As former Secretary of State James Baker said at a Saturday news conference, "Machines are neither Republican nor Democratic, and therefore can be neither consciously nor unconsciously biased."
Americans these days are learning a brand-new lexicon of election methodology. First, Palm Beach County's butterfly ballots gently fluttered onto the national landscape. Now, the headlines are filled with talk of hanging chad, swinging chad and dimpled chad. A trio of Malibu surfers? No such luck. These are various types of small holes created in punch cards when citizens vote. When one clings to a ballot card, even barely, a counting machine may misjudge it as a non-vote, even though someone might have picked a candidate.
After selecting four test precincts, Palm Beach officials spent much of Saturday discerning if a chad were swinging (two corners attached to the ballot), in which case it counted as a vote, or dimpled (indented but still sticking to the ballot), which rendered it neutral. Making such refined judgments presents multiple problems.
One is ballot fatigue. After two machine counts and now manual handling, these ballot cards increasingly suffer wear and tear. It doesn't take much to turn an uncounted dimpled chad – deliberately or accidentally – into a tri chad (three corners adhering to the ballot), which constitutes a vote. Likewise, a tri chad could get squeezed back into the ballot card, thus negating a legitimate vote.
Second, Palm Beach officials changed their guidelines for divining voter intent in mid-recount. Some were checked for chad. Others were subject to a "light test." If light appeared through a ballot hole, it registered as a vote. Otherwise, it did not. Florida lacks uniform standards for judging voter intent in ballot hand counts. Palm Beach County used at least two in the same recount.
Finally, the issue of human fatigue is crucial. Even assuming ballots in Florida are checked by honest, even-handed, objective poll workers, they must engage in an incredibly repetitive and tedious task. Imagine looking at your 757th ballot. And then your 758th. And then your 759th.
Bush. Gore. Gore. No vote. Bush. Gore. Nader. God, am I hungry. Gore. Buchanan. Bush. Gore. Bush. Damn! Whose cell phone is that? Bush. Bush. Bush. I better call the gardener when I get home. Gore. No vote. Yawn. Gore. Bush. Oops, I counted that ballot already ... didn't I?
It took nine hours to hand-count 1 percent of the ballots in Palm Beach alone. Assuming officials work 24 hours per day, it will take 891 hours to hand-count the remaining 99 percent of the county's ballots. Those intervening 37 and a half days stretch at least to December 19, the day after the Electoral College meets. Palm Beach county official Carol Roberts said today on "Good Morning America" that the hand count could be finished by Friday. That sounds like a rush to judgment – and a recipe for paper cuts.
This is a disaster in the making. Americans should pray that the Bush-Cheney lawsuit prevails. Barring that, perhaps Gadsden County's canvassing commission could use its clairvoyance to contact James Madison, father of the Constitution. He'll know what to do.
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.
Same Dem Scam: Trash, Poll & Spin
Dan Frisa
Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2000
Here it comes again.
The Dems are trotting out their standby strategy that served them so well during impeachment; it’s a three-part formula to bulldoze their way through seeming adversity.
And the Florida re-re-count debacle is the perfect situation to employ this technique in order to steal the election for Junior Gore.
This is how it works:
First, trash the opposition.
This is the politics of personal destruction, and we saw it first used against Robert Bork during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the Senate, then against Newt Gingrich even before he took office as Speaker of the House, then again against Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater Special Prosecutor.
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris is now in the cross-hairs of the Democrat trash artillery. Watch how fast the media knowingly participates in this detestable onslaught following ruling that Florida law requires a 5 p.m. deadline today for certification of ballots.
And now that a Florida judge has placed the legal onus on her discretion to accept or reject late amendments of voting results from several Dem counties, watch the personal attacks escalate.
After demonizing the opposition, the Democrats then act as victims of the very person they portrayed as a mean, harsh, partisan beast.
Second, the Dems use polls as a means of portraying themselves as on the side of public opinion, on the 'right' side of the issue.
The very same polls paid for by the media, which were so pathetic as a barometer in gauging potential election results, are now being trotted out to paint the Dems as in step with "what the American people want."
During impeachment this was one of the foundations upon which the Dem defenders of Clinton depended.
"Look at the polls, look at the polls," they implored us. "Americans want this, Americans want that!" Of course they interpret these suspect polls to their own advantage, without there ever being an external, objective event – such as an election – to see if the polls accurately reflect sentiment. In essence, it’s one big fantasy; a fiction to be spun.
The third and final prong in the standard Dem attack is to spin, spin, and spin again, until everyone is dazed and confused by the entire exercise, to such an extent that the public becomes sick and tired of all the rhetoric and then, in desperation, just wants it all to be over with.
There you have it. That’s what they’re doing right now.
It really is the same old Dem scam: trash, poll and spin.
Hold onto your hats, folks, the storm is already upon us.
Comment: Socialist Republic of Palm Beach County
Phil Brennan
Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2000
A few years ago someone called the Boca Raton News and complained that the sand on the beach was too hot and it burned his bare feet when he walked on it. He demanded that the city council do something about it immediately.
The gentleman is the archetype of the present-day majority in his city, and Palm Beach County, where the socialist ideal is alive and well.
Boca Raton, where the sun is so politically insensitive that it insists on heating the beach sand despite the inconvenience it causes the tender tootsies of beach goers, is the southernmost outpost of the Socialist Republic of Palm Beach County. It is also one of the hotbeds of raucous dissent about the recent balloting, along with other condo-ridden cities in the north end of this Florida county.
My fellow Boca citizens showed how far left they are when they sent to Congress the odious Robert Wexler, that staunch defender of Bill Clinton on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings, where his strident questioning of witnesses assaulted the eardrums of TV watchers and the sensibilities of his more civilized colleagues.
Mr. Wexler, a devout socialist posing as a Democrat, recently joined just 11 other House members who voted to strip the Boy Scouts of America of their federal charter because of their refusal to expose their young members to the recruitment efforts of the pedophile foxes who yearn to invade the BSA chicken coop and win converts to organized sodomy.
Thirty-two years ago, this was a heavily Republican County. Then the hordes of the FDR generation from New York and environs arrived and changed the political makeup of Palm Beach County, turning it overnight into an annex of the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Signs began to appear in stores proclaiming "We don't care how they did it in New York, or how much it cost." Bumper stickers begged "Pray for me, I drive by (insert the name of any of the huge condo communities that infest the area).
These communities - small cities actually - are run like soviets. In most of them each individual condo has a resident Democrat political activist who herds the residents to the polls on Election Day after telling them precisely how they are to vote. And you can bet they are never told to vote Republican.
Some of these same condo commissars were trotted out by Gore agents to go on TV and bemoan their self-proclaimed stupidity in messing up their butterfly ballots, and then filed lawsuits demanding an opportunity to vote a second time.
They are, as already noted, a generation that grew up during the Roosevelt administration. They are totally dedicated to the idea that government must tend to all their needs, including, it appears, even to cooling the beach sand. Any candidate who suggests otherwise is doomed - these people vote in incredible numbers and can easily overwhelm any less-than-socialist candidate rash enough to seek office.
Last Tuesday they swarmed to the polling places. To hear many of them tell it, they were confounded by a ballot, a sample of which they received in the mail at least a week before. About 10,000 mathematically challenged voters insisted they probably were among the mere 3,000 who cast their ballots for Pat Buchanan, whom several referred to as a "Nazi."
To the astonishment of many, Jesse Jackson arrived on the scene and harangued large and adoring crowds, many of whom were Jewish - the same Jesse Jackson who called their former New York home "Hymietown." It seems that anything can be forgiven if the socialist future appears to be threatened by the likes of George W. Bush, who they are certain will choke off all those government benefits to which they feel entitled, even to keeping the sand red hot.
Since Election Day they have thronged the shopping centers and the streets of downtown West Palm Beach shouting demands for an opportunity to "revote." They spout the Gore party line to every member of the huge media contingent here, all of whom are lusting for a chance to promote the outright theft of the election by the Gore forces.
When the true story of this fiasco it told, we are going to discover that the entire production was choreographed by the Gore campaign before Election Day when somebody saw the butterfly ballot - which both the Democrat and GOP representatives had OK'd - and recognized a golden opportunity to pull off a massive scam.
The media do not seem eager to pursue this story - to look into the hiring on Election Day of a marketing firm to make thousands of phone calls asking people in the county if they voted, and if they had, were they certain that the voted for Gore and not Buchanan.
It was a set-up from the beginning. Once they had enough people riled up they trotted out Wexler to screech that he personally witnessed thousands of voters emerging from the polling places in tears because they had been conned by a confusing ballot - a story not even Larry King could swallow when Wexler tried it out on him.
The whole scam is straight out of the socialist playbook of Saul Alinsky. Someday somebody will dig into it and find the truth about the great butterfly ballot scam - that it was just another chapter in the continuing saga of the socialization of the United States of America played out on the stage of the Socialist Republic of Palm Beach.
* * *
Phil Brennan is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web, http://www.pvbr.com. He is a veteran journalist and onetime Washington correspondent for National Review magazine and a former staff aide to the House Republican Policy Committee.
Friday, November 10, 2000
IN THE NEWS…
“N. Florida County Tries to Fill in Blanks on Ballots,”
Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau, by Mary Ellen Klas, 11/10/00
“In a small side-street office of this rural North Florida town, four county officials -- all of them Democrats -- spent seven hours Wednesday examining every pencil mark on 2,073 ballots that had been rejected by Gadsden County's ballot scanning machine to try to reconstruct what the voters meant.
“The machine was calibrated to reject any ballot that had anything from a stray mark to an extra vote for a candidate.
“But rather than reject these ballots outright -- as they did in Palm Beach County and many other counties that use punch ballots -- the practice of the Gadsden County canvassing board is to look at each questionable ballot to try to determine the intent of each voter.
“Some voters colored in the circle for one candidate, crossed it out and then filled in a circle for another. Others filled in the circle for a candidate, then wrote the name of the same candidate in the write-in space, as if for emphasis.
“‘The only ones we reconstructed were the ones we could tell the intent of the voter,’ explained Sterling Watson, a county commissioner and member of the canvassing board.
“Watson, two other county commissioners and a county judge were the people trying to read the minds of their fellow voters.
“This county, the most Democratic in the state, cast 16,812 votes in the presidential race, 66 percent of them for Vice President Al Gore.
“When campaign officials for both Gore and his Republican opponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, learned of the uncounted ballots, they dispatched election law lawyers to the tiny town.
“When the Gadsden officials began at 3 p.m, they suspected the results of their efforts had the potential to change the outcome of the presidential race.
“When they ended their recount at 10 p.m., they found only 170 additional votes for Gore, 17 additional votes for Bush and the threat of a lawsuit from the Florida Republican Party.
“‘They're not simply recounting the votes they counted (election) night, they're adding ballots by taking into consideration ballots that were not considered,’ said Ken Sukhia, a Tallahassee attorney representing the Republican Party.
“County officials justified their actions, saying they simply forgot to review the ballots before they certified them to the secretary of state on election night.
“‘It was not done. It should have been done,’ said Watson. ‘This is Gadsden County, we get a lot of concerns about the ballot box. We wanted to do it to make sure we had the most accurate count.’”
