Bad Lands, Bad Votes: Putting Tim Johnson over the top, by any means necessary

National Review, Dec 23, 2002 by Byron York

On Election Day, Noma Sazama knew something unusual was going on the moment she arrived at her polling place, the St. Thomas Parish Hall in Mission, South Dakota. Sazama, a member of the local election board, noticed several strangers in the room -- an unusual sight in Mission, population 904, where most people know one another. It turned out the strangers were all lawyers, Democrats who had come to town to serve as poll watchers for the race between incumbent Democratic senator Tim Johnson and Republican John Thune. One was from Washington, D.C., another was from New York City, and a third was from California. "There were no locals, and I've never seen that happen before," says Sazama, who has lived in the area for 73 years.

According to Sazama, the Democratic team quickly set up shop in the Parish Hall kitchen, just a few feet from the tables where voters would cast their ballots. The party had rented dozens of vans and hired drivers to bring voters to the polls, and the out-of-state lawyers made the kitchen their transportation headquarters. "I saw this young man from New York with boxes of file cards," Sazama says. "They had the names and time-of-pickup and whether someone voted on them, and from those he would contact the drivers." It took her a few minutes to realize that the Democrats intended to run their get-out-the-vote effort from inside the polling place.

As they worked, the lawyers were constantly on the phone in the kitchen. It was the only phone in the Parish Hall, and on more than one occasion election officers were unable to make calls when they needed to. Sazama, a Republican, worried about that, and so did Nancy Wanless, a Democrat who served as the precinct's election supervisor. "A lot of times it was hard for me," says Wanless. "They were on the phone using it to call I don't know where, and I needed to call because we had some new districting. They were always talking on it." When Wanless protested, she got a chilly reaction from the out-of-towners. "I felt like they were trying to intimidate me," she recalls.

Through much of the day, Sazama wondered whether it was legal for the Democrats to use the precinct as a campaign office. "I didn't think that had any business in our polling place," she says. "If they wanted to do that, they could have had an office away from where we were doing the voting." In fact, such tactics are specifically forbidden by South Dakota law. But Sazama didn't know that, and there were no Republican lawyers, from out of state or anywhere else, at the precinct to help her (the GOP poll watchers were all locals, like Sazama). So she did nothing.

The big-city attorneys were part of a force of 10,000 lawyers deployed nationwide by the Democratic National Committee, ostensibly to ensure that voters' rights would be protected. But there is compelling evidence to suggest that at least some of the lawyers did just the opposite. According to the testimony of dozens of South Dakotans who worked at the polls, the out-of-state attorneys engaged in illegal electioneering, pressured poll workers to accept questionable ballots, and forced polling places in a heavily Democratic area to stay open for an hour past their previously-announced closing time. In addition, the testimony contains evidence of people being allowed to vote with little or no identification, of incorrectly marked ballots being counted as Democratic votes, of absentee ballots being counted without proper signatures, and, most serious of all, of voters who were paid to cast their ballots for Sen. Johnson.

The stories are told in more than 40 affidavits collected by Republicans in the days after the election and obtained by National Review. That evidence, along with interviews with state and local officials, suggests that Johnson may have benefited from hundreds of votes that were the product of polling-place misconduct. Had those votes not been added to his total, it seems likely that the senator, who won by just 524 votes, would instead have lost, and John Thune would today be South Dakota's senator-elect.

Ed Assman is a retired highway-patrol officer who lives in Pierre, the state capital. He has several relatives who are politically active in Todd County, home of the Rosebud Indian Reservation, and on Election Day he traveled to the small town of Parmelee, in the northwest part of the county, to serve as a Republican poll watcher. The precinct where he worked was in a place known as the Elderly Nutrition Center.

"It was one big open room," Assman recalls, about 20 feet by 45 feet. At one end were tables for election officials and voters. Poll watchers sat at another table. The main Democratic poll watcher was from Washington, and he set up an area not far from the voting table from which he directed the van operation that picked up Democratic voters. "It was obvious that they were running their campaign headquarters out of there," says Assman. "The drivers of the vans were coordinating their efforts with Democratic poll watchers inside the polling place." Assman's recollection is quite similar to what Sazama saw in Mission. And at yet another precinct, in the town of Rosebud, a witness who asked not to be identified says he also saw Democratic poll workers running a carpool system "out of the polling place."