Early and often - absentee voting fraud

National Review, June 17, 1996 by Rich Lowry

Vote fraud used to be a crude tool ofmachine politicos. Now it is skillfully engineered by liberal reformers.

ON ELECTION day, five men show up at a post office carrying luggage. Their bags are stuffed with 1,100 ballots, which will constitute 20 per cent of the vote cast that day. Some of the ballots have probably been filled out by the men themselves; others have been wrung from voters under the threat that they will lose their government benefits if they don't go along. The fraudulent ballots will help maintain in power a corrupt elite that regularly manipulates elections to its advantage no matter how people vote at the polls. Is the scene Guatemala? Honduras? Almost. In destitute Greene County, Alabama, democracy is practiced strictly Third World - style by the local black Democratic machine. ''Races are being stolen here, there's no two ways about it,'' says Leewanna Parker, editor of the local Greene County Independent.

Absentee ballots should, according to the Alabama Secretary of State, account for about 3 to 4 per cent of all votes cast (only the physically infirm and persons who will be out of town on election day are eligible to vote absentee). But in 1994 in Greene County 34 per cent of all ballots were cast absentee. Besides the post-office incident, a local watchdog group attests to absentee ballots being stolen from people's mail-boxes, voters being threatened with the loss of their public assistance, and batches of absentee ballots being sent to local Democratic officials. It all paid off. The chairman of the Greene County Commission, who otherwise would have had a tough race with an anti-machine challenger, won re-election handily, with 50 per cent of his votes cast absentee. Forget sending envoys to Haiti, local activist Pam Montgomery remembers thinking. ''They ought to send them here.''

In recent years evidence of vote fraud has cast doubt on the results of several statewide and federal races, a stunning failing of democratic practice in 1990s America. Yet fraud still gets short shrift in the national press. Except for a June 1995 Reader's Digest article and a chapter in Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson's new book Dirty Little Secrets (an excellent, thorough account which touches on most of the cases dealt with here), vote fraud has gotten little play.

But if this political scandal has no resonance, it has lots of growth potential. The new federal Motor Voter law effectively mandates that state registration laws become more lax, and mail-in balloting -- the most frequent vehicle for abuse -- stands to get a boost nationally from Oregon's highly touted experiment with it in the special election last January to fill Sen. Bob Packwood's seat. In short, vote fraud, already a serious problem, is poised to get worse.

--In a notorious 1993 case in Philadelphia, Republican Bruce Marks ran against Democrat William Stinson in a race that would decide control of the Pennsylvania State Senate. Marks won at the polls by about 550 votes, but Stinson won overall with a 1,396 to 371 edge in absentee ballots. The Stinson campaign had gone into minority areas with absentee-ballot applications, falsely telling residents that they could vote absentee as a convenience. The campaign took the resulting 1,000 applications to the board of elections, the Democratic members of which improperly gave the applied-for ballots directly to the Stinson people. Campaign workers took the ballots back to the voters and talked them into voting for their candidate, or else simply filled out the ballot themselves. A federal judge awarded the election to Marks.

-- In California's 36th Congressional District Republican Susan Brooks lost by 812 votes to Democrat Jane Harman, with absentees providing the margin of victory. Brooks workers compiled a detailed list of more than 2,000 apparently invalid votes. As Reader's Digest put it, ''findings indicated that of 5,292 absentee ballots from 20 Venice precincts that went overwhelmingly for Harman, 1,337 (26 per cent) had been cast by voters whose addresses on the rolls turned out to be abandoned homes, empty apartments, vacant lots.'' Susan Brooks dropped her election appeal when it became clear it wouldn't have been resolved until this year (she is running against Rep. Harman again). -- In North Carolina's 7th Congressional District in 1994, incumbent Democrat Charlie Rose beat Republican Robert C. Anderson by fewer than 4,000 votes. Anderson subsequently produced about a dozen affidavits alleging a variety of electoral misconduct, including voter intimidation and tampering with ballot boxes. The alleged fraud was concentrated in heavily Democratic Robeson County, which gave Rose his margin of victory. A House task force found ''serious problems with the electoral process in Robeson County,'' but ruled there were not enough irregularities to swing the result.

-- In July 1991, in the run-up to school-board elections in Fresno, Calif., the local chapter of the Black American Political Association of California launched its Voter Education Project. BAPAC's president described it as ''a highly selective process of both voter registration and absentee-ballot applications. With some $10,000 in cash, equipment, and materials, we are projecting a landslide in seven of the elections and comfortable wins in the others.'' BAPAC workers went door to door registering voters and getting them to fill out applications for absentee ballots, which the workers illegally had sent directly to BAPAC offices. The ballots -- roughly a thousand -- were then taken to the voters, who would be pressured or duped into voting the right way. The California Supreme Court finally overturned these elections in 1993.