How the Major Parties Cheat in Elections: A Primer for the Uninformed.
Jay Bates

One of the major untold stories of our democracy is how the two major political parties cheat on Election Day. Undercounts, overcounts, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, machine error…all of these play a role in how the two major political parties cheat average American voters out of their vote in order to achieve victory at the polls. The average voter is unaware of the nuances of state election laws, and probably couldn't tell you the difference between a provisional ballot and an absentee ballot. This blog is designed to educate and inform readers not only of the differences between the various types of ballots and voting methods used, but also about the documented instances of voter fraud and computer error that have plagued recent elections.

Ballot Types

There are different types of ballots used in elections. Many voters choose to use the absentee ballot to avoid long lines, or in the event that they will be unable to attend the polls on Election Day. An absentee ballot essentially allows a voter to vote in advance of an election. They request an absentee ballot through their local Elections Office (most counties have an elected official known as an Election Supervisor), and they enter in their votes on the ballot, and finally, they mail it back into the Elections Office. The ballot is then theoretically counted on Election Day with regular ballots. The appeal of an absentee ballot is obvious, as is the necessity. For soldiers serving abroad, it is the only way in which they can vote in elections back home.

A provisional ballot is a ballot that is used to record a vote when there is some doubt as to the potential voter's eligibility. When a voter's name doesn't appear on voter registration rolls, or when they have no photo ID, they are given a provisional ballot. The ballot is then counted upon verification of the voter's eligibility. Provisional ballots became far more widespread in their use following the 2000 elections and the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

The Exploitation of Ballots: Interpretation of Voter Intent, "Spoilage", and Absentee Ballots that aren't Mailed Out.

The two aforementioned ballot types play a key role in the ways in which the two major parties cheat during elections. Simply put, many absentee and provisional ballots are lost, not counted, or simply discarded through a process in which an elections official declares them "spoiled." In addition, absentee ballots have to be mailed to voters. There are documented instances of voters requesting absentee ballots well within the timeframe that such ballots could be sent out, and yet the voters never received their ballots.

In Broward County, Florida, an election supervisor failed to send out 60,000 absentee ballots before the 2004 election. The significance of such a matter is this: Broward County is overwhelmingly Democratic. There's also a backstory: Broward County is the county whose votes were not counted in 2000 due to the Supreme Court decision which awarded the Presidential race to George W. Bush.

Also occurring in 2000 was the election of a new Supervisor of Elections for Broward County. Her name was Miriam Oliphant, and she was a Democrat who was elected with some 70% of the vote. Oliphant immediately set about outsourcing many of the tasks that had been issues in the 2000 election for Broward County. She also publicly criticized Governor Jeb Bush's plan to use ES & S voting machines in the 2002 elections.

Two holdovers within the Elections Office proved to be formidable opponents for their new boss as well. Mary Hall routinely criticized her new boss, as did Pat Nesbit. Oliphant's reforms of her office seemed to have been the major issue. Mary Hall had been an employee appointed in 1986 by the old Supervisor of Elections, a Republican named Jane Carroll.

After much hemming and hawing and many volleys through media outlets, Oliphant fired both Hall and Nesbit on October 7, 2003 after what ultimately proved to be disastrous 2002 gubernatorial election fiasco in Broward County. Hall was responsible for overseeing absentee ballots. However, in the aftermath of the 2002 state election, 268 unopened absentee ballots were found post-election.

Hall had previously been accused of altering the outcome of an election when she threw out 176 of 437 absentee ballots collected by Pompano Beach City Commissioner candidate Walter Hunter, who lost to his opponent by 236 votes. Hunter also complained to no end that Hall had publicly supported his opponent during the campaign!

Hall was predictably fired after the absentee ballot episode in 2002 and the 2003 issues with Walter Hunter. For that matter, she had spent the prior three years openly criticizing her own boss, who was elected by the citizens of Broward County with 70% of the vote.

And here is where things become very interesting: after being terminated from her position, Hall took up employment in Republican Congressman Alcee Hastings' office. The man who hired her was Hastings' chief of staff, a GOP operative named David Kennedy. David Kennedy had ties to both the governor's mansion (Jeb Bush) and the White House (George W. Bush).

After the firings of Nesbit and Hall, Miriam Oliphant felt that she was in the clear to run her office as she saw fit. She had already raised voter registration in Broward County by some half a million voters, and she was on her way to further reforms of the office. However, the day after the firings, Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood contacted Oliphant with concerns about her office. A week later, David Kennedy, the GOP operative who got Hall a job in Alcee Hastings' office, was on the phone to Governor Jeb Bush to urge him to send in an assessment team to the Broward County Elections Office.
Jeb Bush subsequently suspended Miriam Oliphant without pay for incompetence. Bush then turned around and tapped David Kennedy to help pick Oliphant's replacement. A Republican, Brenda Snipes, was chosen despite the fact that the people of Broward County had elected a Democrat with some 70% of the vote. Snipes would run for election in 2004, and her campaign would be run by William Scherer, a lawyer who co-chaired George W. Bush's campaign in Broward County.

Snipes then re-hired Hall in December of 2003, re-installing her to her position as supervisor of absentee ballots. In the 2004 election, some 60,000 absentee ballots would not be mailed out to voters, who would then lose their vote altogether.

Moreover, Snipes also brought back another holdover from the 2002 fiasco. Gisela Salas was made Deputy Elections Supervisor in time to oversee the 2004 election. Despite the objections of many Broward election workers who protested that Salas had been incompetent during the 2002 election, Snipes overruled their protests and made Salas her second in command.

Salas had presided over a primary in September of 2002 that saw polling places in Miami-Dade open late, voting machines malfunction, and workers abandoning their posts altogether. At the time, Jeb Bush called the events in Miami-Dade "shameful." Two years later, the replacement that he named for Miriam Oliphant would hire the official in charge of that shameful fiasco in Miami-Dade's 2002 primary as her second in command. 60,000 absentee ballots would not be mailed out to voters in a primarily Democratic district, and John Kerry would lose a very tight state and national election for the presidency.

However, absentee ballots were not the primary reason that John Kerry lost the 2004 election. Provisional ballots by and large accounted for the greater amount of lost votes for the Kerry campaign. In Ohio, some 155,000 provisional ballots were not counted. Another 92,672 votes were discarded, bringing the total number of uncounted votes to 247,672. This is according the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

To understand how important provisional ballots are to a Democratic candidate like John Kerry, you must first understand why they have come into vogue. In the 2000 election, Republican Party operatives headed to the polls with lists of names. The names on the lists that they carried belonged primarily to minority voters. The lists are known as caging lists.

The operatives then challenged the votes of people on the list, effectively trying to make it difficult for them to vote or dissuading them from voting altogether. The significance of such a strategy ought to be obvious: minorities vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats. If you can jam minority voters at the polls by challenging their right to cast a vote in the first place, you increase the odds that a Republican will win.

However, the strategy did not work. Al Gore still managed to win the popular vote in 2000, though the Electoral College that ultimately determines who becomes President went to George W. Bush by virtue of the aforementioned goings on down in Florida and the Supreme Court decision that blocked any count of the votes down in Broward County.

Republicans refined their techniques, recognizing that they'd had a close call. In response to voter outrage over the polling place challenges of minority votes, Republicans offered up a compromise: provisional ballots. The voter whose right to vote was challenged could simply fill out a provisional ballot, and upon confirmation of his or her legitimate right to vote, their vote would be counted.
There was only one problem with such an arrangement. The officials in charge of the investigation and verification of voter eligibility would belong to one of two parties. Depending on which party the official belonged to, the call could and did go a certain way as you might imagine.

Republicans compiled new caging lists of voters who were largely black or Jewish (and therefore more likely to vote Democratic), and they set up their plan to challenge voter eligibility in 2004. They ran into a snag when a Republican operative mistakenly sent caging lists via email to an individual who had purchased the rights to the domain name http://www.georgewbush.org/. They were supposed to have emailed the list to georgewbush.com instead. The individual, realizing what he had in his possession then forwarded the information to the BBC.

The BBC reported on the caging lists, blowing the lid off what had previously been a covert effort to suppress the minority vote in the 2004 election. Ohio, New Mexico, and Florida were the primary targets. States with large amounts of Hispanics, Jews, and blacks were targeted and the names on the list reflected the ugly reality of the Republican Party's strategy.

The Republican Party found itself in an untenable position. Compiling lists for voter challenges based on race is a federal offense. The Republican Party had been busted previously for the same offense back in the 1980's, and as part of a court settlement, they had pledged to never do such a thing again. However, times have changed. The Republicans recognized that the makeup of federal courts had changed as well, and they decided to press on anyway. Though their announced plans to challenge some 35,000 votes in Ohio provoked the ire of the federal judges, it did not provoke substantive action by those judges.

They proceeded on their merry way, and challenged votes based on race and likely political affiliation stemming from race. They managed to achieve their aim. John Kerry lost the election in Ohio by 136,483 votes. However, 247,672 votes simply were not counted, either due to their being designated as illegitimate provisional ballots or through their designation as "spoiled" ballots.
This brings us to our other major issue: that of the machine ballot. Remember those hanging chads down in Florida in the 2000 election? Those little hole punch ballots that still had pieces of paper clinging tenuously to them…they were deemed "spoiled" by virtue of an election officials determination that the vote cast was inconclusive. If the chad wasn't punched all the way through, the candidate didn't get the vote. Or to be more accurate, the voter's vote was rendered meaningless.

Furthermore, machine balloting was proving to be notoriously inaccurate. The old hole punch ballot machines simply fail to record votes. On average, around two million votes are "spoiled" in national elections. They are not counted or they are invalidated due to challenges.

In Rio Arriba, a New Mexico county that is 73 percent Hispanic, 1 out of every 10 votes was not counted by the machines in the 2000 elections. Moreover, in one Rio Arriba precinct, not one single vote for President was recorded on any of the ballots submitted. State and local election officials left this occurrence unchallenged.

Of the two million votes that disappear in every national election, fifty-four percent are estimated to be those of black voters.

Is it merely a race issue? Yes and no. Poverty is greater in minority communities and neighborhoods, and as a result, voting equipment tends to be older and more outdated. However, don't expect Republicans to rush to bring equality in voting conditions and reliability to the precincts where they are most likely to lose.

The Responsibility of the Citizen

When faced with widespread inequity and injustice that strikes at the very core of a participatory democracy such as ours, we as citizens have the obligation and the power to fight back against those who perpetuate threats to our right to vote. Our right to vote is the most precious right that we have, the one upon which all other rights are built.

When faced with a power structure such as our current two-party system that depends on the suppression of votes in order to succeed and thrive, we must revolt against such tyranny. Our democracy depends on the inclusion of votes in order to remain a democracy. If it fails to do so, it fails to represent the very people it governs…it becomes a tyranny and a cancerous threat to freedom.

We have a responsibility to mobilize and insist that all votes be counted in a fair and just manner. We have a duty to hold our government to an account for how it manages that sacred process by which we select those who will stand as our representatives. If we do not stand vigilant, our elected representatives will pursue their own interests, because they will recognize that their employers will not hold them to an account for their actions. We the people are the employers of our government. It answers to us…we govern it with our vote.

We direct it with our input at the polls. To have elected officials essentially striking down votes or excluding votes to achieve their own predetermined objectives is a direct threat to our freedom. Their partisan power does not supersede our democratic rights. They have clearly forgotten this fact. It is time to remind them.

Mobilize. Join the movement to demonstrate against the tyranny of two party politics and election malfeasance so that we can ensure that democracy lives on. Fight for your country and your freedom. We can demonstrate in the streets peacefully, and as long as we show up in number to voice our support of democratic ideal, they will have to listen to us. Join the movement.


Jay Bates

The following are source materials used for the writing of this blog. Please read, investigate, and above all, enjoy!
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/an_election_spoiled_rotten.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_ballot
http://www.newtimesbpb.com/2004-11-04/news/vote-interrupted/1
TomPaine_com - Kerry Won.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/224812/643