By John Fund
The Florida Fiasco of 2000, with putting chads, butterfly ballots and ultimate courtroom intervention, pressured american citizens to confront an unsightly truth. The U.S. has the sloppiest election platforms of any industrialized country, so sloppy that at the least 8 of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the area exchange heart and the Pentagon have been really capable of sign up to vote in both Virginia or Florida whereas they made their lethal arrangements for 11th of September. In "Stealing Elections," John Fund takes the reader on a countrywide journey of voter fraud scandals starting from rural states like Texas and Mississippi to special towns resembling Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He explores darkish episodes resembling the way in which "vote agents" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by way of tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He exhibits how, within the aftermath of the Motor Voter legislations of 1993, Californians used mail-in kinds to get absentee ballots for fictitious humans and pets, whereas in St. Louis it was once chanced on that voter rolls integrated 13,000 extra names than the U.S. Census indexed because the overall variety of adults within the urban. Election officers are attempting to reassure electorate through turning to automatic balloting machines. yet Fund indicates that with the hot expertise come even higher issues. Early in 2004, for example, the nation of Maryland, which has 16,000 new Diebold machines, commissioned a safety professional to aim to rig a tradition election. He and his workforce broke into the pc on the country Board of Elections, thoroughly replaced the result of the election, left, and erased their digital trail—all in less than 5 mins. "Stealing Elections" offers us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability--in the 2004 presidential election and on into the longer term. Writing with urgency and authority, John Fund exhibits how a deadly mix of bureaucratic bungling and poll rigging have placed our democracy in danger.
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Additional info for Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
Sample text
Country music is big: Bakersfield is the home of both Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. In 2002, it was also the site of a fierce struggle for a vacant state assembly district. Local businessman Dean Gardner was pitted against Nicole Parra, a legislative staffer in Sacramento and the daughter of Pete Parra, the powerful chairman of the Kern County Board of Supervisors. Over half the district was located in Kern County, which includes Bakersfield, and that was where the campaign became most bitter and the results most controversial.
He presented evidence before circuit court judge Thomas S. Wilson Jr. that hundreds of absentee ballots in the initial election had been forged. In February 1998, a grand jury found massive fraud in absentee ballots cast in the first mayoral race. Judge Wilson began a nonjury trial to examine these findings, and twenty-four witnesses took the Fifth Amendment. The next month, he declared the original November 4 election void and called for a new election in sixty days. But the evidence of fraud was so strong that within days, the state’s Third District Court of Appeal had overturned Wilson’s ruling, thrown out all 4,740 absentee ballots from the November 4 election and installed Carollo as mayor.
And the zeal of local partisans makes some suspect there was hanky-panky in south Florida in 2000. Palm Beach County was one of the last counties in Florida to release its voting results, and Al Gore’s strong showing there reduced Bush’s lead from 50,000 votes statewide to less than 1,500 when Palm Beach finally came in well after midnight. It is highly likely that after the polls closed and ballots were collected for counting, people would have known how close the race was and that every vote would indeed count — or not count if something was done to it.
