Vote Counts and Vampire Counts

Jack E. Kemp

“I do not believe the last (2012) Presidential Election was decided by voter fraud. And there was voter fraud.” – John Fund, in response to an audience question.

Recently two well known conservative experts on U.S. voting irregularities came to speak at the Federalist Society of Mineola, Long Island. They included the above mentioned John Fund of the Wall St. Journal and National Review, and co-author of “Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk.” The second speaker was Grant Lally, an attorney who successfully argued the 2000 case of then-Presidential candidate George W. Bush before the Miami-Dade and Orange Counties Boards of Elections, as well as later being involved in many other recount battles. Mr. Fund’s coauthor, Hans von Spakovsky was scheduled to speak but couldn’t leave Washington due to weather conditions.

John Fund began by saying that he found that our voting system is encumbered by bureaucratic bungling as well as voter fraud which he described as “purposeful confusion.” Citing the example of Long Beach, Long Island, Fund told of vote totals at a nursing home of a 100 percent Democratic turnout. After an investigation, the vote count totals dropped by one third and the Democrats then got 75 percent of the vote (that is a realistic figure). When Fund later mentioned arguments made by liberals wanting no requirement of voter i.d.s because they claimed it was a civil rights issue for minorities, he replied with the counter-argument that every illegal vote was a violation of the opposition party voters’ civil rights. The larger voter plurality in Downstate communities like Long Beach, NY, the easier it is to have that total overcome the typical Upstate  Republican majorites. Later Atty. Lally told of his investigation of a NY State Senate race where Democrat George Amedore was declared the winner. Students from the nearby State University at Albany were part of something called an “Opportunity Program” which allowed them to register as Albany residents, even if they lived elsewhere (such as New York City). Although Mr. Lally caught some of them, he couldn’t catch enough students and others to reverse what some believe was a false election result. And once a winner is declared anywhere in the nation, it is extremely difficult to overturn the result.

What I have just described will be familiar to residents of many other locations - and not just the “usual suspects” like Chicago and parts of California. 

Returning to the example of the photo i.d., John Fund told of many Democrats arguing that asking for a voter’s photo i.d. equates to racism from the Jim Crow days. The fact that every person of every ethnic group has to show a photo i.d. to get on a plane, on Amtrak, etc. – and that 65 percent of support photo i.d. is swept aside by such activists. Fund noted that blacks living in neighborhoods decimated by poor police and social services, low job opportunities, etc., would lead one to think that many residents would be fed up and a significant number of them would vote Republican because they lived with the failures of their local government every day and would be willing to try a different approach. One partial explanation Fund gave for this lack of change was the provision of the national Motor Voter Act that said one can’t remove someone from the voter rolls for four federal elections, i.e., eight years. That means someone can have moved away or be dead for about eight years yet still be a “zombie voter” (my term) in a given district.

Fund mentioned the topic of illegals voting as well. On page 96 of “Who’s Counting” it states that:

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As the story by the local NBC station in Florida demonstrated , some noncitizen registrations can be detected through the jury process. The vast majority of state and federal courts draw their jury pools from voter registration lists, and the jury questionnaires used by court clerks ask potential jurors whether they are U.S. Citizens. In most states, however, and throughout the federal court system, court clerks rarely notify local election officials when potential jurors have sworn under oath that they are not U.S. citizens. (Italics are mine).

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The book goes on to state that since most illegals don’t have a paper trail, they don’t get called for jury duty in Florida as do legal residents. On the next page – and also summarized in his in-person speech - Fund went on to state that in Orange County, California, a jurisdiction that selects 85 to 90 percent of its jurors from the voter registration list, the California Secretary of State reported in 1998 that two to three thousand individuals claim exemption from jury duty because they are not citizens. “Who’s Counting?” concludes from these facts that:

“While some of those individuals may have simply committed perjury to avod jury service, this represents a significant number of potentially illegal voters: 24,000 to 36,000 noncitizens…over a one year period.”

END OF QUOTE

It is no surprise that both the book and the speakers that evening were advocates of purging the voter rolls of those who could not claim either citizenship, being alive or living in the district or state.

Mr. Fund then switched to his final topic, Thomas Perez, the latest Obama nominee for Secretary of Labor - and why this was strongly related to identifying voters. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/print/2013/03/thomas-perez-may-...  A significant side issue found in an internet search is that a  Los Angeles Times  headline says that “Obama to name civil rights enforcer as Labor Secretary”  http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/10/nation/la-na-labor-secretar...  and a CBS News headline says that “Obama to name Thomas Perez as new labor secretary.” http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57573416/obama-to-name-thomas-p...   In neither case does the headline make mention of a required Congressional approval process. It is as if the L.A. Times and CBS see Obama as an Absolute Ruler, unencumbered by the U.S. Constitution – or these papers are politicking for such a status for a Once and Future King.

Mr. Fund went on to say that Thomas Perez opposes any and all immigration law, that he advocated free tuition for immigrants. Perez also was involved in the famous New York Fire Department hiring exam case, saying that blacks who failed 70 percent of the exam questions should be hired anyway. http://spectator.org/archives/2013/03/12/thomas-perez-should-be-blo...   As for Perez’s relationship to the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, a quote from The American Spectator is needed to explain the details of what John Fund so quickly summarized concerning Thomas Perez’s involvement:

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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the little matter of a federal judge hinting broadly that Perez may have committed perjury when testifying that there had been no interference by political appointees in the course of the Obama DoJ’s decision to drop already-won voter-intimidation cases against New Black Panthers in Philadelphia. This came after Perez also had, apparently unlawfully, refused to honor valid subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights — and it was in addition to yet another falsehood by Perez, this one to the effect that DoJ had sought the maximum allowable penalty against the Panthers. And it is in addition to several other of Perez’s alleged falsehoods as recounted by noted whistleblower J. Christian Adams, who resigned in protest of them — most egregiously, to my mind, when Perez wrongly denied that anybody in his division had ever announced that Obama DoJ practice would be to avoid prosecuting certain types of cases or enforcing certain sections of voting laws.

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Attorney Grant Lally continued where John Fund left off. He spoke of finding “shocking incompetence, sometimes by design.” Using the example of the Cong. Bob Turner ‘s (R-NY) failed reelection bid in 2012 for Anthony Weiner’s reapportioned former district, Lally found that the NY Board of Elections was not purging records and had mailed thousands of ballots to dead people,” mentioning that an absentee ballot fits perfectly into new voting machines, yet the ballot and computer system is not designed to exclude a mailed absentee ballot from the machine. That obviously means anyone can take an absentee ballot down to a polling place (no photo i.d. required, as has been my own New York voting experience) and simply vote as someone else – living or dead.

Mr. Lally told also of investigated the Cleveland, Ohio, area where his grandmother originally  came from. He found vote totals at 110 percent of the population and various students from Oberlin College assuming the name of a dead person by simply changing the age on the voter form from 80 to 20. I guess this is the political version of Pareto’s Principle, the “80-20 Rule.” http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/Pareto081202.htm

Attorney Lally’s talk wouldn’t be complete without some details of the famous and gut wrenching 2000 Presidential Election. One thing that happened was that a candidate named Clay Shaw was involved in a recount that started before then Gov. Bush’s attorneys even arrived in Florida. But Mr. Shaw was on the same ballot with candidates Bush and Gore, so these ballots were handled and recounted with no outside Republican attorneys or poll watchers for some time, in a total denial of ballot security. And overseas UN Observers of the election expressed shock at how the votes were counted. When I first heard of UN Observers at an American election, my thoughts reflexively turned to foreign interference, but it seems that these outside observers may actually nowadays be a positive influence on what goes on at American polling places.

Mr. Fund also discussed civil rights and voting, saying that it is “patronizing to say that blacks can’t manage voter i.d.s because they use i.d.s all the time” (in their daily life). There was a lie in the 2012 Presidential Debates that stated 25 percent of blacks don’t have an i.d., yet in a District Court case in Georgia, they could not find one example of someone who couldn’t get to vote because of their race.

The speakers said that voter fraud was like shoplifting in that the more people who show up to monitor the activities at the polls, the more they will scare away fraudulent voters just by their presence.

There were other stories of outrage, but I will leave you with two of Mr. Fund’s suggestions: Buy a copy of “Who’s Counting?” – and go to the website of www.TruetheVote.org  to learn more about what you can do to insure a more honest vote – and to answer the question in Mr. Fund’s book title with one word: “me.”