Georgia Election Reform

The Associated Press:

Gov. Sonny Perdue on Friday signed into law a requirement that voters show photo identification before casting ballots, legislation that had prompted most black lawmakers to walk out of the state Capitol.

Previously, registered voters could present a Social Security card or other non-photo ID when they arrived to vote. Republicans, who control both legislative chambers, pushed the plan as a way to crack down on voter fraud.

“I believe this is a reasonable requirement,” said Perdue, also a Republican. “It will not be a hardship on any voter.”

Under the new law, an ID will be given free to people who can’t afford the fee or say they don’t have a driver’s license or other form of photo ID and need one to vote.

(Word is, they will even go to people's house to give them a state issued ID)

Report Card

Take the Election Reform Taskforce Survey to grade the Governor's Election Reform Taskforce on the job they did addressing your concerns related to our election mess.

New HB on Felon Voting

HB 2062 - Sponsored by Jeannie Darnel. If you are in jail you don't vote, if you are out of jail you do, REGARDLESS weather you pay your fines, restitution, etc. or not.

This bill has the blessing of the queen!

CALL YOUR LEGISLATORS!!!

Preview - Election Reform Taskforce

Well, they are only 2 days late, but here is a preview of the Election Reform Task Force report that will be revealed later today at a press conference. Considering the way they count and figure things, I suppose they consider March 3 close enough to March 1 that we probably are not supposed to consider this report late.

Based on the preview, I have the feeling I am going to be very disappointed in their report.

Voting Rights for Ex-Prisoners

Michael A. Wallace, Americas Voices, lays out the rational used by the left, then exposes the real reasons why they are pushing so hard to win voting rights for felons.

The Pro-Democracy folks have structured their public argument so that they appear to only support ex-prisoners – i.e., felons who have been incarcerated. 7 In public they say ex-prisoners, but their real agenda is felons, the reason being felonies affect the privilege of voting. The fact is that a third of all people facing our criminal justice system never are incarcerated at all – they get straight probation.

Technically, felons on probation and parole cannot vote (the majority for a temporary period of time). The fact that so many felons receive straight probation, or are on probation or parole after incarceration, makes it imperative that checks are put in place at State levels which precludes them from registering and voting until they meet conditions levied upon them. Some States at least are doing precisely that. 8,9

Liberals seem to believe that just because a felon has been released from incarceration that they have finished their sentence. This is not necessarily true. In the majority of cases, there is a conditional period of probation attached to their release, which means in effect their full sentence has not been served. But liberals don’t seem to care about that technicality, or the fact recidivism rates are fairly high for probationers and parolees. 10

Liberals are factually incorrect when they imply that once convicted of a felony, a person never can regain the right to vote. Their literature cites over 4 million Americans who are permanently disenfranchised, "…particularly African Americans who are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate." They further claim that "these lifetime voting prohibition laws violate citizens’ constitutional voting rights and must be repealed." 11 Further still, there is the claim that the disenfranchisement helps elect Republicans! 12

Liberals are ignoring the fact that States impose conditions for the reinstatement of voting rights depending on the nature of crimes committed and the person’s conviction record. States vary somewhat in terms of sentencing, incarceration, probation, parole, and the process for regaining civil rights, to include voting rights. 13, 14,15, 16 Most recognize that people convicted of crimes should have to prove to their fellow citizens, through demonstrated behavior, that they are good citizens before full restoration of civil rights.

Liberals twist and ignore facts quite easily if they stand in the way of their objective.


What the Issue is Really About: The Census and the Electoral College

The real reason the liberals are pushing the vote for felons so hard is related to the 2000 Census results and its effect in conjunction with other planks in their agenda. They don’t admit this publicly.

Imagine that the liberals successfully secure the right of felons to vote, either within particular States or even nationally. And imagine that liberals successfully alter the manner in which electors are chosen, such as proportional to the popular vote, either within particular States or even nationally. Or imagine that they are successful in dismantling the Electoral College. Got the picture of the setup? This is why the Pro-Democracy Campaign is structured the way it is.

Because of demographic trends, in the next two presidential elections, New York and Pennsylvania, for example, lose two electors each. Those also happen to be two States with high felon populations. If the Democrats have their hopes realized, they will pad their voter rolls with felons and gain, they hope, a virtual "lock" on all elections. That’s the danger. But it can get worse.

If the Electoral College is eliminated and this country moves to direct voting, liberals hope that the felon vote, among other measures, will deliver the Presidency every time. With a difference of a couple hundred thousand popular votes in the last election, figure the odds on the political shift to the left as a result of felons voting. That’s what the Democrats are counting on.

Whether at the State level or national level, liberals are hoping for gains related to the felon’s vote; they desperately want felons to vote because they believe they will vote for the liberal cause. The liberal cause is a lessening of personal responsibility and accountability for one’s choices and actions in life. Certainly the cause includes promoting the cult of victimization and unjust persecution and the offering of sympathetic affirmation that circumstances cause effect, rather than human choice and action. In other words, blame someone or something else for your lot in life. Liberals confuse notions of responsibility, accountability and forgiveness behind a demand for rights.

The intent of their program, my friends, is about power; it is not about altruism and a sense of right and wrong. The liberals are advocating change behind a smokescreen of piety when their true intent is to gain advantage at the polls. 17

7 Felony Sentencing in the United States, 1996, by Jodi M. Brown and Patrick A. Langan (Author's comment: The Pro-Democracy folks confuse the issue as just ex-prisoners when, in fact, many are not ex-prisoners at all. In 1996, for example, only 69% of felons were incarcerated, while 31% received straight probation. If these folks are on probation, they haven’t served their sentence yet. The author's conclusion is the Pro-Democracy folks really want everyone to vote, no matter the crime, no matter if they are incarcerated, no mater if on probation.)

8 Area election officials check felon figures, August 18, 1999 by Sun Staff writer Karen Voyles. "[Florida] Secretary of State Sandra Mortham told reporters Tuesday that the first cross-check of a new statewide voters database with criminal records turned up 50,483 felons registered as voters." "Election supervisors in each county are responsible for verifying whether the 50,483 people on the new felon list are in fact ineligible or whether they've had their civil rights restored." [Author's note: These figures are clearly within Bureau of Justice statistics for the State of Florida. For example, at yearend 1998, there were 240,000 Floridians on probation and 85,000 on parole.]

9 In 1999, Virginia installed a computer system that enables voting registrars to access the list of convicted felons - the intention being of course to maintain the integrity of voter rolls.

10 U. S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Probation and Parole in the United States, 1998, revised 10/01/99, by Thomas P. Bonczar. At yearend 1998, the total estimated correctional population was 5,890,300. 3,417,613 people were in a supervisory status of probation; 704,964 were in a supervisory status of parole. 584,372 people were incarcerated in jails; 1,232,900 were incarcerated in prison. 57% of all probationers had been convicted of a felony. [Author's note: The preceding figures include both felonies and non-felonies.]

Adults entering probation without incarceration in 1998 - 77%; with incarceration - 17%

Adults leaving probation in 1998:

successfully 59%
returned to incarceration 17%
with a new sentence 9%
with same sentence 9%
absconder 3%
other unsuccessful 9%

Of 423,700 parolees discharged from supervision in 1998, 45% had successfully met the conditions of their supervision, while 42% had been returned to incarceration.

11 Barring Democracy, by Sasha Abramsky, October 17, 2000, Mother Jones Magazine. "Some four million US citizens, most of them minorities, are denied the right to vote because they were once convicted of felonies. The growing number of disenfranchised Americans may be helping elect Republicans, from state legislatures to the White House." [Author's note: Surely Sasha doesn't mean to imply that criminals are likely to be Democrats, or Democrats are likely to be criminals!]…. "Because most of those who can't vote are poor and/or people of color - exactly the demographic groups most likely to vote Democrat – many close elections won by Republicans in recent years might have turned out very differently had ex-felons (sic) had the right to vote." [Author's comment: Total hogwash. First, being poor or a person of color do not by themselves prevent one from voting. Second, there is no such thing as an "ex-felon". Third - does being poor or a person of color make one disposed to be a felon? Is this the implication? If so, the assertion is degrading and racially disparaging.]

12 US Department of Justice, Office of the Pardon Attorney, Civil Disabilities of Convicted Felons, Oct 1996. This report provides a state by state analysis of the procedures necessary to have civil rights and voting privileges restored.

13 US Department of Justice, Office of the Pardon Attorney, Civil Disabilities of Convicted Felons, Oct 1996. This report provides a state by state analysis of the procedures necessary to have civil rights and voting privileges restored.

14 CBS News National, Felony Voting Ban Called Biased, Washington, September 21, 2000. This article states 2% of all Americans, or 3.9 million have lost the right to vote. (Author's italics) They report 9 States impose lifetime voting bans on convicted felons, and in 32 states they can vote after serving their sentence and completing parole. "Three states, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont - have no prohibition and allow prisoners to vote, but Massachusetts voters will act on a ballot measure in November that will strip prisoners of voting rights." "Six other states impose restrictions based on a felon's prison record or parole status." [Author's note: Massachusetts's voters subsequently approved a measure denying prisoner's voting rights. The issue came up because a local prison population had formed a political action committee and threatened to dominate local politics!]

15 The Sentencing Project, Regaining the Vote: An Assessment of Activity Relating to Felon Disenfranchisement Laws, by Patricia Allard and Marc Mauer, January 2000. http://sentencingproject.org/news/regainvote.htm This reference is a thumbnail sketch of the policy disparity between some states. The report states 46 States and DC deprive inmates the right to vote. [Author's note: Actual number appears to currently be 48 States. The two exceptions are Maine and Vermont.] "In thirty-two states, convicted offenders may not vote while they are on parole, and twenty-nine of these states disenfranchise offenders on probation. In 14 states, ex-offenders who have fully served their sentences nonetheless can be disenfranchised for life." They estimate that 3.9 million have currently or permanently lost the ability to vote. (Italics by author.) [Author's note: Notice the disparity in the facts reported both here and in the citation above, reported the same year. The previous CBS report asserted 3.9 million people have lost the right to vote, whereas The Sentencing Project more correctly notes they estimate 3.9 million people have currently or permanently lost the ability to vote. In yet another Sentencing Project source, Facts About Prisons and Prisoners, they cite dramatically growing numbers of incarcerated and people on probation and parole. "There are now 6.3 million Americans incarcerated or on probation, or parole, and increase of 242 percent since 1980." This figure is cited in current Bureau of Justice reports.]

16 In June 15, 2001, I interviewed Patricia Allard, one of the authors of The Sentencing Project report cited above. I questioned her about State by State differences in how felons are accorded restoration of voting rights, and issues related to portability of a felon's right to vote when moving between States. To her knowledge, she said, there has not been a State-by-State study on portability of the felon's vote. She stated that Delaware once had a lifetime ban, but now felons can register to vote after five years. In Connecticut, probationers cannot vote. (Yet on May 4, 2001, the Governor signed a bill allowing just that.) And in Florida, felons are required to fill out a 12-14 page application. (The author appreciates Ms. Allard's time and thanks Marc Mauer for written permission granted to reference their material.)

17 During the run-up to the 1996 campaign and after, the Clinton Administration went after the immigrant vote in a big way – by relaxing criteria for admission and time requirements for citizenship - all the while aggressively pushing Democrat registration drives. Now that a Gore Administration is prevented from furthering the strategy, the next place for Democrats to turn is inward, to the felon population.

[http://www.americasvoices.org/archives/WallaceM/WallaceLinks.htm]

Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Michael A. Wallace & America's Voices, Inc. All rights reserved.
Michael A. Wallace is a registered Republican, a former Eagle Scout, a Lifetime Member of the National Rifle Association, a strong believer in Second Amendment rights, a retired Marine officer, and a pro-life advocate –- all things liberals seem to dislike. In addition to his affiliation with America's Voices, Mike is a founding member of ConservaVets, a conservative veteran's organization (which has since become Rally4America). Mike uses thorough constitutional and historical research to analyze and explain key moral and political issues of the day. He particularly enjoys debunking the myths and lies perpetrated by the many liberal groups who claim to speak for most Americans and by those who misrepresent Constitutional principles to further their own agendas. E-mail Mike at mwallace@americasvoices.org.

History of Sufferage

SUFFERAGE - A history of voting rights

The history of the right to vote in the United States suggests an inevitable progress toward democracy. In colonial America property qualifications limited the right to vote, whereas suffrage today is open to all citizens at the age of eighteen. The colonists regarded the suffrage as a privilege; Americans today consider it a right. But this interpretation obscures long periods in which various groups—women, black men, and paupers—were disfranchised.

The history of American suffrage begins in England in 1430, when Parliament restricted the vote in county parliamentary elections to persons owning land that generated an annual income of at least forty shillings. English boroughs had a hodgepodge of criteria for their elections. Laws also excluded aliens, servants, non-Anglicans, and women.

The colonies initially established suffrage requirements that resembled the rules of the boroughs, but by the early eighteenth century lawmakers came to emulate the spirit of the law of 1430. For example, Massachusetts at first enfranchised all male adult Congregational church members, but excluded Anglican property owners. Pressure in post-Restoration England compelled the colony to allow propertied Anglicans over the age of twenty-four to vote alongside twenty-one-year-old propertyless Congregational church members.

After the Glorious Revolution, the charter of 1691 established a modified version of the election act of 1430. Elsewhere in New England and in New York, the forty-shilling freehold was reproduced; frequently it involved a freehold of a certain size (often fifty acres) or value (usually forty or fifty pounds). Several New England colonies also allowed a personal estate of forty pounds as a substitute.

Because land was readily available, the application of English standards created a large electorate. Eligibility ranged from about 50 to 80 percent of free males. Moreover, because most free men eventually acquired land, the landholding qualification functioned most often only as an age requirement.

Voters also had to meet religious, racial, and residency requirements. Some colonies disfranchised dissenting Protestants, Catholics, and Jews until 1689; thereafter, most excluded only non-Protestants. Free blacks were disfranchised in every southern colony during part of the colonial era, and ten colonies established residency requirements.

Colonial and revolutionary Americans believed that a man's economic independence earned him membership in the political community. His autonomy supposedly enabled him to make independent political decisions; his economic stake in society would impel him to act in the public interest. The disfranchisement of propertyless males grew partly out of the related belief that economic dependence encouraged corruption, and that economic grievances endangered property rights.

During the crises leading to the Revolution, quarrels about representation caused a reconsideration of relations among property, taxation, and voting. Americans insisted that Parliament lacked the authority to tax unrepresented subjects. Extending this argument, many claimed that taxpayers, not only property holders, needed the vote to protect themselves against excessive taxation. By 1790, five states permitted all male (in some states only white male) taxpayers to vote for all or some offices. The states also relied increasingly upon residency, not land ownership, as evidence of one's attachment to the community. Virtually all set one to two years as the required length of residency.

The Revolution itself and the subsequent turmoil in the states threatened to sever political rights from their economic moorings. During the war many Americans argued that the polity should include those men who supported the Revolution, without reference to property. Tories, no matter how much property they possessed, were denied the vote. After the war, residency requirements took the place of loyalty oaths.

For all the alterations in political rights wrought by the Revolution, far more than half the adult population remained disfranchised. Among them were many propertyless men, women, slaves, some free black men, apprentices, indentured laborers, felons, and those considered mentally incompetent. Slaves and indentured servants were excluded because of their legal dependence upon a master, felons and the mentally impaired because they showed no attachment to the community or were considered incompetent.

Women were excluded because of a presumed incapacity for sound reasoning. Only in New Jersey were women enfranchised. The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 granted the vote to all inhabitants "worth" fifty pounds who had resided in a voting place for one year. In subsequent years, election officials interpreted the provision literally and permitted propertied women to vote. New Jersey, however, was the exception.

But the revolutionary struggle had significantly expanded the electorate. During the Revolution states with poll taxes and taxpayer franchises (such as North Carolina and New Hampshire) established nearly universal free male suffrage. When suffrage qualifications were tied to the value of an estate, wartime inflation eroded barriers. All states ended religious restrictions on voting. At war's end, the eligible electorate numbered from 60 to 90 percent of free males, with most states edging close to the high end of that range.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, politically active Americans carried forward the Revolution's ambiguous legacy. Because property ownership was widespread, it no longer served as a benchmark for citizenship. Political incapacity continued to be linked to gender. Most men thought of women as politically incompetent and thus connected civic virtue with masculinity. But white Americans also linked civic virtue to race. Blacks were seen as incapable of civic virtue, white men as naturally virtuous. Between 1790 and 1860 almost every state, old and new, disfranchised free blacks while expanding the electorate to include almost all white adult male citizens.

The suffrage requirements of the frontier states were more democratic than eastern ones. Beginning with Kentucky in 1792, all but two western states embraced white male adult suffrage; in the East, all but two states retained either a property or taxpaying qualification for all or part of the period from 1820 to 1860. Several western states even enfranchised aliens who had established permanent residence and Indians who had given up tribal citizenship. The new West's rapid movement toward universal white manhood suffrage was facilitated by insecure land titles, the erosion of social distinctions, the desire to attract new settlers, and the belief that Indians could eventually become enough like whites to exercise political rights intelligently. Electoral competition everywhere also encouraged politicians to lower suffrage qualifications so they could portray themselves as champions of popular democracy.

With the advent of the second American party system, Democrats and Whigs hotly disagreed about the scope of political rights. The Democrats, worried less about civic virtue and more about each man's need to defend himself against governmental tyranny, viewed the suffrage as an inherent right of white males. The Whigs largely accepted republican notions of a hierarchical organic society and therefore treated the suffrage as a privilege. But by 1850, electoral pressure had converted most Whigs to the idea of white male democracy.

Only in the state of Rhode Island did politicians resist the trend. The state's requirement that a man own a $134 freehold in order to vote became increasingly restrictive as the Rhode Island economy shifted from agriculture toward industry. By the early 1840s more than half of the state's male population was disfranchised. But a reform effort led by Thomas Dorr, after holding an extralegal constitutional convention in 1841 and an extralegal gubernatorial election, sparked some liberalization of suffrage requirements.

In Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 three hundred female and male reformers asserted the right of women to vote. The idea of woman suffrage grew in response to the nearly universal enfranchisement of white males and female participation in abolitionism after the 1820s. But in a culture that exalted the domestic role of women, few people argued the merits of female enfranchisement.

Although suffrage had always been regulated by state constitutions and statutes and local ordinances, woman suffragists after the Civil War hoped for national enfranchisement alongside newly freed black men. But they lost as traditional notions of woman's place predominated in Congress: the Fourteenth Amendment tacitly endorsed suffrage restrictions based upon sex.

Congress, in an act unique among postemancipation societies, admitted freedmen to membership in the political community. In so doing, congressmen imagined that the suffrage would give the freedmen the ability to protect themselves and their families from exploitation. The Republican-dominated Congress also enfranchised black men to strengthen Republican control in the southern states. Black male suffrage became national in 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states from discriminating against potential voters because of race or previous condition of servitude (but not sex).

The amendment was partially successful. For most of Reconstruction, blacks voted and often used their resulting political power to protect their other rights. Although white Democrats overthrew Reconstruction by forcibly keeping blacks from the polls, thereafter they generally eschewed violence. Instead, they relied upon discriminatory apportionment and election laws to limit black and poor white political influence, and in the 1890s and 1900s, imposed poll taxes and literacy and property requirements through constitutional revisions. Thus they disfranchised virtually all black men and many poor whites, and thereby ensured Democratic hegemony.

At the same time, northern ballot reformers sought to "purify" the election process, thereby reducing the size of the electorate. The secret ballot eliminated vote-buying, but also voters who were illiterate in English. Formal literacy tests were adopted in a dozen northern states by the early twentieth century. Strict voter registration laws placed the burden of proving eligibility on citizens.

The disfranchisement of growing numbers of blacks and immigrants was applauded by many woman suffragists, who argued that the enfranchisement of native white women would secure the social order, whereas undesirable black and immigrant male voters endangered it. This conservative turn did not appreciably help their cause. Neither did the reunification of the movement in 1890 under a new organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Despite the changing role of women in American society (as more women entered the workplace, became educated, bore fewer children, and spent less time caring for them), the movement met increased resistance from the liquor industry (which feared female support for prohibition) and the textile industry (which feared female support for restrictions on child labor). Beneath such practical concerns lay a more deeply felt anxiety about changing sex roles.

But the adoption of more vigorous tactics and the triumph of progressive reforms throughout the country (which made woman suffrage appear to be less radical) stimulated massive support for woman suffrage. In 1916, the Democratic and Republican parties endorsed female enfranchisement; in 1919 Congress approved, and a year later the states ratified, the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

As women were gaining the suffrage, blacks sought its restoration in the South. The naacp, established in 1909, pursued reenfranchisement through litigation. At first, it successfully closed loopholes in southern disfranchisement that had permitted some poor, illiterate whites to vote. But its most important early success was the Supreme Court's 1944 decision prohibiting the white primary. The Court ruled that Texas had made the party primary part of the public electoral process; therefore the white-only primary violated black rights under the Fifteenth Amendment.

Despite that victory, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the manipulation of election laws by local registrars effectively excluded the vast majority of black adults. The struggle for southern enfranchisement (a major goal of the civil rights movement) accelerated after World War II for several reasons, among them the belief that the United States was hypocritical in claiming that it was defending freedom against Soviet communism while oppressing African-Americans at home. But the most important reason was the migration of millions of black southerners to the North, where blacks already voted. That circumstance gave blacks political leverage on both parties. But because Democrats hoped to retain the allegiance of southern white voters and Republicans wished to attract those voters, weak compromises resulted in the form of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which ineffectually authorized federal protection of black voting rights.

The civil rights struggle intensified in the early 1960s. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, activists focused increasingly on the suffrage. The Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 registered few black Mississippians but drew national attention to black disfranchisement. Then, in March 1965, the Alabama State Troopers' assault on marchers outside the town of Selma generated so much support for national protection of black voters that President Lyndon B. Johnson demanded passage of an effective voting rights act, which he signed into law in August. When combined with prohibition of the poll tax in federal elections by the Twenty-third Amendment and a sweeping Supreme Court decision in 1966, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sparked the registration of the vast majority of eligible black southerners.

Thus, amendments to the U.S. Constitution and federal law enfranchised virtually all male and female citizens at the age of twenty-one. But U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War revived a claim made since the Revolution that men old enough to fight were also old enough to vote: in 1971 the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen.

Absurdity = Clarity

Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas appeared on Fox & Friends on September 28, 2004, to discuss fair elections. A commentary on her remarks includes the following statement:

Notice that Hutchison's biggest concern was not with whether the votes that are cast are counted, but with keeping people from voting who may not be eligible.

In an article on National Review, David Lampo cites a study by sociologists Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Jeff Manza of Northwestern which shows that felons vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — at a rate approaching 70 percent. (In fact, this estimate may be low. In some Florida counties more than 80 percent of the felons who voted illegally were registered Democrats.) Therefore, had Florida's felons voted in the 2000 presidential election at a rate comparable to the rest of the Florida electorate, Al Gore would have won the state by more than 60,000 votes.

This same article goes on to say to point out that overwhelming public opposition has not deterred felon-vote advocates. They've simply resorted to a receptive judiciary to achieve their objective. Several recent lawsuits throughout the country assert that state felon-disenfranchisement laws violate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and the equal-protection guarantees in state constitutions. Typical among these suits is Farrakhan v. State of Washington, a case that had been dismissed by the U.S. District Court in Spokane, but revived a short time ago by the Ninth Circuit. Farrakhan was brought by minority inmates challenging the state of Washington's constitutional prohibition against voting by imprisoned felons. The inmates maintain that racial disparities in the state's criminal-justice system effectively result in a denial of the right to vote on the basis of race. The court noted that while constituting only 3 percent of the state's population, blacks represent 37 percent of those adjudicated "persistent offenders." The Ninth Circuit remanded the case to the district court for a full hearing on the issue of whether racial bias in the criminal-justice system, combined with the denial of voting rights to inmates, violates the Voting Rights Act.

This is the battle we face ladies and gentlemen.

Bob Williams on Election Reform Taskforce

What to look for from the election reform task force

By Bob Williams
Washington voters turned out in large numbers and with constructive attitudes at a series of public hearings sponsored by Gov. Christine Gregoire’s election reform task force, chaired by Secretary of State Sam Reed.

When the task force reports its findings on March 1, there are several things all of us should hope to find. If we do not find them, it will be clear that the task force was little more than a smokescreen to preserve the status quo under the guise of meaningful reform and that ineligible voters will continue to be a factor in our state’s future elections.

Task force member Sam Smith, the President Emeritus of Washington State University, took particular pains after each of the hearings to outline those things he heard from voters concerning the need to reform the system. After each point, he asked attendees if they agreed with him. They did.

Chief among the recommendations is the re-registration of all eligible Washington voters – with proof of citizenship. Iraq registered 14.3 million voters that way in only 45 days. Fewer than 3 million voters voted in Washington’s gubernatorial election. If Iraq can do it, so can we!

An argument has been forwarded by our Secretary of State that re-registering all citizens is not possible under the Motor Voter federal law. This is not true. What our state cannot do is drop people from voter lists for federal elections. That said, the federal law applies to people who are legitimate voters. Several ways exist to re-register voters without breaking the federal law and potentially discriminating against legitimate voters. We find nothing in the law that prevents 100 percent re-registration.

We need to clean our voter rolls and remove people who have died, people who are illegally registered, felons, and people who have moved out of state.

People overwhelmingly supported showing state-issued, photo and signature identification when they come in to vote. Some people argue that showing identification is arduous. Others say it is common sense. We side with the folks arguing for common sense.

After all, you cannot even rent a post office box without showing two pieces of identification.

Other hearing participants argued persuasively that state and local officials must be compelled to implement and enforce the federal voter reform measures adopted by the Congress in 2002 and the state legislature in 2003. Unfortunately, those law changes were not implemented in the 2004 election, the result being that local officials frequently were relying on old law books to interpret the law. There is no rationale or justification for that. Most of the 2004 election problems would have been eliminated if state officials had simply followed the law. That is not too much to expect.

While the Secretary of State has spoken at some length about restoring voting rights to felons who have served their sentences, not much has been said about ensuring the timely and accurate count of military ballots. Hearing participants feel strongly about that, and so should our state government.

Hearing participants made several other important points.

They want to repeal or modify the motor-voter law to minimize abuse. When someone applies for a driver’s license in Washington, they are not required to provide proof of citizenship, but they are asked if they would like to register to vote! The potential for abuse is obvious, but nobody has addressed it yet.

People also are leery of computer program generated voting and want a paper trail for all computerized systems for verification purposes. But nobody trusts anything that happens in King County. And that should make us take some time to evaluate the merits of mail-in ballots, which also are prone to abuse and fraud.

Measures before the state legislature right now probably won’t harm the electoral system any more, but they are band-aids designed to cover up existing voter discontent. Too many elections officials hope that the passage of time will change people’s attitudes.

Time may heal all wounds, but the integrity of the elections system will remain at risk. The keystone of a democracy is the trust of the people in the integrity of the system. The integrity of Washington’s voting system is at a new low.

If Governor Gregoire’s task force election report fails to take into account the concerns of citizens who attended the public hearings, we will know that the fix was in…that the task force was yet another smokescreen.

That isn’t good enough.

Bob Williams is president of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a non-partisan, public policy watchdog organization, focused on advancing individual liberty, a free-market economy, and limited and responsible government.


Contact: Booker Stallworth | Communications Director | 360-956-3482

**Having attended one of these meetings, I can verify that he is exactly right about what the people wanted and their response to Sam Smith as he read off the list of reforms people said they wanted to see.

Democrat Solution on the National Level

Election reform on the way, the Democrats way


Some good news on electoral reform: Today Senators Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, working together with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, introduced the Count Every Vote Act, a bill that proposes several necessary improvements to the way Americans conduct democracy. Among other things, the legislation would require that all electronic voting machines print paper ballots; that ex-felons be allowed to vote; and that Election Day be made a federal holiday, so people don't have to worry about the consequences of being away from work while waiting in a line at the polls. The law, Boxer said in a press conference, "is meant to ensure [that] the election debacle of 2000, and the serious election irregularities of 2004, never ever happen again."

It's a helpful start. But election reform is a notoriously tricky thing to get through Congress (people who've already won aren't fans of changing the rules of the game), and, like reform proposals of years past, the Democrats' effort will go nowhere unless it garners the blessing of some Republicans (we mean you, John McCain!) and broad public support. In other words, to all the folks who insisted, last November, that Bush stole the election, we say: Call your representative and push for this bill.

**I think it is obvious at this point that the Democrats have no desire to close doors to fraud. Their desire to be inclusive has made our election process so vulnerable to fraud that the whole election process will soon mean nothing unless we pull together and insist our Legislators close the doors to the cheaters.

We lock the doors of our homes, it is time to lock the door to our vote.

Election Reform Petition

Click Here to view and sign the Election Reform Petition

How Many Ways To Commit Voter Fraud

I started wondering recently, just how many ways are there to commit voter fraud. I may be naive, but I am shocked at what has been found thus far and I am beginning to suspect that is just the tip of the iceberg.

My wondering turned into research and over the next few days I will post some of the stories and articles I have found. This is the first. The disinfranchised voter is a blogger.

An attempt at disfranchisement

Well drinkers, it appears your tallglassofmilk is a victim of voter fraud. Turns out that if I hadn't voted early, there's a pretty good chance I might have been hauled off in handcuffs on November 2, for attempting to vote twice. Now it might be somebody else who gets hauled away.

Sometime between the recall election and today, someone other than myself has taken the liberty of registering me as a democrat at an address I do not and have never lived at--and they used or forged my signature to do it.

I am unclear at this time if this is widespread or an isolated indident, random or personal, and if personal, against the tallglassofmilk or her real life persona.

The woman at the polling site was very helpful and referred me to a someone in the Los Angeles Registrar's Office, who was not very helpful and who was surprisingly uninterested in getting to the bottom of the fraud. The woman only seemed concerned with the fact that I was able to cast my vote--which I was. But that doesn't mean a crime hasn't been committed! I requested a copy of the voter registration affidavit, but I won't receive it til later next week.

I do not know if someone intends to show up and vote as if they were me. If they do, they are in for a big surprise. I was assured that any attempt to vote twice under the same name and signature would result in immediate arrest. Of course, I realize that by blogging this, that if the person who perpetrated this fraud is reading and was planning to vote, they will be disuaded and will not be caught. But I think that's unlikely and besides, I thought it more important to make you aware of the lengths that the democrats (seriously, who else would register me as one) are going to "steal back" the vote.

This is part of a story about a large number of provisional ballots being cast in one precinct, not an uncommon story, but it points out an interesting side effect of provisional ballots.

"The word we were getting was that students were just being rounded up by groups and brought in," Heim said. "I guess the disappointing thing that was mentioned at Monday's Election Commission meeting is that when groups do that they slow down the line and that potentially disenfranchises folks who actually did what they were supposed to do."

Fraud From the Inside

Voter Registration Probe Unearths Potential Fraud in Wisconsin

By Chad Groening
October 26, 2004

(AgapePress) - An immigration reform organization recently conducted an investigation into possible voter fraud in Wisconsin. The probe revealed that non-citizens of the United States could decide the 2004 presidential election.

Susan Tully, the Midwest field director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), says she became concerned about possible voter fraud in the Badger State when an admitted illegal alien suddenly was named a deputy registrar of voters in Racine, Wisconsin. Tully says a year earlier, the woman's picture appeared on the front page of a local newspaper showing her protesting and complaining that she had been fired from her job -- and admitting she was an illegal alien. Things apparently changed over the ensuing months.

"In July, here she was on the front page of the same local newspaper, saying she's a deputy registrar of voters. How could an illegal alien go from [that] status...to a deputy registrar of voters in less than a year?" Tully wonders.

So the FAIR Midwest field director sent one of her activists to take the class in Racine to become a deputy voter registrar. What Tully discovered concerns her.

"At no time was she asked to show identification; at no time was she asked for her Social Security number; and at no time was she asked if she was a citizen of the United States," she says. "I have a real fear, based on my knowledge now, that this election will be decided by foreign nationals and illegal aliens."

And Tully did not stop there. Suspecting voter fraud, FAIR sent two activists from another state to the office of the former illegal alien who is not only a deputy registrar of voters in Racine but also the leader of a Hispanic organization. Tully gave the activists specific instructions.

"I wanted them to specifically tell this person they were illegal aliens, but that they wanted to register to vote -- and she registered them both," she says. The two activists received a similar response at the Milwaukee office of the Hispanic group. "This time one of the men in the office at least said it's a felony to register someone who's not a citizen to vote -- but the office manager went ahead and registered them."

According to Tully, the Hispanic organization had set the goal of registering 20,000 voters between May and the election. She explains why that is significant. In Wisconsin, she notes, Al Gore -- the 2000 Democratic presidential candidate -- won by only 850 votes.

"If this organization, all by itself, managed to hit their goal of 20,000 people, you could see that foreign nationals and illegal aliens, if they actually vote, could throw the election in the state of Wisconsin," she says.

Tully says she has turned over information on the illegal registrations to law enforcement officials.

History of Registration and the Secret Ballot

From an article written by John Fund How to Steal an Election

As the century closed, however, fraud gradually began to diminish, as popular disgust with vote rigging spurred reforms. States began to require voters to register before Election Day. In Massachusetts, Richard Henry Dana III, son of the author of the classic Two Years Before the Mast, persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to adopt the "Australian" ballot—a government-printed ballot that would list all candidates and that voters would cast in secret in a booth. It became a model for reformers elsewhere. As changes spread to other states, voter "turnout" fell precipitously. Historians Gary Cox and Morgan Krause point out that turnout in New York State elections dropped some 15 percent after the anti-fraud measures took effect.

Kerry Involved In Voter Fraud - GASP

Kerry Campaign Calls Non-Existent Voters

A blogger finds evidence of voter fraud - the local office of the Kerry campaign has at least six different alleged voters registered at his address:

In the last three or four days, my residence has received a half dozen calls from the Clark County "Kerry" Campaign. My caller ID reads: "OHIO VICTORY 937-323-5158". I'm posting that in it's entirety so that if any web crawler comes across it, they'll get slammed by unsolicited phone calls. Anyhow, every time I answer the person on the other line asks for someone who doesn't live at my residence. It's been a different name every time. Interesting isn't it? Could this be another sign that someone has registered "people" to vote using false information? If so that's at least a half dozen voters with my phone number. I know for certain that they don't have old residents of this house, since it has been in my family for many years with no one by those names.

We have called that number to find out where they are getting their contact lists. Well it so happens that they get their lists from the Clark County Board of Elections. Now the board of elections only maintains lists of people who are registered to vote. This means that there are at least five (or more) individuals who have been registered with my phone number, but do not live at this residence. This may be going somewhere....stay tuned.

And he's not the only person with that experience.

Republicans challenge 5,600 addresses that may not exist

Posted: Oct. 27, 2004

State Republicans filed a last-minute complaint Wednesday with the Milwaukee Election Commission claiming that 5,600 city addresses on the voter rolls may not exist.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin checked the addresses of more than 300,000 people registered to vote in the city with a software program also used by the U.S. Postal Service.

...Republicans found that 5,619 addresses may be non-existent and then visited a number of the addresses. They snapped photos showing vacant lots, a gyro stand, a park and spots between two houses where the address should have been....

Among the addresses that don't exist, according to the GOP complaint:

1858 W. Fairmount Ave. Someone listing that address voted in November 2000 and November 2002, but a photo shows a street corner with no home.

5754 W. Villard Ave. Someone listing that address voted in April, but a photo shows a gyro stand on a corner with advertisements adorning a chain link fence.

8829 W. Bender Ave. Someone listing that address voted in November 2000, in April, September and November 2002, and in February and April this year, but a photo shows the address would have to be in a small space between two houses.

UPDATE: Just a followup to the Wisconsin challenge to the non-existent addresses. The electoral commission voted 3-0 that the GOP had failed to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the registrations were incorrect (notwithstanding the USPS program and the photos of the Gyros stand and the park)and dismissed the challenge. Gee I wonder what party those 3 folks belong to...

Posted by: Geezer at October 29, 2004 12:21 PM

Not All Links Are URL's

Here in Colorado at least three groups are involved in registration fraud. ACORN, the New Voters Project and Colorado Progressive Coalition.
ACORN is headed by Wade Rathke. He helped found the United Labor Union in 1979, founded Local 100 of the Service Employees International in New Orleans (affiliated with the AFL-CIO) and sits on the board of both the Tides Foundation and Tides Center. The Tides Foundation receives money from the HEINZ FOUNDATION.

The New Voters Project lists on its' website one of it's main supporters, THE TIDES FOUNDATION.

The Colorado Progressive Coalition has on its' board of directors, Lena Potyondy. She is the Political Director for the Denver Local #105 Service Employees International.

I found all of this information within minutes of searching the internet. I would love for people in other states where ACORN has surfaced or any other group associated with voter registration fraud to search those groups for similar links. If you recall the AFL-CIO was involved with the Oct. 5th "Day of Protests" where several Republican campaign offices were stormed and some people injured. I suspect they may be more involved in a lot of this than many would care to believe. The smell of collusion is almost unavoidable.