Dead Men Voting
Television network executives appeared at a Congressional
hearing this week to issue mea culpas about their inaccurate exit polls on
Election Night. Andrew Lack of NBC News also admitted that "we didn't
do nearly enough digging" into how antiquated and slipshod voting
procedures are in many states. "Now that's a story," he said.
Yawn. How about a real story? How about NBC or one of these other
hard-charging network news divisions sending out its crack investigative
teams to report on voting fraud. You know, dead men voting. If NBC
wants to put its investigative unit on a plane to St. Louis this morning, it'll
find a voting fraud story waiting with a ribbon around it. In St. Louis, an
investigation has found that nearly all 3,000 registrations dropped off by a
single individual in one batch just before close of business on Feb. 7 (the
deadline for registering for the mayoral race) were fraudulent. Similar
questions have been raised about November's elections.
A grand jury has been convened. Yesterday morning, the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch editorialized that the city "appears to have a full-blown
election scandal," and that in any investigation Democratic Governor Bob
Holden must "show he can escape the pull of the Democratic machine" that
delivered his narrow 21,000 vote victory last November.
So far Governor Holden is acting responsibly. He is backing an
examination of 29,500 now suspect registration cards that were turned in
just before last November's election and says he is "leaning toward"
replacing all four members of the city's election board. But he also should
lend support to a full investigation of voting irregularities in St. Louis. A
revealing 250-page report compiled by local lawyers was delivered last
week to the U.S. Attorney.
Everyone knew last year that Missouri was a battleground state; it's voted
for the winner in every Presidential election in the 20th century save one.
And so the national Democratic Party got upset when it learned, after the
close of registration, that the rolls had been pruned of people who hadn't
voted in years and had failed to respond to a written query about their
status earlier that year. Then on Election Day itself, in what became a
famous story at the time, Democrats sued and convinced a local Missouri
judge to ignore state law and keep the St. Louis polls open for three hours
past the 7 p.m. closing time. A state appeals court promptly overruled the
order at 7:45 pm.
The details of the Democratic lawsuit are really something to behold. The
lead plaintiff, named Robert D. Odom, claimed he had been denied the
right to vote. But then it was learned that Mr. Odom had died in 1999.
Whereupon the Democrats said the real plaintiff was Robert M. Odom,
who happened to be a a top aide to Democratic Rep. Lacy Clay. But after
it turned out that the living Mr. Odom had actually voted early that day,
Democratic lawyer Douglas Dowd didn't modify the lawsuit or inform the
judge. "I didn't have to," he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
All of this has convinced Missouri's GOP Senator Kit Bond that the
lawsuit was a premeditated attempt to "hijack the election." He notes
media reports that Rep. Clay told Al Gore's final campaign rally that he
would "get a court order" the next day to keep the polls open. The
Democratic suit was filed about 3 p.m., and at that time voters began
getting pre-recorded phone messages from Jesse Jackson informing them
they could vote late. A short while later, none other than Al Gore himself
phoned a popular radio talk show to tell the audience the polls would stay
open. "They pulled the same stunt when I ran for governor in 1972,"
Senator Bond told us. "This will be the last time." He calls last November's
photo-finish losses by John Ashcroft for senator and Jim Talent for
governor "a mess on the scale of Florida" that demands a full review.
Senator Bond isn't alone. A group of prominent black leaders, including
the Rev. Earl Nance Jr., wants a meeting with city officials to ensure that
next month's mayoral race doesn't turn into as much of a "fiasco" as last
November's election.
Voter fraud isn't confined to St. Louis. In fact, once the networks clean up
voting in St. Louis, they can move on to San Francisco, Philadelphia, and
even Miami where the local newspapers have already done the reporting
on past scandals. But just now, all the elements of a good story await the
national media in St. Louis: legal chicanery, colorful characters, angry
voters, even the Rev. Jackson. Your Emmy is waiting. |
