Manufacturing Votes
How the Gore campaign tried to steal Missouri.
Tuesday, May 8, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
Everyone knows by now that the U.S. voting system isn't perfect, and last week Senator Joe Lieberman arranged a hearing into some of those imperfections. What he got along the way was testimony about how in Missouri the recent Presidential election featured the registration of dead people and most probably a coordinated effort by the Gore-Lieberman campaign to improperly keep polling places open in the swing state of Missouri.
The confusion in Florida will be the subject of tomorrow's hearing before Mr. Lieberman and GOP committee chairman Fred Thompson, but here's hoping that old tale doesn't eclipse the much fresher story of how Democratic lawyers tried to hijack an election in Missouri.
At a rally with Al Gore the night before the election, Democratic Rep. Lacy Clay told a crowd in St. Louis that he would "get a court order" the next day to keep the polls open. Then the next afternoon, lawsuits were filed in Kansas City and St. Louis claiming the polls should stay open because minorities were having trouble voting that day. The Gore-Lieberman campaign was the only plaintiff to appear in both suits. Within minutes of the filing for a problem presumably just discovered that day, pre-recorded phone calls from Jesse Jackson poured into St. Louis telling people they could vote late.
The Kansas City lawsuit was turned down, but in St. Louis a sympathetic local judge ignored state law and extended the 7 p.m. poll closing by three hours. At 7:45 p.m. a state appeals court overruled the order. Only a few hundred votes were cast after the legal deadline, but the intent was clearly for many more to be cast--and counted.
Like many cities, St. Louis is a potential bonanza for voter fraud. A federal grand jury there is now hearing evidence that 3,000 suspect voter registration cards included the names of dead people and even a pet. In fact, St. Louis has more voters on its rolls than it has voting-age adults.
Missouri Senator Kit Bond says the Gore campaign coordinated the lawsuits in both cities. The language in the two suits was similar or identical in several places. Both suits clearly were shopping for plaintiffs. In Kansas City, the local plaintiff was Allison Bergman, but Democratic lawyers forgot to correct the "he/she" language throughout her affidavit. In St. Louis, lead plaintiff Robert D. Odom claimed he had been denied the right to vote. But in court it was revealed that Mr. Odom had died in 1999, so a Robert M. Odom, an aide to Rep. Clay, was substituted. But the Clay aide had voted early that day. The court wasn't informed of that fact.
Upon hearing all this, Senator Lieberman was largely silent. "I don't know enough about the situation . . . to get into the details," he explained. Certainly other states have similar deadwood that represents an invitation to fraud, but the federal Motor Voter law makes purges difficult.
Senator Bond wants those who register by mail to show up in person for their first election rather than sending in an absentee ballot. He also wants to have voters show the same kind of photo ID they use to rent a video or board a plane. Rep. Clay counters that many poor people neither have nor want photo IDs and such a requirement would burden them. But all states issue photo IDs for nondrivers.
Better elections require reforms like Florida's decision last week to upgrade its voting machines. But comprehensive reform has to include efforts to weed out fraud and get to the bottom of efforts to manipulate the system such as the Gore-Lieberman lawsuits. Otherwise, valid voters will continue to be at risk of having their ballots canceled out by error or skullduggery. Every vote should count, but only if it's real.
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