Subject: HOW DEMOCRATS STEAL ELECTIONS!
Hello,
I was sent this very informative message. Wednesday, the former mayor of Palm Beach, Fla. who is recounting ballots in that county, was accused of doing these very same tactics.
Due to the mainstream media's selective reporting we are asking everyone to pass this information along to everyone in their address books. We are confident this method will be the quickest method of informing the most people in the shortest amount of time and the least costly. People need to know the truth
From: Rick Humphreys
Tennessee
We Know Gore Best
worldnetdaily.com
'How Democrats steal elections'
Veterans of hand recounts describe
techniques used to change outcome
By Jon Dougherty and David Kupelian
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
The manual vote recounts being insisted on by Democratic operatives in
Palm Beach County, Fla., have been used for over 20 years to steal elections
from Republicans, claim several GOP veterans of hand-recount election-upsets.
According to Bob Haueter, chief of staff to the California Assembly
Republican Caucus, and an expert on manual recounts, a Democrat lawyer
intimately involved in "stealing" elections from Republicans through hand
recounts admitted to the process and even shared the techniques involved.
After Tuesday's vote and an automatic recount still left GOP nominee
George W. Bush ahead by a slim 288-vote margin, Palm Beach elections officials
decided that a manual recount of all 425,000 votes should be undertaken.
"What's happening in Florida is exactly the game plan laid out to me by
an attorney who represented the Democrats in a recount in California where
they stole a seat from us," former California Assemblyman Pat Nolan told
WorldNetDaily. A staunch conservative legislator, Nolan served in the
California Assembly from 1978 until 1994, when he was convicted, along
with several other lawmakers, in a federal corruption probe. After spending a
little over two years in federal prison, he emerged to become president
of Justice Fellowship, the public policy arm of Watergate figure Chuck
Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. For the past four years, Nolan has worked
with Colson -- another fallen-but-reformed public figure -- to reform the
criminal justice system. Regarding the 1980 California Assembly race between
Republican Adrian Fondse and Democrat Pat Johnston, Nolan recalled that
the Republican won "by about 54 votes or so." But after the election,
Democrats "brought in their junkyard dog lawyers from around the country," said
Nolan, "and basically harassed the local registrar -- got in their faces and
demanded to handle ballots" -- which were of the same type now in dispute
in Palm Beach. The same issue of "hanging chads -- the little squares in the
punch cards -- was also an issue in Stockton," says Nolan. The Democrats'
strategy, he says, was to handle them as often as possible -- perhaps
bending, crinkling or otherwise altering them -- so that additional chads
become displaced, thereby disqualifying the ballot. The result? In the
Stockton election, Nolan said Democrats were successful in getting the
vote count reversed from a plus-54 win by Republicans to a minus-17 loss. "I
vowed that I'd never let that happen again," Nolan said. "So I asked my staff
to track down the lawyer that headed up the team for the Democrats." Haueter
was, at that time, chief of staff for Nolan, and it was he who first
contacted attorney Tim Downs, who readily admitted the Democratic
strategy and even described the tactics to Nolan. "When I first called him and
explained to him who I was and why I was calling, he chuckled and said,
'I wondered when you guys would get around to calling me,'" Haueter said,
adding that Downs told him -- "'I've taken several seats from you across the
United States.'" "Downs told me, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, 'You get me within
100 votes and I can steal any election,'" Haueter told WorldNetDaily. Nolan
subsequently hired Downs and "brought him out to train my staff in the
techniques they [Democrats] were using" so they could protect themselves
against future election-fraud victimization, Nolan said. Nolan and
Haueter said Downs described three basic tactics:
"The first rule is, you keep counting until you're ahead. And if that
doesn't put you ahead, you recount, re-recount -- you keep counting until you're
ahead. If you're behind, then you've got nothing to lose."
Second, Nolan said, "the more times those ballots are handled, the more
chance there is that chads will break loose" and hence disqualify the
ballot.
Third, he said, "the minute you're ahead, you stop and declare yourself
the victor." "After that, you don't want the ballots handled any more," Nolan
said, "because some of the chads for your candidate might break loose.
While you're behind it doesn't matter, but if you're ahead and more break off
or become disqualified for your candidate, that's a bad thing." A favorite
tactic, said Nolan, is to ask election officials for ballots, "allegedly
so they can look at it more closely." When operatives do, often they will
bend or crinkle ballots covertly in an effort to break another chad loose and
thus have the ballot thrown out. "This whole process sounds like exactly what
is going on in Florida," Nolan said. "And the more times those ballots are
handled, the more chances are you'll break some of them [chads] loose."
Nolan referred to Fox News' Tony Snow's weekend interview with Bush campaign
representative and former Secretary of State James Baker, in which he
asked Baker why -- after each time election officials run ballots through
mechanical vote-tally machines -- there have been more votes counted or
taken away from both candidates. "Baker didn't have an answer to that," Nolan
said. "But the answer is, because they've handled those ballots more times,
breaking loose more of those chads" -- those that perhaps weren't
completely punched through. "The tactics fit what [Downs] told me back in 1982 and
1983," Nolan said, who added that he didn't know who Downs may have
worked with using these tactics recently. WorldNetDaily attempted to reach Downs
by phone on Sunday, but was unsuccessful. Following a mechanical recount
over the weekend, Palm Beach election officials awarded an additional 36 votes
to Gore, while Bush lost three. "A hand count of four selected precincts
turned up enough additional votes for Gore to prompt the Democratic majority on
the county election commission to order the hand recount in all 531
precincts," the Associated Press reported. Republicans, news accounts said, lodged
"strenuous protests" and pledged to file a lawsuit halting yet another
recount of Palm Beach votes. That hearing is scheduled for today. Reports
said nearly 30,000 ballots have already been rejected in Palm Beach
County because they had two or more holes punched for president, or because
computers could not detect any holes at all. Ballots with two votes also
are rejected in hand counts. Corroborating Haueter's and Nolan's account is a
parallel story by Los Angeles-area political strategist Arnold Steinberg.
In a <A HREF="http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment111100c.shtml">
National Review.com piece titled "Beware of Hanging Chads,"</A> Steinberg
asks, "Do you know what two words will determine the Presidential
election?" The chilling answer, he said: "Hanging chads." Steinberg, describing a
1980 congressional race between long-time incumbent, Democrat James C. Corman,
and Steinberg's client, Republican challenger Bobbi Fiedler, recalls how
after Fiedler's upset victory -- by a slim margin -- over the heavily favored
Corman, the Democrats called for a hand recount. "Democratic Party
lawyers and recount specialists descended on the county registrar's office," says
Steinberg. "Each recount station had a government employee to do the
counting, flanked by one Democratic and one Republican observer. "The
Democrats' agenda was, of course, to change the election result, and they
went about it systematically. At their urging, the recounting began with
Corman's strongest precincts, Fiedler's weakest. Their intention was to
recount ballots in those areas until the election outcome was reversed,
and then stop the recount. Similarly, today in Florida, the Gore people are
demanding hand recounts in their favored counties, where they would be
most likely to gain." Just as important as the order in which the precincts
are recounted, however, is outright ballot tampering, says Steinberg. "Their
hired guns tried lots of tricks on Corman's behalf, but what I remember
most was the hanging chads. A chad is the perforated square (or circle) on the
ballot that a voter depresses with a pin to indicate his preferred
candidate. The chad hangs from the ballot if the voter didn't fully depress it --
for instance, if an older person did not press firmly enough. This matters
because voter machines usually are not able to tabulate cards with
hanging chads. "It often comes down to interpreting the voter's intention. Does
the chad hang 'strongly' -- i.e, detached only a little -- meaning that it is
a mistake that should not be counted? Or does it hang loosely -- i.e.,
mostly detached -- as an intended vote would be? "What my lawyers soon
discovered was that the opposition would eyeball a disputed ballot before picking it
up to officially inspect it. If the hanging chad indicated a vote for
Fiedler, the lawyer for the other side picked up the ballot ever so carefully, so
he could argue that the voter really never intended to vote for Fiedler. If
the hanging chad was a Corman vote, the lawyer picked up the ballot quite
vigorously, so that the chad soon was no longer hanging. "'You see,'
their guy would declare, 'that voter obviously intended to vote for Corman.'"
Luckily, says Steinberg, "it didn't take long to figure out all the
opposition's tricks. I added more lawyers, more observers, and the bad
guys eventually caved. Bobbi Fiedler's victory was preserved. But it was a
nasty business." Echoing Nolan's and Haueter's experience with manual-vote
recounts, Steinberg says, "The more things change, the more they stay the
same." |
