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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sunshadow who wrote (101853)	12/5/2000 8:00:24 AM
From: sunshadow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

An Election Judge on Fraud WSJ - 12/05/00 (Letter) Your Nov. 22 page-one article “Florida Ballot Miscues touch Off Debate Within the African-American Community” may be misleading to readers. Was the problem of large numbers of overvotes in the black precincts due to a “lack of sophistication,” as Congresswoman Hastings has suggested? Or rather, was there a significant amount of ballot tampering of the Bush ballots by these precinct election officials, by their subsequently punching out the Gore chads to invalidate the ballot and reduce the Bush vote count in these heavily Democrat precincts? Some were reported as 1,000-plus for Mr. Gore, and less than a dozen for Mr. Bush. How many overvoted ballots for president in those precincts? Was Gov. Bush punched on an of these? How many? Having been an election judge here in Houston, Texas (Harris County), for more than a decade, I have been made aware over the years by my fellow Republican Ballot Security officials here of numerous examples of probable serious election fraud in some of the inner-city precincts, where we apparently use similar votomatic punch card voting systems, as in Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade county, Florida. We apparently have seen examples of intentional tampering of already voted ballots by Democrat election officials in our inner-city precincts, that probably took place after the polls had closed and the poll watchers had gone home. The easiest opportunity for tampering has been for precinct officials to improperly reopen the ballot transfer cases on the way to the election center, and punch out a Democrat chad in a particular race on a ballot that was voted as a Republican vote for that race, thus invalidating the ballot for that race, thereby reducing the Republican’s vote count. We even had an incident several years ago of a Democrat precinct official driving around our Loop 610 for more than an hour in their van altering and even adding ballots. Remember that reducing your opponent’s vote count is just as effective as adding new ballots for your candidate, and virtually undetectable. The only way to even sense this kind of tampering has occurred is to examine the overvoted ballots for their two preferences, and then examine the down ballot preferences. Every Bush ballot would have been double punched with Gore votes too, and possibly even straight-Republican ballots would have been punched with straight-Democratic holes too. The real story may be in a closer examination of those 19,000 overvote ballots in Palm Beach County. Some veteran ballot security officials of these vote fraud investigations here in Houston believe massive voter fraud might be found to have occurred in the inner-city precincts in those three Florida counties. Perhaps even in other metropolitan cities across America. If the presumption of election fraud is to be assumed, Gore will have more chads punched out on almost all 19,000 overvoted ballots, and Bush some number short of that. The Gore campaign will argue that this differential proves that Gore got more votes than Bush, but in reality it may simply suggest that his Democrat election officials punched out his Gore chads to invalidate Bush ballots. One need only have watched the hand recounts in Broward County to see how brazen some election officials can be. One other factual note here that should cause to understand the potential gravity of the fraud in Florida. For comparison, here is Hrris County (Greater Houston area), with almost a million similar votomatic ballots cast on Nov. 7, Harris County had only 6,500 (0.7%) overvotes (more than ne vote) and 14,690 (1.5%) undervotes (no votes) for president. So, one should ask, whey such a problem in Palm Beach where overvoting was almost 5%. “Lack of sophistication?” Butterfly Ballots? Fraud? A combination of all three? You can reject “Butterfly Ballot,” if most of the ballots have Bush and anyone else. In Houston, we have even observed discrepancies between the number of votes cast and the number of signatures on poll lists to be as high as 4% to 6% in precincts without pollwatchers, but it apparently reduces to below 1% when poll watchers are used. Sadly, not even poll watchers are a guarantee against a “sophisticated” and dishonest precinct election official. They’re out there every election, stealing lots of votes and undermining our precious electoral system and thus our democracy. Wake up America, all may not be as it appears in those Florida counties with heavily Democrat precincts, let alone the rest of America. Maybe we need to pay attention and investigate high overvote precincts all across the nation. C. Moore, Houston