Gore still got over 300,000 votes more than Bush.
So they say... but how many of those were valid votes? Take a look at what's coming down the pike, and will likely collapse any attempt to continue dogging GW over this election:
Congress to establish voter-fraud task force
Nationwide investigation will 'put
people in jail,' says top GOP leader
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By Kenneth R. Timmerman
© 2000 Western Journalism Center
House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert is putting together a task force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the Nov. 7 election that will be nationwide in scope and will "put people in jail," according to a top member of the Republican leadership.
Hastert initially asked outgoing Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill, to chair the task force, but Hyde says he turned it down. Hyde is the leading candidate to become the new chairman of the House International Relations Committee, in front of two moderate Republicans, Jim Leach and Doug Bereuter.
Republicans will be looking at allegations of voter fraud from across the country, not just in Florida.
"In Madison, Wisconsin, we had homeless shelters with 20 beds where 200 people voted," said a top member of the leadership, who asked to remain unnamed for this report. "In Wisconsin, you can just show up at the polls on election day and vote without being registered by saying that you have just moved into the precinct. In some predominantly Democratic precincts in Texas, we had 125 percent of registered voters cast ballots."
The voter-fraud task force will also examine allegations that the Department of Defense shut down mail call for U.S. military vessels on overseas deployment two weeks before the election, to prevent absentee ballots from being delivered to U.S. Navy personnel or returned by them to their home districts.
Sam Wright, a retired U.S. Navy captain and lawyer who advocates a major overhaul of the military voting system, believes that 200,000 members of the military and their family get systematically disenfranchised.
"That's based on the survey that DoD does after every presidential election," said Wright. "I am now coming to believe that the 200,000 figure is a gross understatement. The DoD survey only shows what military members know."
Motor voters
And in Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles, allegations are surfacing of roving bands of voters who were taken in buses from precinct to precinct to vote in place of registered voters who had moved away or who had never voted before.
"We are relatively certain people were being taken from polling place to polling place and allowed to vote," said Republican national committeewoman from Maryland, Ellen Sauerbrey.
How can someone vote in place of another? Actually, it's fairly simple -- for the fraudulently inclined.
In many states, including Maryland, it is illegal to ask voters to present identification, on the pretext that would be construed as voter intimidation. Election officials in Maryland and in many other states are allowed to ascertain a voter's true identity by asking only for their name, address and date of birth.
"But in practice, there's no check whatsoever," Sauerbrey said. "The election judge will prompt you by asking if you live at such and such address, if you were born at such and such date. This makes it easier for one person to vote in the name of another, simply by mimicking the signature on the voter card."
Repeated attempts by Republicans in Maryland to pass legislation that would require voters to present identification at the polls have been blocked by the Democratic majority in the state's House of Delegates.
No citizenship checks
The motor voter rules (known officially as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993) went into effect in January 1995, and required states to allow anyone applying for a drivers license to register to vote at the same time.
The problem, admitted board of election officials in several Maryland counties, is that no proof of citizenship is required, thus inviting non-citizens to vote by fraud.
An elections-board official in Montgomery County, Md., who declined to be identified, acknowledged there was "no cross-checking" to see if people who registered to vote at the Motor Vehicle Agency are U.S. citizens. "We don't require them to present ID to vote."
When individuals register to vote at the Motor Vehicle Agency, they are required to sign a form stating they are U.S. citizens "under penalty of perjury." However, those forms are only delivered to the MVA in English, whereas many non-English speakers regularly apply for drivers licenses and, by extension, register to vote.
Spanish-language voter registration forms are sent out with state recruiters, who sign up new voters through a wide variety of state welfare agencies, the official added. She could not explain why Spanish-language voter registration forms would be needed for naturalized U.S. citizens, who are required to pass an English-language test as part of their naturalization examination.
Maryland has "no way to check" if non-citizens are voting, state supervisor of elections Linda Lamone said. "We approached the Immigration and Naturalization Service at one point and asked if we could collaborate on this, so people wouldn't get in trouble, but they said no."
About the only way the county or state board of election discovers that a non-citizen has made the voter rolls is when they are called for jury duty.
Montgomery County Jury Commissioner Nancy Galvin said her office sends out 10,000 to 12,000 questionnaires every other month to prospective jurors, asking whether they are U.S. citizens. Non-citizens are not allowed to sit on juries.
"We've had many of them returned asking to be excused from jury duty because they are not U.S. citizens," she said. However, she said her office "keeps no records" of these replies, and takes no further action. A spokesperson for Montgomery County State's Attorney Doug Gansler said it was "not an offense" to do jury duty as a non-citizen and that his office "has not prosecuted anyone for this" or for perjury on the motor voter forms.
In Prince George's County, a heavily Democratic county bordering Washington, D.C., election board official Harold Reston said the board reviews each case individually that is sent over by the jury commissioner.
"If we find that they registered by accident and never voted, we call the individual and ask them to request that they be removed from the voter rolls," he said. "But if they actually voted, we might forward the case to the state prosecutor."
Mike Mcdonough, an assistant to state prosecutor Stephen Montanarelli, said his office has had several hundred election-law cases since motor voter went into effect in January 1995, but had conducted no prosecutions over the past six or eight months.
"Prosecution is not the standard thing that happens in this sort of case," he said. "We try to dispose of it short of prosecution."
A silver lining
U.S. Rep. Bob Stump, R-Ariz., has twice introduced a bill to repeal motor voter in the U.S. Congress, only to have it vetoed by President Clinton. He recently vowed to reintroduce the legislation in the 107th Congress next year.
But not everyone believes that motor voter is all bad. Maryland Republican activist and statistician Henry C. Marshall has done a comprehensive analysis of new registrations in Maryland over the past five years and found that motor voter has actually reduced the Democrats' share from 61.2 percent of total voters to 57.1 percent.
Part of the shift has been a surge in new voters registering as Independents. But it has also resulted from cleansing the voter rolls of the estimated 17-20 percent of voters who leave the state every year. Under motor voter rules, the state board of elections may use change-of-address forms filed with the MVA to purge former residents from the rolls.
Marshall believes the biggest problem is not motor voter itself, but the failure to require new voters to provide proof of citizenship when they sign up to vote.
**********"In 1996, 11 percent of the people voting in Maryland were non-citizens," Marshall believes. Out of the 1,793,991 votes officially cast, that amounts to 197,339 illegal votes.************
While it's virtually impossible to verify such figures, they suggest the potential scope of the problem nationwide, especially in states with close elections.
The midnight coup
Ellen Sauerbrey became an unwilling expert on election fraud following her 1994 bid to become Maryland's governor, which she lost to Democrat Parris Glendening. All during election night as precincts reported in, Sauerbrey remained ahead. Then, close to midnight, results started pouring in from precincts in Baltimore City, giving Glendening a 5,993-vote victory. It was the closest race in Maryland in 70 years.
To this day, Sauerbrey and her running mate, former Howard County police chief Paul Rappaport, believe the election was stolen by Democratic party operatives who stuffed ballot boxes and altered voting machines after the polls were closed.
Sauerbrey's failed challenge of the 1994 election results dragged through the courts for more than six months, and her opponents accused her of being a sore loser.
Drake Ferguson, a private investigator who headed a volunteer group that helped document Sauerbrey's allegations of voter fraud, found that 75 percent of Baltimore City's 408 precincts had "severe flaws" in election-day records, including election cards that were either unsigned or had names different from the printed name on them.
The group also claimed that 5,832 more votes were tallied in Baltimore City than there were voters who checked in at precincts or cast absentee ballots -- mirroring Glendening's election margin almost exactly.
They found that keys to voting machines had been duplicated, and that some people had voted more than once. Sauerbrey even remembers investigators reporting back to her that they had traced the addresses listed by scores of Baltimore City voters to boarded-up houses and to vacant lots.
But Glendening's appointee to head the state board of elections, Linda Lamone, rejected Sauerbrey's allegations of fraud, noting that a Democratic trial court judge and the state attorney general, also a Democrat, had found they had "no merit."
Asked whether Maryland had a problem with voter fraud, Lamone said, "No, I do not think there is a problem."
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