Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (9613)	2/16/2001 7:05:06 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

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.