Journalists From Arizona

"In neighboring Vermont, O’Keefe struck again in March, during the state’s presidential primary. His assistants were freely offered ballots at several locations without being asked to produce identification. In his videos, O’Keefe then documented the same people ordering drinks in bars or trying to rent a hotel room. In each case, they were asked for an ID."

"O’Keefe’s video from the NJEA event records [Wayne] Dibofsky recounting that he was at the offices of the Jersey City Education Association (NJEA), coordinating get-out-the-vote efforts for the 1997 mayor’s race, when a man arrived and announced that he had two voting machines to deliver. Dibofsky told him the JCEA office was not a voting precinct. The unidentified man winked at him and said ‘I don’t care; I was told to deliver these machines.’ When Dibofsky asked more questions, he was told, ‘It does not matter.’ The two voting machines, Dibofsky recounted, ‘were already locked, loaded, and voted,’ which he said meant they had ‘vote tallies that were already added,’ ready to be printed out as the end of the day. ‘Nobody came through; we weren’t a voting location. They came back later on, they took the machines, I called the [city] clerk’s office,’ Dibofsky recounted. ‘They said, just leave well enough alone. And I knew that meant, Keep quiet. That was a tough district for a Democrat to win in, and they carried the district with those voting machines. And nobody came in and voted. That’s Hudson County.’"

"Unfortunately, the 2008 election was not an anomaly. In 2006, only 22 percent of nearly 2.6 million military voters cast ballots, compared to 41 percent of the general voting-age population. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that only 16.5 percent of an estimated six million eligible military and overseas civilian voters requested an absentee ballot, and only 5.5 percent of these ballots were returned and counted. Data from 24 states on the 2010 election shows that only 4.6 percent of eligible military voters cast an absentee ballot that was actually counted."

"The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) requires the Federal Voting Assistance Program (a Department of Defense program) to administer UOCAVA, and requires the Justice Department to enforce it. One of the most significant problems with UOCAVA is that it does not specify when states are required to mail absentee ballots to overseas military voters. Every federal agency and nonprofit group examining the issue, including the Election Assistance Commission, had concluded that, to provide enough time for absentee ballots to be returned from overseas, they would need to be sent out at least 45 days before a state’s deadline for receiving absentee ballots. Yet nearly one-third of states refuse to follow the 45-day standard, and at least 10 states gave military voters less than 35 days to receive, cast, and return their ballots."

"It does not take a visionary to see that, in the absence of clear rules, we can expect campaign lawyers to attempt to turn the most implausible legal theory into a court ruling in their favor. Vague rules on provisional voting could create a nightmare in which the results of a presidential race aren’t known for days. Recall the 35 days it took Colorado officials to decide just one congressional race."

"But few in the media or in urban government seem concerned about the designed sloppiness of our election system. Our current ‘honor’ system in voter registration and voting, and the lax enforcement of voting laws (in which prosecutors shy away from bringing election fraud cases unless the evidence is almost literally handed to them on videotape), is analogous to having counterfeit bills circulating and the Treasury Department not wanting to be bothered until the printing press is located."

"Should ‘anything’ goes continue to be the standard we often allow, the nation may wake to another crisis far bigger than the 2000 Florida folly. Perhaps then we will demand to know just who subverted the safeguards in our election laws. But wouldn’t it be better if—with the lessons of Florida and even more recent election snafus and scandals so obvious—we did something now?"

"State officials such as secretaries of state should be granted investigative subpoena powers to look into both vote fraud and disenfranchisement issues. Historically, election officials have relied too heavily on candidates to identify election problems. Most election boards do not have the authority to conduct vigorous investigations of fraud, and must rely on local district attorney’s offices, which usually are heavily engaged in criminal cases, and not interested in prosecuting election fraud for fear of being labeled partisan or racially motivated."

"The voter-registration process in almost all states runs on the honor system. The Obama administration has done everything it can to keep the status quo in place. The Obama Justice Department has refused to file a single lawsuit to enforce the requirement of the National Voter Registration Act that states maintain the accuracy of their voter-registration lists. This despite a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicate. About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection."

"There is still time to reduce the chance of another election meltdown, both this year and in future years. But this will not happen unless we acknowledge that the United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system befitting an emerging Third World country rather than the world’s leading democracy."

"With its hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, the Florida fiasco compelled this country to confront an ugly reality: that we have been making do with what noted political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has called ‘the modern world’s sloppiest electoral system.’ How sloppy? Lethally so. At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11."

"Many Democrats feel that the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court titled toward Bush, and they refuse to accept his victory as valid. But this issue transcends ‘red states’ vs. ‘blue states’ partisan grievances. Many Americans are convinced that politicians can’t be trusted to play by the rules and will either commit fraud or intimidate voters at the slightest opportunity."

"Reform is easy to talk about, but difficult to bring about. Many of the suggested improvements, such as requiring voters to show ID at the polls, are bitterly opposed. For instance, Maria Cardona, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, claims that ‘ballot security and preventing voter fraud are just code words for voter intimidation and suppression.’"

"Some of the sloppiness that makes fraud and foul-ups in election counts possible seems to be built into the system by design. The National Voter Registration Act (‘Motor Voter Law’), the first law signed into law by President Clinton upon entering office, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring driver’s license bureaus to register anyone applying for licenses, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to forbid government workers to challenge new registrants, while making it difficult to purge ‘deadwood’ voters (those who have died or moved away)."

"In 2001, the voter rolls in many American cities included more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of residents over age eighteen. Philadelphia’s voter rolls, for instance, have jumped 24 percent since 1995 at the same time the city’s population had declined by 13 percent."

"Ironically, Mexico and many other countries have election systems that are far more secure than ours. To obtain voter credentials, the citizen must present a photo, write a signature and give a thumbprint. The voter card includes a picture with a hologram covering it, a magnetic strip and a serial number to guard against tampering. To cast a ballot, voters must present the card and be certified by a thumbprint scanner."

"[I]n the United States, at a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only seventeen states require some form of documentation in order to vote. ‘Why should the important process of voting be the one exception of this rule?’ asked Karen Saranita, a former fraud investigator for a Democratic state senator in California. Americans agree. A Rasmussen Research poll finds that 82 percent of Americans, including 75 percent of Democrats, believe that ‘people should be required to show a driver’s license or some other form of photo ID before they are allowed to vote."

"Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registration, illegal absentee ballots, shady recounts or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, although it is probably spreading because of the ever-so-tight divisions that have polarized the country and created so many close elections lately."

"A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party’s back yard: ‘When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat.’"

"Sometimes that desire to expand voting opportunities takes on unrealistic qualities. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has placed a measure on the November 2004 ballot that would allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections. ‘Candidates who run for school board ought to have to campaign in immigrant communities that are filling the public schools with kids,’ says Supervisor Matt Gonzales, the proposal’s chief sponsor. But city attorney Louise Renne, a Democrat, is adamant that state law probably bars noncitizens from voting on anything until they actually become citizens. ‘What next? Osama bin Laden voting?’ she asks."

"Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the ‘incentivizing’ of fraud and the clash of conflicting visions about the priorities of our election system than the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as the ‘Motor Voter Law.’"

"The [National Voter Registration Act of 1993] imposed an unfunded mandate on the states by requiring that anyone entering a government office to renew a driver’s license or apply for welfare or unemployment compensation would be offered the chance to register on the spot to vote. Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registration, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘deadwood’—people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes—from their rolls. Now, people who didn’t vote would be kept on the registration rolls for at least eight years before anyone could remove them."

"Some registration scandals have been comic. In Broward County, Florida, for example, an eight-year-old girl successfully registered to vote. The error would not have been caught if the girl hadn’t been called for jury duty, whereupon her mother called the election supervisors to report the mistake. More improbably, an elephant at the San Diego zoo was successfully registered to vote."

"The current toxic political atmosphere, in which one side is concerned about voter fraud and the other about voter disfranchisement, is largely the product of the elephant in the parlor left over from the 2000 election. Of course, I’m talking about the Florida recount, the gold standard for botched elections, and all the bitter recriminations it launched."

"The Florida battle returned to the news as the 2004 election approached in w:Michael Moore Michael Moore’s hit film Fahrenheit 9/11, which begins with a malicious account of what happened in 2000. In essence, Moore claims that George W. Bush, aided by Florida’s Republican secretary of state w: Katherine Harris Katherine Harris and the FOX News Channel, stole the election—and that everyone knows it."

"Why do liberals persist in propagating the Myth of the Stolen Election? Many of them sincerely believe in it, all this evidence notwithstanding. Others see it as a rallying cry that can bring out the Democratic Party’s core voters this fall [2004] in righteous anger. The Florida controversy also offers a pretext for some to talk about other changes they want to make in election laws."

"Both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to vote, and this largely benefitted Al Gore.An analysis by the Post found that 5,600 people whose names matched the names of convicted felons who should have been disqualified were permitted to cast their ballots. ‘These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election,’ the Post reported. ‘It’s likely they benefited Democratic candidate Al Gore: Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrat.’"

"In Davison County, election officials improperly counted over-votes On ballots where two Senate candidates had been marked, the election officials decided to block out the mark given to the candidate with the ‘lighter’ mark. These marks were covered with small, round, white stickers. Election officials were videotaped blocking votes from Congressman Thune. Concerns were also raised in Davison County because operatives working for Senator Tim Johnson’s office were initially granted access to the Democratic auditor’s office and its computers without allowing similar access to other parties."

"Hawaii has a history of election fraud going back at least to 1982, when the political and legal community were shocked by a voter registration scandal involving University of Hawaii law school students who illegally registered voters for a Democratic candidate for the state house, Ross Segawa. They were caught when volunteers for his opponent noticed that these youthful supporters of Segawa were registered at the Arcadia Retirement Residence. An investigation by the city prosecutor’s office led to Segawa’s conviction on ten counts of election fraud, criminal solicitation and evidence tampering, for which he served sixty days in prison… In another case of election fraud, an Oahu grand jury indicted state legislator Gene Albano in 1983 for illegally registering voters in his Kalihi Kai-Iwilei House District, and a decade later he was finally convicted of voter registration fraud. Governor Cayetano pardoned both Segawa and Albano in 2000 and appointed several other students in the University of Hawaii law school voter registration scandal to high-ranking government jobs."

"In the crucial November 2002 race for governor, Sequoia client Bernalillo County, New Mexico, had more than 48,000 people show up at six sites with Sequoia voting machines. Somehow, only 36,000 were recorded. The company later admitted that voters in Clark County, Nevada, had had the same problem with Sequoia’s machines just weeks earlier."

"In November 2003, there was a power failure with one of the Sequoia machines in San Jose, California. It was repaired by unknown technicians in the middle of an election without any supervision from county officials. According to the San Jose Mercury News, no one on site could say what the technicians repaired or changed. Then, in March 2004, Sequoia voting machines failed to record nearly seven thousand votes in Napa County, California, because voters used the wrong ink on optical scan ballots. The glitch affected the outcome of numerous races in all levels of government as well as ballot initiative measures."

"In November 2000, voters in San Francisco and in Pulaski County, Arkansas, learned firsthand about the havoc that malfunctioning machines can bring. In one San Francisco polling place, 362 people signed in to vote, and 357 paper ballots were counted manually, but ES&S machines reported that 416 people had voted there. In Arkansas, nearly thirty voters reported that the machines cast their vote for the wrong candidate—after they pushed the button for their candidate of choice, another name popped up."

"Local registration and election boards should be composed of citizen appointees. All such boards should have equal representation from both major political parties and at least one independent or third-party member. We’ve seen over and over, from St. Louis to Palm Beach County, how conflicts of interest are created if election boards are run by officials who have to run for offices themselves—often as partisans. ‘I think you’ll see most of the problems in bad management of elections occur where the top position isn’t nonpartisan and where most of the oversight is by people deeply involved in the political process,’ says Mischelle Townsend, the registrar of voters in Riverside County, California."

"All county the municipal election authorities should be required to have independent audits conducted of their voter tabulation systems, software and security procedures on a regular basis. In business, companies undergo outside audits by independent bodies to confirm to their stockholders that the companies are truthfully reporting on their financial condition and status."

"We should consider paying the people who run our elections more, as well as giving some of them more professional training. We pay many of the election officials in some of our rural counties less than the janitor at the local school. Sue Woody, who had served as the clerk of Park County, Indiana, resigned last year because she couldn’t make it on her salary of $22,000. She was responsible for running both the court and the election systems for her county."

"With the demise of most big-city political machines and the rise of election supervision by nonpartisan civil service employees, concerns about honest and accurate election counts receded. But Dr. Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, who cowrote a pioneering book on the subject,Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics, warned as early as the 1990s that ‘voter fraud is making a comeback… My strong suspicion—based on sores of investigated and unexplored tips from political observers and interviewees over the years—is that some degree of vote fraud can be found almost everywhere, and serious outbreaks can and do occur in every region of the country.’"

"The 2000 recount was more than merely a national embarrassment; it left a lasting scar on the American electoral psyche. A Zogby poll a few years ago found that 38 percent of Americans still regarded the 2000 election outcome as questionable."

"In recent years, the biggest battle in election reform has been over voter ID—requiring voters to present a government-issued photographic identification when they vote at their polling places on Election Day."

"There is no question that every individual who is eligible to vote should have the opportunity to do so. It is equally important, however, that the votes of eligible voters are not stolen or diluted by a fraudulent or bogus ballot cast by an ineligible or imaginary voter. The evidence from academic studies and actual turnout in elections is overwhelming that—contrary to the shrill claims of opponents—voter ID does not depress turnout, including among the ranks of minority, poor, and elderly voters, which exist; the real myth is the claim that voters are disenfranchised because of voter ID requirements."

"Jimmy Carter knows the issue of voter fraud well. His first run for office, in a Democratic primary in Quitman County, Georgia in 1962, was stolen by voter fraud that local residents said ‘had been going on on election days as long as most people could remember.’ He went to court and got the election overturned, and ended up winning in the general election. Newly minted state senator Carter helped sponsor a comprehensive reform of the state’s election code; the culprit responsible for stealing the primary election was later convicted of voter fraud in a previous congressional election. As Jimmy Carter learned, fraudulent voting does exist, and criminal penalties imposed after the fact are an insufficient deterrent."

"The Department of Justice prosecuted its largest voter fraud case ever in Chicago—prosecutors estimated that 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1982 gubernatorial election. The conspirators came within five thousand votes of changing the race to the losing Democratic candidate, and a federal grand jury found that ‘similar fraudulent activities’ had occurred in prior elections. Ten of thousands of individuals had voted twice; thousands of other bogus votes had been cast in the name of individuals who were dead, in prison, or whose registered addresses were vacant lots. Absent voters were impersonated, voters’ signatures on ballot applications ‘had been forged wholesale in many precincts,’ and votes were fraudulently cast under fictitious voter registrations and in the names of transients, the incapacitated, and senior citizens."

"In addition to voting in the names of fictitious people, the crews used several other methods of casting fraudulent votes involving voting under the names of legitimate voters. By reviewing voter registration records at the Board of Elections prior to Election Day, conspirators were able to identify newly registered voters. Crews would go to the appropriate polling places as soon as polls opened in the morning to vote under those names: The reasoning behind this method, according to the experience of one witness, was that newly registered voters often do not vote. By arriving at the polling sites early, the bogus voter would not need to worry about the possibility that the real voter had actually voted."

"Nothing, but nothing, is as washed up as a rock star past her prime."

"Tu primer fiesta de toros, tu primer viage a un protibulo y quiza tu primera borrachera, tu primer pelea en un bar, tu primer viaje a la carcel, tu primer soborno...."

"Muscle cars don't have fins."

"Good cars go fast."

"Love the sinner; like the sin."

"Maybe living past your time is worse than a sin. Maybe we'll all get lucky and it'll never happen to any of us."

"Continuity is for sissies."