September 23, 2004

Election Cheating Has Begun

There's this instance near Cleveland. Then there's this Wisconsin example discovered by radio yapper and columnist Mark Belling:

An outfit called the "New Voter Project" claims to be nonpartisan but is being bankrolled and staffed by leftists. The organization is already active in Wisconsin and already involved in trouble. Thousands of "voters" registered by this group in the last few weeks have submitted registration forms without the legally required proof of identification. This has forced village and city clerks all over the region to send out notices asking for the information. Why would so many of these forms be filled out without identification?

You tell me.

There’s more. The director of the Wisconsin branch of the New Voter Project is Jessy Tolkan. She’s already been involved in election fraud! Tolkan ran for the Madison Common Council in 2001 and was elected. She gave up the seat under pressure and a pending investigation after allegations were made that she lied about her address on her nomination papers and was not a resident of the district in which she ran. Tolkan’s father, an attorney, has threatened to sue me in a lame attempt to get me to stop reporting on his daughter and the slimy activities of the New Voter Project.

Virtually none of the forms sent out by the local clerks to the shady registrants have been responded to. The only plausible explanation for that is that the "voters" not only aren’t voters but aren’t real people, either.

Here’s the method to the New Voter Project madness. In Wisconsin, you can register to vote at the polls on Election Day. You have to produce identification when you register. But sending in a phony registration in advance puts you on the voter list before the election. Already-registered voters don’t have to show any identification. By putting perhaps thousands of fake names on the voter lists, it will be possible for fraudsters to show up at the polls and simply claim to be the person who was already "registered."

One former employee of the New Voter Project has told me that many staffers simply took names out of the telephone book to fill out their daily quotas. He quit his job in fear there’d be a criminal investigation.

I'm predicting a Bush win. Nevertheless, Bush backers have to work hard to get as many people to vote for the President as possible. As Hugh Hewitt's book puts it, "If It's Not Close They Can't Cheat."