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May 23, 2005
Over 100% Turnout!
I have been meaning to an elections fraud update for a while and with the trial to overturn the fraudulent election of former Washington attorney general Gregoire beginning today it seemed like now is a good time to post. First let do the Washington state posts, which are all from Sound Politics. Recently the Republicans went on a disposition spree where their lawyers deposed many elections officials about how they improperly certified the election. The big problem addressed in the dispositions is the discrepancy between the total number of votes and the total number of voters.
The second problem has to do with provisional ballots, which are ballots cast by people who are not on the voting rolls. Provisional ballots are not supposed to be counted until the voter has proved they were eligible to vote, but in King County over 400 ballots were counted in violation of the law before it was proven that the voters were eligible. These ballots are now mixed with the others and we will never know if they were legitimate votes. Remember that the governors race was decided by less than 200 votes so these votes alone could have swung the election.
The second case of voting fraud has to do with Wisconsin. While in the end no overall elections were decided by this fraud it is likely that George Bush won Wisconsin, but fraudulent votes gave the states electoral votes to Kerry. Thankfully Bush had enough electoral votes in other states that this did not really matter this time. Officially Kerry won Wisconsin by around 11,000 votes, but with the fraud that occurred in Milwaukee it is likely that if only honest votes are counted, then Bush should have won. Milwaukee gave Kerry 71% of its 277,000 votes, but that is with 70,000 people registering on Election Day. If only a sixth of those votes were fraudulently cast for Kerry, then Bush should have won Wisconsin. Assuming a more realistic turnout of lets say 65% percent as opposed to the official turnout of 100% and being very, very generous in assuming that Kerry still got 71% of the vote, then Kerrys total Milwaukee votes drop from 197,000 votes to around 125,000 (a loss of around 72,000 votes). While Bushs 77,600 votes (assumes 28% went for Bush) would drop to 50,400 (A loss of 27,000 votes). This math would give Bush 34,000 more Wisconsin votes than Kerry.
The first problem with Wisconsin is that were 4,609 more cast ballots than voters. Here is the Milwaukee Journal Inquirer story:
Investigators said Tuesday they found clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person.Officials said charges will be filed in coming weeks, as individual cases are reviewed and more evidence is gathered.
One of the main problems in Wisconsin is same day registration which allowed 70,000 people to register on Election Day, which led to an extremely suspicious turnout of over 100%. As Ed at Captains Quarters writes:
Barrett wants this entire embarssment to go away, and the spin is designed for the national media to go back into silence mode. Having 4,500 more ballots than registered voters doesnt mean that 4500 extra votes were cast. It means many more thousands of extra votes were cast, unless Milwaukee normally gets 100% turnout for every election. Milwaukee had over 277,000 ballots cast in the election, and even if that accounted for 90% of the registered voters in the city, it would still mean 30,000 extra ballots before you even get to an overage.
Even with all of this fairly obvious fraud, Wisconsins Democrat governor vetoed a bill requiring voters to show a photo ID.
Posted by Pete at May 23, 2005 05:20 PM
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