By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat. That was the book title and sound advice by national radio talk host Hugh Hewitt in 2004.
Well, Democrats still could cheat, the Republican Hewitt would explain, but they’d lose the election anyway because their fraudulent ballots’ numbers would be overwhelmed by honest Republican voters.
Wanderer readers may know the November 4 election results by the time they read this article, which went to press on October 30. Was it close? Did they cheat?
If Democrats traditionally have been known as the vote-fraud champions, think how much this potential increased since 2004, with lawless Barack Obama wielding ultimate national power from the White House, using the U.S. Justice Department as his obedient tool, and even brazenly manipulating supposedly independent agencies like the Internal Revenue Service.
Although Americans are buried under avalanches of polling results for months before elections, including calculations of the margin of error and how representative the sample is of voters, all these statistics pretty much count for nothing if elections actually are decided by fraudulent ballots.
Whatever an individual tells a pollster is less reliable if that individual actually is casting ten illegal votes.
Citing how results can be changed, national radio talk host Laura Ingraham warned on October 27, “Republicans need to win these elections by ten points, just to have a cushion” to support their honest victories.
She noted that Obama and his recently resigned attorney general, Eric Holder, desperately opposed using voter ID to ensure ballot security.
Ingraham cited an October 24 post by Jim Geraghty at National Review Online headlined, “Jaw-Dropping Study Claims Large Numbers of Non-Citizens Vote in U.S.” This was based on an October 24 article in The Washington Post by two researchers who wrote:
“How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010. . . .
“Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008…sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,” wrote researchers Jesse Richman and David Earnest.
“Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,” they continued.
“Sen. Al Franken, D., Minn., won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.”
The potential for fraud exists in every state, which probably has only worsened under Obama’s impatient glare.
Colorado drew a lot of interest this year because of its race for a U.S. Senate seat — plus the fact the state has a revised system that could encourage phony votes.
Many conservatives weren’t surprised after undercover video investigator James O’Keefe of Project Veritas produced the results of his research in hotly contested Colorado on October 22, a state ripe for significant fraud after the Democrat-controlled state legislature pushed through voting changes last year (www.projectveritasaction.com/video/covoterfraud).
On a strict party-line vote, Democrat legislators put as many ballots into circulation as possible by making Colorado an all-mail-ballot state. Even inactive voters were reactivated and sent ballots.
All of the pundits’ talk about Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner successfully refuting Democrat U.S. Sen. Mark Udall’s hollow “war on women” campaign strategy wouldn’t mean much if left-wing activists fished discarded ballots from uninterested citizens’ trash cans and marked them illegally.
How can post-election analyses of winning strategies take into account phony results?
In his video, investigator O’Keefe schmoozes a liberal activist working to turn out the vote for Udall and suggests using other people’s discarded ballots to increase the vote. The liberal replies, “That’s not even lying and stealing. If someone throws out the ballot, if you want to fill it out, you should do it.”
When O’Keefe asks another liberal activist what would be “a specific street or area” to search through people’s trash to find unused ballots, she helpfully gets specific: “Sixth and Belmar Circle is a good one.”
Commentator Deroy Murdock added at National Review Online on October 24 that Colorado “voters claiming to be confined can request emergency ballots as late as 5 p.m. on Election Day, sight unseen, and receive and return them via e-mail before polls close two hours later. There is no mechanism to confirm the legitimacy of such e-mail addresses, especially on such short notice.”
As for checking the validity of mailed ballots by comparing voter signatures on file, Murdock quoted a ballot watcher in Colorado’s Adams County:
“In this county, about 70 percent of the ballot envelopes are reviewed by election judges, and the remainder are approved automatically by computer and unseen by humans. I am seeing some apparently non-matching signatures on return-mail ballot envelopes that are being approved for counting.”
Colorado limits “harvesting” to ten ballots, where an individual can collect those many people’s votes to deposit at a drop-off point, Murdock wrote, which could just be a family member helping out elderly relatives.
But, he added, a Colorado clean-vote advocate said the harvest could have been gathered using pressure tactics, undue influence, intimidation, or forgery. And an activist could have gathered not simply ten votes, but ten votes day after day after day.
In Arizona, the number of votes that can be harvested isn’t limited currently, but when a left-wing activist brings in hundreds of ballots in a single box and acts uncomfortable while depositing them, suspicions can be aroused.
A.J. LaFaro, chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, headquartered in Phoenix, spoke with The Wanderer about what he saw when a Latino wearing an activist group’s T-shirt brought in a box load of early ballots to be tallied for Arizona’s primary election in August.
“There were several hundred ballots” in the box, perhaps 500, LaFaro said.
LaFaro later obtained the surveillance video of the incident. Once posted online, the encounter exploded. Various blogs and news and opinion sites posted it. YouTube counted more than 531,000 views.
He told The Wanderer on October 23, “It’s gone viral locally, nationally, I even understand it’s gone worldwide.”
Although there was no audio of the encounter, the GOP official gave this account.
Activist: “Stop watching me. You’re annoying me.”
LaFaro: “One of your ballots isn’t sealed.”
Activist: “It’s none of your business. What’s your name?”
LaFaro: “I’m the chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party. What’s yours?”
Activist: “Go **** yourself. I don’t have to tell you who I am.”
LaFaro, who was at the voting center as a Republican Party official, told The Wanderer that the activist had “an anger-management issue . . . or they’ve got something to hide.”
He said the activist also used a racial slur, “Go **** yourself, gringo,” according to the Arizona Daily Independent.
“Does voter fraud exist? Absolutely,” LaFaro told The Wanderer. “If people deny it, they’re either uninformed or they’re part of the problem.”
Ballot Parties
The Arizona Daily Independent reported on October 16 that when LaFaro went to observe voting in a heavily Latino area on Arizona’s primary election day, August 26, he asked a poll marshal why there was so little activity, and the marshal replied there had been a big “ballot party” the previous Saturday.
Ballot parties may ask that people bring unmarked ballots to the festivities, where they will be told how to mark their ballots, or turn them over to activists to mark.
On October 17, a Phoenix television station’s website reported that officials in suburban Glendale said they received reports of suspicious collection activity, with strangers offering to help people complete and submit their ballots.
World Net Daily, reporting on LaFaro’s experience with the Latino activist, recalled some remarkable results during Obama’s 2012 re-election. In Pennsylvania, WND said, officials claimed that Obama received a total of 19,605 votes in 59 voting divisions while GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney received exactly zero votes. This wasn’t far from 100 precincts in Ohio where, WND said, Obama got 99 percent of the vote.
WND said radio talker Rush Limbaugh reacted by saying that even “Third World, tinhorn dictators” don’t get near-unanimous results like that.
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