John Fund Quotes

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 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.

It was the day of Washington, D.C.’s presidential primary, April 3, 2012. A 22-year-old white man with a beard entered a polling place in the District, carrying a hidden camera. He walked up to the check-in desk and asked a poll workers if an Eric Holder was registered there. He gave U.S. Attorney General Holder’s address, which he had gleaned from public records. The worker began to hand him a ballot, at which point the young man said that he wanted to show his identification. ‘You don’t need it,’ the poll worker replied. ‘It’s all right. As long as you’re in here, you’re on our list, and that’s who you say you are, you’re okay.’

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 New Hampshire, three of [ James O’Keefe’s ] assistants visited precincts during the state’s January 2012 presidential primary. They asked poll workers whether their books bore the names of several voters, all deceased individuals still listed on voter registration rolls. Poll workers handed out 10 ballots, never once asking for a photo ID. The ballots were immediately given back, unmarked, to precinct workers. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch James , who had vetoed a state photo ID bill, sputtered when asked about O’Keefe’s videos, focusing on the messenger, rather than his message—that polls are dangerously vulnerable to fraud. ‘They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act,’ he roared.

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.

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.

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.

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 in righteous anger. The Florida controversy also offers a pretext for some to talk about other changes they want to make in election laws.

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.

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.