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. Perh… - John Fund

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.

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.’

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.