Saturday, October 23, 2004

GOP ELECTION FRAUD: THE CONTINUING SAGA

Two more from Eschaton. First, from the St. Petersburg Times (in Florida):

Election chief warns of absentee scam

Pasco elections officials have a warning for the county's absentee voters: Don't give your ballot to a stranger claiming to be from the elections office.

They're not who they say they are.

"The people who are soliciting your ballots in this manner are not elections officials," Pasco Elections Supervisor Kurt Browning warned Thursday.

The warning came after a phone call from a west Pasco woman. Other Florida counties have gotten similar complaints.

"We've had a bunch of them - 100 at least," said Bob Sweat, elections supervisor for Manatee County. "It's probably going on all over the state of Florida."

And

Sweat said it appeared the collections were occurring in neighborhoods full of low-income, minority and elderly residents.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, low-income and minority usually means Democrat: if it's not the Republicans doing this, then I don't know who it could possibly be. Nader? Whatever.

Next, from Ohio's Columbia Dispatch:

Instructions to change polling place
don’t come from board of elections

Damschroder said there are two scams: The caller tells voters their precincts have changed or the caller offers to pick up an absentee-ballot application, deliver the ballot to the voter and return the completed ballot to the elections office.

By law, the elections board mails absentee ballots and the only deliveries are made to voters in nursing homes by both a Republican and Democratic elections worker. The only person who can return an absentee ballot, besides the voter, is an immediate family member.


"People are calling saying, ‘I got a call last night when I was watching Oprah from this group,’ " Damschroder said. "By law, the board of elections does not give anybody a ballot to deliver."


Click here for the rest.

This one in Ohio sounds very similar to what's going on in Florida. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was a nationally coordinated attempt to throw the election. In retrospect, I wonder if this was going on in the 2000 election; given what we know about how things turned out in Florida, it's probable.

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