Voter fraud
Two related issues that come up frequently are
voter fraud and requiring photo IDs for voting.
The reaction of the liberal media (which certainly includes most of it) is
first,
voter fraud doesn’t exist (or at least has never been proved to exist)
and second,
requiring photo IDs for voting is an onerous and undue burden
on the poor, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled.
A typical example is 2007-03-16-NYT,
which asserts that Republican-sponsored voter ID requirements
Why should we believe that voter fraud doesn’t exist, probably rampantly?
In every sector of society, fraud does exist.
Some of it is found, publicized, and sometimes punished through legal or administrative action.
Examples include
Further, these frauds have and continue to exist despite vigorous and widely-publicized efforts to stamp them out and punish those who are caught.
Now, if white-collar frauds exist,
despite the often high income of the perpetrators
and the law-enforcement efforts against them,
why should anyone in their right mind think that
partisan operatives would not try to commit fraud to gain partisan advantage?
Here are two excerpts from the chapter titled “Voter Fraud”
in Cleaning House by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton.
The first excerpt is from its section titled “Voter ID—Rhetoric vs. Reality”,
from page 122 to 124.
Allegations of fraud are a regular feature of every election cycle, and fraud does sway elections.
For those who care to look, there is a steady stream of stories concerning electoral fraud of various kinds.
But the justification for voter ID does not depend on establishing the existence of fraud.
It is enough that fraud should not be permitted, and that the opportunity to commit such fraud exists.
That there is an opportunity is clear.
To begin with, vote fraud is both hard to spot and hard to prove.
Particularly where it is successful, vote fraud may never be detected.
For example, without an ID requirement the authorities are unlikely to discover that someone has voted on the still-valid registration of his friend who has moved out of state.
Even where vote fraud is detected, successful prosecution remains unlikely.
There may be no way to track down a perpetrator where, for example, authorities often have nothing but a bogus signature on a poll book or a bogus registration or absentee ballot form.
Too many prosecutors are not interested in pursuing these types of cases because they represent a low priority compared to other crimes or will incur political costs.
The typical argument we hear from the Obama [44] administration and other leftists is that voter ID laws discourage minorities, young people, and the elderly from voting.
Yet, we know from reputable surveys that the common sense use of photo ID is supported by every demographic group in American.
Two-thirds of African-Americans support it; two-thirds of Hispanics; two-thirds of liberals; and even two-thirds of those who consider themselves to be Democrats.
There is simply no evidence to support the contention that the requirement to show a photo ID
(which are provided for free in every state with such a requirement [Is that really so?]) discourages legitimate voters from voting.
In fact, in states such as Indiana and Georgia where photo ID requirements have been in place for almost a decade [relative to 2016], studies show that voter turnout has actually increased.
Photo IDs are part and parcel of living in a modern society.
We have to show a photo ID to fly on a plane, cash a check, purchase prescription drugs, and to enter federal and private office buildings—including the US Department of Justice in Washington, where the Obama administration has directed its mostly unsuccessful (I wish!) attacks voter ID laws.
South Carolina beat the Justice Department in a court fight, when former Attorney General Eric Holder tried to stop the state from implementing its law.
That is why Judicial Watch has worked hard to defend states that have implemented voter ID laws.
For example we filed in amicus brief (a “friend of the court” brief) in Pennsylvania on behalf of state legislators like Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who was the author and driving force behind that state’s voter ID bill.
Nearly half of the members of the legislature who supported the bill were signed on to the Judicial Watch brief.
Pennsylvania’s law was typical of the type of law passed by most states.
It allowed voters to use a Pennsylvania driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID, such as a passport, military ID or government employee ID.
It provided a free ID at no cost and it allowed an individual without identification to cast a “provisional” ballot that would be counted if the identity of the voter could be confirmed within six days of the election.
As we argued in our brief, the “legislature did no more than exercise its sound discretion and create common sense regulatory scheme to secure free and equal elections.”
Although the law was upheld in the lower state courts, it was overturned in a clearly politically biased decision by a higher court.
The decentralized nature of our electoral laws and enforcement activity, our national mobility, and the nature of our demographics also create opportunities for voter fraud.
In 2012, the Pew Research Center on the States released an astonishing report
[“Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient:
Evidence That America's Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade”]
noting that
“[a]pproximately 2.75 million people have an active registration in more than one state.”
That same report observed that
“20 million—one of every eight—active voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,” and that
“[m]ore than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as active voters.”
Those extra registrations are the basic resource needed to steal votes.
It is highly likely that election results in recent years were affected by errors, inaccuracies, and outright crimes.
What possible explanation can there be for the fact that in many U.S. counties there are more registered voters than there are residents?
Judicial Watch found this to be the case all across the country, including in Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Perhaps election officials who don’t maintain clean voter lists share the viewpoint of the chair of the Illinois Board of Elections, who said
“there’s nothing we can do about any of this because
we don’t have any money to stop the fraud.”
[Reported in
“With USJF Support, Defend the Vote Testifies To Illinois Election Board”.]
The second excerpt from the chapter titled “Voter Fraud”
in Cleaning House by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton
is from its section titled “Are Aliens Stealing Our Election?”
(I presume he is not talking about ET :-)
on page 133.
In 2014, a disturbing study was release by political scientists at Old Dominion University.
[“Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?”
by Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, David C. Earnest,
Electoral Studies, Volume 36, December 2014, pages 149-157
(see page 153 for this particular statistic).]
Their work showed that
a significant percentage of foreign nationals residing in the United States,
whether lawfully or unlawfully present,
were registered to vote in U.S. elections—
and that a significant number of them actually have voted in recent years—
6.4 percent in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2010.
That is enough to have swayed election outcomes in some states:
“there is reason to believe non-citizen voting
changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008,
delivering North Carolina to Obama,
and that non-citizen votes have also led to
Democratic victories in congressional races
including a critical 2008 Senate race [in Minnesota]
that delivered for Democrats
a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.”
It is, of course, illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections.
But this study suggests that hundreds of thousands of illegal votes
may have been cast in the United States in every federal election.
If this study’s results are accurate, the implications are startling.
We have Obamacare because of election fraud.
...
from the Associated Press
Washington Post, 2005-01-25
[Emphasis is added.]
MILWAUKEE, Jan. 24 --
The sons of a first-term congresswoman and of Milwaukee’s former acting mayor
were among five Democratic activists charged Monday with
slashing the tires of vans rented by Republicans
to drive voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day.
Sowande Omokunde, 25, son of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), and
Michael Pratt, 32, son of former Milwaukee acting mayor Marvin Pratt,
were among those charged with criminal damage to property,
a felony that carries a maximum punishment of 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The activists are accused of
flattening the tires on 25 vehicles rented by the state Republican Party
to get out the vote and deliver poll watchers Nov. 2.
Also charged were
Lewis Caldwell, 28, and Lavelle Mohammad, 35, both from Milwaukee,
and Justin J. Howell, 20, of Racine.
[The resolution of the charge, a plea of no contest, is mentioned here.]
Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Seth Boffeli said
the five were paid employees
of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)
but were not acting on behalf of the campaign or party.
[Maybe so, but their intent was clearly
to alter the election results to their partisan advantage.]
Washington Post, 2006-01-26
[The full story that appeared in the “Nation in Brief” section of the WP:]
Four Democratic presidential campaign workers pleaded no contest
to charges that they punctured the tires of 25 vehicles
Republicans had intended to use to get out the vote on Election Day 2004.
Those agreeing to the misdemeanor plea were
Sowande A. Omokunde, son of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.);
Michael Pratt, son of former acting Milwaukee mayor Marvin Pratt; and
Lewis Caldwell and Lavelle Mohammad, both from Milwaukee.
Justin Howell was acquitted.
Judge says probation doesn’t atone for crime
By MEG JONES
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2006-04-26
Tossing aside a plea agreement that called for probation, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Michael B. Brennan sentenced four Democratic Party workers to jail Wednesday for slashing tires on 25 vans rented by Republicans to take voters to polls for the 2004 presidential election.
Calling the vandalism more than harmless hijinks,
Brennan admonished the men,
including the sons of two prominent Milwaukee politicians,
for disenfranchising voters.
The judge said he had received letters from county residents upset over the crime.
“They see you tampering with something they consider sacred,
and that’s the ballot box,”
Brennan said during a two-hour sentencing.
Michael Pratt, 33, and Lewis Caldwell, 30, were sentenced to six months in jail, while Lavelle Mohammad, 36, got five months and Sowande Omokunde, 26, got four months. Each was also fined $1,000. They have two weeks to report to jail and will be eligible for work release.
Pratt is the son of former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, and Omokunde is the son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.).
...
“This case has to be an example of what happens
if you interfere in voters’ rights,” Brennan said.
Omokunde [is] a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee senior majoring in political science...
New York Times Editorial, 2007-03-16
In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.
In partisan Republican circles,
the pursuit of voter fraud is code for
suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people.
By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,”
the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been
standing up for the integrity of the election system.
John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”
Later, when he interviewed with Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, for a federal judgeship that he ultimately did not get, he says, he was asked to explain “criticism that I mishandled the 2004 governor’s election.”
Mr. McKay is not the only one of the federal attorneys who may have been brought down for refusing to pursue dubious voter fraud cases. Before David Iglesias of New Mexico was fired, prominent New Mexico Republicans reportedly complained repeatedly to Karl Rove about Mr. Iglesias’s failure to indict Democrats for voter fraud. The White House said that last October, just weeks before Mr. McKay and most of the others were fired, President Bush complained that United States attorneys were not pursuing voter fraud aggressively enough.
There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country.
Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations
as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups.
They have intimidated Native American voter registration campaigners in South Dakota with baseless charges of fraud.
They have pushed through harsh voter ID bills
in states like Georgia and Missouri, both blocked by the courts,
that were designed to make it hard for
people who lack drivers’ licenses —
who are disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minorities —
to vote.
Florida passed a law placing such onerous conditions on voter registration drives, which register many members of minorities and poor people, that the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its registration work in the state.
The claims of vote fraud used to promote these measures usually fall apart on close inspection, as Mr. McKay saw. Missouri Republicans have long charged that St. Louis voters, by which they mean black voters, registered as living on vacant lots. But when The St. Louis Post-Dispatch checked, it found that thousands of people lived in buildings on lots that the city had erroneously classified as vacant.
The United States attorney purge appears to have been prompted by an array of improper political motives. Carol Lam, the San Diego attorney, seems to have been fired to stop her from continuing an investigation that put Republican officials and campaign contributors at risk. These charges, like the accusation that Mr. McKay and other United States attorneys were insufficiently aggressive about voter fraud, are a way of saying, without actually saying, that they would not use their offices to help Republicans win elections. It does not justify their firing; it makes their firing a graver offense.
By BOB HERBERT
New York Times, 2006-08-24
I was browsing at a newsstand in Manhattan recently when I came across a magazine called Felon. It was the “Stop Snitchin’ ” issue, and the first letter to the editor began: “Yo, wassup Felon!”
Another letter was from “your nigga John-Jay,” who was kind enough to write: “To my bitches, I love ya’ll.”
Later I came across a magazine called F.E.D.S., which professes to be about “convicted criminals--street thugs--music--fashion--film--etc.” The headline “Stop Snitching” was emblazoned on the cover. “Hundreds of kilos of coke,” said another headline, “over a dozen murders,” and “no one flipped.”
What we have here are symptoms of a depressing cultural illness, frequently fatal, that has spread unchecked through much of black America.
The people who are laid low by this illness don’t snitch on criminals, seldom marry, frequently abandon their children, refer to themselves in the vilest terms (niggers, whores, etc.), spend extraordinary amounts of time kicking back in correctional institutions, and generally wallow in the deepest depths of degradation their irresponsible selves can find.
In his new book, “Enough,” which is about the vacuum of leadership and the feverish array of problems that are undermining black Americans, Juan Williams gives us a glimpse of the issue of snitching that has become an obsession with gang members, drug dealers and other predatory lowlifes -- not to mention the editors of magazines aimed at the felonious mainstream.
“In October 2002,” he writes, “the living hell caused by crime in the black community burst into flames in Baltimore. A black mother of five testified against a Northeast Baltimore drug dealer. The next day her row house was fire-bombed. She managed to put out the flames that time. Two weeks later, at 2 a.m. as the family slept, the house was set on fire again. This time the drug dealer broke open the front door and took care in splashing gasoline on the lone staircase that provided exit for people asleep in the second- and third-floor bedrooms.
“Angela Dawson, the 36-year-old mother, and her five children, aged 9 to 14, burned to death. Her husband, Carnell, 43, jumped from a second-story window. He had burns over most of his body and died a few days later.”
If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast. As Mr. Williams writes, “Something terrible has happened.”
When was it that the proud tradition of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, gave way to glossy felon magazines and a shameful silence in the face of nationally organized stop-snitching campaigns?
In an interview, Mr. Williams said: “There are so many things that we know are indicators of a crisis within the community. When you look at the high dropout rate, especially among our boys. Or the out-of-wedlock birthrate, which is really alarming. Or the high rate of incarceration.
“When you hear boys saying it’s a ‘rite of passage’ to go to jail, or the thing that is so controversial but has been going on for a while -- kids telling other kids that if they’re trying to do well in school they’re trying to ‘act better than me,’ or ‘trying to act white’ -- all of these are indications of a culture of failure. These are things that undermine a child or an individual who is trying to do better for himself or herself. These are things that drag you down.”
Enough, in Mr. Williams’s view, is enough. His book is a cry for a new generation of African-American leadership at all levels to fill the vacuum left by those who, for whatever reasons, abandoned the tradition of struggle, hard-won pride and self-determination. That absence of leadership has led to an onslaught of crippling, self-destructive behavior.
Mr. Williams does not deny for a moment the continued debilitating effects of racism. But racism is not taking the same toll it took a half-century ago. It is up to blacks themselves to embrace the current opportunities for academic achievement and professional advancement, to build the strong families that allow youngsters to flourish, and to create a cultural environment that turns its back on crime, ignorance and self-abasement.
More blacks are leading successful lives now than ever before. But too many, especially among the young, are caught in a crucible of failure and degradation. This needs to change. Enough is enough.
By ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA
New York Times, 2007-04-12
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 2007-05-16
Bureaucracy, Politics Beat Back Succession of Superintendents and Plans
By April Witt
Washington Post, 2007-06-11
[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]
Over the years [in Washington, DC],
opaque school finances allowed corrupt officials to
engage in bogus business deals,
take kickbacks and
create phony invoices and contract with fictitious firms to raid city coffers
[i.e., engage in financial fraud],
court records show.
Prosecutors Claimed Action Was Willful
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post, 2007-06-22
What’s ‘frivolous’ is his attitude.
Washington Post Editorial, 2007-06-23
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post Op-Ed Column, 2007-12-25
[This op-ed column, by one of the Post’s regular liberal columnists,
gives an overview of some of the fraud, some quite large,
committed by District of Columbia government employees
that has been uncovered in the last six months.
And that’s just the fraud that has been uncovered.
(It’s also worth noting that
about 90 percent of the District of Columbia’s voters are Democrats;
further, government employees in general
are more heavily Democratic than the general population.)
But fraud is not restricted to any one party, race, creed, or sex.
Doubtless much of the fraud uncovered
on Wall Street and among corporate executives
is committed by white male Republicans.
The point is this:
It seems nothing short of insanity
to deny the 100 percent certainty
that vote fraud exists, and is a real problem.
If it isn’t frequently caught, that, I suspect, is because
it leaves no paper trail as financial frauds almost invariably do,
no trail of checks, authorizations, and invoices that may be audited.
Much of the Democratic elite argues against requiring photo ID’s for voting.
I suspect that they know as well as I do
that much of the Democratic electorate
feels so “victimized” by society
that they feel that vote fraud is their entitlement,
their way of empowering themselves --
just as the many fraudsters in the DC government
rationalized their behavior in their own mind.
Let us hope that the Supreme Court justices,
in their upcoming ruling
on the constitutionality of requiring photo IDs for voting,
have more respect for integrity and the principle of “one man, one vote”
than the Democratic “elite” and their media allies do.]
So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
New York Times, 2007-12-30
CAMDEN, N.J. —
When her 16-year-old son was shot dead on a street corner here in June,
Rosalynn Glasco became the latest mother
left to search for justice in
a world without witnesses —
where the stigma of being seen as a snitch or the fear of retaliation
prevents many from testifying about even the worst crimes.
...
By JIMMY CARTER and JAMES A. BAKER III
New York Times Op-Ed, 2008-02-03
McCain Campaign Accuses ACORN of Voter Fraud, Highlights Ties to Obama
By Steven A. Holmes and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post, 2008-10-14
[The photo caption (as follows)
mentions a name which does not appear in the story itself.]
Freddie Johnson,
who said he signed 73 voter-registration forms over five months for ACORN,
speaks in Cleveland.
By MICHAEL FALCONE and MICHAEL MOSS
New York Times, 2008-10-24
[Its beginning; emphasis is added.]
[1]
On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn
and an affiliated charity called Project Vote
announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters.
But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration,
and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide
is closer to 450,000,
Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
[2]
The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address
and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials
for a variety of reasons, including
duplicate registrations,
incomplete forms and
fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers
trying to please their supervisors,
Mr. Slater acknowledged.
[How does he know what was the motivation
for those who submitted fraudulent applications?
Is it not likely (although no doubt hard to prove)
that some of them were from partisans eager to swing the election
by any means necessary?]
...
Over the last few weeks,
the Acorn registration drive has become a flash point in the campaign
when the flood of new voter registrations
prompted complaints from election officials
about the high number of improper submissions.
State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states.
...
Mr. Slater and Acorn officials have defended their voter registration work.
They said that it remained technically difficult to weed out duplications
without better access to election records,
and that their internal auditing
identified many of the fraudulent registrations,
which they flagged for election officials to review.
By Laura Vozzella
Washington Post, 2012-07-26
by Byron York
Washington Examiner, 2012-08-07
In the eyes of the Obama administration, most Democratic lawmakers, and left-leaning editorial pages across the country, voter fraud is a problem that doesn’t exist. Allegations of fraud, they say, are little more than pretexts conjured up by Republicans to justify voter ID laws designed to suppress Democratic turnout.
That argument becomes much harder to make after reading a discussion of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race in “Who’s Counting?”, a new book by conservative journalist John Fund and former Bush Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky. Although the authors cover the whole range of voter fraud issues, their chapter on Minnesota is enough to convince any skeptic that there are times when voter fraud not only exists but can be critical to the outcome of a critical race.
In the ‘08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.
Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman’s lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.
During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.
...
By Ben Pershing
Washington Post, 2012-09-10
A Maryland Democratic candidate quit her congressional race Monday
after her own party told state officials that
she had committed fraud
by voting in both Maryland and Florida in recent elections.
...
by Brian Hughes
Washington Examiner, 2012-09-10
...
Democratic sources told The Washington Examiner
they were tipped off to the voting irregularity over the weekend
and confronted Rosen on Monday morning.
Senior Democrats then asked for Rosen's resignation,
and she agreed to bow out of the race.
Rosen did not return calls for comment on Monday
but told the Baltimore Sun that
she registered to vote in Florida
to support a friend running for St. Petersburg City Council.
...
after allegations she voted in two states
By Matthew Hay Brown
The Baltimore Sun, 2012-09-14
...
Democratic leaders —
who raised the allegations, urged Rosen to step aside and notified prosecutors —
said they would gather Central Committee members this month
to identify a write-in candidate for the district,
which includes the Eastern Shore
and parts of Harford, Carroll, Cecil and Baltimore counties.
Republicans, meanwhile, said
the allegations prove that voter fraud is real
and called on Democrats to join the GOP in calling for reforms.
Rosen, 57, a Cockeysville businesswoman and Maryland voter,
told The Baltimore Sun that
she registered to vote in Florida several years ago
in order to support a "very close friend" running for the St. Petersburg City Council
and to vote on local issues there.
Rosen said she was able to register in Florida because she owned property there.
Under Maryland law,
a voter here may not maintain registration in a second state
if it allows the voter to participate in state or federal elections there,
according to Jared DeMarinis,
director of candidacy and campaign finance at the State Board of Elections.
State Democratic Chairwoman Yvette Lewis said
an examination of voting records in Maryland and Florida showed that
Rosen participated in the 2006 general election and the 2008 primaries in both states.
Maryland and Florida both held
gubernatorial and congressional contests in 2006
and presidential primaries in 2008,
when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
competed for the Democratic nomination.
Asked by The Sun on Monday
if she had voted in both states in the same elections,
Rosen said she did not remember how she voted.
Asked if she had voted twice in the 2008 presidential primaries,
she declined to comment "due to possible litigation."
...
Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary Magazine, 2012-09-12
For most of this year, Democrats have been furiously asserting that Voter ID laws are not only racist but also unnecessary. They have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to make the case that requiring someone to present proof of their identity or citizenship while attempting to vote is the moral equivalent of segregationist “Jim Crow” laws. That is patently false, but they have also claimed that efforts to curb cheating in elections are not needed because there is no such thing as voter fraud in the United States. But apparently one Democratic congressional candidate didn’t get the memo.
Wendy Rosen, the Democrat who was nominated to run in Maryland’s 1stCongressional District, withdrew from the race against a Republican incumbent after it was revealed that she had personally committed vote fraud in 2008. Apparently, Rosen voted in both Maryland and in Florida in both 2006 and 2008. Voting in more than one state is just one form of such fraud, but it is both easy and possibly quite commonplace. But as a candidate, Rosen’s double dip was discovered and now the Democrats are stuck without a viable candidate in the district since it is no longer possible for them to put someone else on the ballot. But the issue here is bigger than their already dim prospects for taking the seat or even whether Rosen will be, as she should be, subjected to prosecution. It is the absurdity of Democrats around the nation spending months telling us that such fraud is unheard of when not only is it quite common but also was committed by one of their own candidates.
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post, 2012-10-02
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post, 2013-04-25
[If people employed in positions of responsibility,
such as elementary school staff members,
are willing to tamper with student tests,
why on earth should any sane person believe that they, and others like them,
are not willing to commit voter fraud?
That hardly seems to be a greater ethical violation
than falsely improving students test scores,
which gives everyone a false picture of how much the student actually knows.
For Mathews' October 2013 follow-up on this situation, click here.]
The Meridian Public Charter School is a well-regarded institution serving students in preschool through eighth grade on 13th Street between V and W streets in Northwest Washington. Nearly all of its 531 students are black or Hispanic. Eighty-seven percent are from low-income families. The student body’s reading and math proficiency rates are about 15 percentage points above the city average.
But now the school’s record has been tarnished: The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE, pronounced aw-see) says that teachers or administrators at Meridian likely changed answers on student tests to improve the school’s results.
This is the first D.C. school, traditional public or charter, to be cited by official investigators for cheating based on abnormal numbers of test erasures, changing wrong answers to the correct ones. It’s about time. Until now, investigators hired by OSSE and the D.C. public schools – in addition to the D.C. Inspector General — to probe potential cheating have largely ignored wrong-to-right erasures or accepted school officials’ assurances that the students themselves made the corrections.
Meridian’s chairman, Christopher Siddall, said Wednesday that the school has hired a law firm to determine who was responsible for the erasures. The school also has hired a consulting firm to oversee security during the 2013 D.C. standardized tests underway there this week.
The case against Meridian could cause trouble for other D.C. schools whose student tests have shown wrong-to-right erasures on the same scale or greater than Meridian but who were given a pass.
On April 12, OSSE released a report by the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal revealing that 11 city schools, including Meridian, had such egregious test security violations on the 2012 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams that many scores were thrown out. At Meridian, all scores were invalidated in five classrooms — a fourth grade and two fifth and sixth grades.
As in previous investigations, Alvarez & Marsal focused on teachers and proctors who defined words and pointed out the right answers to students during exams. It found examples of that behavior at Meridian and other schools, some reported by students. All were declared violations of the District’s test security rules.
But for the first time in any D.C. cheating investigation, the investigators also said that the sheer number of wrong-to-right erasures at Meridian showed “strong circumstantial evidence” that the erasures “occurred at the school level and not at the classroom level.” The erasures themselves violated the city’s rules, the investigators said.
At Meridian, the report said, “1,804 answers were changed from wrong to right,” calling it “one of the highest levels”of such erasures in the city. Meridian had 227 students take the DC-CAS, putting the average number of wrong-to-right erasures per child at about eight. The average per child on the same exams in other D.C. schools was less than one.
...
By Colbert I. King
Washington Post, 2013-09-13
In some circles, it’s called “getting over on.”
It means using a situation to your advantage,
even if doing so is unethical.
In our city, getting over on the D.C. government — and, by extension, taxpayers —
is a flourishing industry.
The scope is sickening.
In the past few months, about 30 people have been arrested or indicted
or have pleaded guilty and gone to prison
for getting over on
the D.C. Department of Employment Services,
the Department of Human Services,
the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp., a city-owned hospital,
the Office of Campaign Finance,
D.C. Medicaid, the Corrections Department, a charter school and Medicare.
The amount of money embezzled, accepted in bribes, defrauded
or spent on illegal political campaign contributions? Nearly $19 million.
Mind you, those figures are based on records of arrests and convictions since June.
They don’t include efforts to get over on federal campaign finance laws.
This week,
a man pleaded guilty to federal charges of failing to report
more than $600,000 that his New York company received
to be spent on behalf of a 2008 presidential campaign.
The source of the unreported funds is widely believed to be
D.C. businessman Jeffrey Thompson,
who is thought to figure prominently in
the corruption of the District’s 2010 mayoral campaign.
All of this comes even after
former D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5)
pleaded guilty to lining his pockets with more than $350,000 in taxpayer money
meant to benefit children;
former council chairman Kwame Brown (D)
pleaded guilty to a felony bank fraud charge; and
former council member Michael A. Brown (D-At Large)
admitted embarking on an illegal bribery scheme.
...
[But none of the Democratic electorate would ever consider committing vote fraud.
Right.
When King writes
but never electoral advantage.
Right.
And the PC media, including in particular the Washington Post editorial board
continues to claim that because vote fraud is rarely caught,
therefore it must not exist.
What a sorry bunch of deceiving sons of bitches such editorial boards are.
Sneering masters of deceit, promoting corrupted elections.]
By Emma Brown
Washington Post, 2013-10-02
[For the relevance of this story, in my opinion, to the subject of voter fraud,
see my comments at the end of the article.]
Options Public Charter School was founded to improve the fortunes of the District’s most troubled teens and students with disabilities, and the District government sent millions of taxpayer dollars to the school each year for their education and care.
D.C. officials alleged in a lawsuit Tuesday that three former managers at the Northeast Washington school diverted at least $3 million of that money to enrich themselves, engaging in a “pattern of self-dealing” that was part of an elaborate contracting scam. The civil case alleges that the managers created two for-profit companies to provide services to Options at high prices, sometimes with the help of a senior official at the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Those companies won lucrative contracts for bus transportation and school management and were paid for services that went undocumented or that were performed by school employees, according to the complaint and supporting documents. The Options managers allegedly received “exorbitant” bonuses shortly before they resigned this summer to run the companies full-time.
The managers were allegedly aided by the chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees at the time — WUSA (Channel 9) vice president and news personality J.C. Hayward — and the senior charter school official, who was responsible for charter-school financial oversight across the city. Documents filed with the court papers show that the signature of Hayward, who allegedly helped incorporate one of the companies, appears to be on some of the expensive contracts. The three ex-managers, their companies, Hayward and the charter-school board official were all named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Hayward told Channel 9 that she did nothing wrong, but she has been relieved of her duties pending further investigation, according to a news report from the station. Hayward and WUSA’s general manager did not return calls from The Washington Post to their offices seeking comment Tuesday.
Donna Montgomery, former chief executive of Options and president of the two for-profit companies, said in a statement that no public funds were misused and that all contracts and payments “were disclosed and vetted by a variety of third parties, including the Options Board, outside auditors and the D.C. Public Charter School Board.”
“People tend to believe allegations like these are true when the facts are otherwise,” Montgomery said in a statement provided by Jeff Smith, who worked at Options until July and now is director of public affairs at one of Montgomery’s companies. “This is unfortunate for the Options School and its staff, me and my team but, most of all, the students.”
Options, an institution meant to change the lives of the city’s neediest children, served as a “cash-generating machine,” according to D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan, who has asked the D.C. Superior Court to appoint a receiver to oversee the school.
Criminal prosecutors are aware of the allegations and “will review all pertinent information as we continue our review of this matter,” said Bill Miller, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board said there are no systemic problems with charter-school finances. The board has financial oversight of the city’s fast-growing charter schools, which now enroll more than 40 percent of District students and receive more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer money each year.
“We see this as an event that is very much specific to Options, and we are pretty proud of the level of oversight that we have in general,” said Darren Woodruff, the board’s vice chairman. “We’re confident that this is something that is not going to be an issue beyond this one school.”
Staff members for the charter board have recommended that Options close, and board members expect to vote on initiating that process at a meeting scheduled for Oct. 16. Scott Pearson, executive director of the charter schools’ board, said the school will remain open through the end of this school year in any case.
Options, founded in 1996, is the city’s oldest charter school. It enrolls about 400 at-risk students in middle and high school; most of them have disabilities, and many are homeless or have been through the juvenile justice system.
Parents who were outside Options at dismissal time Tuesday said they were surprised to learn about the allegations and worried about what might happen to their children if the school closes.
“All I want is for my child to get his education,” said Alanda Bucey, the mother of a student who was kicked out of his last school.
The city charter board launched an investigation of Options on Aug. 19, days after The Washington Post submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking contracts between the school and two for-profit companies founded and controlled by its managers: Exceptional Education Management Corp. (EEMC) and Exceptional Education Services (EES).
Those contracts and other payments to the companies — including a $2.8 million contract signed in February for management services — are at the heart of the District’s case.
Shortly before that contract was signed, the school allegedly projected that its annual revenue would grow by 25 percent — or $2.8 million — because of growth in the number of special education students with the most intensive needs, who also bring with them more city money: $28,284 each on top of the regular per-pupil funding of about $9,000.
Options also agreed to pay EES hundreds of thousands of dollars for bus transportation services. Though Options had paid a previous contractor $70,000 for bus services, it paid EES $981,250, according to a sworn declaration from a forensic accountant who examined the schools’ records for the charter schools board.
Montgomery presented herself as a school official when a Washington Post reporter and photographer visited Options in May. By then, according to contracts obtained by The Post via FOIA, Montgomery had already signed at least two lucrative contracts with the school, one as the chief executive of EES in September 2012 and another as the chief executive of EEMC last February. Montgomery and the other managers left the school in July.
In the court complaint, D.C. officials allege that the managers’ salaries were far out of line with what public officials make, especially given the size of the school.
Montgomery’s “salary and bonuses from Options PCS during a one-year period — at least $425,000 combined — totaled more than the salary of the President of the United States and more than twice the salary of the Mayor of the District of Columbia, even though Options PCS is a small school whose revenue comes mostly from public school funding,” the complaint says.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson earns a base salary of $275,000 to run a school system of about 45,000 students, according to her employment contract.
Hayward, who is widely known as a four-decade veteran of the news business in the Washington area, allegedly “substantially assisted” the scheme by authorizing bonuses and signing contracts with EEMC and EES in her role as chairman of the Options board of trustees, according to the lawsuit.
Jeremy L. Williams, who was the chief financial officer of the D.C. Public Charter School Board until Aug. 21, also allegedly aided the scheme. He “regularly forwarded confidential, internal” e-mails to the three managers, including e-mails alerting them to a planned inspection of Options that was meant to be a surprise, according to court documents.
Williams, who also served on Options’s board of trustees, also allegedly maneuvered to ensure that EEMC’s largest contract, for $2.8 million, would not be reviewed by charter board staff members before it was approved. He is now EEMC’s chief financial officer, according to the lawsuit. Williams did not return calls to his office and home Tuesday.
Molly Evans, a former Options teacher who quit in the spring in part because she felt the school was not providing students with legally required special education services, said she was concerned that the city charter board “could not see past all the charades Options put up.”
A charter board spokeswoman said the board acted quickly when it learned of potential irregularities at Options in August, notifying the city’s attorney general and hiring the forensic accountant. In July, after a study of charter school finances, the board announced that it found “no pattern of fiscal mismanagement” at Options in fiscal 2012.
Charter schools board staff members plan to introduce changes to the contract oversight process at the board’s October meeting, said Theola Labbe-DeBose, a board spokeswoman.
“We take all complaints and tips seriously,” Labbe-DeBose said. “And always, we will continue to work to improve our oversight to identify conflict-of-interest issues.”
[With the widely-reported allegations (in this case)
and convictions (in many other cases,
some of which are cited in the column of Colby King above)
of financial corruption in overwhelmingly Democratic District of Columbia,
not to mention other reports of fraud throughout the country,
how on earth can Democratic politicians and media editorial boards,
e.g. at the Washington Post and New York Times,
claim that the population
which all too often commits financial fraud to increase their financial situation
would never dream of committing voter fraud to further their political situation?
That's real insanity.]
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post, 2013-10-06
[I repeat my comment on Mathews initial article on this problem:
If people employed in positions of responsibility,
such as elementary school staff members,
are willing to tamper with student tests,
why on earth should any sane person believe that they, and others like them,
are not willing to commit voter fraud?
That hardly seems to be a greater ethical violation
than falsely improving students test scores,
which gives everyone a false picture of how much the student actually knows.]
Here is another report on the presence of relevant fraud in America:
IRS 2013-09-20 Inspector General Report on Tax Return Identity Theft
See also a summary news article at USA Today
and this story from the International Business Times.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
The Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, refunded about $3.6 billion in the 2011 tax year to people claiming fraudulent refunds under false identities
...
Of the 1.2 million fraudulent claims that went undetected by the IRS,
1.1 million, or 93 percent, came from electronic filings of tax returns
according to the review
...
The top five cities in the U.S., which claimed undetected tax returns using a SSN --
according to mailing address records --
were Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston,
while most of the fraudulent ITIN [Individual Taxpayer Identification Number]-linked returns
were traced back to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston, Chicago and Phoenix.
...
[Just for comparison, the following table shows the vote tallies in those cities in the 2012 presidential election.]
[Just to belabor the point:
Four of “the top five cities in the U.S. which claimed undetected tax returns using a SSN”
voted heavily Democratic in the 2012 presidential election.
What does that tell you about why the Washington Post editorial page
argues so strenuously (e.g., “Texas holds ’em voteless with new ID law”)
that voter fraud is "insignificant"?
I think the reason is quite clear:
They know damn well that voter fraud is rampant.
It's just that it favors Democrats, whom they generally support.
I.e., the Washington Post is simply running a cover operation for Democrat-favoring voter fraud.]
Judicial Watch Press Release, 2016-08-08
‘This is especially important because of the lack of interest of the Obama Justice Department in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud’ – from attached pre-release chapter of Clean House
(Washington, DC) – A soon-to-be-released book by New York Times bestselling author Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton warns that America may now be facing the greatest voter fraud danger in recent history. And it lays the blame for the crisis directly at the feet of President Barack Obama and his Justice Department.
The book – Clean House (to be released August 30 from Simon & Schuster/Threshold Editions) – cites examples nationwide of attempts by the Obama Justice Department to thwart efforts to clean up voter rolls, require voter ID at the polls, and prevent voter intimidation. In a chapter titled “Voter Fraud – Stealing Elections – The Danger of Voter Fraud and the Fight for Election Integrity,” Fitton describes major legal battles to protect voter integrity in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland, and Indiana.
...
By Erich Wagner
Alexandria Times, 2016-11-04
Lawsuit on behalf of Marylanders compared jury pools
by Rowan Scarborough
Washington Times, 2017-03-19
The debate over noncitizens voting was a hot topic a few years ago in Frederick County, a prosperous Maryland suburb wedged between Washington’s urban metropolis and the state’s rural western gateway to the rest of America.
Conservative activists went to court to show that noncitizens were registering fraudulently to vote. A court employee met their request by turning over pages of residents’ names disqualified from jury duty because of alien status.
When those lists were compared with voting records for just three years — 2007, 2008 and 2011 — nearly 180 noncitizens were found to have registered to vote. Of those, 63 had voted, some in multiple elections. The 180 registered votes came from 1,400 disqualified noncitizens in those three years, a rate of 12.8 percent.
The issue of noncitizen voters has taken on national importance. President Trump, who said 3 million or so voted illegally in November, plans to name a federal task force to investigate.
Frederick County’s numbers offer a limited snapshot from a handful of jury pools, but they indicate that noncitizens are registered to vote and are casting ballots in states, which administer federal, state and local elections.
“Obviously, there are people on the voting rolls who have no business being on the voter rolls,” said conservative activist Daniel M. Gray, a lawyer who filed the lawsuit. “What needs to be determined is how extensive is this.
How many noncitizens weren’t summoned for jury duty and went ahead and voted?”
[A very good question.]
...
State Delegate Haven N. Shoemaker Jr., Carroll County Republican,
has introduced in the Maryland General Assembly the Voter Registration Integrity Act.
It would require
the jury commissioner and elections clerks to communicate with each other —
something Mr. Shoemaker says they have not been doing.
The jury commissioners would provide lists of those who have been excused for noncitizenship,
and elections officials would cross-check voter rolls and take steps to remove any names that appear.
“It seems like common sense to me,” he said.
“Because we have motor-voter in Maryland, you can go to MVA and register to vote there.
And all you have to do is check a box that says you are a United States citizen.”
How many noncitizens vote in Maryland?
“We don’t know,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “No one keeps statistics on that.”
Maryland does not ask voters for ID at the polls.
Mr. Shoemaker said the chances are slim that the Democrat-controlled assembly will pass his bill.
The Democratic Party nationally embraces illegal immigrants
by supporting sanctuary cities
and providing driver’s licenses and access to welfare benefits to aliens.
While Registered in Maryland
Krishanti Vignarajah has been registered to vote in D.C. and Maryland since 2010
By Andrew Metcalf
Bethesda Magazine, 2017-08-09
voter fraud and requiring photo IDs for voting.
The reaction of the liberal media (which certainly includes most of it) is
first,
voter fraud doesn’t exist (or at least has never been proved to exist)
and second,
requiring photo IDs for voting is an onerous and undue burden
on the poor, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled.
A typical example is 2007-03-16-NYT,
which asserts that Republican-sponsored voter ID requirements
were designed to make it hard for
people who lack drivers’ licenses —
who are disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minorities —
to vote.
Why should we believe that voter fraud doesn’t exist, probably rampantly?
In every sector of society, fraud does exist.
Some of it is found, publicized, and sometimes punished through legal or administrative action.
Examples include
- stock market frauds
- frauds at all levels and in all sectors of government contracting, transportation being a commonly-observed example
- kickback schemes and graft.
Further, these frauds have and continue to exist despite vigorous and widely-publicized efforts to stamp them out and punish those who are caught.
Now, if white-collar frauds exist,
despite the often high income of the perpetrators
and the law-enforcement efforts against them,
why should anyone in their right mind think that
partisan operatives would not try to commit fraud to gain partisan advantage?
Here are two excerpts from the chapter titled “Voter Fraud”
in Cleaning House by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton.
The first excerpt is from its section titled “Voter ID—Rhetoric vs. Reality”,
from page 122 to 124.
Allegations of fraud are a regular feature of every election cycle, and fraud does sway elections.
For those who care to look, there is a steady stream of stories concerning electoral fraud of various kinds.
But the justification for voter ID does not depend on establishing the existence of fraud.
It is enough that fraud should not be permitted, and that the opportunity to commit such fraud exists.
That there is an opportunity is clear.
To begin with, vote fraud is both hard to spot and hard to prove.
Particularly where it is successful, vote fraud may never be detected.
For example, without an ID requirement the authorities are unlikely to discover that someone has voted on the still-valid registration of his friend who has moved out of state.
Even where vote fraud is detected, successful prosecution remains unlikely.
There may be no way to track down a perpetrator where, for example, authorities often have nothing but a bogus signature on a poll book or a bogus registration or absentee ballot form.
Too many prosecutors are not interested in pursuing these types of cases because they represent a low priority compared to other crimes or will incur political costs.
The typical argument we hear from the Obama [44] administration and other leftists is that voter ID laws discourage minorities, young people, and the elderly from voting.
Yet, we know from reputable surveys that the common sense use of photo ID is supported by every demographic group in American.
Two-thirds of African-Americans support it; two-thirds of Hispanics; two-thirds of liberals; and even two-thirds of those who consider themselves to be Democrats.
There is simply no evidence to support the contention that the requirement to show a photo ID
(which are provided for free in every state with such a requirement [Is that really so?]) discourages legitimate voters from voting.
In fact, in states such as Indiana and Georgia where photo ID requirements have been in place for almost a decade [relative to 2016], studies show that voter turnout has actually increased.
Photo IDs are part and parcel of living in a modern society.
We have to show a photo ID to fly on a plane, cash a check, purchase prescription drugs, and to enter federal and private office buildings—including the US Department of Justice in Washington, where the Obama administration has directed its mostly unsuccessful (I wish!) attacks voter ID laws.
South Carolina beat the Justice Department in a court fight, when former Attorney General Eric Holder tried to stop the state from implementing its law.
That is why Judicial Watch has worked hard to defend states that have implemented voter ID laws.
For example we filed in amicus brief (a “friend of the court” brief) in Pennsylvania on behalf of state legislators like Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who was the author and driving force behind that state’s voter ID bill.
Nearly half of the members of the legislature who supported the bill were signed on to the Judicial Watch brief.
Pennsylvania’s law was typical of the type of law passed by most states.
It allowed voters to use a Pennsylvania driver’s license or other government-issued photo ID, such as a passport, military ID or government employee ID.
It provided a free ID at no cost and it allowed an individual without identification to cast a “provisional” ballot that would be counted if the identity of the voter could be confirmed within six days of the election.
As we argued in our brief, the “legislature did no more than exercise its sound discretion and create common sense regulatory scheme to secure free and equal elections.”
Although the law was upheld in the lower state courts, it was overturned in a clearly politically biased decision by a higher court.
The decentralized nature of our electoral laws and enforcement activity, our national mobility, and the nature of our demographics also create opportunities for voter fraud.
In 2012, the Pew Research Center on the States released an astonishing report
[“Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient:
Evidence That America's Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade”]
noting that
“[a]pproximately 2.75 million people have an active registration in more than one state.”
That same report observed that
“20 million—one of every eight—active voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate,” and that
“[m]ore than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as active voters.”
Those extra registrations are the basic resource needed to steal votes.
It is highly likely that election results in recent years were affected by errors, inaccuracies, and outright crimes.
What possible explanation can there be for the fact that in many U.S. counties there are more registered voters than there are residents?
Judicial Watch found this to be the case all across the country, including in Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Perhaps election officials who don’t maintain clean voter lists share the viewpoint of the chair of the Illinois Board of Elections, who said
“there’s nothing we can do about any of this because
we don’t have any money to stop the fraud.”
[Reported in
“With USJF Support, Defend the Vote Testifies To Illinois Election Board”.]
The second excerpt from the chapter titled “Voter Fraud”
in Cleaning House by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton
is from its section titled “Are Aliens Stealing Our Election?”
(I presume he is not talking about ET :-)
on page 133.
In 2014, a disturbing study was release by political scientists at Old Dominion University.
[“Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?”
by Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, David C. Earnest,
Electoral Studies, Volume 36, December 2014, pages 149-157
(see page 153 for this particular statistic).]
Their work showed that
a significant percentage of foreign nationals residing in the United States,
whether lawfully or unlawfully present,
were registered to vote in U.S. elections—
and that a significant number of them actually have voted in recent years—
6.4 percent in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2010.
That is enough to have swayed election outcomes in some states:
“there is reason to believe non-citizen voting
changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008,
delivering North Carolina to Obama,
and that non-citizen votes have also led to
Democratic victories in congressional races
including a critical 2008 Senate race [in Minnesota]
that delivered for Democrats
a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.”
It is, of course, illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections.
But this study suggests that hundreds of thousands of illegal votes
may have been cast in the United States in every federal election.
If this study’s results are accurate, the implications are startling.
We have Obamacare because of election fraud.
...
2005-01-25-WP
Democratic Activists Face Chargesfrom the Associated Press
Washington Post, 2005-01-25
[Emphasis is added.]
MILWAUKEE, Jan. 24 --
The sons of a first-term congresswoman and of Milwaukee’s former acting mayor
were among five Democratic activists charged Monday with
slashing the tires of vans rented by Republicans
to drive voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day.
Sowande Omokunde, 25, son of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), and
Michael Pratt, 32, son of former Milwaukee acting mayor Marvin Pratt,
were among those charged with criminal damage to property,
a felony that carries a maximum punishment of 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
The activists are accused of
flattening the tires on 25 vehicles rented by the state Republican Party
to get out the vote and deliver poll watchers Nov. 2.
Also charged were
Lewis Caldwell, 28, and Lavelle Mohammad, 35, both from Milwaukee,
and Justin J. Howell, 20, of Racine.
[The resolution of the charge, a plea of no contest, is mentioned here.]
Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Seth Boffeli said
the five were paid employees
of the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)
but were not acting on behalf of the campaign or party.
[Maybe so, but their intent was clearly
to alter the election results to their partisan advantage.]
2006-01-26-WP
Democratic presidential campaign workers punctured tiresWashington Post, 2006-01-26
[The full story that appeared in the “Nation in Brief” section of the WP:]
Four Democratic presidential campaign workers pleaded no contest
to charges that they punctured the tires of 25 vehicles
Republicans had intended to use to get out the vote on Election Day 2004.
Those agreeing to the misdemeanor plea were
Sowande A. Omokunde, son of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.);
Michael Pratt, son of former acting Milwaukee mayor Marvin Pratt; and
Lewis Caldwell and Lavelle Mohammad, both from Milwaukee.
Justin Howell was acquitted.
2006-04-26-Milwaukee-Journal-Sentinel
4 get jail in election day tire slashingJudge says probation doesn’t atone for crime
By MEG JONES
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2006-04-26
Tossing aside a plea agreement that called for probation, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Michael B. Brennan sentenced four Democratic Party workers to jail Wednesday for slashing tires on 25 vans rented by Republicans to take voters to polls for the 2004 presidential election.
Calling the vandalism more than harmless hijinks,
Brennan admonished the men,
including the sons of two prominent Milwaukee politicians,
for disenfranchising voters.
The judge said he had received letters from county residents upset over the crime.
“They see you tampering with something they consider sacred,
and that’s the ballot box,”
Brennan said during a two-hour sentencing.
Michael Pratt, 33, and Lewis Caldwell, 30, were sentenced to six months in jail, while Lavelle Mohammad, 36, got five months and Sowande Omokunde, 26, got four months. Each was also fined $1,000. They have two weeks to report to jail and will be eligible for work release.
Pratt is the son of former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, and Omokunde is the son of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.).
...
“This case has to be an example of what happens
if you interfere in voters’ rights,” Brennan said.
Omokunde [is] a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee senior majoring in political science...
2007-03-16-NYT
Phony Fraud ChargesNew York Times Editorial, 2007-03-16
In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.
In partisan Republican circles,
the pursuit of voter fraud is code for
suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people.
By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,”
the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been
standing up for the integrity of the election system.
John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”
Later, when he interviewed with Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, for a federal judgeship that he ultimately did not get, he says, he was asked to explain “criticism that I mishandled the 2004 governor’s election.”
Mr. McKay is not the only one of the federal attorneys who may have been brought down for refusing to pursue dubious voter fraud cases. Before David Iglesias of New Mexico was fired, prominent New Mexico Republicans reportedly complained repeatedly to Karl Rove about Mr. Iglesias’s failure to indict Democrats for voter fraud. The White House said that last October, just weeks before Mr. McKay and most of the others were fired, President Bush complained that United States attorneys were not pursuing voter fraud aggressively enough.
There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country.
Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations
as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups.
They have intimidated Native American voter registration campaigners in South Dakota with baseless charges of fraud.
They have pushed through harsh voter ID bills
in states like Georgia and Missouri, both blocked by the courts,
that were designed to make it hard for
people who lack drivers’ licenses —
who are disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minorities —
to vote.
Florida passed a law placing such onerous conditions on voter registration drives, which register many members of minorities and poor people, that the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its registration work in the state.
The claims of vote fraud used to promote these measures usually fall apart on close inspection, as Mr. McKay saw. Missouri Republicans have long charged that St. Louis voters, by which they mean black voters, registered as living on vacant lots. But when The St. Louis Post-Dispatch checked, it found that thousands of people lived in buildings on lots that the city had erroneously classified as vacant.
The United States attorney purge appears to have been prompted by an array of improper political motives. Carol Lam, the San Diego attorney, seems to have been fired to stop her from continuing an investigation that put Republican officials and campaign contributors at risk. These charges, like the accusation that Mr. McKay and other United States attorneys were insufficiently aggressive about voter fraud, are a way of saying, without actually saying, that they would not use their offices to help Republicans win elections. It does not justify their firing; it makes their firing a graver offense.
2006-08-24-Herbert
A Triumph Of Felons And FailureBy BOB HERBERT
New York Times, 2006-08-24
I was browsing at a newsstand in Manhattan recently when I came across a magazine called Felon. It was the “Stop Snitchin’ ” issue, and the first letter to the editor began: “Yo, wassup Felon!”
Another letter was from “your nigga John-Jay,” who was kind enough to write: “To my bitches, I love ya’ll.”
Later I came across a magazine called F.E.D.S., which professes to be about “convicted criminals--street thugs--music--fashion--film--etc.” The headline “Stop Snitching” was emblazoned on the cover. “Hundreds of kilos of coke,” said another headline, “over a dozen murders,” and “no one flipped.”
What we have here are symptoms of a depressing cultural illness, frequently fatal, that has spread unchecked through much of black America.
The people who are laid low by this illness don’t snitch on criminals, seldom marry, frequently abandon their children, refer to themselves in the vilest terms (niggers, whores, etc.), spend extraordinary amounts of time kicking back in correctional institutions, and generally wallow in the deepest depths of degradation their irresponsible selves can find.
In his new book, “Enough,” which is about the vacuum of leadership and the feverish array of problems that are undermining black Americans, Juan Williams gives us a glimpse of the issue of snitching that has become an obsession with gang members, drug dealers and other predatory lowlifes -- not to mention the editors of magazines aimed at the felonious mainstream.
“In October 2002,” he writes, “the living hell caused by crime in the black community burst into flames in Baltimore. A black mother of five testified against a Northeast Baltimore drug dealer. The next day her row house was fire-bombed. She managed to put out the flames that time. Two weeks later, at 2 a.m. as the family slept, the house was set on fire again. This time the drug dealer broke open the front door and took care in splashing gasoline on the lone staircase that provided exit for people asleep in the second- and third-floor bedrooms.
“Angela Dawson, the 36-year-old mother, and her five children, aged 9 to 14, burned to death. Her husband, Carnell, 43, jumped from a second-story window. He had burns over most of his body and died a few days later.”
If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast. As Mr. Williams writes, “Something terrible has happened.”
When was it that the proud tradition of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, gave way to glossy felon magazines and a shameful silence in the face of nationally organized stop-snitching campaigns?
In an interview, Mr. Williams said: “There are so many things that we know are indicators of a crisis within the community. When you look at the high dropout rate, especially among our boys. Or the out-of-wedlock birthrate, which is really alarming. Or the high rate of incarceration.
“When you hear boys saying it’s a ‘rite of passage’ to go to jail, or the thing that is so controversial but has been going on for a while -- kids telling other kids that if they’re trying to do well in school they’re trying to ‘act better than me,’ or ‘trying to act white’ -- all of these are indications of a culture of failure. These are things that undermine a child or an individual who is trying to do better for himself or herself. These are things that drag you down.”
Enough, in Mr. Williams’s view, is enough. His book is a cry for a new generation of African-American leadership at all levels to fill the vacuum left by those who, for whatever reasons, abandoned the tradition of struggle, hard-won pride and self-determination. That absence of leadership has led to an onslaught of crippling, self-destructive behavior.
Mr. Williams does not deny for a moment the continued debilitating effects of racism. But racism is not taking the same toll it took a half-century ago. It is up to blacks themselves to embrace the current opportunities for academic achievement and professional advancement, to build the strong families that allow youngsters to flourish, and to create a cultural environment that turns its back on crime, ignorance and self-abasement.
More blacks are leading successful lives now than ever before. But too many, especially among the young, are caught in a crucible of failure and degradation. This needs to change. Enough is enough.
2007-04-12-NYT
In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter FraudBy ERIC LIPTON and IAN URBINA
New York Times, 2007-04-12
2007-05-16-Meyerson
The Cost of a GOP MythBy Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, 2007-05-16
2007-06-11-WP
Worn Down by Waves of ChangeBureaucracy, Politics Beat Back Succession of Superintendents and Plans
By April Witt
Washington Post, 2007-06-11
[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]
Over the years [in Washington, DC],
opaque school finances allowed corrupt officials to
engage in bogus business deals,
take kickbacks and
create phony invoices and contract with fictitious firms to raid city coffers
[i.e., engage in financial fraud],
court records show.
2007-06-22-Barry
Barry Won’t Go to Prison For Late Taxes, Judge RulesProsecutors Claimed Action Was Willful
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post, 2007-06-22
2007-06-23-Barry
Mr. Barry’s Blame GameWhat’s ‘frivolous’ is his attitude.
Washington Post Editorial, 2007-06-23
2007-12-25-Cohen-DC
To Live and Take in D.C.By Richard Cohen
Washington Post Op-Ed Column, 2007-12-25
[This op-ed column, by one of the Post’s regular liberal columnists,
gives an overview of some of the fraud, some quite large,
committed by District of Columbia government employees
that has been uncovered in the last six months.
And that’s just the fraud that has been uncovered.
(It’s also worth noting that
about 90 percent of the District of Columbia’s voters are Democrats;
further, government employees in general
are more heavily Democratic than the general population.)
But fraud is not restricted to any one party, race, creed, or sex.
Doubtless much of the fraud uncovered
on Wall Street and among corporate executives
is committed by white male Republicans.
The point is this:
It seems nothing short of insanity
to deny the 100 percent certainty
that vote fraud exists, and is a real problem.
If it isn’t frequently caught, that, I suspect, is because
it leaves no paper trail as financial frauds almost invariably do,
no trail of checks, authorizations, and invoices that may be audited.
Much of the Democratic elite argues against requiring photo ID’s for voting.
I suspect that they know as well as I do
that much of the Democratic electorate
feels so “victimized” by society
that they feel that vote fraud is their entitlement,
their way of empowering themselves --
just as the many fraudsters in the DC government
rationalized their behavior in their own mind.
Let us hope that the Supreme Court justices,
in their upcoming ruling
on the constitutionality of requiring photo IDs for voting,
have more respect for integrity and the principle of “one man, one vote”
than the Democratic “elite” and their media allies do.]
2007-12-30-NYT-Scared-Silent
Scared Silent:So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
New York Times, 2007-12-30
CAMDEN, N.J. —
When her 16-year-old son was shot dead on a street corner here in June,
Rosalynn Glasco became the latest mother
left to search for justice in
a world without witnesses —
where the stigma of being seen as a snitch or the fear of retaliation
prevents many from testifying about even the worst crimes.
...
2008
2008-02-03-Carter-Baker
A Clearer Picture on Voter IDBy JIMMY CARTER and JAMES A. BAKER III
New York Times Op-Ed, 2008-02-03
2008-10-14-WP-ACORN
GOP Officials Assail Community GroupMcCain Campaign Accuses ACORN of Voter Fraud, Highlights Ties to Obama
By Steven A. Holmes and Mary Pat Flaherty
Washington Post, 2008-10-14
[The photo caption (as follows)
mentions a name which does not appear in the story itself.]
Freddie Johnson,
who said he signed 73 voter-registration forms over five months for ACORN,
speaks in Cleveland.
2008-10-24-NYT-ACORN
Group’s Tally of New Voters Was Vastly OverstatedBy MICHAEL FALCONE and MICHAEL MOSS
New York Times, 2008-10-24
[Its beginning; emphasis is added.]
[1]
On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn
and an affiliated charity called Project Vote
announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters.
But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration,
and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide
is closer to 450,000,
Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.
[2]
The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address
and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials
for a variety of reasons, including
duplicate registrations,
incomplete forms and
fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers
trying to please their supervisors,
Mr. Slater acknowledged.
[How does he know what was the motivation
for those who submitted fraudulent applications?
Is it not likely (although no doubt hard to prove)
that some of them were from partisans eager to swing the election
by any means necessary?]
...
Over the last few weeks,
the Acorn registration drive has become a flash point in the campaign
when the flood of new voter registrations
prompted complaints from election officials
about the high number of improper submissions.
State and local officials have begun investigations into possible fraudulent activity in at least 10 states.
...
Mr. Slater and Acorn officials have defended their voter registration work.
They said that it remained technically difficult to weed out duplications
without better access to election records,
and that their internal auditing
identified many of the fraudulent registrations,
which they flagged for election officials to review.
2012
2012-07-26-WP-Virginia-forms-sent-to-ineligible-voters
Romney campaign seeks criminal probe of forms sent to ineligible votersBy Laura Vozzella
Washington Post, 2012-07-26
2012-08-07-Examiner-York-1099-felons-vote-in-race-won-by-312-ballots
When 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballotsby Byron York
Washington Examiner, 2012-08-07
In the eyes of the Obama administration, most Democratic lawmakers, and left-leaning editorial pages across the country, voter fraud is a problem that doesn’t exist. Allegations of fraud, they say, are little more than pretexts conjured up by Republicans to justify voter ID laws designed to suppress Democratic turnout.
That argument becomes much harder to make after reading a discussion of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race in “Who’s Counting?”, a new book by conservative journalist John Fund and former Bush Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky. Although the authors cover the whole range of voter fraud issues, their chapter on Minnesota is enough to convince any skeptic that there are times when voter fraud not only exists but can be critical to the outcome of a critical race.
In the ‘08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.
Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman’s lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.
During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.
...
2012-09-10-WP-maryland-democrat-quits-congressional-race-amid-vote-fraud-allegations
Maryland Democrat quits congressional race amid vote fraud allegationsBy Ben Pershing
Washington Post, 2012-09-10
A Maryland Democratic candidate quit her congressional race Monday
after her own party told state officials that
she had committed fraud
by voting in both Maryland and Florida in recent elections.
...
2012-09-10-Washington-Examiner-voter-fraud-allegations-sink-maryland-democrats-congressional-bid
Voter fraud allegations sink Maryland Democrat's congressional bidby Brian Hughes
Washington Examiner, 2012-09-10
...
Democratic sources told The Washington Examiner
they were tipped off to the voting irregularity over the weekend
and confronted Rosen on Monday morning.
Senior Democrats then asked for Rosen's resignation,
and she agreed to bow out of the race.
Rosen did not return calls for comment on Monday
but told the Baltimore Sun that
she registered to vote in Florida
to support a friend running for St. Petersburg City Council.
...
2012-09-14-Baltimore-Sun-wendy-rosen-withdraws
Democrat withdraws from 1st District congressional raceafter allegations she voted in two states
By Matthew Hay Brown
The Baltimore Sun, 2012-09-14
...
Democratic leaders —
who raised the allegations, urged Rosen to step aside and notified prosecutors —
said they would gather Central Committee members this month
to identify a write-in candidate for the district,
which includes the Eastern Shore
and parts of Harford, Carroll, Cecil and Baltimore counties.
Republicans, meanwhile, said
the allegations prove that voter fraud is real
and called on Democrats to join the GOP in calling for reforms.
Rosen, 57, a Cockeysville businesswoman and Maryland voter,
told The Baltimore Sun that
she registered to vote in Florida several years ago
in order to support a "very close friend" running for the St. Petersburg City Council
and to vote on local issues there.
Rosen said she was able to register in Florida because she owned property there.
Under Maryland law,
a voter here may not maintain registration in a second state
if it allows the voter to participate in state or federal elections there,
according to Jared DeMarinis,
director of candidacy and campaign finance at the State Board of Elections.
State Democratic Chairwoman Yvette Lewis said
an examination of voting records in Maryland and Florida showed that
Rosen participated in the 2006 general election and the 2008 primaries in both states.
Maryland and Florida both held
gubernatorial and congressional contests in 2006
and presidential primaries in 2008,
when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
competed for the Democratic nomination.
Asked by The Sun on Monday
if she had voted in both states in the same elections,
Rosen said she did not remember how she voted.
Asked if she had voted twice in the 2008 presidential primaries,
she declined to comment "due to possible litigation."
...
2012-09-12-Commentary-not-getting-the-democrat-memo-on-voter-fraud-voter
Not Getting the Dem Memo on Voter FraudJonathan S. Tobin
Commentary Magazine, 2012-09-12
For most of this year, Democrats have been furiously asserting that Voter ID laws are not only racist but also unnecessary. They have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to make the case that requiring someone to present proof of their identity or citizenship while attempting to vote is the moral equivalent of segregationist “Jim Crow” laws. That is patently false, but they have also claimed that efforts to curb cheating in elections are not needed because there is no such thing as voter fraud in the United States. But apparently one Democratic congressional candidate didn’t get the memo.
Wendy Rosen, the Democrat who was nominated to run in Maryland’s 1stCongressional District, withdrew from the race against a Republican incumbent after it was revealed that she had personally committed vote fraud in 2008. Apparently, Rosen voted in both Maryland and in Florida in both 2006 and 2008. Voting in more than one state is just one form of such fraud, but it is both easy and possibly quite commonplace. But as a candidate, Rosen’s double dip was discovered and now the Democrats are stuck without a viable candidate in the district since it is no longer possible for them to put someone else on the ballot. But the issue here is bigger than their already dim prospects for taking the seat or even whether Rosen will be, as she should be, subjected to prosecution. It is the absurdity of Democrats around the nation spending months telling us that such fraud is unheard of when not only is it quite common but also was committed by one of their own candidates.
2012-10-02-WP-Fahrenthold-selling-votes-is-common-type-of-election-fraud
Selling votes is common type of election fraudBy David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post, 2012-10-02
2013
2013-04-25-WP-Mathews-surprise-dc-admits-school-test-tampering-at-meridian-public-charter
Surprise! D.C. admits school test tampering at Meridian Public CharterBy Jay Mathews
Washington Post, 2013-04-25
[If people employed in positions of responsibility,
such as elementary school staff members,
are willing to tamper with student tests,
why on earth should any sane person believe that they, and others like them,
are not willing to commit voter fraud?
That hardly seems to be a greater ethical violation
than falsely improving students test scores,
which gives everyone a false picture of how much the student actually knows.
For Mathews' October 2013 follow-up on this situation, click here.]
The Meridian Public Charter School is a well-regarded institution serving students in preschool through eighth grade on 13th Street between V and W streets in Northwest Washington. Nearly all of its 531 students are black or Hispanic. Eighty-seven percent are from low-income families. The student body’s reading and math proficiency rates are about 15 percentage points above the city average.
But now the school’s record has been tarnished: The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE, pronounced aw-see) says that teachers or administrators at Meridian likely changed answers on student tests to improve the school’s results.
This is the first D.C. school, traditional public or charter, to be cited by official investigators for cheating based on abnormal numbers of test erasures, changing wrong answers to the correct ones. It’s about time. Until now, investigators hired by OSSE and the D.C. public schools – in addition to the D.C. Inspector General — to probe potential cheating have largely ignored wrong-to-right erasures or accepted school officials’ assurances that the students themselves made the corrections.
Meridian’s chairman, Christopher Siddall, said Wednesday that the school has hired a law firm to determine who was responsible for the erasures. The school also has hired a consulting firm to oversee security during the 2013 D.C. standardized tests underway there this week.
The case against Meridian could cause trouble for other D.C. schools whose student tests have shown wrong-to-right erasures on the same scale or greater than Meridian but who were given a pass.
On April 12, OSSE released a report by the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal revealing that 11 city schools, including Meridian, had such egregious test security violations on the 2012 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams that many scores were thrown out. At Meridian, all scores were invalidated in five classrooms — a fourth grade and two fifth and sixth grades.
As in previous investigations, Alvarez & Marsal focused on teachers and proctors who defined words and pointed out the right answers to students during exams. It found examples of that behavior at Meridian and other schools, some reported by students. All were declared violations of the District’s test security rules.
But for the first time in any D.C. cheating investigation, the investigators also said that the sheer number of wrong-to-right erasures at Meridian showed “strong circumstantial evidence” that the erasures “occurred at the school level and not at the classroom level.” The erasures themselves violated the city’s rules, the investigators said.
At Meridian, the report said, “1,804 answers were changed from wrong to right,” calling it “one of the highest levels”of such erasures in the city. Meridian had 227 students take the DC-CAS, putting the average number of wrong-to-right erasures per child at about eight. The average per child on the same exams in other D.C. schools was less than one.
...
2013-09-13-WP-King-dcs-epidemic-of-guilt
D.C.’s epidemic of failed ethicsBy Colbert I. King
Washington Post, 2013-09-13
In some circles, it’s called “getting over on.”
It means using a situation to your advantage,
even if doing so is unethical.
In our city, getting over on the D.C. government — and, by extension, taxpayers —
is a flourishing industry.
The scope is sickening.
In the past few months, about 30 people have been arrested or indicted
or have pleaded guilty and gone to prison
for getting over on
the D.C. Department of Employment Services,
the Department of Human Services,
the Children and Youth Investment Trust Corp., a city-owned hospital,
the Office of Campaign Finance,
D.C. Medicaid, the Corrections Department, a charter school and Medicare.
The amount of money embezzled, accepted in bribes, defrauded
or spent on illegal political campaign contributions? Nearly $19 million.
Mind you, those figures are based on records of arrests and convictions since June.
They don’t include efforts to get over on federal campaign finance laws.
This week,
a man pleaded guilty to federal charges of failing to report
more than $600,000 that his New York company received
to be spent on behalf of a 2008 presidential campaign.
The source of the unreported funds is widely believed to be
D.C. businessman Jeffrey Thompson,
who is thought to figure prominently in
the corruption of the District’s 2010 mayoral campaign.
All of this comes even after
former D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5)
pleaded guilty to lining his pockets with more than $350,000 in taxpayer money
meant to benefit children;
former council chairman Kwame Brown (D)
pleaded guilty to a felony bank fraud charge; and
former council member Michael A. Brown (D-At Large)
admitted embarking on an illegal bribery scheme.
...
[But none of the Democratic electorate would ever consider committing vote fraud.
Right.
When King writes
In some circles, it’s called “getting over on.”we are supposed to believe that this is being done to achieve financial advantage,
It means using a situation to your advantage,
even if doing so is unethical.
but never electoral advantage.
Right.
And the PC media, including in particular the Washington Post editorial board
continues to claim that because vote fraud is rarely caught,
therefore it must not exist.
What a sorry bunch of deceiving sons of bitches such editorial boards are.
Sneering masters of deceit, promoting corrupted elections.]
2013-10-02-WP-charter-school-officials-diverted-millions-lawsuit-alleges
Charter school officials diverted millions, lawsuit allegesBy Emma Brown
Washington Post, 2013-10-02
[For the relevance of this story, in my opinion, to the subject of voter fraud,
see my comments at the end of the article.]
Options Public Charter School was founded to improve the fortunes of the District’s most troubled teens and students with disabilities, and the District government sent millions of taxpayer dollars to the school each year for their education and care.
D.C. officials alleged in a lawsuit Tuesday that three former managers at the Northeast Washington school diverted at least $3 million of that money to enrich themselves, engaging in a “pattern of self-dealing” that was part of an elaborate contracting scam. The civil case alleges that the managers created two for-profit companies to provide services to Options at high prices, sometimes with the help of a senior official at the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Those companies won lucrative contracts for bus transportation and school management and were paid for services that went undocumented or that were performed by school employees, according to the complaint and supporting documents. The Options managers allegedly received “exorbitant” bonuses shortly before they resigned this summer to run the companies full-time.
The managers were allegedly aided by the chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees at the time — WUSA (Channel 9) vice president and news personality J.C. Hayward — and the senior charter school official, who was responsible for charter-school financial oversight across the city. Documents filed with the court papers show that the signature of Hayward, who allegedly helped incorporate one of the companies, appears to be on some of the expensive contracts. The three ex-managers, their companies, Hayward and the charter-school board official were all named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Hayward told Channel 9 that she did nothing wrong, but she has been relieved of her duties pending further investigation, according to a news report from the station. Hayward and WUSA’s general manager did not return calls from The Washington Post to their offices seeking comment Tuesday.
Donna Montgomery, former chief executive of Options and president of the two for-profit companies, said in a statement that no public funds were misused and that all contracts and payments “were disclosed and vetted by a variety of third parties, including the Options Board, outside auditors and the D.C. Public Charter School Board.”
“People tend to believe allegations like these are true when the facts are otherwise,” Montgomery said in a statement provided by Jeff Smith, who worked at Options until July and now is director of public affairs at one of Montgomery’s companies. “This is unfortunate for the Options School and its staff, me and my team but, most of all, the students.”
Options, an institution meant to change the lives of the city’s neediest children, served as a “cash-generating machine,” according to D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan, who has asked the D.C. Superior Court to appoint a receiver to oversee the school.
Criminal prosecutors are aware of the allegations and “will review all pertinent information as we continue our review of this matter,” said Bill Miller, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr.
The D.C. Public Charter School Board said there are no systemic problems with charter-school finances. The board has financial oversight of the city’s fast-growing charter schools, which now enroll more than 40 percent of District students and receive more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer money each year.
“We see this as an event that is very much specific to Options, and we are pretty proud of the level of oversight that we have in general,” said Darren Woodruff, the board’s vice chairman. “We’re confident that this is something that is not going to be an issue beyond this one school.”
Staff members for the charter board have recommended that Options close, and board members expect to vote on initiating that process at a meeting scheduled for Oct. 16. Scott Pearson, executive director of the charter schools’ board, said the school will remain open through the end of this school year in any case.
Options, founded in 1996, is the city’s oldest charter school. It enrolls about 400 at-risk students in middle and high school; most of them have disabilities, and many are homeless or have been through the juvenile justice system.
Parents who were outside Options at dismissal time Tuesday said they were surprised to learn about the allegations and worried about what might happen to their children if the school closes.
“All I want is for my child to get his education,” said Alanda Bucey, the mother of a student who was kicked out of his last school.
The city charter board launched an investigation of Options on Aug. 19, days after The Washington Post submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking contracts between the school and two for-profit companies founded and controlled by its managers: Exceptional Education Management Corp. (EEMC) and Exceptional Education Services (EES).
Those contracts and other payments to the companies — including a $2.8 million contract signed in February for management services — are at the heart of the District’s case.
Shortly before that contract was signed, the school allegedly projected that its annual revenue would grow by 25 percent — or $2.8 million — because of growth in the number of special education students with the most intensive needs, who also bring with them more city money: $28,284 each on top of the regular per-pupil funding of about $9,000.
Options also agreed to pay EES hundreds of thousands of dollars for bus transportation services. Though Options had paid a previous contractor $70,000 for bus services, it paid EES $981,250, according to a sworn declaration from a forensic accountant who examined the schools’ records for the charter schools board.
Montgomery presented herself as a school official when a Washington Post reporter and photographer visited Options in May. By then, according to contracts obtained by The Post via FOIA, Montgomery had already signed at least two lucrative contracts with the school, one as the chief executive of EES in September 2012 and another as the chief executive of EEMC last February. Montgomery and the other managers left the school in July.
In the court complaint, D.C. officials allege that the managers’ salaries were far out of line with what public officials make, especially given the size of the school.
Montgomery’s “salary and bonuses from Options PCS during a one-year period — at least $425,000 combined — totaled more than the salary of the President of the United States and more than twice the salary of the Mayor of the District of Columbia, even though Options PCS is a small school whose revenue comes mostly from public school funding,” the complaint says.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson earns a base salary of $275,000 to run a school system of about 45,000 students, according to her employment contract.
Hayward, who is widely known as a four-decade veteran of the news business in the Washington area, allegedly “substantially assisted” the scheme by authorizing bonuses and signing contracts with EEMC and EES in her role as chairman of the Options board of trustees, according to the lawsuit.
Jeremy L. Williams, who was the chief financial officer of the D.C. Public Charter School Board until Aug. 21, also allegedly aided the scheme. He “regularly forwarded confidential, internal” e-mails to the three managers, including e-mails alerting them to a planned inspection of Options that was meant to be a surprise, according to court documents.
Williams, who also served on Options’s board of trustees, also allegedly maneuvered to ensure that EEMC’s largest contract, for $2.8 million, would not be reviewed by charter board staff members before it was approved. He is now EEMC’s chief financial officer, according to the lawsuit. Williams did not return calls to his office and home Tuesday.
Molly Evans, a former Options teacher who quit in the spring in part because she felt the school was not providing students with legally required special education services, said she was concerned that the city charter board “could not see past all the charades Options put up.”
A charter board spokeswoman said the board acted quickly when it learned of potential irregularities at Options in August, notifying the city’s attorney general and hiring the forensic accountant. In July, after a study of charter school finances, the board announced that it found “no pattern of fiscal mismanagement” at Options in fiscal 2012.
Charter schools board staff members plan to introduce changes to the contract oversight process at the board’s October meeting, said Theola Labbe-DeBose, a board spokeswoman.
“We take all complaints and tips seriously,” Labbe-DeBose said. “And always, we will continue to work to improve our oversight to identify conflict-of-interest issues.”
[With the widely-reported allegations (in this case)
and convictions (in many other cases,
some of which are cited in the column of Colby King above)
of financial corruption in overwhelmingly Democratic District of Columbia,
not to mention other reports of fraud throughout the country,
how on earth can Democratic politicians and media editorial boards,
e.g. at the Washington Post and New York Times,
claim that the population
which all too often commits financial fraud to increase their financial situation
would never dream of committing voter fraud to further their political situation?
That's real insanity.]
2013-10-06-WP-Mathews-erasures-school-level-test-security
Meridian Public Charter School shrugs off D.C. investigation into test tamperingBy Jay Mathews
Washington Post, 2013-10-06
[I repeat my comment on Mathews initial article on this problem:
If people employed in positions of responsibility,
such as elementary school staff members,
are willing to tamper with student tests,
why on earth should any sane person believe that they, and others like them,
are not willing to commit voter fraud?
That hardly seems to be a greater ethical violation
than falsely improving students test scores,
which gives everyone a false picture of how much the student actually knows.]
Here is another report on the presence of relevant fraud in America:
IRS 2013-09-20 Inspector General Report on Tax Return Identity Theft
See also a summary news article at USA Today
and this story from the International Business Times.
Here is an excerpt from that article:
The Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, refunded about $3.6 billion in the 2011 tax year to people claiming fraudulent refunds under false identities
...
Of the 1.2 million fraudulent claims that went undetected by the IRS,
1.1 million, or 93 percent, came from electronic filings of tax returns
according to the review
...
The top five cities in the U.S., which claimed undetected tax returns using a SSN --
according to mailing address records --
were Miami, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Houston,
while most of the fraudulent ITIN [Individual Taxpayer Identification Number]-linked returns
were traced back to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston, Chicago and Phoenix.
...
[Just for comparison, the following table shows the vote tallies in those cities in the 2012 presidential election.]
| City | Obama percentage | Obama votes | Romney percentage | Romney votes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atlanta (Fulton County) | 64.11% | 250,514 | 34.72% | 135,672 |
| Chicago (Cook County) | 74.0% | 1,488,537 | 24.6% | 495,542 |
| Detroit (Wayne County) | 595,846 | 213,814 | ||
| Houston (Harris County) | 49.39% | 587,044 | 49.31% | 586,073 |
| Miami | 61.58% | 541,440 | 37.87% | 332,981 |
Four of “the top five cities in the U.S. which claimed undetected tax returns using a SSN”
voted heavily Democratic in the 2012 presidential election.
What does that tell you about why the Washington Post editorial page
argues so strenuously (e.g., “Texas holds ’em voteless with new ID law”)
that voter fraud is "insignificant"?
I think the reason is quite clear:
They know damn well that voter fraud is rampant.
It's just that it favors Democrats, whom they generally support.
I.e., the Washington Post is simply running a cover operation for Democrat-favoring voter fraud.]
2016
2016-08-08-JW-Fitton-soon-released-book-judicial-watch-president-tom-fitton-warns-massive-voter-fraud-danger-current-presidential-election
Soon-To-Be-Released Book by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton Warns of Massive Voter Fraud Danger in Current Presidential ElectionJudicial Watch Press Release, 2016-08-08
‘This is especially important because of the lack of interest of the Obama Justice Department in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud’ – from attached pre-release chapter of Clean House
(Washington, DC) – A soon-to-be-released book by New York Times bestselling author Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton warns that America may now be facing the greatest voter fraud danger in recent history. And it lays the blame for the crisis directly at the feet of President Barack Obama and his Justice Department.
The book – Clean House (to be released August 30 from Simon & Schuster/Threshold Editions) – cites examples nationwide of attempts by the Obama Justice Department to thwart efforts to clean up voter rolls, require voter ID at the polls, and prevent voter intimidation. In a chapter titled “Voter Fraud – Stealing Elections – The Danger of Voter Fraud and the Fight for Election Integrity,” Fitton describes major legal battles to protect voter integrity in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland, and Indiana.
...
2016-11-04-AlexandriaTimes-former-alexandrian-charged-with-voter-fraud
Former Alexandrian charged with voter fraudBy Erich Wagner
Alexandria Times, 2016-11-04
2017
2017-03-19-WashTimes-noncitizens-voting-across-us-frederick-county-coun
Maryland county’s count suggests noncitizens voting across U.S.Lawsuit on behalf of Marylanders compared jury pools
by Rowan Scarborough
Washington Times, 2017-03-19
The debate over noncitizens voting was a hot topic a few years ago in Frederick County, a prosperous Maryland suburb wedged between Washington’s urban metropolis and the state’s rural western gateway to the rest of America.
Conservative activists went to court to show that noncitizens were registering fraudulently to vote. A court employee met their request by turning over pages of residents’ names disqualified from jury duty because of alien status.
When those lists were compared with voting records for just three years — 2007, 2008 and 2011 — nearly 180 noncitizens were found to have registered to vote. Of those, 63 had voted, some in multiple elections. The 180 registered votes came from 1,400 disqualified noncitizens in those three years, a rate of 12.8 percent.
The issue of noncitizen voters has taken on national importance. President Trump, who said 3 million or so voted illegally in November, plans to name a federal task force to investigate.
Frederick County’s numbers offer a limited snapshot from a handful of jury pools, but they indicate that noncitizens are registered to vote and are casting ballots in states, which administer federal, state and local elections.
“Obviously, there are people on the voting rolls who have no business being on the voter rolls,” said conservative activist Daniel M. Gray, a lawyer who filed the lawsuit. “What needs to be determined is how extensive is this.
How many noncitizens weren’t summoned for jury duty and went ahead and voted?”
[A very good question.]
...
State Delegate Haven N. Shoemaker Jr., Carroll County Republican,
has introduced in the Maryland General Assembly the Voter Registration Integrity Act.
It would require
the jury commissioner and elections clerks to communicate with each other —
something Mr. Shoemaker says they have not been doing.
The jury commissioners would provide lists of those who have been excused for noncitizenship,
and elections officials would cross-check voter rolls and take steps to remove any names that appear.
“It seems like common sense to me,” he said.
“Because we have motor-voter in Maryland, you can go to MVA and register to vote there.
And all you have to do is check a box that says you are a United States citizen.”
How many noncitizens vote in Maryland?
“We don’t know,” Mr. Shoemaker said. “No one keeps statistics on that.”
Maryland does not ask voters for ID at the polls.
Mr. Shoemaker said the chances are slim that the Democrat-controlled assembly will pass his bill.
The Democratic Party nationally embraces illegal immigrants
by supporting sanctuary cities
and providing driver’s licenses and access to welfare benefits to aliens.
2017-08-09-Bethesda-Vignarajah
Newly Announced Gubernatorial Candidate Voted in D.C. Multiple TimesWhile Registered in Maryland
Krishanti Vignarajah has been registered to vote in D.C. and Maryland since 2010
By Andrew Metcalf
Bethesda Magazine, 2017-08-09
posted by KHarbaugh at 16:00
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