election fraud

I wrote about this yesterday, but I am revisiting it with the smoking gun letter uploaded rather than just linking as a PDF. I want to emphasize that this is a scan of the letter sent by the company that makes the voting machines Sarasota County used warning of a glitch. This warning was ignored by Kathy Dent, the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections. The result was an election with an unprecedented, and HIGHLY suspicious, 18,000 vote undercount for Congress and that undercount is believed by election experts to have changed the outcome of the election, essentially stealing the election from Democrat Christine Jennings. Here's the letter:

This letter suggests a specific action...which the Sarasota election board NEVER ACTED UPON. Furthermore, posters were sent by the company that were meant to be posted at each polling place to warn voters of the delay. The posters were never posted. Finally, and probably criminally, Kathy Dent never released this letter when Christine Jennings' legal team filed a letter of discovery. That essentially is a cover up.

You can help Christine Jennings fight this by donating here. Anyone who felt disappointed that John Kerr

Part 2 of a letter from the makers of Sarasota's eVote machines to the Sarasota election board. The election board ignored the letter.

Part 1 of a letter from the makers of Sarasota's eVote machines to the Sarasota election board. The election board ignored the letter.

Back in November there was a blatant case of a defective election. Without accusing anyone of wrongdoing, SOMEHOW 18,000 votes for Congress were missing (an unprecedented "undervote") the vast majority of them coming from Democratic leaning districts. This loss of 18,000 votes almost certainly altered the result of the election, depriving Democrat Christine Jennings a win. This particularly bothers me since Christine was one of the candidates I raised the most money for last year and I was very impressed with her as a candidate. But partisanship aside, the loss of 18,000 votes is just plain unacceptable. Yet the Republicans in Florida did all they could to prevent an analysis of this problem and Florida remains one of the states with the most dubious of elections. Remember, the Carter Center, which monitors elections all over the world and is one of the most respected election monitoring organization in the world, refused to monitor Florida elections because Florida did not meet their minimum requirement for fair elections.

Christine Jennings is fighting back. As I said, I was impressed with her. She is one of only a handful of women who successfully founded her own bank (she gives credit to the Clinton economy for her success!). She reminded both my wife and myself of Ann Richards in a way. So she clearly is not the type to give up easily.

Here is a message from Christine Jennings about her fight to make elections in Florida more reliable:

When I hear people say "get over it" regarding the dubious elections of 2000, 2002 (Georgia) and 2004, it makes me wonder what they think a democracy is all about. The civil rights of voters were probably infringed upon with some regularity in those elections by a variety of methods possibly leading to stolen elections. THAT is un-American and un-democratic, and election fraud is NOT something I intend to "get over."

I want to make it clear that I don't know if any of those elections were outright "stolen." And that is the problem. If we don't have confidence in our own election system, then we have a big problem, and buying overpriced, unreliable, hackable machines to privatize our elections is NOT the solution.

So here is the latest piece of the puzzle of Ohio's very messed up election in 2004. From the San Diego Union-Tribune: (note: San Diego is another place where elections are suspicious, according to former mayor of San Diego Roger Hedgecock)

CLEVELAND – Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio's most populous county.

Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.

There are three Congressional races that still need out attention to round out the 2006 election year. All three are critical because all three address fraud on some level. FL-13 represents a major battle in the fight for election integrity and could lead to one more pick up for Democrats in the House. LA-2 represents a chance to replace an extremely corrupt poltiican who is likely to go to jail with an honest politician. NC-8 is a case where the Republican is trying to prevent the counting of all ballots, including those from areas where military families live. The Republican is just barely ahead and the Democrat picks up more votes each time a batch of uncounted ballots is finally counted. So whether you want to fight election fraud or more run-of-the-mill fraud, these three races deserve your attention.

All three races (described in detail below) can be found on my Final Races for 2006 Act Blue Page.

Christine Jennings Recount Fund

Jennings is running to replace Katherine "Stolen Election" Harris who prevented the 2000 recount in Florida and was rewarded by the Republican Party with this House seat. Harris tried moving on to the Senate, but failed. Jennings is locked in a neck and neck race to replace Harris. But Harris' legacy of election fraud continues as electronic voting machines in this district gave strange results, leading to an unusually large undercount. This suspicious behavior on the voting machines' part could cost Jennings the election. This one race could be the smoking gun that will discredit the eVote machines that do not have a legal paper trail.