Posted on 08/27/2004 1:34:19 PM PDT by neefer
The Summit County Board of Elections is expected to act today on what appear to be fraudulent voter registration cards sent to the board from the Cleveland AFL-CIO.
John Schmidt, deputy director of the board of elections, said the board is expected to refer the matter to the sheriff or prosecutor's office for further investigation.
Schmidt said several dozen cards were mailed to the board in an envelope that contained a return street address but no name.
Aside from the lack of identification of the sender, he said board workers had questions about the cards for other reasons.
They were printed by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, but were an effort to register voters in Summit County. Also, many of the signatures on the cards appeared to be in the same handwriting.
Workers suspected that one person may have forged them, Schmidt said.
After some unsuccessful checking of the return address, Schmidt said he and elections board Director Bryan Williams actually drove to the Euclid Avenue location in Cleveland one afternoon, only to find themselves at the AFL-CIO headquarters.
Schmidt said the labor group is part of a larger voter registration effort, but staffers there didn't know where the cards came from.
``I don't believe the AFL-CIO has any knowledge of who is doing this or they would put a stop to it, I'm sure,'' Schmidt said.
John Gallo, a staffer at AFL-CIO office, said the labor council had no way of knowing whether the cards were valid or who collected them.
Gallo said the AFL-CIO is one of about 50 organizations comprising the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition -- a nonprofit, nonpartisan group whose focus is to register voters.
Gallo said his office is receiving voter registration cards every day from a variety of sources. Staffers merely forward them to the appropriate county boards of elections, based on the addresses of the voters.
``I have no idea where they came from,'' Gallo said. ``We didn't do anything wrong. We're the middle man.
``We don't know. Like I told the two guys (Schmidt and Willliams) who came here, we get these from all over and we turn them over to somebody else,'' he said.
Gallo said there are about a dozen national organizations, some of which are working with the Cleveland coalition, which pay people to register voters. He suspects the cards were an attempt by someone to try to cash in without actually registering voters.
Gallo, however, said that wouldn't work because payments are made only after the registrations are determined to be legitimate by the local board of elections.
``Why somebody would do that, I don't know, because nobody's going to get any money for that,'' Gallo said. ``Clearly this was somebody messing around.
``It was illegal.... It could be somebody setting something up, trying to get somebody in trouble. It's happened before, back in the '60s.''
Gallo stressed that the vast majority of those working to register voters are unpaid volunteers.
Schmidt said elections board staffers are attempting to verify the registration cards. An early sampling showed that at least a few of the registrations were not legitimate.
Well knock me over with a feather. Voter fraud will be hugh. Bush needs a large lead in order to counter the left's fraud.
Liberals don't need no rules or laws.
This is series.
What? Labor unions involved in fraud??
SAY IT ISN'T SO!!
Shocking, positively shocking!!!
Without vote fraud, Democrats would never win an election.
The mutable voting from NY and Florida - 67% democrat.
Chads and dimples from trying to punch too may ballots at one time in Florida.
Unions faking names for mutable voting.
This is just the tip of the ice burg. Voter ID's would literally destroy the democrat party. It would bring back one vote per person. That's why they fight so hard to stop voter identification.
we also need alot of Freepers to volunteer as election observers...
Union vote fraud ping!
Reached for comment, the head of the union said, "We chopped up and fed to the fishes four guys in the past year, and you want to bother me about chickensh%$ vote fraud?"
How dare they disenfranchise these upstanding citizens. Yawn!!
I'm thankful Summit County stepped up to the plate. I hate to think about what goes on at the Cuyahoga County board. Ohio's an important state and luckily WEWS gave this a lot of airplay during its morning broadcasts last week.
What galls me is that they're so blatant about it. Couldn't they have at least made the signatures look different?
They've probably done it for so long, they thought nothing of it. It's habit by now.
The story is about how 46,000 dual residents of New York and Florida are registered to vote in both states, which is illegal. They give the statistic that of the offenders, 68% are Dems and 12% are Pubs. Pretty damning for our side. They also say of the 46,000, between 400 and 1000 voters actually voted twice in at least one election.
snip
3) If 500 Dems voted twice, that's 1.6% of all Dems who registered twice. And if 500 Republicans voted twice, that's 9.1% of all Republicans who registered twice.
4) In conclusion, a Republican is more than 5 times as likely to vote twice than a Democrat. This of course comes as no surprise to me.
ROTFL
The ratio of double voting is 68%(D) to 12%(R).
That's 5(D) to 1(R).
That means democrats voting twice is 5 times more likely.
Somehow, someway, from somewhere, in their disturbed little minds, they made it into a 500/500 each, and then assumed they were the ones being robbed. LOL
Take your video camera, incognito.
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