Voting Fraud in WI already?

Reader Thomas Chiappetti sent us a link to this piece by Mark Belling on the groundwork that the Democrats are laying to commit voter fraud on a massive scale in Wisconsin:

An outfit called the "New Voter Project" claims to be nonpartisan but is being bankrolled and staffed by leftists. The organization is already active in Wisconsin and already involved in trouble. Thousands of "voters" registered by this group in the last few weeks have submitted registration forms without the legally required proof of identification. This has forced village and city clerks all over the region to send out notices asking for the information. Virtually none of the forms sent out by the local clerks to the shady registrants have been responded to. The only plausible explanation for that is that the "voters" not only aren’t voters but aren’t real people, either.

Here’s the method to the New Voter Project madness. In Wisconsin, you can register to vote at the polls on Election Day. You have to produce identification when you register. But sending in a phony registration in advance puts you on the voter list before the election. Already-registered voters don’t have to show any identification. By putting perhaps thousands of fake names on the voter lists, it will be possible for fraudsters to show up at the polls and simply claim to be the person who was already "registered."

One former employee of the New Voter Project has told me that many staffers simply took names out of the telephone book to fill out their daily quotas. He quit his job in fear there’d be a criminal investigation.

Now, the New Voter Project is turning in thousands of dubious voter registration forms and the organization is run by a woman who has already been linked to election fraud. Bush better get 52 percent of the actual vote in Wisconsin because at least 2 percent of the Kerry vote is going to come from cheaters.

This may be the election in which voter fraud plays such a decisive role that it can no longer be ignored or tolerated. If President Bush doesn't win easily, Democratic fraud will either swing the election to Kerry, or, at a minimum, provide the basis for endless legal challenges to the election's outcome. It has been reported in the mainstream press that the Kerry campaign has already prepared lawsuits in 10 to 15 states, ready to file in the event Kerry loses. Indeed, lawsuits have already been started in some states.

Before long, the issue of election fraud will have to be addressed. The Democrats have consistently blocked efforts at reform, but the reality is that neither the Republican Party nor anyone else has made adequate efforts to assure the integrity of the ballot.

UPDATE: A Wisconsin blogger named Sandi is working on this story. She points out that first-time voters in Wisconsin who registered by mail are supposed to present some kind of documentation to identify themselves before they vote. At the same time, a "voter" who has no identification of any kind can submit a "provisional ballot," which sounds like an invitation to politicized litigation. Sandi writes:

There are thousands of registrations being filed daily, and the Dems are up to no good as usual. Back in August Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the Wisconsin Elections Board, said he took calls Monday August 30th from irate clerks across the state who are having trouble handling the flood of incomplete applications from the New Voter Project and other groups.

LOTS of nasty stuff, all over the map. From the Kerry Spot:

FORGET ALL THE POLLS - REPORTS INDICATE MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD EFFORTS [09/29 11:22 AM]

Revise all your expectations. Throw all the poll results out the window. All bets should be off for this year’s election, because the huge get-out-the-vote efforts promised by various new independent groups is apparently yielding a “get-out-the-ineligible-dead-and-vote” effort.

Bill Hobbs is beginning a project to collect reports in this area.

Besides yesterday’s reports about Ohio, there are a lot more reports of fraudulent voter registrations around the country.

Here’s a report from Lansing, Michigan:

The Lansing city clerk's office is sorting through thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms that have been turned in recently.
The city is using $2,000 from its general fund budget to pay for two temporary workers to sort through 5,000 to 8,000 bad forms.

"We're going to have them painstakingly compare each form to the qualified voter file," Lansing City Clerk Debbie Miner said.

Officials believe the forms were turned in by the state advocacy group Public Interest Research Group In Michigan, Ingham County Clerk Mike Bryanton said.

The Ingham County Sheriff's Office is investigating.

Calls to PIRGIM's Ann Arbor office were not returned Friday or Tuesday.
Bryanton said the investigation shows that some people took names out of a phone book and forged signatures.

Meridian Township has been dealing with the same problem for the past few weeks.

"They have no idea the problems they've caused," Meridian Township Clerk Mary Helmbrecht said.

Helmbrecht said Tuesday that her staff hasn't requested extra help, but that her office has been flooded with extra forms.

"We just got an envelope (Monday) with 100 more forms from that group," she said. "It's extraordinarily time consuming."

Last month, Helmbrecht's office notified Bryanton about registration form irregularities such as addresses that didn't exist or several people listed for the same apartment.

The sheriff's investigation shows that members of PIRGIM, a statewide advocacy group that encourages voter registration, were paid $50 a day to collect registrations and were given bonuses for collecting extra forms, Bryanton said.

The Detroit Free Press observes, “Officials of two of the organizations conducting voter registration drives, PIRGIM — the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan — and Project Vote say only a handful of collectors and a relatively small number of registrations are at issue. Perhaps so, but the integrity of a system is at stake.”

Here is another report from Racine, Wisconsin.

A group that says it has registered 30,000 voters in southeastern Wisconsin could face a criminal investigation because of voter registration applications that may have been filed fraudulently.
Acting Racine City Clerk Carolyn Moskonas said Tuesday she will ask the district attorney's office to investigate at least six voter registration applications filed by Project Vote.

That non-profit organization, which also has filed scores of Racine applications that contain bogus addresses, has fired its Racine-area coordinator because of problems with the filings.

Moskonas said that in each of the six potential fraud cases, the people named on the Project Vote applications told her office they had not signed the forms and had not been contacted by any voter registration drives.

"It was kind of scary," Racine Affirmative Action Officer Jerry Scott said about seeing his name and apparently forged signature on one of the six applications. He was already registered to vote and also registers voters as a volunteer.

"I'm a firm believer that your name is one thing about you that is sacred and it should be protected," Scott said. "Someone forging your name and your signature - I think there should be some pretty strict penalties for that."

Denise Peterson said she also was outraged that her name and signature and those of her husband, Terry Peterson, also were on forms that she said they did not complete or authorize.

"I hope somebody finds out who's doing this," she said.

The same problem has surfaced in neighboring Caledonia, said Town Clerk Wendy Christensen. She has asked Caledonia police to investigate cases in which four residents said they had not signed applications turned into the clerk's office, including at least two submitted by Project Vote.

Whether the possibly fraudulent voter registration applications could lead to any widespread voter fraud seems unlikely, because anyone wanting to vote in someone else's name would have to know which faked applications were processed, Moskonas and Christensen said.

But they said they could not guarantee that they will catch all of the applications that have problems.

Doris Alexander, head of Project Vote in Milwaukee, said she fired Damien Jones, the organization's Racine-Kenosha coordinator, last Friday after she learned there were problems in Racine.

She said she did not know details of the problems and would not comment further on Jones.

"I'm very hopeful that we can resolve this right away," Alexander said. "We're confident that whatever problems that we're having will be eliminated."

Jones, a former Racine resident who is the Green Party candidate for a state Assembly seat in Milwaukee in the Nov. 2 election, said his termination "was pretty much a mutual thing." He said the Racine problems were serious but isolated, given that Project Vote - which pays workers $7 an hour and $1.50 per application after they reach a quota - has filed nearly 1,900 voter registration applications with the city in the past couple of months.

Not angry enough? How about this report from Nevada?

Clark County Registrar Larry Lomax first warned the public in July that his office was receiving a large number of suspect forms distributed by groups looking to register new voters in this tight election season.

Lomax originally turned over the matter to the FBI, which he said had declined to investigate.

The issue later went to the Nevada Division of Investigations, which continues to look into the matter, Heller said.

The Dan Rather philosophy - that the ends justify the means as long as it harms Bush - has spread to many of these “voter outreach” groups.

Folks, I’m going to be voting in the District of Columbia on Nov. 2, which means my vote is about as worthless as you can get. But nothing can tear down people’s faith in democracy like the suspicion - or, increasingly, the knowledge - that their vote is canceled out or overtaken by a bunch of "the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me" goons who stuff the ballot box.

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