1) An account of voter fraud which could have changed the world. The following is based upon memories over 40 years old. The details may be off in non-essential ways, but the essence is true:
2) Tip O’Neill was Speaker of the House back in the 70’s. He came from a fairly conservative Irish Catholic district in Massachusetts. Tip was a leftist but one of them.
3) Even Tip was required by law to gather signatures to get on the ballot.
4) A wonderful, brilliant man by the name of Bill Barnstead ran as a conservative Republican against O’Neill for three successive elections, as quixotic as it gets, although Barnstead did significantly better each time.
5) During the last run, Barnstead surprisingly challenged the petitions O’Neill submitted to get on the ballot.
6) Let’s say 3500 signatures were required. O’Neill submitted a few more than 3500. IIRC few = 2 or 3 hundred extra.
7) You did not have to be an expert to see the petitions were what were called “kitchen petitions,” meaning 5 or 6 people sat around the kitchen table and circulated the petitions to each other, signing the name of a voter, so that every 5th or 6th signature was signed by the same fraudulent political operative.
8) IIRC a few of the petitions were signed by one person, so every signature was identical handwriting, absurdly so.
9) Barnstead’s lawyer, Arthur Levine, a brilliant and meticulous man, called a hand-writing expert at the hearing to challenge the petitions. The expert had been qualified as an expert over 90 times before the very body ruling on the petitions. He had NEVER been disqualified as an expert.
10) The expert’s testimony in a sense was superfluous because anybody could see both from the handwriting itself and from the pattern of signatures that the signatures were fraudulent. But he testified that many hundreds of signatures were fraudulent, bringing the number well below that needed to get on the ballot.
11) There was every reason to believe that O’Neill was off the ballot, and Barnstead would run unopposed.
12) After lengthy deliberation, the ruling body declared that Barnstead’s witness did not qualify as an expert and thus his testimony was excluded and the petitions upheld. They rejected the argument that any lay person could see from the handwriting and pattern that the signatures were fraudulent.
13) O’Neill might have won a write-in vote, although in the election Barnstead did very well, and the fraud committed by O’Neill might have been a deciding factor. The Globe ignored the story entirely and the Herald gave it perfunctory coverage. If O’Neill was kicked off the ballot, the news would have been huge national news, as would the fraud.
14) Without O’Neill, the Democrats would have suffered greatly at least in the short term.
15) I was a witness to the preceding, and have kept it as a lesson in the corruption of the system.
Torricelli was in the midst of a scandalous melt-down, and it seemed clear, his opponent, Douglas Forrester, would win.
Torricelli, under pressure, dropped out of the race.
The time limits in New Jersey election law made it impossible to substitute another candidate.
But the Democrats put in former Senator Lautenberg, and the Supreme Court of New Jersey, said it was ok, because, essentially, it was important that the Democrates win.