BREAKING AND EXCLUSIVE: Funny business with Chicago absentee ballots

Election Law Center ^ | October 18, 2010 | Christian Adams

[jazusamo]

EXCLUSIVE TO ELECTION LAW CENTER: Election Law Center has learned about some strange things happening in Illinois when it comes to military and overseas ballots. Because of events in Chicago, overseas and military voter ballots will have election judges “recreating” their ballots before they are fed into the tabulating machines.

In Illinois, military and overseas voters can ask for either a paper ballot or a ballot sent by email. Ballots sent by email must be reprinted by the voter on the voter’s printer and send back.

In most counties the electronic choice is made by about a quarter of voters. Three quarters want good old fashioned paper. The highest rates of choosing electronic is in Champaign County and Lake County – which is about 30 percent.

There is one place, however, that is strangely off the scale: Chicago. Where else?

In Chicago, the rate of voters “choosing” to get an email attaching their ballots is a whopping eighty six percent. This is such as extraordinary outlier, that something must be wrong.

In Chicago, 6,800 ballots were sent by email, 982 were sent by paper.

A person expert in the administration of elections in Illinois told Election Law Center that “Chicago appears to be disregarding the choice of the voters and may be simply sending ballots electronically in almost all instances, perhaps anytime the voter communicated by email, even if they communicated they wanted a paper ballot. The problem with this is that no printer can replicate the quality needed by the Sequoia ballot machine readers. This means that every one of these ballots must be recreated back in Chicago before they can be read through the machine.”

Did you hear that? Chicago election officials are going to have to take the paper ballots mailed from overseas, and “recreate” them before they feed them into the machines. Can you imagine Chicago election officials, pencil in hand, deciding who the guy in Iraq wants to vote for in the U.S. Senate race, and faithfully “reproducing” his mark on a nice new official ballot. That’s what seems to be coming in Chicago.

But it’s not as if Chicago has any kind of reputation for cooking election results, do they?

It is even worse than this. In many instances, voters in Afghanistan or Iraq don’t have access to computers and printers. That’s why they chose paper ballots. Paper mail ballots will get to them sooner in forward operating bases than will an email. So the decision to ignore the wishes of the voter, which is obvious with an 86% outlier, means that military voters will be disenfranchined.

Then there is St. Clair County. Guess how many voters in St. Clair chose to have their ballot delivered electronically? Zero, according documents ELC.com has obtained. Really? Not a single military member asked for a ballot electronically in the world?

This, on the other hand, means that St. Clair is most likely violating the provision of the MOVE Act which requires the electronic delivery option. I’ll bet the DOJ is right on top of this violation.
 
UPDATE: Actually it seems DOJ might be sniffing around this issue, but will it act in time?  ELC has obtained an email from state election offiicals to counties stating "I am requesting the actual ballot delivery method of the persons that have requested a ballot using the MOVE site."  This may mean DOJ is hip to the problem.  Maybe not.

[pieceofthepuzzle]

The DOJ would help perpetrate the fraud if they were confident they could get away with it.

[WHBates]

Didn’t see this comming! /sar, if needed

[Westbrook]

Breaking and Exclusive: The Pope is Catholic!

Vote fraud in Chicago? Ya don’t say!

[jazusamo]

Exactly...Just because DOJ is sniffing around doesn’t mean they’ll do a darn thing about it, the New Black Panther fiasco proves that.

[jazusamo]

Please bump the Freepathon and donate or become a monthly donor!

[therightliveswithus]

Why am I not surprised?

[dusttoyou]

Would imagine there are many more military voters state-side that are seeing this news and being even more determined to throw out these crooks than the advantage the dems will have by denying our fine soldiers and sailors votes serving overseas.

These kenyan dem politicians prove daily their ever increasing stupidity.

[Logical me]

Communists never give up. Corrupting elections is the only way they win.

[combat_boots]

Conservatives SHALL not win if we do not FIGHT.

[TommyDale]

The simple solution is to delay the outcome of any election until all irregularities are settled by a bipartisan panel. This includes military votes. All legal votes need to be counted, and all illegal voters need to be prosecuted.

[jazusamo]

Completely agree. Illegal voters and illegal vote enablers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent and down to the last one. They should all pay the heaviest price the law allows.

[Gator113]

Well, we either need to have a fair and honest paper ballot election, or we will eventually have ballots of blood.

These folks better start thinking of just how bad the consequences of corruption could actually become.

[dartuser]

No ... surely you jest.

[Gator113]

I know this makes me an extreme far right nut case, but in my dreams, I’d like to see such crimes punishable by the death penalty.

Yes, that is how serious I think it is to destroy our election process by corruption..... it is essentially destroying our country, our futures and the futures of our children. Just give them a fair trial, then kill them swiftly, and most of this crap will come to a halt.

[jazusamo]

There’s little doubt that sentence would only have to carried a few times to make a huge dent in voter fraud.

I do agree the right to vote and having an honest election process is vital to the survival of our freedom.

[Red Badger]

Votes saved or created?................

[mrmeyer]

I’ve always thought that if the vote is as sacred as the political whores would have one believe, then the penalty for conviction of voter fraud/intimidation should be capital punishment.

[Verginius Rufus]

The email ballots are only a problem for those voters who didn't want to vote for the Democratic candidates, since the "recreated" ballots will have them voting for the Democrats.

The Republican candidates have to win by a larger margin than the total number of electronic ballots sent.

[Josephat]

And PRAY!