A Marion County judge will hear arguments next month on Democrats’ challenge to Charlie White’s ability to remain Indiana’s secretary of state.
The Democrats are contesting the Indiana Recount Commission’s June ruling that White can stay in office despite allegations that he was illegally registered to vote at his ex-wife’s address when he declared his candidacy.
A Marion County judge will hear arguments next month on Democrats’ challenge to Charlie White’s ability to remain Indiana’s secretary of state. The Democrats are contesting the Indiana Recount Commission’s June ruling that White can stay in office, despite allegations that he was illegally registered to vote at his ex-wife’s address when he declared his candidacy.
Marion Circuit Judge Louis Rosenberg will hold oral arguments on the Democrats’ petition for judicial review Nov. 23.
Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White is asking a Hamilton County judge to dismiss criminal charges against him because of errors special prosecutors allegedly committed when they obtained his indictment from a grand jury.
In a motion filed Friday, White’s attorney, former Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi, claims, among other things, that the special prosecutors handling his case weren’t appointed correctly and that they didn’t provide the grand jury with the appropriate descriptions of the law.
At a Wednesday press conference, Maine’s secretary of state said an investigation turned up no cases of voter fraud from a list of out-of-state students created by the chairman of the Maine Republican Party. A July list presented to the Maine Office of the Secretary of State by Maine Republican Party chairman Charlie Webster gave the names of 206 students at four state university campuses — including some from the University of Maine — he said were registered to vote in Maine and out of state.
But Wednesday, Secretary of State Charlie Summers said most of the students on Webster’s list were, contrary to the chairman’s claim, registered to vote only in one state: Maine. And none of them voted in the same election twice. “I’m not surprised he didn’t find students voting twice, because I didn’t find any of those,” Webster said after the conference, saying he merely pointed out possibilities.
“What Charlie Summers’ press conference really showed today is that Charlie Webster was on a witch hunt,” said Rep. Emily Cain, D-Orono, the House minority leader. “Students of Maine were vindicated today.”
Maine’s Secretary of State released his findings Wednesday from an investigation into potential voter fraud and that report shows barely any evidence of wrongdoing. Secretary of State Charles Summers says his investigation of possible voter fraud didn’t turn up much. But he says it points to Maine’s election system need for an overhaul. “We have a situation in the state of Maine that if we don’t try to modernize our election practices and procedures, it will eventually lead us down the road where something breaks down,” Summers told reporters in his office Wednesday.
Summers report shows 77 students were found to have simultaneously registered in Maine and another state but that’s not necessarily illegal. “What I said was there were 77 students in both Maine and another state. It is fraud if they intentionally did that. It’s very difficult to prove it,” Summers said adding it most likely would not be prudent to even try prove that intent.
Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster claimed to have uncovered more than 200 cases of potential voter fraud committed by college students in Maine. Summers says five were found to have voted in Maine and another state the same year – but not in the same election. A driver’s license fraud investigation found one non-citizen, who’s left the United States.
Balochistan had the highest rate of fake voters during the 2008 general election, according to findings from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA).
A glance at statistics from the province do not reflect well on the electoral process. In Killa Abdullah there were total of 387,823 registered voters and only 70,820 could be verified. In Kech, of the 218,953 registered voters only 84,500 were legitimate. In Loralai there were 226,658 registered voters, of which a meagre 52,657 could be verified. Of Jaffarbabad’s 391,608 registered voters, only 98,919 were not bogus.
The legitimacy of our current government has been severely questioned by recent findings that almost half of the entries in voter lists at the last election were fake. The startling facts emerged as the ECP and NADRA were preparing new voter lists based on computerised national identity cards(CNICs). Discrepancies emerged between the electoral rolls used for last general election and succeeding by-polls held so far.
The West Virginia Supreme Court has rejected a request by Janet “J.T.” Thompson, Charleston Mayor Danny Jones’ lone challenger in the May election, to block Charleston City Council from holding a hearing on her claims of voter fraud. According to the Court’s order list Friday, all five justices voted to turn down her request for a writ of prohibition.
Jennifer Bundy, a spokeswoman for the Court, said Monday the individual order was not yet ready. The Court’s ruling means that the results of the tribunal, which rejected all of Thompson’s claims, will remain.
The Indiana Supreme Court has refused to take over jurisdiction in the election challenge against Secretary of State Charlie White. Democrats have sued to overturn a Recount Commission ruling that White’s voter registration was proper. White had asked the Supreme Court to take over the case from Marion Circuit Judge Louis Rosenberg.
The justices say a case can skip the Court of Appeals, but not the trial court. “All I was trying to do is just expedite the process,” White says. “You know, I tried, and I guess we’ll just move forward.”
Technological innovations will make bogus voting difficult if not impossible in Pakistan, where the number of bogus votes has called into question the legitimacy of the present government, if the introduction of biometrics is mandated for the next elections.
Once election authorities have compiled computerised electoral rolls with voters’ pictures, they plan to introduce specially designed ballot papers inscribed with a watermark, magnetic ink and biometrics to determine voters’ identity. Voters will stamp the ballot paper with magnetic ink. Once the votes are polled, the election commission (ECP) will be able to verify them by their counterfoils. “In case of any complaints, the fake voter can be traced by biometrics,” an official involved in the electoral reforms told The Express Tribune.
What is it about being from Belmont and being accused of voter fraud. Earlier this year, a fringe candidate for the Republican presidential candidacy claimed that long-time Belmont resident and fellow candidate Mitt Romney was committing voter fraud, an allegation – later proven baseless – that was quickly picked up by websites and left-leaning political cable television shows.
Now a Belmont resident studying at the University of Maine is now at the center of a growing controversy in which the chairman of the state’s Republican Party claiming out-of-state students were engaged in voter fraud, according to a Maine media site.
Christopher Knoblock is among 206 students on the list submitted in July by Maine Republican Party chairman Charlie Webster to the secretary of state for investigation of voter fraud. “Webster is attempting to challenge students’ right to register and vote where they attend school, indicating some had registered in their home state and then re-registered on campus,” according to a report this week from the Bangor Daily News.
The State Police are not conducting a proposed criminal investigation into 64,000 irregularities in the state’s voter file, although Secretary of State Dianna Duran sent the files to the agency months ago for an inquiry.
Gorden Eden, secretary of the state Department of Public Safety, which oversees the State Police, said Friday that his agency has been acting in an “advisory” role with Duran’s office but does not have the resources to look at all 64,000 cases. He also said it is more appropriate for Duran’s office to conduct the inquiry.
“This is truly an issue, a case, that needed to be looked at by the SOS’s office,” Eden said. But Eden did not rule out a future criminal investigation, if evidence is presented that one is needed.
Police in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, have fired tear gas to disperse several hundred opposition supporters who accuse the electoral commission of fraud in the run up to elections later this year.
The protest is the latest sign of growing tension in Congo before presidential and parliamentary polls in November, the second set of elections since the last war ended in 2003. The demonstrators accuse President Joseph Kabila’s party of rigging polls in his favour by allowing for the multiple registrations of voters ahead of the elections.
Charlie Webster sounds a lot like LeRoy Symm. Symm, the registrar of voters in Waller County, Texas, had a special questionnaire he used for college students. It included questions such as: Do you own property in the county? Where did you attend church? What are your job plans?
If Symm and his deputies knew a voter by name and face, they were simply registered. College students had to pass Symm’s test. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1979 said this violated the Constitution, thereby establishing the practice of allowing college students to list their dormitory as their residence for the purposes of voting.
Three decades later, the ruling has not deterred Webster, the Maine Republican Party chairman, who weeks ago brandished a list of more than 200 college students he said likely engaged in voter fraud.
Embattled Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White will represent himself as state Democrats’ challenge to his candidacy works its way through the next round of court hearings.
As 24-Hour News 8 reporter Jim Shella first reported in his blog at noon Tuesday, Republican attorney Jim Bopp confirmed Tuesday that he had resigned as White’s lawyer.
Another person has been arrested in the Wake County voter fraud sweep – an 89-year-old Raleigh man who said he tried to alert elections officials to a fault in their system. Leland Duane Lewis said he had voted only one side of the ballot at an early-voting station at Optimist Park in West Raleigh on Oct. 29. When he later realized what he had done, he went to his regular precinct on Election Day and requested another ballot, which poll workers gave him.
Lewis said he filled out the other side of the ballot and on the way out told poll workers what he had done, assuming they would report it. Lewis said he called the county elections office several times in weeks that followed and left messages to report it himself, but never heard back until Gary Sims, the deputy director of the Board of Elections, called him to say officials had discovered he had voted twice. “I voted with two ballots, but only once, really,” Lewis said. “Half and half is one.”
Secretary of State Charlie White’s criminal trial has been postponed again. It will now begin Jan. 30, White’s attorney, Carl Brizzi, confirmed this morning after a telephone conference with a Hamilton County judge and prosecutors.
White faces seven felony charges, including voter fraud and theft, because of confusion over where he lived during his campaign for statewide office. His trial had been scheduled for Aug. 8 but was pushed back to Sept. 12.
The latest delay comes days after Brizzi, the former Marion County prosecutor, took over the case. “I think the most compelling reason (for the continuance) is that I’m brand new to the case, so the judge thought it was a good idea to get me up to speed,” Brizzi said this morning.
The arrest warrants for nine people in Wake County charged with felonies for voting twice in the 2008 election were barely dry when the state Republican Party came to its fanciful conclusion that its stymied campaign for requiring photo identification of all voters would have thwarted these people. The problem is, it wouldn’t have.
Wake District Attorney Colon Willoughby (yes, a Democrat) says voter IDs would have made no difference in these cases. This was about people voting twice, perhaps by absentee and then at the polls. And it should be noted that nine people were charged, and that’s out of a huge 2008 turnout. There were more voter fraud cases statewide than usual in that year, more than 200, out of over 4 million votes cast.
Which is to say, nine is not many, and there probably would have been nine with or without voter ID.
The big story today was the arrests of four people in Wake Co. for voter fraud. Three are accused of having cast double ballots in 2008 – first during early one-stop voting, and then again at their local precincts on Election Day. (Two of them deny any criminal intent.) The fourth person was arrested for double-voting in 2010.
Backers of this year’s Voter ID legislation, which was vetoed by Gov. Bev Perdue – one of the few vetoes that hasn’t yet been overturned – heralded the news as proof that Perdue’s position was wrongheaded. Whether that’s true in general depends on your views on Voter ID. But in fact, the Voter ID bill supported by Republican lawmakers this year wouldn’t have prevented the double voting.
The Voter ID bill, H351, would require voters to produce a photo ID to prove they are who they say they are – if they vote on election day. But according to what we know tonight about the charges, these four voters didn’t claim to be anyone else – they voted twice under their own names, and the system didn’t catch it.
One of the most thoroughly documented histories of voter fraud was recently presented by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican. Over a span of 13 years (1997 – 2010), there were 221 instances of alleged voter fraud reported in Kansas. Of these, 30 individuals were prosecuted and seven were convicted. One was convicted of electioneering (advocating someone’s election too near a polling place) while the other six were convicted of double voting. Comparing the conviction number with the number of eligible voters in Kansas, we arrive at a “fraud index” of ~ 0.00033 percent. Keep in mind that this is over a span of 13 years so the yearly index would be ~ 0.000025 percent. As one can readily see, this number is vanishingly small. The data used for his report was provided to the public by Kobach’s office.
In response to this small-time epidemic, Kobach and the Republican-controlled legislature, passed a very restrictive voter-ID measure which was signed into law by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback. Incidentally, Kobach also drafted Arizona’s SB 1070 immigrant identification law.
While the Kansas fraud index is quite small, it mirrors data from other states. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, the accumulated rate of voter fraud in the states with documented cases is minuscule, with overall rates of 0.0003 percent in Missouri, 0.0002 percent in New Jersey and 0.000009 percent in New York.
The foundation of Florida’s election-law changes — the bedrock belief that spurred major reforms this spring – was the notion that voter fraud is rampant. So the Legislature passed and Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a bill that limits early voting, makes it harder for some groups to register voters and will cause headaches for voters who’ve recently moved. Their ballots might not even be counted.
And guess what? We’ve known for months the “voter fraud” excuse was phony.
Okaloosa County Supervisor of Elections Paul Lux and Susan Blackwell, president of the Okaloosa chapter of the League of Women Voters, said that instances of fraud are rare. It just isn’t a big problem. Richard Means, a former Illinois prosecutor, wrote an essay denouncing some states’ new “voter ID” requirements. Those laws, too, were applied after lawmakers raised the specter of voter fraud.
The Attorney General’s Office has been asked to investigate the handling of voter records kept in Mont Vernon, hometown of Speaker of the House William O’Brien. Town resident Joyce Cardoza filed a complaint this week after reading news reports that O’Brien’s son Brendan was registered to vote in both his hometown and in Lewiston, Maine, where he attended college and ran for public office in 2009.
Cardoza, a registered Democrat, noted that Speaker O’Brien’s wife Roxanne is one of three supervisors of the checklist who handle voter registration matters. State law requires local election officials to take specific steps to notify officials in a voter’s previous town of a change in registration.
In this case, the registration form young O’Brien filled out when he voted in Mont Vernon in November 2010 never made it to Lewiston. State law requires supervisors of the checklist to send a copy of the registration form to a voter’s previous town if it lies within New England.
Former Secretary of State Matt Dunlap has made no secret of the fact that he’s seriously considering running against Senator Olympia Snowe.
Secretary of State Charlie Summers used to be Snowe’s State Director. So when Summers held a press conference last week talking about potential voter fraud and destruction of evidence that may have occurred under Dunlap’s watch, Dunlap had some questions.
Dunlap said, “It is questionable timing, and I don’t know what the answer to that is. It doesn’t look very good in terms of being a politically active as Secretary of State, which by the way, there is no prohibition on.”
Former Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap asserted Monday that allegations of possible voter and identity fraud made last week by current Secretary of State Charlie Summers were resolved several years ago, shortly after they first surfaced. Dunlap said Summers would have learned that fact had he simply called him before gathering reporters and television cameras last Thursday to announce a broad investigation.
“I wish he had talked to me first,” Dunlap said in an interview Monday. “A little bit of homework prior to the press conference might have canceled the press conference.”
During that event, Summers referenced as the basis for his investigation a July 1 conversation with a Bureau of Motor Vehicles employee who expressed concerns about “noncitizens” trying to register to vote. The employee told Summers that she had brought her concerns to the Secretary of State’s Office under previous administrations and was told to disregard the activity. She also said she was advised to destroy evidence she had collected to support those claims.
When the fleeing motorcycle hit the curb, scraped past a utility pole and hurled 20-year-old Craig Eney to his death, a bogus South Carolina driver’s license was in the hip pocket of his jeans. He spent the final hours of his life trading on that phony license to buy shots for his buddies at two downtown Annapolis bars, places so popular among underage drinkers that bouncers are stationed outside to check everyone’s ID. Yet scores of young people flash fake driver’s licenses and waltz on by to the bar.
The days when faking driver’s licenses was a cottage industry — often practiced in college dorm rooms by a computer geek with a laminating machine — have given way to far more sophisticated and prolific practitioners who operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
In an era when terrorism and illegal immigration have transformed driver’s licenses into sophisticated mini-documents festooned with holograms and bar codes, beating the system has never been easier. Just wire money to “the Chinese guy.”
While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme.
In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.
Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing. “This crime cuts against the fabric of our free society,” Judge Webster said.
Indiana Democrats on Thursday appealed a decision allowing embattled Republican Secretary of State Charlie White to stay in office while he fights voter fraud charges. The Indiana Democratic Party appealed the Indiana Recount Commission vote allowing White to stay in office. State Democratic Chairman Dan Parker said he wants a Marion County judge to review the decision.
The two Republicans and one Democrat on the Recount Commission voted unanimously last month to let White to keep his job. But comments from the commission’s chairman that White’s actions brushed up against the line of being illegal merited a court review, Parker said.
When the state’s top election official makes a public allegation of criminal behavior during prior elections, it is something that should be taken seriously and looked at closely. Secretary of State Dianna Duran made just such an allegation in March during a legislative committee hearing. Duran told lawmakers she had uncovered evidence that 37 people who are not U.S. citizens had voted in New Mexico elections.
But, when the ACLU filed an open records request the next day to examine the registration records of the 37 voters highlighted by Duran during the public meeting of the Legislature, she refused to turn them over, hiding behind the weak and inappropriate excuse of “executive privilege.”
Executive privilege allows a president, governor or other member of the executive branch to confer with advisors in private, without divulging the nature of those discussions or the participants. For example, when Democrats wanted to know who had served on an energy task force several years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed executive privilege in denying that request. It does not allow a member of the executive branch to conceal evidence of an alleged crime.
A Hamilton County judge has granted Secretary of State Charlie Whites request to delay his trial on seven felony charges.
The trial, scheduled for Aug. 8, will instead begin on Sept. 12, according to Hamilton Superior Court.
Maine Republican Party Chairman Charles Webster said Monday he’s uncovered more than 200 cases of election fraud in Maine. And he says as many as 8 to 10 percent of the out-of-state students he saw registered to vote in Maine were registered to vote in two places.
Maine election law states that, in order to register, a voter has to declare Maine as his or her residence and intends to return there after absences. “Our election laws need reform and I believe are being abused,” Webster said at a State House news conference.
… Webster’s claims of fraud were quickly shot down by Democrats and leaders of a coalition trying to force a statewide repeal vote.
A Camden County Superior Court judge threw out a lawsuit Wednesday that sought to overturn the results of Chesilhurst’s June primary due to alleged voter fraud.
Judge Edward J. McBride Jr. ruled that the suit had been filed after the 10 days allowed for election challenges.