Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our DemocracyThe Florida Fiasco of 2000, with hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, forced Americans to confront an ugly reality. The US has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialised nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11. In Stealing Elections, John Fund takes the reader on a national tour of voter fraud scandals ranging from rural states like Texas and Mississippi to big cities such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He explores dark episodes such as the way 'vote brokers' stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how, in the aftermath of the Motor Voter Law of 1993, Californians used mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets, while in St Louis it was discovered that voter rolls included 13,000 more names than the US Census listed as the total number of adults in the city. Election officials try to reassure voters by turning to computerised voting machines. in 2004, for instance, the state of Maryland, which has 16,000 new Diebold machines, commissioned a security expert to try to rig a practice election. He and his team broke into the computer at the State Board of Elections, completely changed the outcome of the election, left, and erased their electronic trail - all in under five minutes. Stealing Elections gives us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability - in the 2004 presidential election and on into the future. Writing with urgency and authority, John Fund shows how a lethal combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging have put our democracy at risk. |
Contents
Introduction Democracy Imperiled | 1 |
Chapter Two The Myth of the Stolen Election | 27 |
Chapter Three Voters without Borders | 41 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
absentee ballots absentee voting Al Gore alleged American ballots cast Bill Bob Holden Bush California campaign candidate cast ballots Cayetano charges Civil Rights claims close court Demo Democratic lawyers Democratic Party Diebold district DREs Duta elec Election Day election fraud election night election officials election process election system ES&S federal felons Florida former Gore governor Hawaii illegal Interview intimidation investigation issue John Kerry Johnson judge Kerry later Louis mail-in mayoral Motor Voter National noncitizens November Odom overvotes Palm Beach County percent photo ID political poll watcher poll workers polling place precincts president presidential problems provisional ballots race recount registered to vote registered voters reported Republican require says scandal secretary Sequoia Shannon County South Dakota state's statewide Texas Thune tion Todd County told U.S. Senate voter fraud voter registration voter rolls voting irregularities voting machines Yoshina
References to this book
Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political ... Tracy Campbell No preview available - 2005 |