I was one of many people who just got an email from Dan Winslow, Chief Legal Counsel for the Scott Brown for U.S. Senate Committee. Dan writes:
Next week, Massachusetts’s citizens will head to the polls to vote in a historical election. Close elections draw intense scrutiny, and ensuring the accuracy and credibility of the process is crucial. For that reason, the Scott Brown campaign is assembling a volunteer team to ensure that every legally cast ballot is accurately counted. The citizens of Massachusetts deserve a fair and honest election.
He concludes: “Please do not wait, Election Day is January 19th!”
I will add a few comments.
There will be attempted vote fraud by some Democrats in the Brown/Coakley Senate race. There is a lot at stake. A defeat which takes away Ted Kennedy’s old seat, and loses their super-majority, will be a humiliation and a political disaster for the Democrats. They will have every incentive to use all means available to them to prevent that defeat.
If you are lawyer who can volunteer in Massachusetts on January 19, go to the link and sign up now, or please forward this link if you know a lawyer who lives in Massachusetts or can be there on election day.
I have worked as a poll watcher in the Chicago area several times. As a Republican in a majority Democratic precinct, I have been treated with very cold courtesy, and some snide remarks, but only rarely with outright hostility. I have never seen any vote fraud, and I do not think there was any. My presence may have deterred any attempted fraud. I will never know. I do know I helped to insure at least one honest polling place on election day, and that is good enough.
The point here is not partisanship. The point here is that we do not live in Albania, or the Congo, or Red China. We supposedly live in a democracy where the citizens vote, and their votes are counted fairly.
Democracy only works if the integrity of the system is insured. And that only happens if there are people from both parties posted in every polling place. An honest system is an American value, not just a Republican value.
In a close, and important, election like this one, the incentives to cheat, by the incumbent party in particular, are very high. It need not come from the candidates or their staffs. Some areas have almost a tradition of cheating, in both parties, where others are squeaky clean. It can occur spontaneously at the bottom rung. Precinct captains are judged on how well they got the vote out. Their political future turns on winning their precinct for the Party’s candidate, and getting their own voters out and to the polls. The incentive to corruption and electioneering, and voter intimidation, are permanent features. Corruption in the system is a permanent challenge that can only be minimized and never eliminated.
Ensuring an honest election is labor intensive. You need mobs for jobs on the day.
I cannot be in Massachusetts on election day. But if you can help out on January 19, please do so.
To ensure that “every legally cast ballot is accurately counted” is surely not the problem. It’s all those ones that turn up in car boots …
“The point here is that we do not live in Albania, or the Congo, or Red China,” or for that matter Minnesota.
Unfortunately, the history of the US shows many examples of corrupt elections. “Landslide LBJ” is probably the most infamous. Chicago and New York have formidable machines who have turned many elections into Third World jokes. Nevertheless, by the end of the 20th century it appeared that the war against corruption was rendering these as isolated exceptions.
But with the rise of ACORN – an organization whose sole reason for existence is to perpetuate voter registration fraud on a vast scale – the US is sliding back into the corrupt past. And rather than expose corruption, most of the media is either silent or openly complicit.
Already in the past decade we have seen elections stolen in the Washington governor’s race (2004), the Minnesota US Senate race (2008-9), the Virginia US Senate race (2006), and the NY-20 House special election (early 2009). In 2000 the Presidency itself was nearly stolen. What used to be confined mostly to cities run by crooked machine politics seems now to be going nationwide.
Amy lawyers who agree to go to Massachusetts for Tuesday’s vote must realize that it is in some ways like being asked to monitor elections in a Third World kleptocracy. You will be under the eyes of a wrathful ruling party that will lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power. For the most part the media will either ignore you or be openly hostile. Do not be surprised if the authorities simply brush you aside – or even try to legally threaten you if you become too big a pest.
Brown will ‘lose’ this election. It will be ‘close’, but in the end he will ‘lose’.
Just like all the last gods-know-how-many ‘close’ elections that the Dems have somehow managed to ‘win’ in the past two or three years. They find ballots in abandoned cars. They find boxes of ballots that were ‘misplaced’, they have folks in other countries cast ballots because they’re all registered in the same house in Ohio. They have judges appoint them. Whatever.
If you seriously believe there will be an election – as was defined in decades long past – in Massachusettes(!) you are fooling yourselves.
I hope I’m wrong. I fear I am not.
Orion
Hey, give Albania a break! At least it’s *trying* to become an open, transparent democracy. We’re headed the other way!
Indeed it is…thank you for your service.
It doesn’t require a few saving souls,it requires an Army of Davids.
There is no doubt that thousands of ACORN’s will be dug up or bused in.
If there is a problem, who are you going to report it to? The Boston machine? Eric Holder? This is a problem.
As for the media, it wouldn’t hurt for the GOP to educate some in the media on precinct rules and procedures…and WHY the rules are important. For example, every election we read news reports about discrepancies between # of ballots cast and # of signed-in voters. Where I vote the ironclad rule is that discrepancies must be resolved BEFORE the ballots leave the voting precinct (not after they arrive at election central). I think these rules are pretty universal (why have counts if they’re not going to be “balanced” at the end of the day?).
Yet reporters never bear down on election officials to explain why ballots were allowed to leave their precinct without a full (and credible) accounting for discrepancies. I think reporters simply do not understand the principal of dealing with discrepancies at their lowest level (the precinct) before they are folded into a larger pool (county-wide ballots).
Whether it be “balancing” signed-in voters with ballots cast, or walk-in absentee ballots, or same-day registrations: there are clear rules on how to account for them AT THE PRECINCT LEVEL. Reporters do not seem to know or care about those rules. The GOP needs to re-educate them on why those rules are so important and why they must be enforced at the precinct level.
Scott Brown has a huge warchest that could also be used for suing people who have been distorting his record.
I’d start with Martha Coakley day after she loses this election; but there are dozens of union organizations which have been running advertisements all but accusing Brown of being a serial rapist himself.
There must be a cost imposed on such groups, or our democracy surely is doomed.
Re: “who are you going to report it to?” Good point. The answer is to bring your camera phone. Eric Holder still will not prosecute, but it will be evidence for Brown’s lawsuit.
I firmly believe that Brown has to win by at least 5% or 6% to safely overcome election fraud by the Democrats which might amount to 3% or 4% of the vote. The presence of ACORN and SEIU is particularly troubling. I did have a close friend who served as a poll watcher in nearby Pontiac, MI, There was fraud and attempted fraud and he was threatened when he protested. And in our listing of recent fraud, let us not forget the outright theft of the Washington State Governor’s race by the KIng County (Seattle) political machine a couple of years ago.
If you are licensed for concealed carry (I know, it’s Massachusettes), make sure you volunteer to escort people to the polls. We know what the busloads of SIEU and New Black Panthers will do, and be prepared to counter it.
At some point, a corrupt election means the elected lose legitimacy. Illegitmate government has no legal authority. At what point does this occur, so government taxation becomes mere theft, and government acts to enforce false law become assault under cover of law?
At that point, each must do what they think is right, and each can only do justice in their own eyes.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/barnes-massachusetts-senatorial-race-and-obamacare