US Election Fraud VII: Voter Suppression - Dale Tavris

[Tace]

This is an important series on election fraud by Democratic Underground's Time for change.



Dale Tavris -- World News Trust

Sept. 15, 2018

Election Fraud in the United States: 2004 to Present

Part VII: Voter Suppression

Targeted voter suppression is a well-known and frequently practiced tactic of right-wing operatives. Some of the most common methods used are:

-- illegal and targeted purging of legally registered voters

-- voting equipment shortages resulting in voting lines so long that many prospective voters have to leave before voting in order to avoid missing work

-- closing of polling places

-- dirty tricks such as threatening prospective voters or notifying them of bogus changes in the day of the election or the place of voting in their precinct

All of these practices were especially common in the Ohio 2004 Presidential race and are described in detail in “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio” -- Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff.

Voter suppression does not manifest itself in red shifts, as does electronic vote theft. The reason is that prospective voters who don’t get a chance to vote, for whatever reason, don’t get exit polled because exit polls are directed solely at voters who just voted. So the damage to election integrity from voter suppression is above and beyond whatever damage is manifested by red shifts.

In this article, I will discuss some selected incidents of massive voter suppression in two very high-profile elections -- the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio and the 2016 Democratic primaries.


Illegal voter registration purging

Ohio 2004
I initially suspected that there was something very wrong with voter registration in Ohio, and especially in Cleveland, when I discovered a huge discrepancy between reports by The New York Times of massive new voter registration in Democratic areas of Ohio (ten times that of Republican areas) and official voter registration figures. The NY Times reporters (Kate Zernike and Ford Fessenden) identified 230,000 new voters registered in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County in 2004, compared with official Secretary of State figures indicating only 119,000 newly registered voters in Cuyahoga County. I estimated that if the discrepancy between the official figures and the newspaper reports was due to voter registration fraud, that probably cost Kerry about 47 thousand net votes in Cleveland alone.

I obtained a large degree of confirmation for that estimate from Norman Robbins, leader of the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition. According to his figures, as communicated to me by e-mail, there were 160,894 new voter registrations received by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in 2004 (compared with 31,903 new voter registrations in 2000). This was about 42,000 more registered voters than the 119,000 increase in registered voters between March and November of 2004 indicated by the official figures. The discrepancy between Robbins’ figures and the official figures could have been due to purging of newly registered voters, or failure to process the new voter registrations, which Robbins described in his report.

Confirmation of the probable reason for the above-noted discrepancies came from research by Victoria Lovegren, who posted a report at Ohio Vigilance which indicated the purging, apparently illegal, of 165,224 voters from Cuyahoga County alone, for no other rationale than that they hadn't voted recently. Dr. Lovegren noted in her report that this practice violated the National Voting Rights Act. Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of these reports was that the purging appears to have been done with no specific stated criteria for who would be purged.

Dr. Lovegren's report also noted numerous other issues of serious concern, including:

-- registration applications being rejected for trivial reasons

-- requests for absentee ballots not responded to

-- hundreds of long time voters missing from the voter rolls

-- the public was not allowed to watch the provisional ballot verification process

-- numerous voters did not receive provisional ballots as required by law

-- numerous dirty tricks aimed at disenfranchising Democratic voters

A question that was often asked of me when I talked about voter registration fraud in Ohio is what effect the purging of Democratic voters would be likely to have on the election results. There are two lines of doubt that have been expressed to me on this question. One is the question of whether newly registered voters would be as likely to vote as would longtime voters. This question is answered in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) report, “Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio,” on the 2004 Ohio election. According to Section VI, Figure 12 of that report, new voter registration was correlated with high voter turnout, meaning that in general, newly registered voters were more likely to vote in the Ohio 2004 election than were previously registered voters.

The other line of doubt is the question of whether people who are purged actually are prevented from voting. I am asked, “Couldn’t these people re-register after they found out that they were purged? I would answer this question by saying that maybe they could re-register if they know they were purged -- but an unknown number of these voters didn’t know they were purged until Election Day. But I didn’t have much of a sense of how frequently the purging would actually prevent voters from voting until I read Mark Crispin Miller’s book, “Fooled Again – How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them).”

In that book, Miller recounts his conversations with Denise Shull, a poll checker in Summit County. During the course of her work on Election Day, Shull noted that approximately 10 percent-20 percent of registered Democratic voters on her list were not on the official list of registered voters. Furthermore, these voters were described as ardent Democrats, as longtime voters in the area, and most of them were not voting. A possible reason for their not voting is suggested by an encounter that Shull had with one of these voters as the voter (or more accurately, non-voter) was leaving the polls. This person was simply told that she couldn’t vote and was given a phone number to call. And even more disturbing, Shull noted three of her fellow Democratic volunteers who described to her very much the same phenomenon occurring at the polling places where they worked that day.

What Shull describes not only provides confirmation that legally registered voters were purged from the voter rolls prior to the 2004 election, but it also indicates that most of these voters ended up not voting. What effect would this have had on the net vote count?

In addition to the estimated 46,000 net votes lost in Cleveland, Miller's book showed that an unknown number of other counties were involved as well. Targeting of Democratic voters in Cleveland could have been done easily and efficiently since Cleveland is heavily Democratic (voted 83 percent for Kerry, 16 percent for Bush in 2004), and many precincts in Cleveland voted more than 90 percent for Kerry. In order to target Democratic voters in Cleveland, one would merely have had to pick out those precincts with a history of voting 90 percent or more for Gore in the last election.

But what about Summit County, the county where Denise Shull and other Democratic volunteers described on-the-ground evidence of voter registration purging, and where only 57 percent of voters voted for Kerry. Voter purging in Summit County would have been much less efficient than voter purging in Cuyahoga County, because any voter purging that occurred would have included a large proportion of Republicans as well as Democrats – unless the purging was specifically targeted.

Miller’s book also describes a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in Akron, Summit County, in the summer of 2004. The only things stolen were two computers with Democratic campaign-related information on them. A similar break-in occurred three months later in Lucas County, and was described by the Toledo Blade. One can surmise that with voter information obtained from these computers, the targeting of Democratic voters in these two counties could have been made a lot more precise than it would have been without that information. When other voter registration fraud from other counties (for which we don’t have specific numbers) is added to that from Cuyahoga County, who can tell how many votes John Kerry lost in Ohio from illegal voter purging alone?

(more)

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-vii-voter-suppression-dale-tavris


***

PART I: Vulnerability of Electronic Vote Counting in U.S. Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-i-vulnerability-of-electronic-vote-counting-in-u-s-elections-dale-tavris

PART II: Evidence for Election Fraud in Exit Poll Discrepancies from Official Results

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-ii-evidence-for-election-fraud-in-exit-poll-discrepancies-from-official-results-dale-tavris

PART III: The Validity of Exit Polls for Monitoring Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iii-the-validity-of-exit-polls-for-monitoring-elections-dale-tavris

PART IV: Untimely Deaths Associated with the 2004 Presidential Election

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-united-states-2004-to-present-part-iv-untimely-deaths-associated-with-the-2004-presidential-election-dale-tavris

PART V: Disallowed and Corrupted Vote Recounts in Presidential Elections

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-us-2004-to-present-part-v-disallowed-and-corrupted-vote-recounts-in-presidential-elections-dale-tavris

PART VI: Evidence for Election Fraud in Election Machine "Glitches"

https://worldnewstrust.com/election-fraud-in-the-us-2004-to-present-part-vi-evidence-for-election-fraud-in-election-machine-glitches-dale-tavris

***

Dale Tavris, M.D.

Dale Tavris has worked as a public health physician/epidemiologist for 40 years, with state departments of public health, the U.S. Air Force, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Food and Drug Administration. In that capacity, he has authored 39 publications in peer-reviewed medical or public health journals.

Since 2004 he has been actively involved in the national election reform movement, serving in a volunteer capacity with the Election Defense Alliance for a few years as their data coordinator.

He has written dozens of online articles about election fraud. In 2007 he co-authored a journal article on election fraud: “Fingerprints of Election Theft: Were Competitive Contests Targeted.”

Tavris has written and published three books, including two of a political nature: “The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals,” 2011; and “Democracy Undone: Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Impending Demise of American Democracy,” 2012.

[clementine613]

1. I can make this really easy for you...

If a Rethug is running in a race and he won, he cheated.

(Oh, and if he lost, he cheated too, just not enough to actually win).

[Time for change]

2. This is a very serious issue

If you don't believe or don't agree with something said in this post, why don't you just say so and explain why you don't believe it, rather than use pointless sarcasm?

[clementine613]

3. Who said I was disagreeing with you?

Election fraud is a serious issue. I was just making it easier for you to identify it.