US Presidents and Election Fraud

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Many people, even after the 1876 Hayes vs. Tilden and Florida 2000 Bush vs. Gore elections, still believed that election fraud was a relatively rare event in the USA, especially as regards presidents, and exerted a relatively small effect on history.

That perception is false. In fact, election fraud has exerted a very large effect on US (and hence world) history. Indeed, it has been one of the largest factors affecting post-World-War-II US history. To show that, we will now detail the fact that of the 11 US Presidents since World War II, the careers of at least 6 depended crucially on election fraud.

If you can name any other factor which created 6 or more out of 11 US presidents, please do. We suspect you can't name very many, in which case you agree with us that election fraud has been one of the pre-eminent factors altering US and world history. Bet you didn't learn that as a schoolchild, did you? Gee, I wonder why.

The list:

Harry Truman: Harry Truman was a failed haberdasher from Independence Missouri who, fortunately for him, was friends with Kansas City's ultra-corrupt political boss Tom Pendergast (1873-1945). Truman first got the Pendergast machine to support him so that he could be elected county Judge. (Which was somewhat odd since he had not yet entered law school. But actually Truman's judgeship was not about judging cases, it was about deciding which contractors would get Kansas City money. The goal was to make sure Pendergast and his friends got the money. After many years of loyal-to-Pendergast service in this capacity, Pendergast decided Truman was ready to move on to higher office. ) Truman never would have gotten beyond County Judge, if it were not for the massive, career-starting, election fraud in the 1934 Democratic party primary, which enabled him to win his Missouri Senate seat. The election came down to a battle between Pendergast's Kansas City corrupt machine (supporting Truman) versus the (also amazingly corrupt) St. Louis machine, supporting congressman John Cochran. In St.Louis, Cochran beat Truman by an amazing 121,048 to 4614. (In the fourth ward alone, it was Cochran 5568 to Truman's 8.) But in Kansas City, Truman won Jackson County by an even more amazing 137,529 to Cochran's 1,525. (In the earlier 1932 race, Cochran – then enjoying Pendergast's support – had won Jackson County by 95,000 votes.) In the rest of Missouri, which was contaminated to a certain degree by honest counting, it was Truman 134,707; Cochran 113,532, and Jacob Milligan 128,401. (Milligan's vote in St.Louis and Kansas City combined was below 20,000; Milligan was the last thing either city machine wanted, for reasons that will soon be apparent.) Pendergast had about 70,000 phantom "ghost voters" on his Kansas City registry rolls, plus used armed thugs to steal ballot boxes, ferry around repeater-voters, and intimidate reporters, observers, and any semi-organized opposition. (In the 1934 election they killed 4 and beat about a dozen. Only a small number of killings suffice to cause a great deal of voter-intimidation.) Pendergast's machine also controlled and faked the appointment of election judges en masse, e.g. appointing over 250 "Republican" election judges who were actually Democrats; in many wards the votes were not counted at all, but simply the totals announced.



As a postscript: U.S. District Attorney Maurice Milligan (Jacob's brother) convicted 259 people (out of 278 tried) in the Jackson County area for fraud in the 1936 election, and Pendergast was imprisoned in 1939 for tax evasion on his enormous graft-made fortune. (Failed to pay income taxes 1927-1937; part of a $750,000 insurance scam; and faked the books of 8 companies he owned.) Milligan later wrote the book Missouri Waltz: The inside story of the Pendergast machine by the man who smashed it, Charles Scribner's Sons NY 1948. M.Milligan then tried to run against Truman for the senate in 1940, which might have worked thanks to his weakening of the Pendergast machine – but Truman was re-elected anyway thanks to (a) Truman made a deal with St.Louis and nationwide Democratic party political boss Robert E. Hannegan to get Truman votes in the St.Louis wards Hannegan controlled, and (b) the "vote splitting" flaw in the plurality voting system, which caused the anti-Pendergast vote to be split between Lloyd C. Stark and Milligan, allowing Truman to win by a 7000-vote margin. Missouri governor Stark was also a Pendergast creation, but later publically turned against him. Milligan's efforts, massive though they were, only partially succeeded in cleaning up Kansas City politics (and St.Louis politics, as far as I can tell, was never cleaned up), and Truman after his Presidency could find no room in his heart to appreciate Milligan, describing him as a "dumb cluck." In what Time Magazine [6 Nov. 1944 cover story on Truman] called the "low point of Truman's career," Truman as Senator tried unsuccessfully to block Milligan's appointment as Federal prosecutor, "fighting him tooth and nail, rising to make a violent speech on the Senate floor in which he even questioned Milligan's 'public morals'." If that effort had succeeded, the Pendergast machine might still be around today, but the rest of the Senate was unimpressed and confirmed Milligan overwhelmingly. Truman also arranged, as senator, to get Missouri's WPA-administrator post for a Pendergast henchman named Matt Murray (later imprisoned for income-tax evasion); this post probably was worth millions in graft for the Pendergast machine. Meanwhile Hannegan made a deal with F.D.Roosevelt to make Truman his vice president, which in turn allowed him to become US president. Truman's administration was highly corrupt with, e.g. 166 of his appointees resigning or fired after a scandal re financial misbehavior in the Internal Revenue Service (Kefauver commission investigation, etc.). John F. Kennedy: Kennedy's election in 1960 over Nixon involved heavy fraud in Illinois and Texas. (If Nixon had won those two states, he would have won the presidency.) As examples of ballot box stuffing: In Texas's Angelina County, in one precinct, only 86 people voted yet the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon; in Fannin County the 4895 registered voters cast 6138 votes (75% for Kennedy). Discarded spoiled ballots were to be placed by Texas law in "ballot box 4" for later re-examination, but many counties (e.g. Fort Bend County, which had a huge 16% spoilage rate, topping even the worst Florida 2000 County) just discarded them, and did not store them, making any biased discarding decisions uncorrectable and unprovable. The 100%-Democrat Texas Election Board refused to conduct a recount, so game over.



Kennedy carried Illinois by 8858 votes thanks to a 456,312-vote advantage in Chicago, whose precincts reported their totals remarkably late. (Compare this with Kennedy's nationwide victory margin of 118,574.) The "turnout" in Daley-machine Chicago was a spectacular 89%. This contrasts with the nationwide turnout of 63%. It also contrasts with the fact that in the 11 presidential elections during 1960-2000, totalling 550 statewide contests, not once did any state ever exceed 1964 Utah's 78.4% turnout, and the states with the largest-% turnout were always rural (namely North and South Dakota, Utah, Minnesota, and Maine), not urban.



In 1992 mob boss Sam Giancana's nephew and brother wrote a book ["Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America," Warner books] again recounting how Giancana had rigged the Cook County vote for Kennedy as part of a deal, and further stating that when Kennedy reneged on the deal, Giancana had him assassinated. (They claimed they had heard this directly from Giancana himself who also noted "Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson knew about the whole damn thing." The book also linked Giancana to a total of 7 US Presidents.) Giancana and Kennedy both shared Judith Campbell Exner as mistress.



Circuit Court Judge Thomas Kluczynski, a Daley machine loyalist, dismissed Republican lawsuits, for which Kennedy rewarded him by appointment to the federal bench. Recounts were generally blocked by Daley cronies, but special prosecutor (a Democrat!) Morris Wexler found that the simultaneous IL Attorney General race had been massively corrupted to defeat Adamowski (8875 extra Adamowski votes were found during a partial recount, i.e. exceeding the Kennedy-Nixon margin) and embarked on 667 prosecutions, but the Daley machine trumped that by getting a judge to dismiss all the charges en masse, and game over. During the 1960 election, 176 out of 180 positions on the Board of Election Commissioners were Daley Democrats. In 1962, after an election judge confessed to witnessing vote tampering in Chicago's 28th ward, three precinct workers pled guilty and served short jail terms. Reporter Earl Mazo, visiting the Chicago address where 56 Kennedy voters "lived," found an abandoned demolished house. He also found a cemetary where all the tombstone names were registered voters. In Ward 27, Precinct 27, the 376 voters cast 397 votes; In the 15th precinct of ward 2, Kennedy beat Nixon 74-to-3 but only 22 people were registered to vote.



Following Kennedy's election, he appointed his brother Bobby (who would seem to be somewhat underqualified, e.g. he'd never argued a case in a courtroom) US attorney general, and Bobby shut down all federal investigations into voting fraud.



Some cleanup of the Daley machine finally occurred in the early 1970s after the Chicago Tribune hatched a plan in 1972 to get 20 of its reporters to become precinct officials so they could see the machine from inside; this plan resulted in 40 indictments for election fraud. They observed countless cases of workers illegally helping voters and distributing partisan literature. Vote-buying including "chain voting" was done openly. Election observers were threatened with death. Others were simply refused permission to observe. The livelihood of the "precinct captains" was based on the votes they "delivered." They had quotas that differed in different precincts based on past history, and had to deliver quota or lose job. Counts were falsified. Democrat party bosses controlled all the election judge appointments. 82% of Republican election judges admitted they had been recruited and appointed by Democratic ward bosses. Lyndon B. Johnson: Johnson won his initial Texas senate seat in 1948 with the aid of massive fraud in the Democratic Party primary, aided by enormous funding from the Brown & Root Tobacco Company (which had picked LBJ as the man they were going to create) to pay off the Parr corruption machine in Southern Texas. Of course, due to 1-party Democrat control of Texas at that time, the primary election was the real election; the Republicans had no chance. "Brown and Root" later morphed into "Halliburton" and "KBR," both of which laid a trail of worldwide corruption behind them for decades that continues up to 2010 with no sign of stopping.



Stevenson had earlier been the Texas Governor and had won in Parr's counties by about 97% margins thanks to support from Parr's machine. But in 1948, Johnson had the funds and Parr felt betrayed by Stevenson's failure to appoint enough Parr cronies. Stevenson, who was enormously popular and had won elections statewide by over 80%, would seem to have no problem beating the unknown Johnson if voting were honest. And indeed he did in 168 counties versus Johnson's 72, winning statewide over Johnson by 71,000 votes. But fortunately for Johnson, the six Parr-controlled counties in South Texas "voted" for him 98%, which, while not enough to get Johnson more votes than Stevenson, was enough to get him into a runoff with Stevenson. In the runoff, Johnson used his funds to buy enormous numbers of votes in San Antonio and to pay off other counties to get numerous 5:1 ratio leads. But Stevenson still was ahead statewide by 854 votes the day after election day, and since the Parr-headquarters Duval County had, e.g. voted Johnson by 99% (with 99.6% turnout), it seemed unlikely Parr could generate enough additional "votes" to put Johnson over the top. No problem. The Parr-controlled counties simply kept "amending" their returns daily to keep generating more Johnson votes, with the final trick, a week later, being precinct number 13 in Jim Wells County, which was election judge Luis Salas's precinct, which had voted for Johnson 765 to 60. Somebody simply "closed the loop on the 7" to make it 965 to 60, giving Johnson a statewide victory by 87 votes, and earning him the nickname "Landslide Lyndon." The last 203 names on the voting list in this precinct were written in alphabetical order in the same ink and all were witnessed under the signature of Parr-deputy election judge Luis Salas; albeit this list later mysteriously was "lost." (Much later, Salas and various Johnson campaign aides publically admitted all these frauds and Parr committed suicide when it appeared the Feds were finally going to be able to get to him on tax evasion charges. One of Johnson's campaign aides, John Connally, became Texas Governor. The story is described in, e.g. Caro's and Feinberg's books. Too-inquisitive election inspectors and observers would be jailed and ordered out of Parr counties at submachine gun point; the homes and businesses of those insufficiently loyal to Parr would be burned. Three prominent critics of Parr were assassinated by unknown assailants.) Richard M. Nixon: Nixon, recall, had suffered a close defeat in 1960 to J.F.Kennedy (but eventually ran again, winning the presidency in 1968 and re-election in 1972). Nixon in 1960 also employed fraud in downstate Illinois, as reporter Mazo found when he went there. (Practices there included voting by telephone and bulk voting by political leaders.) "In downstate Illinois, there was definitely fraud," said Mazo. "The Republicans were having a good time, too. But they didn't have the votes to counterbalance Chicago. There was no purity on either side, except that the Republicans didn't have Daley in their corner – or Lyndon Johnson." Later, Nixon, after winning in 1968, wanted (for reasons best known to him) to win re-election in 1972 by a "landslide." (The polls suggested he would win easily, but that was not good enough.) Nixon thus initiated a dirty tricks campaign including the Watergate scandal in which he had the Democratic Party headquarters "bugged" with electronic eavesdropping devices, and also used the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate and "shake down" campaign money donors. For this, Nixon would have become the only president to be successfully impeached – except that he avoided that fate by resigning and having his VP (Ford) pardon him.



On 26 March 1969 – only a few months after he took office – Nixon approved a plan by White House Counsel John Erlichman for the US government to conduct secret round the clock survellance on senator Edward M. Kennedy, JFK's youngest and only surviving brother. (JFK had been assassinated in November 1963, his younger brother Robert had also been assassinated in June 1968, and their eldest brother Joseph had died in a warplane explosion during World War II.) In mid-1971 Nixon also set up a similar 24 hour surveillance operation on Senator Edmund S. Muskie (who had run as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate against Nixon in 1968). Thus Nixon was using the surveillance/spying capabilities of the US government to spy on potential rivals (both Muskie and Kennedy were top potential rivals of Nixon or likely to talk with those who would be) over a year in advance of the 1972 election.



Perhaps most remarkable of all was this. The 1968 election was close. Official results of Tuesday 5 Nov. 1968 election:

R.Nixon/S.Agnew(R) 43.4%, H.Humphrey/E.Muskie(D) 42.7%, G.Wallace/C.LeMay(I) 13.5%. One big reason for Humphrey's unpopularity was the Vietnam War, which he (as the VP in the Johnson adminstration) was associated with. Nixon proclaimed he had a "secret plan to end the war" which was a big reason to vote for Nixon, at least for voters who believed him. (Actually, it was very convenient that Nixon kept this plan secret, since later history revealed that no such plan existed.) On Thursday 1 Nov. – 4 days before the election – Johnson in a surprise nationwide televised address announced that the war would soon end because negotiations in Paris between the USA, S.Vietnamese, and N.Vietnamese had yielded a peace agreement! This might have swung he election to Humphrey – except that on Saturday (3 Nov.) the S.Vietnamese, even more surprisingly, announced that they were rejecting the peace agreement!! That presumably swung the election back to Nixon (who anyway definitely won). Why this sudden switch? The answer was only revealed 45 years later, in 2013, after President Johnson's recorded telephone calls were declassified in 2008 and examined. It turns out that Nixon had secretly contacted the S.Vietnamese and told them that Johnson was scamming them, they needed to get out of the peace agreement and withdraw from the talks pronto – whereupon if/when Nixon got elected, he'd give them a much better deal. Johnson found out about Nixon's peace-sabotage because the USA was secretly wiretapping/bugging the S.Vietnamese embassy and thus overheard their phone conversations with, e.g, Nixon's senior campaign advisor Anna Chennault! E.g. in the FBI transcript of one conversation she tells the S.Vietnamese ambassador to "just hang on through the election." Johnson then had the Nixon campaign placed under FBI/NSA surveillance(!!) with the result that he became convinced Nixon indeed was behind this. Johnson discussed this discovery with several people, and some of those discussions were recorded on the Johnson tapes. Nixon, however, pretended he had no idea why the peace talks had fallen through. Humphrey & Johnson then decided not to reveal Nixon's skullduggery (which Johnson in one recorded conversation called "treason," which incidentally is a capital crime – if you or I had tried this, we'd probably be locked up if not executed, and indeed Aaron Burr, the US vice president who came within a single vote of being elected US president in 1800, was tried but acquitted for treason in 1807 on charges and evidence which seem far less serious and convicing than for Nixon) because To do so they'd have had to reveal their own skullduggery with the spying on our "ally" S.Vietnam and later use of US government spy agencies to spy on the Nixon campaign (quite reminiscent of Watergate albeit probably more justified). If Humphrey & Johnson had aired the Chennault tape on national television and radio, it would have had a very dramatic, albeit perhaps highly unpredictable, effect. Humphrey thought he was going to win the election without needing to do this, and/or feared that an attempt in the last two days(!) before the election to brand Nixon a traitor, and blast exculpatory evidence over the airwaves rather than in court, would backfire. Humphey & Johnson said nothing. Nixon ended his campaign by suggesting the administration war policy was in shambles: they couldn't even get their friends the South Vietnamese to the negotiating table. Result: Nixon won by 0.7%.



Did the USA and Vietnam then get the peace, and/or more favorable agreement, Nixon had promised? Of course not – they'd been played and now it was time to screw them. Peace from the point of view of the USA did not arrive until 1973 (5 years later) and from the point of view of the Vietnamese had to wait until 1975. If Johnson's peace had not been sabotaged, that would seem, on the surface at least, to have been a far better deal for the S.Vietnamese than what Nixon got them (i.e. complete defeat), 5-7 years earlier, and would have saved about 22000 American and 900000 Vietnamese lives.



Also rather slimy was the way Nixon's career got started: his hounding and prosecution of State Dept. employee Alger Hiss, resulting in Hiss's jailing and the end of his career. Hiss supposedly was a "spy" but was neither tried nor convicted for espionage, but rather for perjury, for which he was convicted in the second trial (first trial had a hung jury). The book A tissue of lies by M. & M.Levitt (McGraw Hill 1979) tells the story and makes it clear that the prosecution behaved extremely illegally. The only evidence Hiss perjured himself was a single witness, Whittaker Chambers – so one could equally well conclude that Chambers was the perjurer. Chambers indeed did lie in testimony that was kept secret from the jury and Hiss defense team: he told the FBI and Congress he'd "lost all contact with Hiss after 1937" and broken with the Communist Party in 1937 too. But the Hiss case rested on documents dated 1938 which therefore Chambers could not have received from Hiss. Chambers then revised his story, and the revision was the only one the jury heard. There also was typewriter evidence, but the Levitt book shows that the FBI knew that the typewriter they had could not have been the one Hiss used, because it was manufactured two years too early. Nixon put it this way in his book Six Crises: "A typewriter has this characteristic in common with a fingerprint; every one is different, and it is impossible to make an exact duplicate unless the same machine is used... an expert from the FBI typed exact copies of the incriminating documents on the old Woodstock machine and had them flown up to New York as exhibits for the members of the Grand Jury to see." Note how Nixon, here as in the actual case, neglects to inform that this typewriter could not have been the one, a fact well recognized by the FBI (who had gotten the records from the factory that manufactured it) but kept secret, e.g. a directive from FBI Chief J.Edgar Hoover instructs to "...interview Thomas Grady to obtain an explanation as to how he could sell a machine which was manufactured in 1929 to the Fansler-Martin partnership in 1927." The FBI typewriter expert Feehan's testimony was also somewhat suspicious, e.g. "I examined each and every character of typewriting appearing on the questioned and known documents" which R.A.Werchen & F.J.Cook in The Nation (28 May 1973) calculated would have taken Feehan "800 eight-hour days with no recess for lunch" to do in the style he'd described. Contrary to Nixon's quote, it is possible to forge typewriter evidence – in fact Hoover had visited a government facility devoted to exactly that task! This fact again was kept secret from the jury. Later it was theorized that this evidence indeed had been forged, e.g. the New York Post headline "DEAN: NIXON ADMITTED FAKING HISS TYPEWRITER" about a somewhat ambiguous claim in Nixon aide John Dean's 1976 tell-all book Blind Ambition. The FBI also employed "double agents" who infiltrated the Hiss legal defense team and reported back to them. (All these facts were revealed in FBI documents long after Hiss's conviction.) Another problem was Noel Field, a Soviet Agent who had allegedly gotten spy goodies from Hiss. Field was unavailable during the Hiss trial but later announced that was false. So all in all, it appears that, had the prosecution and FBI not behaved in illegal manners, there would have been considerably more reasonable doubt about Hiss's guilt, which would probably have resulted in more failures to convict him, at which point Nixon's political career would not have been jumpstarted, but rather the opposite. Jimmy Carter: Carter's career got started with a blatant massive fraud against him by the Quitman County corruption machine under political boss Joe Hurst, which caused Carter's 1962 defeat in his Democratic primary race for the district-14 Georgia State Senate seat. Aided by a series of exposes in the Atlanta Journal by John Pennington, Carter sued. The fraud was so blatant that Carter's legal team easily produced vast amounts of human and physical evidence of the fraud, e.g. voters who were out of town, in the penitentiary at the time, voted in alphabetical order, were falsely registered, etc. This still was insufficient because Hurst simply had the review committee dismiss Carter without even hearing his case. Carter however persisted in going to higher authorities beyond Hurst's complete control, and on November 1, just days before the general election, received a hearing before a committee headed by Judge Carl Crow. Upon opening the Georgetown ballot box in court, numerous illegalities were found (e.g. the box's seals were faked, the stubs for all the ballots had been "lost," etc. 431 votes appeared in one district despite the 333rd voter being the last; this was explained as due to absentee ballots – all of which, mysteriously, were missing. Other voters testified that their ballots had been extracted from the ballot box and torn up right in front of them to the accompaniment of verbal death threats. Crow voided Carter's defeat, which fortunately for Carter was by a slim enough margin (139 votes!) that the small number of votes he was able to prove fraudulent, actually sufficed. Carter then won the general election (they just barely managed to print the revised ballots in time) and a few years later become Georgia's governor and later went on to the presidency. (Hurst ended up in jail on a moonshining charge.) This case was remarkable because it depended on a host of exceptional circumstances; normally the corruption machines were able to defeat all such challenges (or at least delay them enough to prevent their success), stifle the careers of such as Carter, and control the judges like Crow, and normally reporters like Pennington did not exist or were unable to gather enough evidence. Carter, after his presidency, started the "Carter Center," which does election monitoring all over the world; and quite possibly Carter's interest in this topic was spawned by his own experience with election corruption. Carter is the only US president in the modern era to have played a substantial role in cleaning up elections. Ronald Reagan? National Security Council member and Navy Captain Gary Sick's 1991 book October Surpise alleged that Reagan (whose running mate was former CIA-head G.H.W.Bush, whose campaign head was former CIA-head W.Casey, and many of whose campaign operatives were former CIA officers including covert ones and CIA former associate director T.Shackley, a prime mover behind the Bay of Pigs invasion; nothing comparable had ever happened in any previous presidential campaign) had emissaries meet with Iranian emissaries and Israelis to arrange that their US hostages were to be released after the election thus helping Reagan defeat Carter in 1980, in return the USA would unfreeze most Iranian assets and provide covert arms shipments, some through Israel. This theory was re-examined pages 282-292 of American Dynasty, published by former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips in 2004. The evidence these two authors uncovered and reviewed fell short of being convincing. (Since this, if true, was the quintessential small conspiracy with little or nothing written down, it would easily have been kept secret and hence is extremely hard to prove or disprove; furthermore, sources mostly insisted on anonymity or were members of foreign intelligence services hence with suspect motivations. For example, a released Russian intelligence report confirmed the meeting, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir claimed Sick was right, and so did Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, who claimed he'd personally been approached by Reagan emissaries to arrange the deal. In the reverse direction a later congressional investigation found some of the alleged Reagan emissaries could not have been meeting Iranians in Europe because their credit card records said they were in the US at the time.) There were arms flowing from Israel to Iran... and the hostages were released immediately after Reagan's inauguration. And, it definitely is true that later, the Reagan administration fell into a stunning scandal involving covert arms shipments to Iran, with the money thus obtained being used secretly to fund a CIA "contra" army in Nicaragua in direct defiance of laws forbidding that! President Reagan's excuse was that he was unaware of all this!

Phillips concludes Sick's October surprise theory is probable but not proven. George W. Bush: Bush's victory over Gore in the 2000 election depended upon a number of fraudulent techniques in Florida (which he officially won by 537 votes), without which Gore would have won by tens of thousands of votes. Bush was aided by the fact that his brother Jeb was Florida Governor; his campaign co-chair Katherine Harris was the top Florida election-supervising official (secretary of state); and 4 of the 9 members of the US Supreme Court has been appointed by Bush's father (or when Bush senior was VP) – all 4 voted for Bush in the showdown, along with Justice Kennedy in the 5-4 decision. (7 of the 9 Supremes had been appointed by Republican presidents; the 2 others voted against Bush in the decision.)



(Bush also had won the Republican primary versus McCain by pulling ahead in Carolina with the aid of sudden closings of 21 of the 135 polls in Greenville County despite court order for them to stay open, which McCain & Campbell tagged as suspicious.)



We'll only mention a few techniques. (Some more.) Florida Blacks voted 93% for Gore, so a top goal of Bush's team was to stop blacks from voting or eliminate black votes from the count.



First, the famous Florida Felon's list. By Florida law, felons could not vote. Conveniently, 54% of the names on the "felon's list" were black, although the state as a whole was about 12% black. Over 300 "felons" on the "list" had printed conviction "dates" in the future (including as late as 2007) but that was of course just the tip of the iceberg. Tallahassee (Leon County) election supervisor Ion Sancho, after checking the 694 listed in his area, found only 33 were actually convicted criminals, an error rate of 95%! Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found herself listed on it. DBT On-Line, the company which had been paid over 400 times the previous company's rate to prepare the list (and was awarded the contract with no competitive bidding), was specifically instructed not to perform rudimentary identifying checks (such as social security number matching – nor even listing these numbers) – but the race of every felon was explicitly listed. Consequently far more names were purged than the number listed, but only if they were people of the right race. Before the next election (2004) the news organization CNN requested to examine Florida's new and "corrected" felons list, but that request was denied. After they won that permission on 1 July 2004 in a lawsuit, the list – again with every one of the over 47,000 voters on it identified by race – was found, amazingly, to contain fewer than 0.1% Hispanics, in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic. (The Hispanic vote was pro-Bush.) And the Miami Herald reported on July 2 that it found more than 2100 names erroneously included on the list because they had received clemency. (According to Jeb Bush, these things were "an oversight and mistake.")



Second, after Gore contested the election, the absentee ballots, especially the late ones, became crucial since they were the only class that had not yet been counted. Here's how the late-arriving absentee ballots got counted: In pro-Bush counties: 530 accepted, 523 rejected and hence uncounted. In pro-Gore counties: 150 accepted, 666 rejected. If you were black in FL 2000, your chances of having your vote "spoiled" and hence uncounted was 10 times higher than if you were white – and that's assuming you hadn't already been purged by the felon list. This was due to systematic manipulation of voting machines in Florida counties and precincts on a precinct by precinct basis.

To learn more about US election fraud, we recommend Campbell's, Gumbel's, Feinberg's, Saltman's, and Palast's books.

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