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Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy

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This is an excellent book that I highly recommend for every citizen who cares about our democracy and the integrity of the voting system through which it is repeatedly renewed. John Fund has written an important, concise work that readers will find readily accessible and informative.

I was hooked from page one, where Fund asserts that "the United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system benefiting an emerging Third World country rather than the world's leading democracy." Those are bold words, but in the chapters that follow Fund chronicles a rash of voter scandals from across the country-from Florida to Texas, from Missouri to South Dakota, and from Hawaii and elsewhere. The voting shenanigans pulled by many of the persons chronicled, the lax procedures and lack of serious law enforcement are particularly outrageous--if not downright SCARY.

Very intriguing was Funds reference to the "conflict of visions" concept proposed by Thomas Sowell and how those competing visions of human nature and reality provide the lenses through which competing political forces view the goals of electoral law. Seeing as this book is a compact one, Fund does not delve too deeply into the philosophical, but this reviewer (who is an admirer of "A Conflict of Visions") nonetheless appreciates this insight.

Most of the voter scandals discussed by Fund were perpetrated by Democrats (sometimes carried by Democrats battling other Democrats in local primary elections). However, Fund also points out incidents of voter fraud carried out by persons who are Republicans. Crime, including voter crime, is an equal opportunity offense. One need not be a member of a particular party to appreciate the contents of the book and the arguments presented. It should be noted that this book does not dwell upon courtroom litigation and legal arguments, particularly those involved in the 2000 Presidential election fiasco in Florida. Nor does the book spend an inordinate amount of time on the 2000 Florida mess, in general, although Fund does provide some key insights into what really happened in Florida once the dust settled, and much of it will be news to many. In any event, regardless of what may have taken place in recent times, it is of greater importance that citizens understand the voting process problems we have and the urgent need to address those problems.

Fund discusses some recent election reforms prompted by the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and poses a number of suggestions near the end of this book. His advice strikes one as imminently sound. The discussion of electronic voting was very informative-showing both its merits and also chronicling some serious technical blunders. (This reviewer leans toward an electronic voting system that provides a printout paper trail.)

An experienced journalist, Fund's book is well-written and is an enjoyable read. It hits readers with first-rate reporting and solid analysis. With election season now upon us, this book is very timely, and comes highly recommended.

In his brilliant, well-written, and downright frightening new book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy", Wall Street Journal political reporter John Fund looks at how easily votes are stolen or voters disenfranchised in this country, how Florida in 2000 was just the tip of the iceberg THAN YEAR, and how virtually nothing has changed since then to prevent an even longer, drawn out leagal battle from occuring.

Fund opens his book by describing the two types of people who are concerned about threat to the integrity of elections. One group, mostly Demcorats, are primarily concerened with the most people voting as possible, the "Unconstrained" view of Democracy that deempahsizes rules governing registration and voter ID in favor of getting as many people as possible to the polls. The other, "constrained" view, held by Republicans, is that the rule of law in elections must be upheld. This came to a head in two states in particluar in 2000, Florida and Missouri. Florida's problems are well-known, and Fund effectively and convincingly demonstrates that while the largest stories about fraud focused on so-called "disenfranchised" voters, the real problem was outright fraud committed in battlegrounds like Palm Beach Co. He decontructs the myth that 1000's of lower-income and minority votes were surpressed by relying on facts and statistics, not charges that were made only in the media, not the Courts. He also demonstrates that the Media probably crushed turnout in the Florida panhandle, which operates on Central Time, by declaring the polls closed statewide while there was still and hour of voting left in the Panhandle, and then calling Florida for Gore with 12 minutes left before the polls closed in that part of the state.

In Missouri, classic, machine fraud was a problem, with the established state laws governing elections essentialled overruled on a case by case basis by judges sympathetic to Democrats. While George Bush won the state when Senator Kit Bond finally insisted the polls close 3 hours after they were supposed to, Fund demonsrates eerie coincidences that seem to indicated a pattern to defraud the vote by the national Democratic Party.

The other chapters detail the fact that by eletion stanards, America's electoral integrity is teetering dangerously close to third world banana republicanism, that Mexico has a more secure voting system than we do, and he outlines ways to ensure that the process, which he argues must be uniform, transparent, and legally enforced, can be made safe and stable again. While some on the left may not like the harsh truths detailed in the book, if you want to understand exactly what is happening to the democratic process and how to fix it before it's too late, this book is a scary but essential read.

I wish I could say I was surprised at this book, and some of the details were fairly shocking, but as a poll watcher in several states over the decades, I am only sorry that this book is not getting the attention it deserves. The voting system in the country is very broken, and getting worse every day as the rhetoric escalates and the cheaters game the system. While there have been stolen elections many times in the USA, the only recent one at the national level was JFK's election in 1960 by dead people in Chicago and ghosts in Texas. Of course you could say the Democrats are up to the same old tricks with a different twist since they did a good job of disenfranchising black voters in the South with Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and KKK intimidation back when Senator Byrd was still wearing his white dress and hood in the 'hood. The claims by Democrats of election fraud in Florida in 2000 were proven to be false by every reputable organization that looked into it, including some very liberal newspapers who spent a lot of time doing recounts. But John Fund's little book shows numerous examples of voter fraud on a grand scale, in mostly Democratic areas, and this election will make 1960 look like petty theft. With more registered voters in some areas than there are living adults, where 40,000 New York voters from heavily Democrat districts are also registered to vote in Florida and thousands of them apparently did vote for Gore twice in 2000, and where the system is rigged to reward fraud, our election system is headed towards anarchy, if it isn't already there. With the race card played by Democrats at any attempt by Republicans to make this an honest process, we could well wind up with a president who was elected by fraud instead of by the will of the people. This is the only nation where cashing a check requires more identification than casting a vote. It is a sad day when the American soldiers who liberated Afghanistan and Iraq may well have their vote stolen while overseeing a more honest election process in those countries so new to freedom.

As I finish up and ponder "Stealing Elections" on the eve of the 2004 Presidential election, I cannot help but be alarmed at what has become of the election process in this country. John Fund has hit it right on the head in his matter-of-fact book about how various kinds of election fraud has undermined the way we choose our leaders.
The problems appear to have started in 1994 with the enactment of the Motor Voter Law. This innane Act allows individuals to register to vote in church, at the laundromat or at just about any government agency. And what is even more ludicrous is that absolutely no identification is required to register. When I read about this at the time I recall thinking just how ridiculous this law was. People can also register by mail, again with no identification required. And the consequences of this law should not be at all surprising. We now have many more fraudulant votes being cast by illegal aliens, convicted felons, by folks who moved away years earlier and yes even by dead people!!! And as a result the ballots cast by legitimate, law-abiding citizens are being negated. It is an outrage!
Another way elections are being stolen in this country is by the use of absentee ballots and extended election periods. It used to be that a citizen needed to present officials with a legitimate reason for being sent an absentee ballot. Today, standards have been relaxed and a greater and greater percentage of voters are opting for absentee ballots. The opportunities for voter fraud increase exponentially in such a scenario. Likewise, many states now allow voting over several days or even weeks. And in Oregon, virtually all balloting is now done by mail. Melody Rose, a professor at Oregon State University observes in "Stealing Elections" ""Vote by mail brings a perpetual risk of systemic fraud." In such a system ballots can easily be stolen from mailboxes and once again the opportunity for all kinds of hanky panky dramatically increases.
In Chapter 8 entitled "High Tech Voting", John Fund also discusses the myriad problems with just about all of the new voting machine technologies now available to states and municipalities. He points out significant problems that have occured with just about all of the new technologies including touch screens and scanners. Once again, the potential for fraud is tremendous. And even if some of these machines are working properly on Election Day recent history has taught us that poll workers are frequently poorly trained and often do not know how to operate these machines themselves. Add to all of this the new requirement for so-called "provisional" ballots and you just might agree that all of this adds up to a recipe for disaster.
As an important first step to remedy some of these issues and to return some level of sanity to the process, John Fund proposes that photo identification be required before voting. This seems like a reasonable idea. A recent poll indicates that 89$ of potential Bush voters and even 75% of John Kerry voters approve of this proposal. Yet Civil Rights groups fight such an idea tooth and nail. It is also clear to me that much of the new voting equipment in use might not be quite ready for prime time use. It is imperative that before a state commits to such new technologies that adequate testing be done beforehand. After all, what is the big rush? Are we falling all over ourselves just so the networks can get faster results on election night? Let them wait!
In "Stealing Elections" John Fund has painted a chilling picture of what our elections are turning into. I take this book very seriously and worry what the ramifications might be if people come to believe that elections can be easily manipulated or even stolen in our country. These are issues that all of us should become acquainted with and "Stealing Elections" is a good choice assist you in doing that. Highly recommended!

Although Fund's basic premise is very sound--the American election system is broken and is in need of repair--the incidents that he cites are either partially-inaccurate or are hugely insignificant in the overall context of the problem. The ones he leaves out are the big ones, and his astonishing omission can only be explained by the party he aligns himself to.

Here's a great example: In Chapter 2 Fund claims that the Democratic Party in Florida altered votes and almost gave the state to Gore in 2000. I guess he must have missed then-Gov Jeb Bush's post-election apology to the over 57,000 African American men who were "accidentally" bumped from the state voting roster and denied the opportunity to cast a ballot. Bush admitted they were incorrectly purged, but blamed the mistake on ChoicePoint, the company that he and his Sec of State Katherine Harris paid five times the normal data-retrieval rate to --supposedly--purge his state's voter roster of doubles. After ChoicePoint "accidentally" purged 57,7000 registered Black voters, Bush admitted they had made a mistake. The amount that his brother eventually "won" the state by was 537 votes. African Americans typically vote Democrat, so you don't even have to look at the 4000 typically Democratic Jewish voters whose votes "accidentally" went to GOP Pat Buchanan. Just the denial of the vote to Black men alone was way more than enough to illegally give the election to Jeb's brother. But Fund somehow missed this piece of the puzzle--a piece that Jeb Bush himself does not even deny.

Fund's omissions could be considered sloppy if they weren't so consistently one-sided. Like the CEO of e-voting machine company Diebold, Wally O'Dell, who was a "Bush Pioneer," a major contributer to the 2004 Republican campaign, and famously stated that he would "deliver" Ohio to President Bush. His machines, in fact, did just that. Diebold and the other two largest e-voting machines that counted the 2004 election were all owned by conservatives (Rep) and virtually 100% of the times they malfunctioned, the "error" favored the GOP candidate. One of our real problems is that much of our technological election technology has been jobbed out to private corporations, and that these corporations are owned by people who belong to one party--the GOP.

The real ways to help our broken system are not addresses by Fund either, simple ways like not allowing the Sec of State in charge of elections to be a campaign chair for a candidate! This seems like a no brainer, but the fact that both Florida's Katherine Harris in 2000 and Ohio's Kenneth Blackwell in 2004 were Bush campaign chairs AND their state's Sec of State in charge of elections seems to have slipped past Fund's scrutiny. If this one inappropriate conflict of interest had been addressed in 2000 and 2004 the massive election fraud most likely wouldn't have happened.

I'm glad that someone is still trying to address our broken election system, and for that I give Fund some credit. But if you want to read a comprehensive account of the more recent election fraud in America, read Mark Crispin Miller or Greg Palast or Steven Hill, and don't waste your time here.

Did you know that the U.S. has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center 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 reading that in the books description of 'Stealing Elections' by John Fund I knew I needed the book. I read that 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 U.S. Census listed as the total number of adults in the city. Election officials are trying to reassure voters by turning to computerized voting machines. But Fund shows that with the new technology come even greater concerns. Early 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. ' that I knew I needed to read the book and then recommend it to others.

I was thinking about this after listening to NPR and then Coast to Coast on radio one night where it was noted that there HAS to be a repeat of the fraud in Florida this year for two simple reasons. First because there have been major hurricanes which have left people homeless with no polling place, and those using touch tone screens will NOT have any proof they voted like one does with a paper ballot either from a polling place or via absentee ballot.

And now the United Nations and other countries are being asked by American citizens to please come and monitor American elections just like they do in Iraq, Afghanistan and other third world countries where corruption is rampant. Its a MUST read book.

Blatant attempt by this partisan republican to attack the democratic party and blame them for voter fraud, to cover up the fact that the 2000 and 2004 elections were outright stolen via intimidation, disenfranchisement and electronic voting machines, all designed to prevent minorities, poor people and young people from voting. Disgusting and nasty politics, not journalism.

Florida drew the attention of the country and the world to the United States election system. But this was not the first and certainly won't be the last time that (shall we call them) irregularities occur in an election. Here are the stories of a few irregularities from where the country took the ballot boxes home (just for safe keeping of course) before the votes were counted to the big time vote arranging of the political bosses. Great reading, and plenty of blame on both parties. This way readers can say that he is prejudiced against their party.

This presidential year I'm living in one of the battleground states. An organization set up tables at a series of super markets around the state to get people to register. They passed out the proper forms and collected the filled out forms to be filed with the country clerk. But only one party's forms were turned in.

All and all, it's a wonder that our Government hasn't been any worse than it has. This book talks a lot about fraud. Maybe he'll write another one about incompetence.

Our county was told that we had to have dual language voting.

OK, our machines will do that.

The second language has to be Piute indian. - Guess what indian language doesn't have a written language.

This book properly recognizes that election shenanigans are virtually an American tradition, but slinks into pure propaganda with its implicit and explicit contention that Democrats are solely to blame. But, if there's an equivalent book out there for Democrats that focuses solely on the misdeeds of Republicans, then perhaps we all can agree that elections need protocols to determine fraud by officials, by parties, by voting equipment vendors, and by voters. And that we especially need officials with an attitude capable of protecting the integrity of elections, and not one that pooh-poohs every conceivable threat.

Fund grossly undervalues two things, greatly damaging the value of his work. First, he grossly underappreciates insider fraud. In fact, with secret vote counting now the order of the with electronic voting, economics argues that elections can and will be up for sale to the highest bidder, and we'll never know any better. Second, he grossly underappreciates the fact that ALL voting systems will be vulnerable and subject to attack, because elections have always been highly competitive events with a unhealthy dollop of dirty tricks. Because all systems can be compromised, a good voting system is inexpensive and creates witnesses and EVIDENCE when cheating happens and also has a low payoff per election crime, while a bad voting system leaves little or no evidence, and a relatively small number of people can throw the election, getting a high payoff for their election crime.

Guess what? Electronic voting leaves no evidence of hacking or rigging if it's done properly, insiders are the most likely culprits, and the payoff for a single crime can easily be the whole election. Paper ballots, while subject to felon voting, double voting and the ills Funds describes in this book, leave EIVDENCE. In fact, this is the very reason Fund is able to write a book about them! They were caught, in most cases!

In a democracy we should not be quick to blame the people as pretty soon the people may be considered untrustworthy and then we don't have a democracy any more. Instead, since voting is a right, let people freely exercise the right, and then punish AFTERWARD the abuse of that right, being careful to create systems where it's hard for an abuse to yield more than one vote. Paper ballots are easy on the tax dollar, and meet this bill. Despite the thousands of people trying to cheat the election system, it's a good system, and the rats are getting a might small piece of cheese with paper ballots. In contrast, you can see Howard Dean on the web hecking an election in less than 60 seconds. I kid you not. The only solution is total openness and observation by all parties, watching each other like hawks.

19th century New York City Democratic Party boss William Marcy Tweed was quoted saying "As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?" Things have not changed much in the last 100 years.

Fund, a writer for the Wall St. Journal, writes this book as something of an extended 'report from the front'. There isn't a lot of theory, and the author is somewhat embarrassed that the Democratic Party perpetrated almost all his examples.

Here is a summary of the contents:
Chapter 1: Vocabulary and positions (author cites pre-2000 examples of election fraud, both Republican and Democrat)

Chapter 2: How the Democratic Party in Florida altered votes and almost gave the state to Gore (2000). The standard trick was taking a stack of ballots and running a needle through the 'Gore hole'. If the ballot was already marked for Gore, nothing changed, if it was marked for Bush, there was a double vote and the ballot was void.

Chapter 3: How absentee ballots are used to steal elections. Under the guise of 'voter registration' drives, candidates give money to independent 'registration' contractors. This provides a legal protection should the 'contractor' ever be convicted of registering dead people, pets, felons and/or non-citizens. Examples are drawn from California, Florida and Colorado.

Chapter 4: Using corrupt judges to steal elections. The entire chapter is devoted to St. Louis and the 2000 senate election.

Chapter 5: Using fake ballots (stuffing the ballot box) in Texas (2000).

Chapter 6: Using Indian reservations in South Dakota to steal elections.

Chapter 7: Appointing your friends to the election commission, and having them throw out the vote of anyone who disagrees with you (Hawaii)

Chapter 8: This chapter covers 'Computerized voting'. Rather than cite examples of computers enabling fraud, the chapter only debates the possibility of their use in fraud. Overall, Fund like the computers.

In the final chapter, Fund makes a few recommendations:
a) Get involved, don't let the lawyers steal your vote!
b) Before the elections, get election rules established for addressing voter fraud in a timely manner, especially for 'provisional ballots'.

I heard the author speak on my local public radio station prior to the 2004 election. He made several points verbally, that were missing from the book. It is incredibly hard to 'prosecute' voter fraud. The prosecutor, a government official, who is often standing for election, must bring the case to trial. This invariably polarizes half their constituency since no one thinks 'their party' could commit voter fraud. Since elected official can rarely risk enraging any block of voters, the cases are politely lost.

Second, the whole election process relies on thousands of volunteers. These volunteers are generally pulled from the 'World War II' generation, and baby boomers are not filling in as they depart. This leaves allows the 'political activist' class to run the election. This group has few qualms about rationalizing fraud. In their minds, they are only 'voting' for someone who couldn't make it to the polls. That can't be too bad, can it?