Bart,
I got a tip from an insider who has a day job
in a position where they hear a lot of 'chatter' that they
can't repeat. They managed to point me to enough
pieces of public domain stuff that I got the whole
picture for myself. Rural counties scare the
snot out of me as far as predicting the outcome on Tuesday.
Faun
Republican Official Sent Out 3 Ballots per Voter
The GOP claim to be worried about vote fraud and
yet they oppose replacing
one of the most noxious county election
officials.
John Hodges is a rural GOP hack in California
who was caught sending out THREE absentee ballots at a time to
the same voter. John boy has a history
of this sort of thing. He was sued in May 2004 by the Department of
Justice for failing to provide any ballots or
other materials in Spanish at the last election although 47%
of San Benito’s population is Hispanic. He was
also sued for rejecting provisional ballots without
explanation. Here’s the DOJ lawsuit for you insomniacs
to browse:
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/hava/SanBenito_Comp.htm
Local officials want to get rid of their election
director but the state GOP love him and won’t budge.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a county
employee told me that Hodges also screwed up the water
district board race by sending out ballots telling
voters to select three of the candidates. Election day ballots
say there are only two positions open. As a result,
the early and absentee ballots may all be ruled invalid.
Ashcroft’s DOJ are almost sectarian in their Republican
bias but even they couldn’t ignore this mess.
They announced yesterday that they were sending
Federal Voting Rights Act observers to watch San
Benito county’s polling.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBD8U0HV0E.html
Hodges produced one of the more amusing Republican
denials of his attempted vote fraud;
"There's no such thing as three ballots
going out to one person. They have to prove it to me."
Source: http://www.pinnaclenews.com/sb-edition/story.php?id=2
The Pinnacle newspaper has some of the last real
journalists in America and they bothered to follow up on
the claims that multiple absentee ballots were
being sent out to voters. Although it is not online, I understand
that the photograph of two voters with their
six ballots is clearly not doctored like some George Bush campaign ads.
As you might guess, the poor folk who have to
deal with the day to day running of this farming district on the
southern edge of Silicon valley are not happy
campers. They are asking for the state to remove Hodges.
That should be easy except for one thing: the
Republican Central Committee wants to keep him in place!
So when a Republican shouts, “Election fraud,”
ask them why they support sending three ballots per
absentee voter, refusing to translate ballots
and instructions into Spanish in a largely Hispanic area,
and rejecting provisional ballots without providing
any reason.
I only hope that Ohio and Florida don’t have enough John Hodges clones to steal this election.
Faun Otter