I try and post this every election cycle to remind folks what the Dems are capable of...and willing to do to steal an election.EDITOR’S NOTE: The publication of Byron York's "Bad Lands, Bad Votes," describing voting improprieties in South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson's 524-vote victory over Republican challenger John Thune, has set off a storm of debate, both in South Dakota and in Washington. Some Republicans have been outraged at their party's decision not to pursue the allegations and challenge Johnson's victory — especially in light of the GOP's precarious 51-49 majority in the Senate. But South Dakota attorney general Mark Barnett, a Republican with designs on the governor's office, has dismissed criticisms of voting in his state, calling the story "shoddy and irresponsible and sensationalistic and garbage." (Barnett made that statement without investigating most of the allegations in the article.) Until now, "Bad Lands, Bad Votes" has been available only to readers of National Review magazine. Today, NRO is publishing the entire story.
On Election Day, Noma Sazama knew something unusual was going on the moment she arrived at her polling place, the St. Thomas Parish Hall in Mission, South Dakota. Sazama, a member of the local election board, noticed several strangers in the room — an unusual sight in Mission, population 904, where most people know one another. It turned out the strangers were all lawyers, Democrats who had come to town to serve as poll watchers for the race between incumbent Democratic senator Tim Johnson and Republican John Thune. One was from Washington, D.C., another was from New York City, and a third was from California. "There were no locals, and I've never seen that happen before," says Sazama, who has lived in the area for 73 years.
According to Sazama, the Democratic team quickly set up shop in the Parish Hall kitchen, just a few feet from the tables where voters would cast their ballots. The party had rented dozens of vans and hired drivers to bring voters to the polls, and the out-of-state lawyers made the kitchen their transportation headquarters. "I saw this young man from New York with boxes of file cards," Sazama says. "They had the names and time-of-pickup and whether someone voted on them, and from those he would contact the drivers." It took her a few minutes to realize that the Democrats intended to run their get-out-the-vote effort from inside the polling place.
As they worked, the lawyers were constantly on the phone in the kitchen. It was the only phone in the Parish Hall, and on more than one occasion election officers were unable to make calls when they needed to. Sazama, a Republican, worried about that, and so did Nancy Wanless, a Democrat who served as the precinct's election supervisor. "A lot of times it was hard for me," says Wanless. "They were on the phone using it to call I don't know where, and I needed to call because we had some new districting. They were always talking on it." When Wanless protested, she got a chilly reaction from the out-of-towners. "I felt like they were trying to intimidate me," she recalls.
Through much of the day, Sazama wondered whether it was legal for the Democrats to use the precinct as a campaign office. "I didn't think that had any business in our polling place," she says. "If they wanted to do that, they could have had an office away from where we were doing the voting." In fact, such tactics are specifically forbidden by South Dakota law. But Sazama didn't know that, and there were no Republican lawyers, from out of state or anywhere else, at the precinct to help her (the GOP poll watchers were all locals, like Sazama). So she did nothing.
The big-city attorneys were part of a force of 10,000 lawyers deployed nationwide by the Democratic National Committee, ostensibly to ensure that voters' rights would be protected. But there is compelling evidence to suggest that at least some of the lawyers did just the opposite. According to the testimony of dozens of South Dakotans who worked at the polls, the out-of-state attorneys engaged in illegal electioneering, pressured poll workers to accept questionable ballots, and forced polling places in a heavily Democratic area to stay open for an hour past their previously-announced closing time. In addition, the testimony contains evidence of people being allowed to vote with little or no identification, of incorrectly marked ballots being counted as Democratic votes, of absentee ballots being counted without proper signatures, and, most serious of all, of voters who were paid to cast their ballots for Sen. Johnson.
The stories are told in more than 40 affidavits collected by Republicans in the days after the election and obtained by National Review. That evidence, along with interviews with state and local officials, suggests that Johnson may have benefited from hundreds of votes that were the product of polling-place misconduct. Had those votes not been added to his total, it seems likely that the senator, who won by just 524 votes, would instead have lost, and John Thune would today be South Dakota's senator-elect.
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york121902.asp
