Election Fraud Suspected in Defeat of South Dakota Judicial Accountability Initiative
CARL BERNOFSKY
November 10, 2006
Election fraud is very much on the minds of Amendment E proponents as they study the results of the Nov. 7th election in which the ballot initiative was defeated by a margin of nine-to-one.
They are not just talking about the misleading description of the amendment designed by the attorney general that appeared on the ballot. They are considering that the ballot count itself may have been manipulated and point to several lines of evidence that support this conclusion.
The state election actually returned fewer yes-votes (35,640) than the number of signatories (about 46,800) who initially endorsed the initiative. The number of valid signatures required to qualify for the ballot initiative was 33,456. South Dakota uses paper ballots that are then fed into Diebold computer machines that count the votes. These are the same machines that are widely suspected of being susceptible to "dirty tricks" that can invalidate a scanned vote.
South Dakota's Indian reservation counties (Corson, Dewey, Jackson, Shannon, Todd and Ziebach) registered a yes-vote of 29%. That vote was anticipated to be at least 50% because many Indian families have a relative who has been in prison (the Indian population of prisoners is around 25%), and there is known animosity between Indians, which comprise about 8% of South Dakota's population, and the South Dakota Courts.
Polls commissioned by the State Bar of South Dakota and by Amendment E's proponents indicated there would be a three-to-one vote in favor of the amendment. A third poll commissioned just prior to the election by KELOLAND-TV and based on the attorney general's ballot description still revealed a 51% to 40% vote in favor of the amendment.
The state legislature, which unanimously opposed the amendment, ultimately controls the mechanics of the election. Thus, the official vote in which Amendment E was defeated by such an overwhelming margin is suspected by its proponents to be fraudulent.
Amendment E's proponents Ron Branson, Bill Stegmeier and Gary Zerman have indicated their intention to further investigate allegations of this year's election fraud and are projecting another judicial accountability initiative for the next election cycle in 2008.
Copyright 2006, Tulanelink.com
CNN's Jack Cafferty and Zane Verjee report on the threat to the integrity of America's election system by electronic voting machines, ca. October 18, 2006, (7 min, 54 sec).
See also: "Invisible Ballots: A Temptation for Electronic Vote Fraud," hosted by G. Edward Griffin, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1940566667864847724&q=Bev+Harris, (2 hr, 20 min), accessed 12/23/06. See also: "Hacking Democracy," featuring investigative journalist Bev Harris, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-365586126885215066, (1 hr, 21 min), accessed 07/13/07.
"It is enough that the people know there was an election.
The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
-- Joseph Stalin (attrib.)
Reference
[PDF] A.J. Feldman, J.A. Halderman, and E.W. Felton, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine," Princeton University, September 13, 2006, http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting, accessed December 12, 2006.
From: Tulanelink.com, November 10, 2006. All rights reserved. CNN video, "American Democracy Threatened by Electronic Voting Machines, courtesy of YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/v/wYKI66vPSBY, accessed December 12, 2006. Reprinted in accordance with the "fair use" provision of Title 17 U.S.C. § 107 for a non-profit educational purpose.
