A History of Election Fraud
October 22, 2016
THE VOTE, writes Thomas Droleskey, has long been rigged:
Actual election fraud has been a common phenomenon in the history of this nation. The stuffing of ballot boxes was common in the nineteenth century when paper ballots were used. Voters were intimidated by means of physical threats. People voted two or three times. Ballots cast for some candidates were thrown out or burned. Dead people voted, a phenomenon still to be found in certain precincts in the country. Most of the popular vote totals of the nineteenth century are merely advisory. They do not truly reflect the actual votes cast by voters.
The tradition of election fraud has continued into this century. It was somewhat attenuated by the traditional voting machine, which is much more difficult (although not entirely impossible) to tamper with than the paper ballot of yesteryear or the computer punch card now being used by a number of states. But even the old voting machine can be “adjusted” in such a way as to make it difficult for voters to vote for the candidate of their choice.
To wit, on the day of my primary election against Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato to be the U.S. senatorial nominee of the Right to Life Party, in 1998, I received reports from all over the state of New York indicating that people who wanted to vote for me had difficulty doing so. Eleven or so people told me that the lever they needed to pull down to vote for me did not work. One man, a lawyer from the Borough of the Bronx, said that an election judge refused even to hear the complaint he brought about the situation. Several long-time enrollees in the Right to Life Party were told at their polling places that there was no record of their voter registration.
It was clear that something was happening. Lacking the resources, however, to mount any legal challenge to the results, I just went about my business, accepting the fact that it was entirely possible that the Republican machine in New York found the threat of my candidacy to be so real that it had to place obstacles in the path of voters who desired to support me in the Right to Life Party.
