by Lou Jones

Created on: November 13, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

Election fraud is not unique to Republicans, to the manipulation of high tech voting machines, to this generation, or to this nation or century. Having said that, vote fraud has risen alarmingly during the past seven years, has primarily benefited the Republican Party, has been made easier to perpetrate and harder to detect with the advent of voting machines, and is underreported and under-monitored.

Lack of widespread public interest (much less alarm or outrage) in reports of vote fraud and failure to demand thorough official investigations, accountability, and safeguards is a dangerous symptom of American frustration and apathy. The failure of the media to accurately and in a timely fashion report verified incidents of machine error, inequitable distribution of voting equipment, and outright fraud is partly to blame, and is another cause for alarm.

In 2001, many Florida voters (particularly minority Florida voters) were improperly scrubbed from voter rolls based on partial name matches of people with prior convictions. As Greg Palast noted in his well researched, widespread (widespread in Europe and in the rest of the world, at any rate) report, partial matches were good enough when it came to the name, but race was exactly matched. So a white Fred Bailey Roberts would not be scrubbed if a black Fred Joseph Roberts had a conviction, but a black Fred Bailey Roberts would be scrubbed.

Since statistically, our justice system prosecutes and convicts more blacks than it does whites, and since statistically, more blacks vote Democrat than Republican, this benefited Bush. In 2001, 22,000 minority voters in Florida were denied their voting rights.

Eventually, Florida settled a lawsuit the NAACP brought against it. If the Palast story and other reports were inaccurate, Florida would not have settled a suit that did not simply claim Florida erred, but that Florida systematically discriminated against minority voters. The willingness of the NAACP to settle, rather than pursue the case in hopes of holding those responsible accountable, or at least bringing much-needed publicity to widespread civil rights violations doesn't say much for the NAACP, either.

In 2004, exit poll discrepancies were blithely explained away, despite the regular accuracy of past polls and the failure of the ones doing the explaining to provide Americans with a reasonable explanation as to why this election was different. By the time statisticians picked apart the excuses and concluded that, most

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