Besides all these sophisticated new disenfranchisement devices, there remains good old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing.15
The good old system of filling out a bunch of blank ballots and sticking them in the box has a modern electronic twist: the proliferation of notoriously hackable electronic voting and tabulation machines can make recounts impossible. Compounding that threat to democracy is a raft of new state statutes that make it difficult to obtain hand recounts.
During the 2004 presidential contest, rural Warren County was among the last of Ohio’s jurisdictions to report its vote count. Immediately after polls closed, Warren County’s GOP election officials declared a terrorist alert, locked down the polling station, evicted all media observers, and trucked the ballots to a secluded warehouse controlled by a Republican Party official where they tallied and then retallied until they produced for Bush a suspicious fourteen thousand more votes than he had earned in 2000. The FBI subsequently acknowledged that the terrorist alert was a Republican contrivance. A Cincinnati Enquirer investigation proved that Republicans had planned the fabricated emergency nine days before the election.
In Baldwin County, Alabama, GOP activists used similar tactics to overturn the 2002 reelection of Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman is best known nationally for his conviction and imprisonment under laughable charges of bribery ginned-up by a cast of crooked GOP attorneys, political operatives, and judges acting in concert with Karl Rove. (A federal judge who initially reviewed and dismissed the case urged that the Justice Department should be investigated for false prosecution; the Supreme Court overturned the dismissal.) Congressional hearings on Siegelman’s case stalled over Karl Rove’s refusal to testify, and the Bush White House claimed to have lost key documents. The faux bribery charge received national attention, but not this story of the theft of Siegelman’s 2002 election:
STUFFING: Election officials stuff ballot boxes with ballots they’ve filled out.
Heavily Republican Baldwin County on the “Redneck Riviera” was one of the last Alabama counties to report results during Siegelman’s hotly contested race against GOP challenger Bob Riley. At 11:00 that evening, local Republican officials huddled in the basement of the Bay Minette Courthouse, struggling with an electronic tabulator that they claimed had malfunctioned. The tabulator was supposed to count votes that had been collected from voting machines across the county. The GOP officials told Democrats and members of the press gathered outside the tabulator room that there was a “glitch,” but they refused to give details. After virtually all the other counties had reported, Republican officials distributed a printout summarizing Baldwin County’s election results to officials from both parties, and to Associated Press and local media reporters. The official tally had Siegelman with 19,070 votes to Riley’s 31,052. The results—consistent with predictions for this Republican-dominated Gulf Coast county—meant that Siegelman had won the statewide race and would retain the governor’s seat.
Republican officials then locked the courthouse for the night and sent poll watchers, the Democratic Party chairman, and the media home. Governor Siegelman gave a victory press conference and called upon Riley to concede.
Later that night, however, Republican officials posted another report on the county probate court’s website reducing Siegelman’s count to 12,736, a deduction of 6,334 votes. The revised tally gave Riley a margin of 3,120 votes out of 1.3 million cast, or a razor-thin victory by 0.23 of a percentage point. Tellingly, neither the lieutenant governor’s race, nor any of the down-ballot contests, changed in the new tally by even a single vote.
Siegelman next plowed into the same brick wall Al Gore had encountered two years before: a system rigged by Republicans to prevent hand recounts. At eight the next morning, Wednesday, Siegelman and his supporters, attorneys, and a contingent of reporters assembled at the probate court building seeking an explanation for the sudden change in Siegelman’s results. But the canvassing board—the body charged with safeguarding the election— had barred the courthouse doors from inside and refused Siegelman’s team entry. The board included the probate judge, a representative from the sheriff’s department, and the clerk of court—all Republicans. Finally, around 10:15 a.m., the board emerged and announced its intention to certify the election results immediately. Under the statute, the canvassing board should not have certified the result until noon Friday. Siegelman and his team pleaded with them to wait. But the canvassing board insisted that the results were correct and illegally certified the altered election results at 10:30 a.m. A half hour later, Riley delivered his victory speech in Montgomery.
In response, the Democratic Party filed recount petitions in all of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties. One petition demanded a manual recount of all of Baldwin County’s paper ballots.
Section 307-X-1.21 of Alabama’s administrative code requires that, in the face of such requests, “the box or envelope holding the ballots shall be delivered unopened to the supervising official in charge of the re-count,” and that a “recount must be conducted under the supervision of a trained and certified poll official and/or Probate Judge of the County.” Faced with this unambiguous language, local Republican officials, including the sheriff and the circuit court and probate judges, all agreed to let Siegelman have a hand count of one of the precincts where large numbers of votes had been switched. That’s when Republican Attorney General Bill Pryor stepped in.
Pryor threatened to jail anyone who attempted to count the ballots, citing an obscure Alabama constitution provision prohibiting the breach of a sealed ballot box in the absence of a court order. Siegelman filed the lawsuit asking the court to unseal the ballot boxes, but he already knew it was a lost cause.
It was a Karl Rove courthouse. The Business Council of Alabama had imported Rove from Texas in 1994 to mastermind a GOP takeover of the state’s electoral offices, particularly its judiciary, which was perceived as unreliable by the state’s corporate interests. Rove brought his rough brand of politics to the races for Alabama’s appellate courts, one that soon had judicial candidates accusing each other of bribery, favoritism, and moral turpitude. It worked. The state high court went from solid Democratic to all Republican, except for one lone Democrat.
“So we were then left with filing a state lawsuit,” Siegelman told us, “knowing that by that time, Karl Rove had already changed eight of the nine members of the Alabama Supreme Court, so we were facing an eight-to-one Republican majority on the State Supreme Court. Knowing what Al Gore went through, I just felt like the elections contest wasn’t going to go anywhere, we were never going to get the recount that we needed, so I announced that we were going to just live to fight another day and we walked away from the contest.” Siegelman threw in the towel on November 18, and Riley was sworn in as governor on January 21, 2003, at the state capitol in Montgomery. (President Bush rewarded Pryor for his accomplishments with appointment to a federal judgeship.)
“Karl Rove’s fingerprints were all over this,” Siegelman told us. The Alabama Republican Party, apparently proud of its acumen rather than shamed by the corruption, gave its consultant Kitty McCullough (a.k.a. Kelly Kimbrough) credit for the electronic vote switch, applauding her “for finding the votes that delivered the election to Riley.” McCullough was Rove’s business partner at his political consulting and direct-mail firm K. Rove & Company.
McCullough shared the credit with another of Rove’s key Alabama operatives, Dan Gans. Gans, a self-described “electronic ballot security expert,” had served as Riley’s chief of staff during Riley’s term as a US Representative for Alabama’s 3rd District, before going to work on Riley’s gubernatorial campaign. Not long after the election, he went to work for the Alexander Strategy Group (ASG), the Washington lobbying and consulting firm run by Rove’s friend Jack Abramoff. ASG disbanded in 2006 when it was implicated in the scandal that resulted in Abramoff’s imprisonment. Gans would brag on his ASG Internet bio that he “implemented a state-of-the-art ballot security program that was critical to securing governor-elect Riley’s narrow margin of victory (3,120 votes).”