Something wacko is going on in Nevada. Some voters in Boulder City are complaining that their ballots were cast before they went to the polls. These complaints are raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines. Guess who holds the contract to conduct maintenance on those machines? President Obama's Favorite Union the SEIU.
Yesterday Joyce Ferrara said when she went with her husband to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, Harry Reid's name was already checked. Ms Ferrara said she wasn't the only one who had that problem, her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.
"Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."
There is no voter fraud, says the guy in charge of the voting machine, Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax. He said that issues do come up because the screens are very sensitive to touch. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they make a selection at any time. He added that the only people who would have a problem with the machines were the elderly insinuating that they were clumsy old people.
"Especially in a community with elderly citizens (they have) difficulty in (casting their) ballot," Lomax said. "Team leaders said there were complaints (and the) race filled in."
Mark Hemingway of the Washington
Examiner adds Now there's absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet), but it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle -- nearly all of that on Democrats. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is formerly the SEIU's top lobbyist, and former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent vistor to the White House last year.
Just in Nevada, the SEIU has given a lot to groups that are heavily vested in the state -- in just one prominent example, the SEIU gave $500,000 to the Patriot Majority PAC, which has spent $1.3 million against Reid's opponent Sharron Angle. They've and have dropped large sums directly on candidates:
Public service unions such as the SEIU support the progressives because the bigger the government, the bigger their member base. So this money is designed to expand government without any concern whether or not it's the right move for the country.
These public service unions fear that conservative legislators will push to clip the political power of public-sector unions which has grown tremendously under the Obama administration. Don't forget that the SEIU acted as the
Democratic Party's bully squad during the Obamacare debate, how they got key positions within the NLRB, and of course that former SEIU president Andy Stern was one of the White House's most frequent visitors while he worked for the Union.
While there is no evidence of SEIU tampering with the voting machines, the county technicians are members of the Unions (as are many of Clark County's employees), but the fact that there are complaints about the machines automatically voting Democratic and they are being serviced by SEIU does make one wonder.
Unions increasingly have a major financial stake in election outcomes, both as a matter of their own election expenditures, and as a function of what they stand to gain if their legislative agenda is enacted. Should they really be responsible for tabulating the votes? That's certainly something voters ought to think long and hard about
At the bottom of this post is page 75 of Clark County's SEIU contract Voting Machine technicians are listed as classified positions represented by SEIU.
Reid's opponent Sharron Angle claims there is something screwy going on. At least according to this fund-raising letter sent out by her campaign lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, today. The letter (which I received as an email from the campaign) says in part:
Harry Reid intends to steal this election if he can't win it outright. As a result, we need to deploy literally dozens of election law attorneys and poll watchers to combat these tactics at a cost of nearly $80,000. That's over and above our current budget. We need to raise $80,000 and we need to do it RIGHT NOW, because even as I am writing this, Harry Reid and his Machine are trying to steal this election. I'm sorry that we have to come to you yet again and ask for you to reach deep and contribute, but we must.
Understand, EVERYTHING we have worked for in the last year could be destroyed by dirty tricks and criminal acts in the next 8 days. As Sharron's first line of defense on these matters I am absolutely committed to making sure this won't happen.
What Harry Reid is doing is clearly illegal. Nevada law (NRS 293.700) provides that, "A person who bribes, offers to bribe, or use and other corrupt means, directly or indirectly, to influence any elector in giving his or her vote or to deter the elector from giving it is guilty of a category D felony and shall be punished as provided in NRS 193.130."
We've seen evidence of this sort of voter 'enticement' by groups such as ACORN - where, in 2008, two ACORN workers in Milwaukee were accused of offering pre-paid gasoline cards or restaurant gift cards to people in exchange for registration.
John Fund wrote in his book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, cited reports from the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (South Dakota) and the election in 2004, where certain residents were quoted saying that "people on the streets were saying you go vote, they would give you gas money, $10, maybe a pack of cigarettes..."
Now, this week in Las Vegas, at our election hotline, we received reports that some teachers' union representatives were offering Starbucks cards to people to get them to vote for Harry Reid. It is even more disturbing and may be possible that they are using their influence and authority as educators to entice students on behalf of Reid.
Here's the bottom line: when the powerful are threatened, they will do anything to retain their position. It's clear now that Harry Reid's campaign is even willing to skirt the laws of Nevada to do it.
Is there any question that they will do the same on Election Day?
Will you help us raise this $80,000 today? With it we can fight the election-stealing tactics of Harry Reid and his corrupt cronies.
Campaign fodder or actual election stealing. Probably a bit of both.
