Re: Comment on Mail ballot elections

On 11/11/07, Cary Lacklen <cclacklen@xxxxxxxxx > wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cary Lacklen < cclacklen@xxxxxxxxx >
Date: Nov 10, 2007 4:40 PM
Subject: Comment on Mail ballot elections
To: cclacklen@xxxxxxxxx

Post on Rocky Mountain News web site

Mail ballots are the instrument of choice for those who would steal
elections--and that includes the "City Fathers" in Denver. There was
no question, in my mind before the election, that all the bond issues
would pass, since the money machine--the public works
contractors--like big fat public contracts and they are the ones who
put our elected officials in office.

I can tell you a little bit about how Denver conducts mail ballot
elections. In the Jan. 30, 2007, mail ballot election in Denver,
183,000 ballots WENT MISSING. They were wholly unaccounted for. In
addition, this election violated a host of ordinance, statutory, and
constitutional provisions. It was for a charter change--abolishing the
Denver Election Commission, to replace it with an elected clerk, who
of course turns out to be Wellington Webb's daughter--and almost no
one in Denver knew about it. There was only one publication of notice
of the election, which was WITHIN the 30-days-before-election
prohibition of the law, and that was in a journal which caters
exclusively to the construction trades and is available almost
nowhere. You can't even get it at the public library downtown. There's
only one copy and it always goes missing: contractors who want to bid
on projects steal it.

Former Denver election commissioner Jan Tyler and I challenged the
January election in Denver district court, but, unfortunately, the
judges in this state are just another tentacle of the same octopus
which controls it generally. Judge Martinez was totally uninterested
in the violations of law we established, and totally uninterested in
the fact that 183,000 ballots were unaccounted for. (The measure
passed with only about 54,000 voters voting, total, so less than
one-third of the number which went missing.). He spent most of the
hearing trying to decide if service on the city was proper, even
though two city attorneys were there defending the city vigorously,
with witnesses and exhibits, just as they had been doing for the prior
five months since the case was filed.

Neither of the two local "newspapers" reported anything about our
case, except when it was first filed in January by Jan acting on her
own. The public has never been told that 183,000 ballots were
UNACCOUNTED FOR.

Jan Tyler has started her own blog, "Election Neutrality Now." I will
be writing more about the problems with mail ballots there.

I fought two elections in Castle Rock on behalf of citizens trying to
reclaim their government there, in 1998-2000, where absentee ballots
were used to steal the election. There are organized operatives in
this state paid by real estate developers to co-opt elections. The
ones who worked the Castle Rock elections were employed by a crook
named Rick Reiter, who does business as "Reiter and Associates." The
developer who funded Reiter--and, mind you, none of the financial
disclosures required by law were ever made; we had to make a big issue
in our court case to get any documents, at all, about the money they
spent--was Lee Alpert. We uncovered forged absentee ballots (that is,
the signatures on the outside envelopes were forged) and forged
applications for absentee ballots. The town clerk was even marking
return ballot envelopes before sending packets to the voters so she
could distinguish the voter's allegiance when the ballot came back in
the mail. She was able to tell what the voter's sympathies were
because our opponents were using one type of form for application for
ballots, and my clients another.

Our evidence showed that she had to have thrown many of my clients'
applications for absentee ballots into the trash: she never even
recorded them as having been received. People told us that they had
sent in completed applications, and never received a ballot back.
Their names did not show up on the list she kept of applications
received. In fact, whenever the U.S. Postal Service was involved, she
made a false record, since she knew it could not be pinned on her.
This town clerk, Sally Misare, was deeply in bed with the operatives,
even meeting with them at 6:00 a.m. the day of the election. The
Reiter operatives had BALLOTS in their possession; they also obtained
an official ballot box from the County, which they got from their
crony from the Castle Rock Chamber of Commerce, who had gotten herself
elected Douglas County Clerk & Recorder, Carole Murray. They set this
bogus ballot box up on the grounds of the Town rec center as if they
were election officials. They were conducting a "courier service,"
handing out ballots to people and picking them up on election day,
even taking them out of people's mail boxes. One of the Reiter
employees, Matt Fitzgerald, was videotaped carrying this ballot box
around in his personal car, with his girlfriend in the front seat,
then dumping the ballots out on his carseat when he arrived at the
offices of the developers, where he went before taking the ballots to
the town hall. They violated the law in numerous respects.

I filed a 28-page affidavit with the district attorney after that
election, documenting hundreds of violations of election laws,
including what I've set forth above, as well as people voting twice,
people offering to vote twice, hundreds of false records made by the
clerk (each of which is a felony), and more. The DA kept assuring me
he was "working on it," then LET THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS EXPIRE
without filing any charges. This DA was Jim Peterson; the investigator
who is the one who kept telling me "we're working on it" was Mike
Knight.

In our election contest in the district court, we started out with a
great judge, Judge Scott Lawrence, who was outraged by what he saw
unfolding in Castle Rock. He gave us several pre-trial orders which
were favorable to us. Ten days before our hearing, however, he was
suddenly rushed into emergency surgery, and his voicebox and part of
his tongue were removed. He never returned to the bench. It was a
tragedy. We had to wait a long time for another judge, and then got a
"good ol' boy," one who saw no problem with anything Sally Misare or
the other defendants had done. No problem. Sally didn't mean to commit
fraud. The absence of records which were required to be kept, and
hundreds of false records, no problem: she didn't mean it. Oh, I
forgot a big one, although it deals with the polling place portion of
the election, not mail ballots: she filled out the ballot accounting
forms WITH A TYPEWRITER THE DAY BEFORE THE ELECTION, and got the
election judges to sign them. The form stated how many ballots were
issued, how many defective, spoiled, etc., the day BEFORE the
election. This woman did not even keep a pollbook, one of the most
important checks in an election.

In a nutshell, that's why we cannot accept the idea of mail ballots.
In a polling place election, every part of the process--other than the
voter's actual casting of a vote in the booth--is observed by a
multitude of eyes of different political persuasions. Every single
ballot is accounted for (or at least it is supposed to be). In the
January Denver mail election, in contrast, there was this absolutely
preposterous figure of 183,000 ballots that were simply unaccounted
for, yet no comment by the press and no interest by the judge.
Numerous activities which constitute criminal conduct in the polling
place occur in the mail ballot process as a matter of course, and now
have become acceptable. For instance, you can't, standing in line at
the polling place, state whom you are going to vote for. That's a
crime. But if you are involved in a mail ballot election, you can
lobby the voter nonstop while the ballot is in his possession. You can
get your whole group together and fill out your ballots at the same
time while you're talking about it. And, if you're an employer, you
can make sure your employee votes the way you require before sending
his ballot in.

We cannot tolerate this idea of "mail ballot elections" in a free
society. We must return to one-day-only, secure polling place
elections with hand-counted paper ballots, and enforcement of the
criminal laws governing election procedures. We must return to how it
was before! It's the only way to protect our democratic form of
government--and it may already be too late. I fear that it is.

Alison ("Sunny") Maynard

Posted by Alison Maynard on November 9, 2007 10:25 AM

--
Cary Lacklen
1395 Bear Mountain Drive #96
Boulder, CO. 80305
303-499-8283
Fax 303-449-2198
cclacklen@xxxxxxxxx

--
Cary Lacklen
1395 Bear Mountain Drive #96
Boulder, CO. 80305
303-499-8283
Fax 303-449-2198
cclacklen@xxxxxxxxx