BREAKING: In Chicago, Reports of Voters Receiving Ballots Already Marked for Emanuel

[Judi Lynn]

Web Only / Features » April 7, 2015

BREAKING: In Chicago, Reports of Voters Receiving Ballots Already Marked for Emanuel

After a Facebook post suggested voting irregularities blew up, similar reports are emerging.

BY Rick Perlstein

Around 10:30 this morning, Sam Dreessen, a 26-year-old unemployed DePaul University graduate (and former In These Times intern) who’s been voting in Chicago since 2006, walked into his polling place at Kozminski Community Academy on 54th and Drexel, a mostly black neighborhood in the city’s 5th Ward. He approached the election judge at the table and, like thousands of Chicagoans on this mayoral election day, received a paper ballot and a felt-tip pen. But, he says, one of the two blanks—the one you fill in to vote for Mayor Rahm Emanuel—was already filled in. Dreessen, a volunteer for Emanuel’s opponent, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, smelled a rat.

“I just said to one of them, the one who gave me the ballot, ‘This has already been filled out. I want one that’s blank.’ And he acted surprised. He said, ‘I don’t know how that happened.' And he even said there had been other ballots with similar problems.’ He gave me one that was blank, and I told him more than once that they should look at all the ballots, the ones that hadn’t been handed out yet, to see if this happened.”

Dreessen says he was too shocked to even take a picture. “And I thought, ‘I don’t know, this must be happening to other people.’ It just seemed to be so crude.”

He reported it next to the Garcia campaign office in nearby Woodlawn, where they said they had already received similar complaints. Then he took to Facebook, where he posts under the name “Barry Lyndon.” As of 6:08, 52 minutes before the polls close at 7, his post had been shared 538 times. He also texted what happened to a neighbor of his who is a city election commissioner, Marisel Hernandez, who said she was sending investigators “right away.”

I learned all this after tracking “Barry Lyndon” down and speaking to him late this afternoon. I was especially interested to confirm his story because on Facebook some Chicagoans, ever wary, feared the reports were a dirty trick from the Emanuel campaign to discourage people from voting. But no, Sam Dreessen is real and stands by his story. And similar accounts are circulating. The Garcia campaign says it has received several accounts of ballots pre-marked for Emanuel and was able to confirm one. DelMarie Cobb, spokesperson for 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston, told me she personally talked with one voter who ran into the same problem voting at O’Keeffe Elementary School at 69th and Merrill—an even more heavily minority area. And she had heard similar reports from her boss this morning. (Alderman Hairston, meanwhile, a critic of the mayor, warned about the same ballot irregularity on her own Facebook page this afternoon.) Cobb also fielded a report from a person voting on an electronic machine that tried to register a vote for Emanuel every time she punched in a vote for Garcia.

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17818/stories-circulate-of-voters-receiving-ballots-pre-checked-for-rahm-emanuel

[tblue37]

1. I have always believed that the reason the Dem leadership doesn't address the obvious

evidence of vote tampering and the hacking of those stupid machines is that a lot of the most powerful corporatist Dems also benefit from the rigging of elections.

Their deal, I believe, is to prevent any real investigation or correction of these obviously rigged elections as long as any truly liberal Dem challenger to their own office is knocked out of the race by way of rigged primaries.

Regardless of the harm to the country, I am convinced that quite a few members in the Dem leadership benefit personally from rigged elections, and as long as their own cushy position isn't jeopardized, they don't care if our elections are as shady as those in any dictatorship.

[yeoman6987]

3. Great just we need in time for Republicans to use this against us

I can hear them now we weren't even part of that election and look how it was. We need to clamp down on election all over the country. Horrid timing!

[yurbud]

7. the don't want to rock a boat they sometimes ride

[Peregrine Took]

2. Rahm used lots of city workers on their days off to

Do campaign work....bad business to use employees as they often have to meet quotas of votes and that is how the cheating begins. Scared they will lose their job if they don't produce required number of votes per precinct.

[Turbineguy]

4. This is what republicans have been hoping for.

Maybe it was republican operatives who marked the ballots?

[Judi Lynn]

5. Nothing can hold a candle to Republican election fraud. No one could come close.

Remember one of their operatives, the illustrious Nathan Sproul:

G.O.P. Operative Long Trailed by Allegations of Voter Fraud
By STEPHANIE SAUL
OCT. 4, 2012

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said it was reviewing “numerous” claims involving a company that Mr. Sproul runs to determine if a criminal investigation is warranted. Complaints have surfaced in 10 Florida counties, among them allegations that registrations had similar signatures or false addresses, or were filed under the names of dead people. In other cases, party affiliations appeared to have been changed.

In recent days, similar claims against Mr. Sproul have arisen in Nevada and Colorado.
Mr. Sproul, 40, a former executive director of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Republican Party in Arizona, is well known in political circles there. Since 2004, Mr. Sproul’s companies — he has operated under several corporate names — have collected more than $17.6 million from Republican committees, candidates and the “super PAC” American Crossroads, mostly for voter registration operations, according to campaign finance records.

The Republican Party, which paid Mr. Sproul about $3 million this year for work in five states, has severed its ties with him, saying it has no tolerance for voter registration fraud. But questions about Mr. Sproul’s methods first emerged in 2004, when one of his companies, Sproul & Associates, was paid nearly $8 million during the election cycle. The payouts made the company the seventh-biggest recipient of campaign expenditures by the committee, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Sproul declined to be interviewed.

In a statement issued by his lawyer, Mr. Sproul said the huge size of his voter operation — he claims to have registered more than 500,000 people in more than 40 states through election cycles — would invariably lead to a few problems. “Inevitably, there have been accusations of ‘bad registrations,’ isolated instances that have been thoroughly investigated not only internally but by the appropriate legal authorities,” the statement said.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/us/politics/nathan-sproul-a-republican-operative-long-trailed-by-voter-fraud-claims.html?_r=0

[center]

Nathan Sproul

Brad blog photos.[/center]

[appalachiablue]

6. A Chicago woman reported a ballot marked for Rahm when she went to vote and called Thom

Hartmann's radio program later that day. She said she also contacted local news outlets. If this is more vote tampering why aren't the Dems. calling it out since they have the most to lose-