Brief History of Bipartisan Ballot Bamboozlement: 2000–2020

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

The distinctive competence of the modern political party lies in its control over the ballot: Which parties get a ballot line and for which candidates, which voters are allowed to cast a vote, how the ballot is cast (and where, and when), how the ballots are counted (and, in the United States, filtered through a second balloting system: The Electoral College), and how the results of the ballot count are legitimated.

In canter through past election cycles, I will aggregate examples of ballot bamboozlement over the past decades, both in elections and primaries. I will go as far as the 2020 primaries, because the 2020 general election raises issues that apply to 2024, which I will address in a companion post, covering what may come on Election Day — three weeks from now! — and beyond. (Because of link rot and the general decay of search, I will more than occasionally have to rely on my memory; but I will write nothing about which I did not write at the time, while it was happening.) When I have finished this catalog of horrors, I hope you will agree with me that “our democracy” has been in trouble for a long, long time, and anybody who thinks otherwise, or thinks only one party is to blame, is a fool, a grifter, or a partisan (sorry for the redundancy). I should also caveat that I came up as a Democrat, so most of my examples come from that party. That in no way implies that I don’t regard the Republican party apparatus as equally culpable.

Before going year by year, let’s look at general characteristics that apply to balloting through the entire period covered by this post.

Generalized Shenanigans

First, it’s not easy to get a new party on the ballot at all; Kennedy’s ballot access effort was extraordinary. Here is the Green Party’s guide to getting on the ballot; there are a lot of steps, but left unmentioned is that the Democrat Party will deploy armies of lawyers to keep any third party off the ballot, often sucessfully. (The search results on Democrats fighting to keep the Greens off the ballot go on for pages and pages; sadly, I wasn’t appled to find an aggregationi of all those efforts.) These shenanigans, unbecoming to a party calling itself “democratic” go on routinely, year after year after year.

Second, candidates may need to swear fealty to party elders. An example on the Democrat side from Unherd:

“A 21-year military career gave [Ty Pinkins] a passport full of stamps, three combat tours, a Bronze Star, and a job in the White House. After retirement, Pinkins earned not one but two law degrees from Georgetown University. He turned down the big money of a Washington law firm for the Delta. Back in his hometown, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, [Ty] Pinkins published a memoir, 23 Miles and Running, and litigated hundreds of civil cases for the underprivileged. In 2021, he made national news by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of fired black farm labourers, who had been replaced by white South Africans. Filing suit and testifying before Congress on the issue, he forced a settlement. Taking note was Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman, Bennie Thompson. The chair of the January 6 Select Committee tapped Pinkins to run for the local school board. By the time Pinkins learned of Thompson’s desire, he had already publicly declared his candidacy for [a] Senate seat.” You’ll never guess what happened next: “In theory, Thompson and state Democratic chair Cheikh Taylor promised Pinkins, the only Democrat to announce for the race, their party’s full support. But though he knew the contest would be an uphill struggle, Pinkins never expected a major hurdle would be Bennie Thompson — his own Congressman and the very politician to first have noticed his talents. At first, his phone calls asking for endorsements went unanswered. Then, when his phone did ring, respondents attacked, apparently upset that Pinkins’ hadn’t followed Thompson’s advice and run for his local school board. As Will Colom, a prominent black Mississippi attorney and party donor allegedly told him: ‘You will lose. You are a loser. And you will always be a loser.’ A young Mississippi state representative also phoned. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, getting your name on the ballot?’ they yelled. ‘You need to go through us gatekeepers.’ Gatekeeper. The term shocked Pinkins. Party insiders refused to support him simply because, as he tells me, ‘I didn’t ask anyone, ‘can I please run?” The candidate’s astonishment went beyond personal ambition. With its pungent whiff of machine politics, what Pinkins calls Mississippi’s ‘Gatekeeper Syndrome’ is the very problem ‘preventing our democracy at the state level from blossoming.'”

(Given that the Republican base hated their gatekeeper and got rid of them — many became Democrats — I’m reluctant to say that their party works in exactly the same way as Democrats, meaning these shenanigans are not absolutely universal. Still, I would bet the tendency still exists (“Meet the new boss….”).

Third, to get and remain on the ballot line, candidates and electeds need to commit to enormous amounts of fundraising (i.e., hours and hours of “call time” servicing the rich). Democrats:

A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in “call time” and another hour is blocked off for “strategic outreach,” which includes fundraisers and press work. An hour is walled off to “recharge,” and three to four hours are designated for the actual work of being a member of Congress — hearings, votes, and meetings with constituents. If the constituents are donors, all the better.

And:

“Any member who follows that schedule will be completely controlled by their staff, handed statements that their staff prepared, speaking from talking points they get emailed from leadership,” said [Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.)]. “They certainly are going to be asking questions to witnesses at hearings that their staff suggested. If they offer an amendment it will be something that leadership suggested they offer … to try to give them a little boost back home.”

Like that’s a bad thing! And Republicans:

Norah O’Donnell: Florida Republican David Jolly won a special election to Congress in March 2014. Facing a reelection bid that November, he was happy to get a lesson in fundraising from a member of his party’s leadership. But he was surprised by what he learned.. Rep. David Jolly: We sat behind closed doors at one of the party headquarter back rooms in front of a white board where the equation was drawn out. You have six months until the election. Break that down to having to raise $2 million in the next six months. And your job, new member of Congress, is to raise $18,000 a day. Your first responsibility is to make sure you hit $18,000 a day…. Norah O’Donnell: How were you supposed to raise $18,000 a day?

Rep. David Jolly: Simply by calling people, cold-calling a list that fundraisers put in front of you, you’re presented with their biography. So please call John. He’s married to Sally. His daughter, Emma, just graduated from high school. They gave $18,000 last year to different candidates. They can give you $1,000 too if you ask them to. And they put you on the phone. And it’s a script.

So in all the shenanigans that follow, limiting the franchise, fealty, and fundraising are a sort of constant background hum. I will run very quickly through Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, Texas 2008, the 2012 General, the 2016 General, and Iowa 2020. All this should set the background for what the parties are preparing for 2024 (with additional treats, I am sure).

Florida 2000 (General)

Here is a brief summary of Florida 2000. Election shenanigans have happened in this country before (Kennedy-Nixon 1960 is a possible candidate) but not for weeks on national television. Here is a brief summary from Brookings:

No work of fiction could have plausibly captured the extraordinary twists and turns of the 2000 U.S. presidential election. After mistaken television network projections on election night leading to a concession call by Al Gore to George W. Bush that was withdrawn an hour later, and the ensuing 36-day political and legal war over how to resolve what was essentially a tie, Bush ultimately garnered the presidency when a sharply divided and transparently political Supreme Court ended the manual recount in Florida that might have produced a different outcome. It was the closest presidential election in American history, with only several hundred votes in Florida determining the winner out of more than 100 million ballots cast nationwide.

In this post, I won’t go through all the twists and turns (including the manual recounts, the famous “hanging chads,” which drove the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), through Congress, a “reform” that saddled us with electronic voting machines, the lawsuits butchered by Gore, or Bush v. Gore, the “good for one time only” Supreme Court decision where Antonin Scalia — I am persuaded — halted the recount and selected Bush because he was certain Bush would nominate judges who he would find ideologically compatible, as indeed Bush did. Instead, I will focus on two salient shenanigans that have interest for more than one election.

First, the voter rolls, which determine which voters are allowed to cast a vote. Handily for George W. Bush, his older brother, Jeb! Bush, was governor of Florida at the time. The Nation explains:

Before the election, Florida sent its county election supervisors a list of 58,000 alleged felons to purge from the voting rolls. Florida was one of eight states that prevented ex-felons from voting. Blacks made up only 11 percent of registered voters in the state, but 44 percent of those on the purge list, which turned out to be littered with errors.

If errors they were!

The widespread and wrongful purging of registered voters was the most consequential—and least discussed—aspect of the Florida election.

The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was 22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.

No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.

Second, the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the recount in Miami. WaPo:

As the most populous of the four Florida counties where the vote count was fiercely contested, Miami-Dade was the front line for recount efforts.

Joe Geller was deep in the trenches. The county’s Democratic Party chairman was worried that thousands of Miami-Dade ballots might have been affected by a voting machine glitch, potentially costing Gore the election. So on Nov. 22, he headed to the drab government high-rise in downtown Miami where a manual recount was underway.

But when he arrived, he found the lobby and elections office filled with several dozen protesters — many of them in suit jackets and button-down shirts.

Geller had walked into the “Brooks Brothers riot,” a protest organized by Republican campaign operatives, congressional staffers and lawyers.

When Geller asked election officials for a sample ballot to test his voting machine theory, the GOP operatives suddenly surrounded him, accusing him of stealing ballots to try to influence the election, he told The Washington Post in a telephone interview this week.

“This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” recalled Geller, who is now a state legislator. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.”

Brad Blakeman, a Bush campaign operative who proudly admits to coordinating what he prefers to call the “Brooks Brothers Rebellion,” denies that things got violent.

“That’s all bulls—,” he told The Post. “There was no violence. There was no threatening behavior.”

Perhaps no “violence.” But “shouting down a recount” and “media-attention grabbing theatrical chaos” seem like a fair descriptions. (Incidentally, the men in “suit jackets and button-down shirts” were all well-known to the reporters present, but somehow their identities never made it into the contemporaneous coverage.

We’ll see other examples of voter roll shenanigans as we go along, and “media-attention grabbing theatrical chaos” strikes a chord as well.

Ohio 2004 (General)

I live-blogged election eve 2004 — Bush v. Kerry — from a cafe in Philly, and shenanigans doesn’t begin to describe what went on. It was wild! When I went to bed, word from Kerry campaign’s press secretary was that they would challenge the results, for which they had raised money. When I woke up, they had conceded. So it goes! I won’t do all the twists and turns, but some of the better shenanigans–

First, voter registration. From Harpers:

On September 7, based on an overzealous reading of an obscure state bylaw, [Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio] ordered county boards of elections to reject all Ohio voter-registration forms not “printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text weight.” Under public pressure he reversed the order three weeks later, by which time unknown numbers of Ohioans had been disenfranchised.

Second, “caging” (a well-known technique). Again Harpers:

Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still more Democratic voters through a technique known as “caging.” The party sent registered letters to new voters, “then sought to challenge 35,000 individuals who refused to sign for the letters,” including “voters who were homeless, serving abroad, or simply did not want to sign for something concerning the Republican Party.” It should be noted that marketers have long used zip codes to target, with remarkable precision, the ethnic makeup of specific neighborhoods, and also that, according to exit polls last year, 84 percent of those black citizens who voted in Ohio voted for Kerry.

Third, the ballots themselves, and the counting (and imagine I’m live blogging and stories like this keep popping up. It was remarkable!):

We do know, however, that Ohio, like the nation, was the site of numerous statistical anomalies—so many that the number is itself statistically anomalous, since every single one of them took votes from Kerry. In Butler County the Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court took in 5,347 more votes than Kerry did. In Cuyahoga County ten Cleveland precincts “reported an incredibly high number of votes for third party candidates who have historically received only a handful of votes from these urban areas”—mystery votes that would mostly otherwise have gone to Kerry. In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer, and, in Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In Perry County the number of Bush votes somehow exceeded the number of registered voters, leading to voter turnout rates as high as 124 percent. Youngstown, perhaps to make up the difference, reported negative 25 million votes.

In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast, as in West Palm Beach back in 2000. In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for president—representing nearly 7 percent of the electorate—mysteriously dropped out of the final count. The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas County kept going haywire, prompting the county’s election director to admit that prior tests of the machines had failed. One polling place in Lucas County never opened because all the machines were locked up somewhere and no one had the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because county workers, in taking Ralph Nader’s name off many ballots, also happened to remove John Kerry’s name. TheWashington Post reported that in Mahoning County “25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column,” but it did not think to ask why.

And then of course there were the long lines at the precincts somehow always in Democrat districts. But a shenaniganier Shenanigans, again, come from tampering with the voter rolls:

Blackwell’s two most potent acts of disenfranchisement, skeptics say, were the purging of 133,000 [more than caging, therefore] mostly Democratic voters from the rolls and the non-counting of 92,000 ballots rejected by voting machines as unreadable. “It’s clear to me that somebody thought long and hard back in 2001 about how to win this thing,” says [Bob] Fitrakis. “Somebody had the foresight to check an obscure statute that allows you to cancel people’s voter registrations if they haven’t voted in two presidential elections.” Fitrakis notes that newspapers reported the purging of 105,000 voters in Cincinnati and another 28,000 in Toledo. But because the purging was conducted gradually between 2001 and 2004, no one saw the big picture until the Free Press connected the dots.

Concluding, there are reasons to be skeptical that Ohio was stolen. However, Christopher Hitchins writes:

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

When all the errors go one way….

New York 2016 (Primary)

From CNN:

Bernie Sanders’ campaign on Tuesday called reports of voting irregularities in New York state “a disgrace” as local officials rushed to condemn the city Board of Elections for stripping more than 125,000 Democratic voters from the rolls.

“It is absurd that in Brooklyn, New York – where I was born, actually – tens of thousands of people as I understand it, have been purged from the voting rolls,” Sanders said during an evening campaign rally at Penn State University.

In an email to CNN, Sanders spokesman Karthik Ganapathy called the state’s handling of the primary a “shameful demonstration.”

“From long lines and dramatic understaffing to longtime voters being forced to cast affidavit ballots and thousands of registered New Yorkers being dropped from the rolls, what’s happening today is a disgrace,” he said.

A little before the polls here closed at 9 p.m., the polling site coordinator at Brooklyn Borough Hall estimated that about 10% of those who showed up to vote on Tuesday were previously removed by the board of elections. More than 2,800 people had voted at the location.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Hillary Clinton supporter, called for major reforms to the Board of Elections as a series of snafus continued to bubble up, including reports of the errant “purge” in Brooklyn.

Because of course he did. Now, Clinton won Brooklyn handily. But there is something a little whiffy… From Daily Kos:

So far, the purge is being reported as some sort of mistake, perhaps perpetrated by a fairly incompetent person:

Haslett-Rudiano reportedly skipped a step in normal procedure to prevent the removal of eligible voters when conducting a periodical purge of voters who had either died or moved away. This error resulted in the removal of nearly 8 percent of Brooklyn’s registered voters.

Haslett-Rudiano has a recent history of real estate dealings that provides her with a strange connection to the Clinton campaign. Until 2014, she was the owner of a distressed property (an old townhouse) on the Upper West Side of New York City. The property was generally viewed as a hazard, and for many years she refused to sell it off due to her emotional attachment to it. Not for lack of trying, eventually, however.

In 2013, the property was listed for sale, and according to Zillow, it was offered on April 21, 2013, for $1.5 million. Seems like a steal for a big Upper West brownstone, so the fact that it was taken off the market on June 20, 2013, would suggest that the place really was in a pretty terrible state.

And then something interesting happened.

In 2014, while the property was officially off the market (it never came back on, according to Zillow), it sold for $6.6 million. To “an investment group, Holliswood 76 LLC, headed by Dana Lowey Luttway, a developer and daughter of U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey (D, N.Y.).”

Nita Lowey is a major, serious Clinton supporter and committed superdelegate.

I am not intentionally promoting a conspiracy theory. The dots to connect here are obvious. I am bothered. We don’t need any more baseless accusations of election fraud or vote suppression in this primary. So somebody, anybody -— show me there is no reason to wonder here.

Me too!

2016 (General)

In 2016, we have two very creative efforts, both from Democrats. The first involved an attempt to get “faithless electors” to switch their votes from Trump to Clinton. I wrote about that here. From Clinton loyalist Dalia Lithwick:

Take for example Clinton loyalist Dahlia Lithwick[6] on December 5. Lithwick is making the case for “faithless electors”; electors who vote for one candidate even though the voters in their state chose another.

We believe it is our constitutional duty to follow Alexander Hamilton’s intent for the Electoral College. He wrote in Federalist 68 that the Electoral College should protect the presidency from one who is unfit, one who is under foreign influence, and one shows signs of becoming a dangerous demagogue. We do not believe that Mr. Trump passes these tests.

(See the the post for why Lithwick is wrong, and the implications.)

The second? RussiaGate, the shenaniganiest of shenanigans, which was the Democrat attempt — partly successful — to delegitimize an elected President From The Nation:

Shattered, the insider account of the Clinton campaign, reports that “in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss.” Instead, one source recounted, aides were ordered “to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way.” Within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession speech, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

“Within 24 hours.” Nimble. Quick work!

Conclusion

I wish I had time to write more, though I left the most speculative on the cutting room floor: the 2008 Democrat Texas Primary; 2008, when a small plane crash took out a Bush Republican IT consultant, granted after election day; the 2012 general, when Karl Rove had a meltdown on live television, which many attributed to his having tried to rig Ohio again, and failing; the Iowa 2020 caucuses, where an ill-tested app coded by Democrat insiders trashed the entire caucus count — the DNC hated caucuses, so that was a win in itself — allowing the nimble Pete Buttigeig to claim victory from Sanders before the votes were counted; and perhaps others can share. Life’s rich pageant!

On election day, keep all these shenanigans in mind. You may seem something familiar. And do consider that voter rolls play a very, very important part, and those shenanigans may have already taken place!