““I was the driver of the van, picking up the people to go down there to vote at least 10 times or more. . . .’’ ““The people they was using to do the extra voting . . . when they was getting ready to go back in again, they’d change jackets and sometimes they’d give them sweatshirts.’’ ““I brought them to some local schools around there to vote and I just brought them back and forth to different types of schools to vote and they voted more than one time.’’ ““I voted about 10, 15 times. . . .’’ ““They cheated me out of my money. . . . all I got was $25! We went to three places. The agreement was we was supposed to get $25 each place. All I got was $25 . . . and then they going give us ol’ ol’ stanky T-shirt with her picture on it. . . . I don’t want no T-shirt. I want the rest of my money.''
Leading up to the election last November, tracking polls showed Woody Jenkins, the candidate to become Louisiana’s first Republican senator elected since Reconstruction, leading his Democratic opponent, Mary Landrieu. On Election Day exit polls showed Jenkins leading by four points. At 3:30 p.m. a caller to Jenkins’s campaign headquarters stated that ““the Landrieu campaign has panicked.’’ There were widespread suspicions that the Landrieu supporters would be ““ringing the bell,’’ meaning voting after the polls were supposed to close at 8 p.m.
At 9:45 p.m. Seifert, Jenkins’s attorney, called Louisiana’s secretary of state’s office, learned that 70 of 474 precincts in New Orleans were not reporting and concluded: ““We’re dead.’’ He assumed the Democratic machine would not report until it knew how many votes it needed. Landrieu won the closest Senate race in Louisiana history, by a margin of 5,788 votes out of 1.7 million votes cast, or 1.4 votes per precinct.
Even though Seifert has been operating without subpoena power and he says he has been confronting resistance tantamount to a cover-up by municipal authorities in New Orleans, he thinks he has ““moved the ball to the five-yard line.’’ The question is, will the Senate Rules Committee hold the kind of hearings that could complete the drive? If it can be demonstrated that more votes were stolen than provided Landrieu’s margin of victory, Jenkins could be seated in the Senate. If the committee concludes only–only–that the election was riddled with fraud, a new election could be ordered.
So far the Democratic money scandals involving the White House have concerned how money was raised. The assumption has been that the scandals stop there, that there was nothing wrong with the uses to which the money was put–buying television time and so on. However, that assumption may not survive an examination of the source and uses of the many thousands of checks written to Louisiana individuals for Election Day services. Some of the money dispersed by these checks may have come from the national Democratic Party, or have been directed to Louisiana by the national party.
Thousands of checks were written by the state Democratic Party and gambling interests that supported ballot initiatives that Jenkins opposed. The fundamental question Seifert’s investigation raises is: Did some checks–and if so, how many–help pay to transport and reward with cash people who voted even though they were ineligible, or who voted an unseemly number of times–say, two or more?
Many voters were perhaps not exactly qualified. Nearly 1,400 New Orleans voters that day listed as their home addresses public-housing units identified by the Housing Authority of New Orleans as abandoned. Furthermore, Seifert says, the handling of voting machines and tabulated returns raises the issue of many thousands of ““phantom votes’’–real votes not connected to real voters. Seifert says that even in spite of multilayered obstruction by New Orleans officials, he already can identify 7,454 ““phantom votes,’’ more than Landrieu’s margin of victory.
All this may be, in part, the fruit of reform. More than 400,000 persons, nearly 16 percent of all Louisiana’s voters, have registered under the Motor Voter Bill since April 1995. One third of these–147,695–registered by mail without, Seifert says, having to show adequate identification.
The Senate Rules Committee has assigned two lawyers, a Republican and a Democrat, specialists in electoral matters, to complete their report by this Thursday. Then the spotlight will shift to chairman John Warner of Virginia, a Republican so fastidious about propriety that in 1994 he refused to support the Senate nominee of the Virginia Republican Party, Oliver North. But will he have the kidney to press an investigation that might be intensely discomforting to, and perhaps ruinous to, a woman who now is a Senate colleague? It will be incongruous if, while Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson’s committee is pursuing its hard-won mandate to investigate illegalities and improprieties all around, the Rules Committee seems to express indifference to the Senate’s own integrity.
Seifert tells Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, ““This is the most heavily documented [contested election] case ever filed in the U.S. Senate. If we get an investigation, it is over. No Democrat, or very few of them, would stand for it. It’s too big. It’s too ugly.’’ Seifert may be exaggerating the strength of his case. He almost certainly is overestimating the power of esthetic recoil (““too ugly’’) to overpower partisanship.
However, if even half of the evidence that Seifert has gathered proves what he says it proves, Jenkins is right to say he was robbed. And imagine televised hearings featuring testimony from, say, people who drove vans full of repeat voters from one polling place to another while the voters collected their cash and T-shirts. Such behavior is instantly intelligible and viscerally repulsive. Like renting the Lincoln Bedroom.
