posted October 30, 2006 07:03 PM            

Steven T. Vermilye was a home inspector and general contractor who grew up in Croton-on-Hudson - he and his father helped build the boat launch at Senasqua Park - went to college in Texas and settled in New Paltz in 1971.

Betty L. Johnson came from a small town in Virginia and moved to Beacon when she was 17, where she raised eight children while boxing duct tape at Tuck Tape and working in the kitchen at the Castle Point Veterans Hospital.

David S. Stairs was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1927, where as a 16-year-old he pounded hot rivets into the New York Central Railroad at Croton-Harmon and then spent 45 years working his way up through Texaco's research center in Glenham.

The three mid-Hudson Valley residents had little in common during their lives, but share one thing now: Records exist of them casting a vote after they died.

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File." That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937.

The state database was current as of Oct. 4, the master death index through June.

The same process has been used to identify deceased registrants in other states, but is not yet being used in New York.

The numbers do not indicate how much fraud is the result of dead voters in New York, only the potential for it. Typically, records of votes by the dead are the result of bookkeeping errors and do not mean any extra ballots were actually cast.

The Journal did not find any fraud in the local matches it investigated.

"Of course we are concerned about people voting if they are dead," George Stanton, chief information officer for the state Board of Elections, said in an e-mailed response.

He said an updated version of the voter list was being developed.

"Any tool that will help us maintain a more accurate voter list will be considered for use," he said.

Among the Journal's findings:

- There were dead people on the voter rolls in all of New York's 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.

- One Bronx address was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., in Riverdale, site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

- Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where the higher population produced more matches.

Tales of votes being cast from the grave are part of election lore. Last year, at least two dead voters were counted in a Tennessee state Senate race that was decided by fewer than 20 votes. As a result of that and other irregularities, seven poll workers were fired, an entire precinct was dissolved and the election results were voided by the state Senate, forcing the removal of the presumed winner. Three elections workers were indicted for faking the votes.

In 1997, a judge declared a Miami mayoral election invalid because of widespread fraud, including dead voters.

And in one of the more notorious examples, inspectors estimated that as many as 1 in 10 ballots cast in Chicago during the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election were fraudulent for various reasons, including votes by the dead.

In one reported case, a dead man's signature was clearly spelled out on voting records even though while alive he could only mark an "X" because he had no fingers.

In most cases, instances of dead voters can be attributed to database mismatches and clerical errors. For instance, the Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are not dead.

They include Wappingers Falls resident Hilde Stafford, an 85-year-old native of Germany. The master index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997.

"I'm still alive," she said. "I still vote."

State and federal laws require dead voters to be purged from the rolls, but it requires a tricky balance of commitment and restraint. Failing to do so enhances the opportunity for fraud, the case of one person pretending to be another.

"The only reason it's a potential problem is that elections are very contentious," said David Gamache, Dutchess County's Republican elections commissioner. "And there is a reason why the election law takes up almost 500 pages. If there is a way to cheat people, people are going to look at it and see if it is viable and whether or not they should do it."

Removing dead voters also can save boards of elections the cost of sending unnecessary mail-checks and absentee ballots. But overzealous matching can result in legitimate voters being removed.

"It's almost damned if you do, damned if you don't," said Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project in Washington. The nonprofit clearing house was formed in 2001 with a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to track election reform developments around the country.

Other states have used the death index to supplement data collected by their health departments. Earlier this year, officials in Washington state used health department records and the death index to remove 19,579 deceased people in the first four months after its statewide database was created. The effort there was underscored by the results of the 2004 gubernatorial election, in which Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes after two recounts of the more than 2.8 million cast.

States are creating statewide databases to comply with the Help America Vote Act, the federal legislation that was sparked by the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election. The deadline for compliance was Jan. 1.

In March, the U.S. Department of Justice sued New York over its failure to meet that deadline. In response to a court-approved settlement, the state completed a preliminary version of its database in time for the 2006 election cycle. The database merged each of the 62 county files into one. It is updated daily with changes sent in batches by the counties. The final version will let county officials log in and make changes directly to the database.

New York has not decided whether it will use the Social Security Administration's database to search for dead voters, said Stanton, the manager of data processing services for the state board. Stanton said one concern is that the state, by law, can ask for only the last four digits of an applicant's Social Security number.

"Nobody wants to remove someone from the voter rolls who may not be dead," Stanton said. "I got one of those calls once."

For now, the responsibility of removing dead voters falls on county boards of elections. Each month, counties receive a list of recent deaths from the state Health Department and cross-check that information against their rolls. In August, 21 people were removed by Dutchess County's board this way.

That system does not always account for all deaths.

"You are going to miss people that went across the border, who may have gone hunting or fishing someplace" and then died, said Steve Excell, Washington's assistant secretary of state.

Boards of elections use mail checks as one way to verify the status of registered voters. If a card is returned by the postal service, the voter is flagged as inactive. That method does not work if the card is not returned - if family members are living at the same address and still collecting their deceased parents' mail, for instance.

In Ulster County, Vermilye, the former Croton resident, voted for the last time in his life in 2000. Vermilye was suffering from a malignant brain tumor and needed a wheelchair to get around. He asked his daughter, Lydia Weiss, to take him to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the U.S. Senate primary.

"Something like that with a wheelchair and a 200-plus pound man who was immobilized was no easy endeavor," Weiss said. "He lived five miles away, and the whole thing took maybe an hour and a half. The whole reason we went and made such an effort is he thought it was going to be his last. He knew that Hillary had the primary in the bag, but wanted her to have one more vote on her side."

Vermilye lived long enough to cast one more vote, by absentee ballot, in the November general election. He died June 19, 2001, at age 54.

So it came as some surprise to his daughter that the Ulster County Board of Elections had a record of him voting in the 2004 general election. Again, there was no fraud. Ulster officials found that an absentee ballot cast by Vermilye's son, Jamie, had mistakenly been added to his father's record.

"I was willing to assume it was a clerical error," Weiss said. "I am so proud to be from New York, and not a state like Florida or Ohio. But it is discouraging to see even a state (like New York) - that hasn't been revealed to have problems that have made it onto the national radar - is rife with problems of its own."

posted November 06, 2006 06:54 PM            

Odd isn't it Pid that with voter fraud on all levels staring democrats in the face..the dead voting, felons voting, illegal aliens voting and some people casting multiple ballots..odd isn't it that democrats resist any attempt to confirm the identity of voters with a drivers license or other identification...when they show up to vote.

In the 2000 election lots of felons voted. The Miami Herald tracked ballots and found 87% of the illegal ballots cast by felons were for democrats.

Without the votes of the dead, felons, illegal aliens and those voting multiple times under different names in different voting precincts, the democrat vote would be a hell of a lot smaller than it is.

Perhaps that's the reason democrats encourage voter fraud.

posted November 06, 2006 09:47 PM              

quote:

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Mercury is retrograde and square to Neptune, which implies something may be going on behind the scenes that lead many to speculate about the legitimacy, or honor, of the election. Allegations of fraud may be rampant—and may be true—according to this signature. And with Mercury retrograde, initial results may be reversed later on.”

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quote:

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Short-Term Geocosmics

As discussed last week, “… Now we see Mercury turn retrograde this weekend, October 28, followed by Neptune turning stationary direct on Sunday. Right away this tells us we are in a period when all information (Mercury) may be subject to distortion (Neptune), and perhaps this is done intentionally to project an overly inflated view of oneself, or an overly unflattering (and even damaging) view of someone else. Mercury and Neptune correlate with the phenomenon of rumors and false information, and that makes this last week before the mid-term U.S. national elections particularly dangerous.” It was sure dangerous for John Kerry, who harmed his chances for the 2008 Presidential elections with his botched joke last week about people ending up “stuck in Iraq” if they don’t get an education and work hard. He was referring to George W. Bush, but it came off as if he was attacking the (lack of) intelligence of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq. The Republicans were quick to make the most of that “gift” from Kerry.

There were other “gifts” for the Republicans in effect on Friday when the unemployment reports came out. Much to the surprise of almost every analyst on Wall Street, the report showed that U.S. unemployment now at a new 5-year low of 4.4%. Even more shocking was the revision in the last two monthly reports of new jobs, showing that over 139,000 more new jobs were created than originally reported! How could these data reporters (government employees?), be so far off the mark? With the national elections coming up this week, and the incumbent party in danger of losing their majority, one can only wonder about the intentions of such reporting under the time of Mercury and Neptune changing directions. With the Sun, Mercury (retrograde), and Venus all square to Neptune this coming week, such wonderment is likely to continue. Do our tax dollars really pay these people to perform so inaccurately? Or is their inaccuracy due to some other reasons? As a Financial Astrologer who has spent many years observing the nature of strong Neptune signatures and their correlation to rumors, deceptions, and scandals in the past, I can only repeat what I said before: don’t believe anything you read or hear at this time. I suppose this could apply to my words as well, as one reader pointed out last week. But I can assure you: my intention is not to mislead you.

Long-Term Thoughts, or This Week’s U.S.A. Mid-Term National Elections

At 12:01 AM on Tuesday, November 7, the first vote of the mid-term national elections in the United States will be cast. It will take place in a little picturesque Swiss-like village in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, known as Dixville Notch. According to most analysts, the results of this election are likely to reflect national discontent (even disgust) of the leadership of the United States, resulting in the defeat of many incumbents—particularly Republicans who have enjoyed (and many personally benefited from ) majority control of both the Congress and White House. But what does the chart of that first vote—known as an “electional chart”—signify to a Mundane Astrologer, or even a Financial Astrologer?

At the moment of the event, the Ascendant is changing signs from Leo to Virgo. This alone suggests a change. Leo is a fixed sign that rules leadership and the ruling class. The Ascendant is leaving Leo for the mutable sign of Virgo, which rules service and the working (trade) class. The Moon is in the Tenth House, on the top of the chart. The Tenth House represents one’s position in the community—status and career. The Moon represents “changing conditions.” It is in Gemini, a mutable sign also representing changing conditions or opinions. Furthermore, the Moon is in an applying square relationship to Uranus in Pisces, which is located in the Seventh House of the challenger (not the incumbent). In my opinion, these factors indicate a “revolutionary spirit” on the part of the voters, and thus a significant change in the composition of the House and maybe even the Senate. Uranus is “in with the new,” and “out with old.” But the astrology can mean other things too. Perhaps it is the upset of expectation. Everyone now predicts a major victory by Democrats and change of majority in at least the House or Representative, something we forecasted back in December 2005 when the Forecasts for 2006 book came out. Is it possible that everyone is wrong, and that is the “unexpected’ nature of Uranus being squared by the Moon? I don’t think so, but a look at the other aspects of the chart may make one wonder.

The ruler of the chart (Ascendant) is either the Sun or Mercury, depending on whether the actual “first vote moment” coincides with Leo (ruled by Sun) or Virgo (ruled by Mercury) rising. In this case, it doesn’t matter that much because the Sun and Mercury are together (conjunct) with Venus. Mercury is retrograde, which means decisions or announcements may be modified. And all three form a square to Neptune, which implies something may be going on behind the scenes that lead many to speculate about the legitimacy, or honor, of the event or decision. Allegations of fraud may be rampant—and may be true—according to this signature. And with Mercury retrograde, initial results may be reversed later on.

The end of the matter is shown by the last aspect of the Moon before it changes signs. In this case, that would be the opposition to Pluto in Sagittarius. This is not a pleasant prospect for coming to an agreement about the end of the matter (the results of the election). The symbolism is akin to what happened in Mexico recently, where the defeated candidate refused to accept the results, and massive national strikes were staged that choked the operation of the government for weeks afterwards. Pluto can even indicate the potential for violence associated with the results. It can also indicate that the result of the election is to unseat the sitting President, as in an impeachment effort, or even a threat to his life. Pluto is said to rule death, and this President is still under “Tecumseh’s curse,” as he was elected in the year of the 20-year Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in earth signs (2000). We don’t predict this, we simply report the history (or rate of frequency) of these signatures. Every U.S. president elected under that signature has failed to live out his term (7 of 7 cases).

Could all of these negative possibilities be avoided? Of course. With Neptune so strong on Election Day, the key to a smooth event is to simply make sure there is no fraud and dishonesty and that the electronic voting machines, as well as the human count, are all conducted honestly and above board. But that is easier said than done, given the climate of scandals, ethical misbehavior, and desire for “power at any cost” that is so rampant in Washington today under the Saturn-Neptune opposition, with Pluto crossing the Galactic Center.

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posted November 06, 2006 11:59 PM            

I remember when the prevailing opinion among astrologers was that Gore would win in 2000.

I remember similar forecasts of a Kerry victory in 2004.

posted November 07, 2006 02:25 PM            

I am so sick and tired of the lying left. Hell, in another thread Ms. Liar herself Mirandee accused me of leaving out a quote on what the Bush campaign said about the lawyer that leaked Bush drunk driving charge in 1976. She even went further and accused me of doing this often with my posts. The best part? She posted the exact same article that I did... word for word- proving I left nothing out and that she is just a hateful, bitterly rabid leftest that has zero reading comprehension.

Then again, I guess when your party routinely has dead people voting, accusing someone of altering a post / article is no big deal LMAO.... Or what was that latest news flash about the Liberal Activist group that registered thousands of people that didn't exist?

"Activists Accused of Voter Registration Fraud
Jim Kouri

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, is once again under scrutiny by elections officials, the public, and the press for apparent voter registration fraud in Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
These accusations are only the most recent in the group's notorious history that includes ties to voter fraud in 12 states, as outlined in a report by the Employment Policies Institute.

The most recent accusations of fraud are an unfortunate case of deja vu, as ACORN faced similar accusations of fraud in Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the last two years. So far this election cycle, state elections boards have uncovered the following:

Missouri -- The St. Louis elections director estimated that after investigating 5,000 registrations turned in by ACORN, only 10 to 15 percent were legitimate and it had appeared that names had been copied from the phone book. More egregious violations include registrations for three dead people and one 16 year old.

Kansas City's director of elections said about 3,000 registrations turned in by ACORN included suspicious signatures, underage registrants, and birth dates and Social Security numbers conflicting with state databases.

Ohio -- Franklin County elections director turned over 500 potentially fraudulent cards turned in by ACORN including registrations with signatures in the same handwriting, addresses for vacant lots, and even a registration for a dead person. Similarly suspicious registrations turned up in Summit and Cuyahoga Counties including a fraudulent card submitted by ACORN that led to a 16 year old being registered to vote.

Pennsylvania -- In Philadelphia, the city's voter registration office rejected about 3,000 cards submitted by ACORN because of missing information or invalid addresses. Nearly 100 fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN in Delaware County prompted the District Attorney's Office to issue an identity theft alert.

"The frequency with which ACORN is accused of voter fraud reveals their continual disregard for the law and the elections process," said Mike Flynn, EPI's director of legislative affairs. "Their cavalier disregard for the law undermines the integrity of our voting system."

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he's a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org). He's former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. Kouri writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others."

http://www.sierratimes.com/06/11/07/205_188_116_8_33562.htm

posted November 07, 2006 03:06 PM              

interesting story.

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"WHATEVER the soul longs for, WILL be attained by the spirit"-Khalil Gibran