There were a lot of angry voters in New Orleans after the last election. It seems they weren't paid as much for their votes as they'd been promised!
On November 5, 1996, Republican candidate Woody Jenkins of Baton Rouge lost his bid for a Senate seat to Democrat Mary Landrieu of New Orleans by 5,788 votes out of 1.7 million cast that day in Louisiana. Outside New Orleans, Jenkins led Landrieu by 95,000 votes statewide. Within the city limits, however, he apparently lost by more than 100,000 votes. Wide-spread voting irregularities prompted Jenkins to contest the election, asking the Senate to decide if Mary Landrieu should retain a seat that may rightfully belong to Jenkins.
All on his own and in a remarkably brief period of time, Jenkins managed to document an extraordinary array of voter fraud on election day in New Orleans. He accomplished this without the power of subpoena, and without the cooperation of local election officials, many of whom are implicated in the alleged violations. Jenkins is able to show that the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the margin of his defeat. So far, he has confirmed 7,454 of what he calls "phantom votes"; these are actual votes cast, but with no paper trail to authenticate them. In some cases, the number of votes cast in a particular precinct exceeded the number of voters registered in that precinct. In other cases, the signatures signed by voters in the precinct registers on election day did not match the signatures on the original voter registration applications.
Jenkins was also able to demonstrate that the election was tainted by political machine corruption. He accuses the Democratic mayor of New Orleans of ordering city employees to campaign for Landrieu or risk losing their jobs. He accuses the mayor's political machine of vote-buying and other illegal campaign activities. He charges election officials allied to the mayor with compromising the security of the city's voting machines. Jenkins has documented the use of illegal foreign and corporate contributions to finance election-day activities in New Orleans. He also has tape-recorded interviews with paid campaign workers who acknowledge their participation in vote-buying and vote fraud.
Jenkins argues that those interviews reveal "a pattern of fraudulent activity which corrupted the election and diluted the votes of all other citizens in the state who cast their votes legally." Jenkins' ability to find "anyone willing to confess to these crimes and explain how the vote fraud was organized and executed is a significant indicator of the breadth and depth of these fraudulent practices in New Orleans." He was able to find as many as he did "because there were thousands of such persons who engaged in vote fraud in one form or another on election day. The persons interviewed," Jenkins contends, "are just the tip of the iceberg."
If Woody Jenkins can turn up this much evidence of vote fraud on his own, with limited resources and no subpoena power, imagine what the U.S. Senate could uncover. Vote fraud undermines the integrity of our electoral process; it must not go unpunished.
