There's not much point in putting legalized gambling to a vote, if gambling interests are going to control the election.
Last November's election in Louisiana offered voters a clear choice between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. Also on the ballot were a number of straightforward local option referenda, giving voters a chance to approve or reject video poker, riverboat gambling, and a landbased casino. But the voice of the people may not have been heard, because gambling interests took steps to ensure the success of the gaming initiatives -- and also to guarantee the victory of Democratic senatorial candidate Mary Landrieu of New Orleans.
"Gambling interests spent over $12 million in this election," Woody Jenkins, the defeated Republican candidate from Baton Rouge, maintains. "On election day, gambling interests, working with Landrieu's political supporters, reportedly put over $1 million on the streets, hiring workers to pass out ballots and haul voters to the polls. The sample ballots distributed by workers hired by gambling interests contained a common feature -- they carried the name of Mary Landrieu for United States Senate."
There are at least two things wrong with this scenario. "Federal election law prohibits corporate contributions in cash or in kind to federal candidates," Jenkins explains. Expenditures by casino corporations to pay for election-day workers "constituted very large and illegal corporate contributions to the Landrieu campaign," he charges, adding that "one of the uses to which some of this illegal money was put was the buying of votes and the perpetration of vote fraud." Much of that illegal money was funneled through a political organization called LIFE, run by New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. Jenkins contends that LIFE, the Louisiana Independent Federation of Electors, "operates outside the law and flouts the normal state and federal regulations with which everyone else must comply."
Jenkins also charges that some election commissioners -- the very persons entrusted to guarantee an honest election -- had "a conflict of interest. On the one hand, they were paid as election commissioners. On the other hand, some of them were also paid for electioneering on behalf of gambling interests [or] the Democratic State Central Committee of Louisiana."
Jenkins has supplied the Senate with "transcripts of interviews with people who explain how they were paid to vote and voted multiple times, always with the active assistance of corrupt commissioners; transcripts of conversations with drivers who carried multiple voters to numerous polling places, also with the assistance of corrupt commissioners; and [evidence] of bizarre irregularities caused by commissioners, such as some names appearing on the poll list and different names appearing on the precinct register."
Jenkins also provided affidavits from voters and pollwatchers alleging that "many commissioners made no effort to identify persons presenting themselves to vote." Jenkins discovered that significant numbers of those unidentified voters were "listed as residing at addresses of long-abandoned public housing units." Given the abundant evidence of massive vote fraud and the corrupting influence of the gambling industry, the United States Senate should either declare Woody Jenkins the duly elected junior senator from Louisiana, or call for a new election.
