In keeping with NLPC’s mission of promoting ethics and accountability in government, NLPC interviewed 1996 Louisiana Senate candidate Louis “Woody” Jenkins who narrowly lost the election in November and appears to have been the victim of massive vote fraud.
A dishonest and unaccountable electoral process destroys the roots of our democratic system. Jenkins’ story is an eye-opening account how elections are stolen in America. Jenkins is working to have the U.S. Senate investigate the election and then hopefully call for a new election -- free of corruption and fraud -- later this year. Jenkins, a Louisiana State Representative and longtime friend of NLPC, recently sat down with NLPC President Peter Flaherty to discuss the specifics of his fight for honest elections in Louisiana.
Peter: You were the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Louisiana in 1996. You won the open primary election, and you went in to election day leading slightly in the polls. Then what happened?
Woody: Of course, Louisiana has never elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate. But we felt that 1996 was our year to do just that. It was a classic liberal vs. conservative race. We had over 14,000 volunteers. We had a solid lead in the polls and election day itself the networks’ exit polls showed us leading 51 to 49.
When the results began to come in election night, we took an early lead and we stayed in the lead until late in the evening. After many people had gone to bed, suddenly there was a huge surge of votes from New Orleans and Mary Landrieu moved ahead. During the day, we had received numerous allegations and reports of irregularities throughout the state.
Peter: What kinds of things were you hearing?
Woody: One of the things that we heard was that a huge number of buses and vans had been hired on the streets of New Orleans and that people were being hauled to the polls and paid to vote and being paid multiple times. We also heard reports of individuals being allowed to vote without having their identifications checked throughout the state.
Peter: Is that required?
Woody: Yes, you have to sign in, but we heard that corrupt commissioners
were allowing people without being checked for identification to go in
and vote without signing anything. So we began our investigation
election night and it has continued since that time. I must say that it
has revealed far more illegal activity than we ever would have imagined.
Peter: “Hauling” is a practice known in several southern states
as providing transportation for people to the polls in buses and vans.
Isn’t it illegal in Louisiana?
Woody: Vote hauling is illegal in Louisiana because of the long association
between vote hauling and vote buying. What is prohibited is renting
vans or buses for the purpose of transporting people to the polls.
There’s no prohibition against voluntarily using your own vehicle without
compensation to bring people to the polls, and there is no prohibition
against hiring a taxi cab or bus to haul people to the polls with a legitimate
established form of transportation. But what was going on on election
night, in all parishes was that hundreds of vans and buses were on the
streets.
Peter: Do you have proof that people were paid to vote?
Woody: Yes we do. What was happening was that these large number
of vans and buses were traveling the streets of New Orleans and drivers
stopped any time they saw a congregation of people in the public housing
areas of the city. If five or six people were standing along the
side of the road, the driver asked them, “Would you like to make some money?”
If they said yes, they were told to get in the van.
When the van was full with eight or ten or twelve people, they would be taken to a precinct where they would be told to go in and go to the commissioners table and vote without signing anything. This was possible only with the cooperation of corrupt commissioners. They might go to a second precinct and be told to sign a legal pad, not the precinct register, but a legal pad.
Peter: So people were voting more than once?
Woody: They were voting eight, ten, twelve times.
Peter: And you have proof of this?
Woody: That is correct. Actually, we believe there were thousands of people in the Orleans Parish who were paid to vote multiple times, and we have taped conversations with a number of them. There was one particularly humorous interview in which a woman was hired to vote three times. She did vote all three times, and was supposed to get $25 a vote or a total of $75. Instead they gave her $25 and a Mary Landrieu tee shirt. And she said, “they just gave me this stanky tee shirt.” She said she kept the $25 but she threw the tee shirt away.
Peter: How could this occur?
Woody: What you have to understand is that most of these things occurred in precincts that are located in the inner city, in areas that are so dangerous that even the police won’t go to them. It is very easy to have commissioners who are all part of one political machine, all representing one party, one interest, often from the same family, cooperating in these practices. And that’s what occurred. In 1975, we had 37 election commissioners go to Federal prison in Louisiana because of vote buying and fraud. So we’ve had experience with this before.
Peter: Can the fraud be demonstrated through the voter records?
Woody: There is a paper trail showing fraud that is created when these kinds of activities occur, particularly if the commissioners are incompetent in the way that they go about their fraud.
For example, if you go in and vote without signing the precinct register,
then there should be more votes on the voting machine than signatures on
the precinct register. This is one kind of “phantom” vote, where there
is no paper trail verifying that the votes were legally cast. We’ve
conducted precinct audits of 4,000 precincts in the state and found
7,454 phantom votes. We feel confident that a complete investigation will
reveal thousands more illegal votes.
Peter: And you “lost’ by how many votes?
Woody: 5,788.
Peter: So the number of problem votes you have identified already exceeds
the margin in the election.
Woody: Yes it does. And when the Senate considers an election
challenge, there is two ways that they will overturn an election.
Number one is on a vote by vote basis, where it’s proven there were more
illegal votes cast than the difference between the two candidates.
The other way is by showing political machine corruption, and that an
election was so politically corrupt that you can’t tell who won.
And we’ve attempted to show, and I believe we’ve proven, both on a vote-by-vote
basis and on the basis of political machine corruption that the results
of this election are completely unreliable and ought to be thrown out.
Peter: Who was paying these drivers and these voters? Who had
an interest in the outcome of this election?
Woody: At the same time that the U.S. Senate race was being conducted,
Louisiana had a referendum in every parish in the state on gambling.
Peter: And a parish is like a county?
Woody: Exactly. In Orleans Parish there was a referendum on video poker,
riverboat gambling, and on the land based casino. In every parish
there were referendums on video poker, and some parishes on riverboat gambling.
Now this was a referendum to close down existing facilities, so some of
the gambling interests had a very strong vested interest in making sure
that the local option elections failed.
There, Harrah’s has their license for the land based casino. They’ve invested several hundred million dollars in this land based casino already, but it’s going bankrupt so they’re trying to get it out of bankruptcy. By the same token the 12 existing riverboats have an investment of over $100 million each, and the 105 video poker casinos have an investment of an average of $5 million each.
So a lot of people had a lot to lose on these referendums. So there was money on the streets, some was illegal -- we believe much of it illegal, that was being spent by the gambling industry upon this election.
Peter: Were the gambling interests hostile to your candidacy in addition
to their obvious interest in these referendums?
Woody: Well, for the last five years I’ve been one of the leading opponents
with the proliferation of organized gambling in our state. So the
gambling industry has seen me as an opponent that they would certainly
rather not have in the U.S. Senate.
In addition to that, I think that they created a marriage of convenience
with many of the political organizations in the state that were supporting
Mary Landrieu, and agreed to support them financially. Actually,
we find that the gambling interests, the Democratic party, and LIFE, the
political organization of New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, became virtually
indistinguishable.
Peter: What does LIFE stand for?
Woody: Louisiana Independent Federation of Electors. It’s Mayor
Morial’s political machine, and curiously it’s not registered with the
state or Federal Election Commission as a political committee.
Peter: Any evidence of public employees being forced to do election work on election day?
Woody: Mayor Morial illegally required 250 city employees to participate in the election campaign. Sheets were posted around city hall with a list of employees telling them where to report to work. If the employee refused or failed to report, they were told they should resign. One of those who was told to report and refused was the assistant city attorney who resigned his job.
Peter: You used the term corrupt political machine, is this what you’re
making reference to?
Woody: Yes, I think from the standpoint of political machine corruption,
what was going on was that the gambling industry and LIFE attempted to
gain and consolidate political control over New Orleans and the elections
over the entire state. The gambling industry was using corporate
dollars to support Federal candidates.
Peter: The use of corporate dollars is illegal in federal elections.
Woody: Including Clinton and Landrieu on sample ballots is illegal.
In addition to that, Morial was using his organization, LIFE, as a way
to bring in gambling dollars in support of his own organization, so Harrah,
for example, hired over 900 workers and at least two-thirds of them were
passing out the LIFE ballot including Clinton and Landrieu.
Peter: You’re talking about a sample ballot with the choices
already made for the voter that they can use as a guide when they go into
the voting booth.
Woody: Exactly. So Morial’s hand picked candidates, including
Federal candidates like Mary Landrieu were receiving tremendous subsidies.
In addition, the Democratic party, through the Democratic State Central
Committee of Louisiana, hired over 5,000 election day workers, including
3,000 in Orleans parish, and they were paid principally with corporate
dollars, including illegal foreign dollars. Because the money that
came in from Thailand and Indonesia was part of the money that was used
to pay the workers on the streets of New Orleans.
Peter: You’re talking about the money that was raised by President
Clinton and his associates from foreign sources and then dispensed to state
parties and Democratic organizations around the country?
Woody: That is right. Up to this point, the investigation about illegal foreign contributions is focused on how the money was raised and the fact it was illegal. What has not been investigated henceforth is how that money was actually spent.
What happened in this case was that over $200,000 was sent from the
Democratic National Committee to the Democratic State Central Committee
of Louisiana. Intermingled with this $200,000 was some of the foreign
dollars from contributors such as Yogesh Gandhi, and all the others whose
names have been on the list.
Peter: You suggested that a big part of the problem was in Orleans
parish, which is New Orleans. How many votes did you lose by in that
parish?
Woody: Well, outside of Orleans parish, we won by 95,000 votes.
Peter: And you “lost” by less than 6,000?
Woody: Yes. New Orleans is very interesting demographically because
here’s a city which is rapidly losing population, especially voting age
population, and yet the number of voters on the rolls has been soaring.
Voter registration has undergone a dramatic change since the passage of
the federal Motor Voter Act, implemented in Louisiana on January 1, 1995.
Until the rolls closed for this election, over 355,000 people registered
to vote under the Motor Voter Act in Louisiana.
Peter: Motor Voter allows folks to register to vote when they get a
drivers license or when they apply for government benefits?
Woody: Actually, the way it works is you can pick up your registration
form at the motor vehicles office or at the welfare office, or a food stamp
office, and then mail in the voter registration card. It’s post card
registration. The problem with that is while we want to make it easy for
people to register, we also want to ensure the sanctity of the ballot and
this method allows people to register without ever showing identification,
without demonstrating that they are a U.S. citizen or that they’re even
a real person. A newspaper in our state conducted a test where they attempted
to register 25 fictitious names and succeeded in registering 20.
Peter: Can’t you just look at the Motor Voter applications to see if signatures provided on election day match?
Woody: Unfortunately, our commissioner of elections maintains that the voter registration application is not a public record. So we’ve had great difficulty getting copies of those motor voter applications, and other than viewing that application, it’s impossible from the voter rolls to tell who registered by motor voter, and who registered the normal way. We are hopeful that in the course of the Senate investigation these documents will be subpoenaed and we can review them.
Peter: I understand that some of the addresses provided by voters were
in abandoned public housing units.
Woody: That is correct. The Housing Authority of New Orleans
conducted some of these voter registration drives through the Motor Voter
Act, and they have a list of those registered voters on a computer.
We took those names and compared them to the names also provided by a number
of abandoned public housing units, and we found that over 3,000 registered
voters were listed in public housing units that were supposedly abandoned.
About 1,300 of those voters actually voted in the election.
Peter: Is there a precedent for the Senate ordering a new election?
Woody: There’s at least four different occasions when the Senate has removed a member and ordered a new election. It has been on the basis of showing vote by vote that there were more fraudulent votes cast than the difference between the two candidates, or by showing that political machine corruption so tainted the election that we can’t tell who won. We believe both circumstances existed in Louisiana in 1996 and that a new election should be held.
EDITOR’S NOTE: After this interview, the U.S. Senate Rules Committee voted 8-7 for a wide-ranging, in-depth probe into the vote fraud in the 1996 Louisiana Senate Election. Richmond, Virginia attorney Richard Cullen, who was a U.S. attorney during the Bush Administration, and his law firm have been hired to lead the Senate probe. The General Accounting Office or the FBI or both will assist in the investigation. It is anticipated that the investigative team will issue a report and recommendation to the Rules Committee in late May or early June. Senate Democrats have promised to filibuster any move to order a new election.
EW