Illegal Balloting Spoiled Elections in the St. Louis Area, Report Finds

At least 1,384 illegal votes tainted November’s election here, including ballots cast by felons, unregistered voters or impostors using the names of dead citizens, according to a blistering report released this week by Missouri’s secretary of state.

The illegal votes were not enough to sway the result of any single contest. But Secretary of State Matt Blunt said that his investigation did suggest a conspiracy to pad election results in this heavily Democratic city and its suburbs, which tend to lean Republican.

Blunt was particularly troubled by the 1,233 people who obtained court orders letting them cast ballots even though their names were not on voter rolls.

By law, judges can grant requests only for registered voters who were removed from the rolls because of mistakes, such as clerical errors. But Blunt found hundreds of unqualified people receiving judicial approval.

On affidavits requesting emergency ballots, many of these applicants admitted that they had never been registered. “I’m a busy lady w/7 children,” one wrote, explaining why she had not registered. She was ushered into a polling station. So were others who acknowledged that they did not live in the city but wanted to vote there anyway--even though, in some cases, they had already received absentee ballots from other states. “I just happen to be downtown,” wrote one woman who successfully sought to vote in St. Louis.

The number of such requests last November was unprecedented, Blunt said. In both the city and county, judges had to set up tables in election headquarters to handle the crush. Would-be voters stood in line for hours to apply for ballots, many toting cranky children, others missing work. Their sheer number “leads one to believe that there was a specific effort to try to abuse the court-ordered voting process,” Blunt said.

He did not cast blame in his 47-page report. (“We were not able to subpoena those we might suspect of perpetuating the fraud,” he explained.) But he urged vigorous prosecution of what he termed “massive abuse.” Both the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney in St. Louis are investigating the alleged irregularities.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), who openly has accused Democrats of trying to steal the election, applauded the report by Blunt, a Republican, saying that it “confirms the sad history of tolerance for vote fraud” in the St. Louis region. “The city deserves better than to be known as the up-and-coming vote fraud capital of the United States,” Bond said.

But Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) said that the report did not tell the whole story. While he deplored the illegally cast ballots, Clay said, he was just as concerned with “the thousands of [legitimate] St. Louis residents who were disenfranchised” when their names were removed from the active-voter list during a routine purge of out-of-date addresses. Many of those voters had to wait in line for hours to clear up their registration; some have testified that they went home in frustration without casting ballots.

For their part, the judges who approved the questionable ballots from unregistered voters have vigorously defended their decisions.

“There was no conspiracy whatsoever” to sneak illegal ballots in, said Judge Barbara Wallace, who presides in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

“The people I saw [asking for ballots] had gone through a lot of effort to sort out snafus in their registration,” she added. She and two colleagues granted ballots to 911 people; Blunt said all but 20 of those were illegal. Yet Wallace insisted that every person she approved swore under oath that he or she was duly registered. “We were sitting there doing our jobs, trying to evaluate each person who came before us,” she said.

In the city, where Blunt deemed 342 out of 357 court-approved ballots illegal, Presiding Judge Michael Calvin could not be reached for comment Thursday. Yet in an interview shortly after the election, he said that while “the overwhelming majority” of voters wrote “woefully inadequate” reasons for wanting ballots on their affidavits, they were able to articulate more valid reasons in face-to-face discussions with judges.

“You really had to pull it out of them to see if they were qualified,” Calvin said. He added that he did not always ask for documentation of local residence. “Sometimes you ask for I.D., sometimes not. It just kind of depends.” Like other judges, Calvin emphasized that he was impressed by how much the applicants wanted to vote, by their patience with the lines--and the bureaucracy. “That does sway me a bit.”

In addition to the questionable court-ordered ballots, Blunt’s report lists several other flaws with the Nov. 7 election, which featured down-to-the-wire contests for Missouri’s governor and senator, plus the tense presidential race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

Among the problems: 114 felons voted, in violation of Missouri law; as many as 68 people apparently voted twice; and 14 ballots were cast in the names of deceased voters. Also, Blunt said, the city election board let 79 people cast ballots even though it had checked the addresses listed on their registration and found them to be vacant lots.

The irregularities did not end with the November balloting, either. The U.S. attorney here is investigating reports that more than 1,000 phony registration cards--including several in the names of deceased politicians--were dropped off at the city election board just before the March mayoral primary.