December 10, 2002: South Dakota Attorney General Says Claims of Voter Fraud Are ‘Flat False’

Mark Barnett in 2009. [Source: Keloland TV (.com)]Mark Barnett, the attorney general of South Dakota, says that Republican allegations of voter fraud in the recent election of Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) over challenger John Thune (R-SD) are baseless. Barnett is a Republican. Republican National Committee (RNC) officials have turned over 50 affidavits to Barnett’s office, alleging an array of crimes and improprieties. Barnett says only one allegation merits any further inquiry. “Many of the things alleged simply are not crimes,” Barnett says. “Those affidavits simply do not give me cause to think there was an election rip-off.” RNC officials secured affidavits from Republican poll watchers after Johnson’s 524-vote victory over Thune, and gave the affidavits to South Dakota prosecutors in late November. Barnett intends to investigate claims that voters were offered cash to vote. “It’s the two or three affidavits out of 50 that really jumped out and grabbed me as something I need to follow up on,” he says. “I don’t express any opinion on whether those affidavits are true or can be proved. We’re going to have those interviews done.” The “cash for votes” allegation was made in three of the 50 affidavits. One affidavit features a witness claiming she was offered money to vote, and two are from people who say they overheard voters being offered money. The other affidavits allege crimes or improprieties where there were none. “Realistically, many of the things set out in those affidavits are not crimes,” Barnett says. “They are what I would call local election-board management problems. A fair number could be read as complaints about how effective the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort was. They had people watching, then jumping on the phone to one of their drivers.” Even if all of the allegations were true, Barnett says, the results of the election would not change. The RNC says after Barnett’s statement: “The information that the attorney general reviewed is only one area of the problems reported with the election. This is not just about criminal activity but about how the people of South Dakota carry out their elections. They will have to decide at both the local level and the State Legislature whether changes need to be made to the system.” A spokesperson for Johnson says Thune could stop all of the dissension and allegations if he would speak out against them. Thune is referring all questions about the election to the RNC. Some of the unfounded allegations include: poll workers offering variants of names to voters until a match could be found in voting records; stickers being placed over votes for Thune on ballots to fool voting machines into not counting the votes; and what the Rapid City Journal characterizes as “a high degree of coordination between poll workers in some precincts and workers for the Democratic Party.” Barnett is particularly irritated by Republican complaints that Democrats forced polls in some counties to stay open too long. Some county polls stayed open until 8 p.m. Central Standard Time; because the counties in question are in the Mountain time zone, they were required by law to stay open until 7 p.m. Mountain, which is 8 p.m. Central. “Saying the polls were open too long is not an accurate way to describe it. It was opened too early,” Barnett says. “Several affidavits assume that Democratic operatives are the ones who made it stay open. That’s not accurate. It was Republican officials who made the decision, myself among them.… If you screw up and open at 6, you don’t fix a morning screw-up by doing an evening screw-up. If a voter had walked up to a polling place at 6:30 p.m. and found a padlocked door, we would have had the clearest case of a voter-rights violation that I ever heard of. If statute says you’re open until 7, you’re open until 7.” Barnett says many of the complaints were of the effective Democratic efforts of getting voters to the polls in vans, and of Democrats working on those efforts inside polling places. These are extraordinarily low-level infractions, Barnett says, and are routinely committed by workers of both parties in every election. The RNC has refused to provide copies of the allegations to local reporters [Rapid City Journal, 12/10/2002] but will provide them to Byron York, a reporter for the conservative National Review. York will write an article alleging “massive voter fraud” based on the affidavits (see December 19, 2002). Three days later, Barnett will report that the allegations of “vote buying” are groundless. One of the witnesses on the three affidavits could not be located. The second said his signature had been forged on the affidavit. The third said she signed the affidavit after being pressured by a friend. Barnett says: “These affidavits are either perjury or forgery, or call them what you will. They are just flat false.” [Talking Points Memo, 12/16/2002]