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Issue 43    

How to Fix an Election

Garrick Alder

Election time! Ah, the roar of the hustings; the pulse of democracy is about to be taken. The enduring worthiness of our political system is about to be proven yet again. But what's that you say? Something's not quite right with the result? You smell a rat? Be quiet. Such things only happen in tin-pot dictator-ships. Such as Zimbabwe.

Wrong. Elections everywhere are open to massive abuse, even in the supposedly 'free West'. The results can be gerry-mandered in a dozen different ways; and enshrined as the will of the people. The word 'gerrymander' is, itself, an historical echo of a vote-rigging exercise of many years ago: Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts governor in the early 19th century, was accused of altering electoral boundaries in order to defeat his main rival. One congressman looked at the map, with its tortuously-redrawn borders and commented that they writhed like a salamander. Another cynic piped up: 'Gerrymander, rather!' and the word was born (Gerry didn't suffer unduly as a result of this stink: he became vice-president a year later, on the Republican Madison/Gerry ticket of 1812).

Far from being an esoteric and complex art requiring specialist knowledge, vote-rigging reflects the many different ways in which social reality, on all levels, can be constructed and manipulated, from the artful selection of data in a scientific experiment to the peer-group pressure and 'psychic contagion' that creates fads and panics. But at election time, the prize is greater than in any other field of human endeavour - the winner of an election takes power, pure and simple. Small wonder that people sometimes feel like cheating.

Consider: in 2000 a report was published that alleged that cannabis was as addictive as cocaine. In fact, it claimed that this had been proven scientifically, in the face of years of evidence to the contrary. How had this remarkable result been achieved? Simple. Stick monkeys in cage. Provide monkeys with self-administration hypodermic equipment and unlimited Charlie (in solution). Allow monkeys to become addicted. Take away Charlie. Replace with psychoactive ingredient of Mary Jane (in solution). Result? Monkeys continue to inject regularly. Proven: cannabis is as addictive as cocaine.

Now contrast: put BBC Radio 4 staff in office. Supply with votes for the Today programme's 'Man of the Year' award. Allow researchers to count votes. Choke off supply of spontaneous votes with a prompted supply of votes for Tony Blair. BBC staff continue to count. Proven: Tony Blair is Man of the Year, 1996 - or would have been, had this delightful scam not been discovered and the BBC suspended voting. (1)

Jules Hurry, Labour party member and former civil servant from the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, had signed a letter from Labour's campaign HQ that was circulated to party members urging them to vote for Tony Blair. In the run-up to the 1997 general election, Blair's win in this popular media event would have been a valuable propaganda coup, making this something of a 'double whammy' in the world of influencing the democratic process. (The coked-up monkeys, similarly, were a rigged sample evidently intended to provide support for a larger campaign - the floundering 'War on Drugs'). Labour figures moved to distance themselves from the attempted fraud. Campaign manager Peter Mandelson announced that 'I have made clear....... that nothing of the kind should ever happen again.' Blair himself was at pains to add: 'I have had nothing to do with this whatever.' But, as the Guardian pointed out:

'Ms Hurry..........works for an Audience Participation Unit whose sole raison d'etre is rigging: getting known Labour sympathisers into audiences which unsuspecting viewers might take as cross-sections of humanity. If Tony Blair was really so shocked by Ms Hurry's excesses, he would close down the unit. But he won't, any more than the Tories would. They are all in this together.' (2)

But such chicanery would never be allowed to interfere directly with the UK's electoral process itself, would it? You bet.

First pick your voters

How can you lose if you select who votes and how? The UK's system allows for postal votes (does what it says on the tin) and for proxy votes (nominate someone, usually a friend or relative, to vote in person on your behalf). Use what has become known as 'the Tipp-Ex trick': mount a door-to-door collection of applications for postal votes, and then rewrite the forms as applications for vote by proxy in which you, or a co-conspirator, are named as the proxy. You now control someone else's vote.

In 1998, two councillors decided to prevent a Labour victory in the elections of Hackney Council, North London. So enthusiastic were their efforts that the prosecutor at their subsequent trial described their efforts as 'the largest attempt to subvert the democratic process' ever discovered in Britain. (3) Isaac Leibowitz (Conservative) and Zev Leiberman (Liberal Democrat) pulled off the Tipp-Ex trick on a grand scale. Under their careful watch, Hackney's population of proxy voters rose by over 2,000 per cent over four years. 88 of these 'proxies', for example, were registered at the local Talmudical college, whose 30 boarders were all under 18. The two crooked councillors also used a sure-fire refinement of the Tipp-Ex trick known as 'Granny Farming'.

Granny Farming relies on the fact that senior citizens are (a) more likely to want to vote by post or proxy, and (b) generally prone to being bamboozled by paperwork and jargon. Leiberman and Leibowitz embarked on a positive orgy of pensioner disenfranchisement. Winifred Isenberg, a Labour voter for 57 years, filled in a proxy form on her doorstep and unwittingly ended up 'voting' Liberal Democrat. Evelyn Ball and Florence Richardson gladly signed away their votes when told they were signing a petition about refuse collection.

And, if you can wangle it, Granny Farming can win you more than just council elections. It is not known how big a part Granny Farming played in the 1992 general election, at which John Major scraped home against Neil Kinnock: but that Granny Farming played a part is not debatable. With Britain's peculiar voting system, the entire national result was decided by just 1,241 votes distributed across 11 seats - an average of about 113 votes in each. Signs of vote tampering were reported from four of those 11 constituencies: Bolton North East, Stirling, and Tynemouth reported signs of Tipp-Ex trickery; and St Ives in Cornwall turned out to be a Granny Farm. At one retirement home in St Ives, 17 electors, aided by a helpful Conservative canvasser to fill out applications for postal votes, had ended up naming Conservative party workers as proxies, instead. At least 70 voters in St Ives complained that Conservatives had used their votes without consent. Some had signed blank forms without knowing what they were; some had signed nothing at all. (4)

Bring out your dead

Why let lack of vital functions stop voters from participating in the democratic process? The St Ives Granny Farming incident saw a remarkable case of election fever, in which four 'Grannies' managed to cast votes after their deaths. In the run-up to UK general election of 2001, Andrew Gilligan, a reporter on the Radio 4 Today programme, made amends for the 1996 'Man of the Year' fix-up by applying for the postal votes of the dead. He looked up the names of the recently-deceased in the obituary columns of Torbay's local papers, checked that they were still on the electoral register using the Internet, and applied for voting papers to be sent to accomplices around the country. Soon, he had control of the voting intentions of seven corpses.(5) Considering that the Liberal Democrats had won Torbay with just 12 votes in 1997, Gilligan could have changed the course of electoral history.

Blind them with science

Voters are rather gullible. A Gallup poll in October 1998 included a rare control question to identify bluffers and dimwits, and discovered that almost 20 per cent of those surveyed believed that William Pitt was a member of the Tory shadow cabinet. Perhaps it was unfair not to specify which William Pitt was referred to. After all, the elder Pitt left office in 1786, whereas Pitt the Younger died in 1806. (6) In the European elections of 1996, Richard Huggett, a maverick independent, stood as a 'Literal Democrat' in Devon and Plymouth East, and got 10,000 votes from people who evidently didn't look too closely at the ballot paper. The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, unexpectedly lost the seat by 800 votes, and rather churlishly took Huggett to court, claiming he'd cost them the election. They lost that, too. (Huggett tried the same trick at the Winchester by-election in 1997, where a more wary electorate saw through him, and he only polled 59 votes against the successful Liberal Democrat candidate's 39,000.) (7)

A more straightforward approach is to threaten to hurt people if they don't vote for you. In Bradford North, in the run-up to the 2001 general election, it was claimed that entire streets had applied for postal votes after receiving visits from gangs of men. The BNP (which did so unexpectedly well in nearby Oldham) denied that their supporters were behind the alleged coercion. Meanwhile, Tory Graham Quar, while out door-stepping, was confronted with one voter asking for help with an application for a postal vote that turned out to be the voting slip itself. Quar said: 'I explained what it was, and tiptoed back out. But I could imagine some party activists taking advantage.' (8) Surely not?

If you can't steal them, invent them

Back in London, Leiberman and Leibowitz transformed Americans resident in Hackney into local voters, a derelict garage into an occupied bungalow, and a boarded-up ruin into a thriving household of seven. This last, when police raided Leiberman's home, was found on an annotated copy of the electoral register marked as 'Seven votes in the bag'. (9) The generation of these votes was - is - made possible by the fact that there is no mechanism for checking the electoral register. You can bung a few extra houses onto the end of a street, or register a name or two at a vacant property. Unless anyone knowing better happens to spot the fictitious registration, you're safe. George Smith, chairman of the Association of Election Administrators, admits that: 'If a form comes in, you treat it at face value, and that's all you can do.' In the case of Radio 4's electoral séance, for example, an obviously embarrassed Torbay council admitted that 'the sheer volume of applications for postal votes' meant that 'no details had been checked'.(10)

In local elections in 1990, a Labour councillor in Chorley, a Conservative councillor in West Lancashire, and a Liberal agent in Sheffield, were separately convicted of forging proxy votes. In Enfield in 1992, Tory agent Miles Parker was fined £750 for the same offence. In Brighton in 1993, Labour party workers found a cluster of 'ghosts', people who had applied to have a local Conservative supporter cast their votes for them, but who otherwise showed all the tell-tale signs of never having existed at all. (11)

The electoral register was reported in 1999 to contain details of 44.2 million voters - with between 4m and 5m omissions and inaccuracies.

The element of surprise

Last, but by no means least: nobble the opposition. No messy fiddling with the votes - go straight to the voters themselves. Hats off to MI6, who proved themselves the masters of this tactic in 1924, when the UK's first-ever Labour government was seeking to be returned to power. With the Russian revolution a recent memory, MI6 and some friends in Conservative Central Office decided that another four years of socialist-oriented policy would be A Bad Thing, and so took it upon themselves to alert the public to The Red Menace. Someone within MI6 forged a letter from the USSR's Comintern president Gregori Zinoviev and released it to the Daily Mail. The letter 'urged' supposed 'fifth columnists' in the UK Labour movement to provoke unrest by industrial dispute and 'agitation-propaganda' paving the way for a British uprising. The Mail's story about this imaginary threat was headlined 'CIVIL WAR PLOT BY SOCIALISTS' MASTERS' and Labour, unsurprisingly, lost by a landslide. (12)

In the second general election of (October) 1974, a similar trick was tried against Harold Wilson's government, struggling with the economic disaster it had inherited from Edward Heath's administration. Chapman Pincher at the Daily Express received a phone call at 6pm on the day before the election from 'a Tory official', who claimed:

'...on that very afternoon, Sir Claus Moser, the government's chief statistician, had made a devastating statement during a lecture to post-graduate students at Southampton University. This was to the effect that while Denis Healey, the chancellor, was claiming that inflation was down to 8.5 per cent, it was in fact much higher and would soon be up to 25 per cent.' The suggestion was that this shocking revelation would make a good story for the election-day edition. But a call to Sir Claus's office, which was just closing, proved that Sir Claus had been in Geneva for the last three days and had made no such lecture. Pincher recalled that "had we printed the story and Labour had lost the election, it would have gone down in history as another Zinoviev letter."' (13)

These, then, are a few of the tried-and-tested ways in which you can 'lean' on the electoral system to get the results you want. Such tricks are made practical by Britain's antiquated 'First-Past-the-Post' system, which means that whichever party holds the largest number of seats forms the government, even if by one seat, by one vote. And with turn-outs typically low and results usually close, a helping hand here and there can win a big payback. In Britain's 1992 election, that highly-suspect handful of 1,241 votes determined the result, when over 44m votes were cast across the UK. At general elections between 1945 and 1992, Labour averaged 41 per cent of the vote and the Tories just 1.3 per cent higher, at 42.3 per cent. But the Tories were in power for twice as long as Labour. (14)

So much for the UK: let's look at how these tricks could be applied on a bigger scale. America of course must be our standard here, since its 'electoral college' system means essentially the same as Britain's FPTP: each state carries a certain number of electoral college votes, representing the 'weight' of votes cast in each; and whoever has the most electoral college votes becomes president; some states are worth few collegiate votes (3 is the minimum), and some are worth many. Florida is worth a thumping 25 electoral college votes.

The USA has had some remarkable vote-rigging manoeuvres in the past: Kennedy's mob-assisted skullduggery in Illinois (worth 22 collegiate votes) seems to have robbed Nixon of the 1960 election. (15) Nixon, in turn, scuppered the Democrats in 1968, by persuading the Vietnamese to hold out on peace negotiations with LBJ, with the promise that they'd get a much better deal under a Nixon White House. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey discovered what was going on while travelling by plane to a rally: 'By God,' he shouted, 'when we land - I'll denounce Nixon!' But he never did. Under Nixon, who escalated the war when he took office, a further 20,763 US soldiers died, in a war that ultimately claimed 58,000 American lives. (16)

But the Vietnam war is over. The Mafia can no longer be relied upon. Suppose that you are a present-day Republican candidate, running against an incumbent Democratic vice-president, in a closely-fought presidential election. How could you apply the above election-fixing techniques in such high-profile circumstances?

You'd probably latch onto one state, worth a large number of collegiate votes, and try to win that, to tip the balance. And you could turn 'passive aggressive': allow certain things to happen without ever being seen as directly responsible for them happening - if you can influence events in this crucial state, that is.

Let's see how this could work in practice, taking - oh, say -- the 2000 presidential election as an example. Remember, as the BBC's energetic Peter Snow might say, this is just a bit of fun.

The element of surprise

Before the election itself has even got under way, you might like to try smearing your opponent. On 12 September 2000, it was discovered that the word 'RATS' appeared for one thirtieth of a second during a Republican TV advert targeting the health care proposals of vice-president Al Gore. The words; 'The Gore Prescription plan: Bureaucrats decide' appear, and fragments of the word 'Bureaucrats' flash across the screen. The letters R-A-T-S appear on their own, larger than any other fragment, and for longer. Bush claimed that the idea that he had used 'subliminable' advertising was 'bizarre and weird'. (Gore said: 'I think it speaks for itself').

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, author of Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy, said that the advert was the second recorded instance of subliminal imagery in US political advertising. The first had appeared in a campaign advert for right-wing North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, who ran against black businessman Harvey Gantt in 1990. At one point in Helms's advert a pair of white hands receives a job rejection letter and crumples it up. For a fraction of a second, the letter is replaced by a photo of Gantt, and the hands appear to be crushing his head. The producer of Helms's subliminal advert was Alex Castellanos - who produced the 'RATS' advert for the Bush campaign.(17)

At about the same time as the 'RATS' advert was being broadcast, Tom Downey, one of Gore's advisors, received a videotape in the post. The tape contained footage of Bush rehearsing for the televised presidential debates. Downey assumed the tape had been sent by a secret sympathiser in the Bush camp, and wisely handed it to his lawyer. His lawyer took it to the FBI. His suspicion aroused by the Bush campaign's relaxed attitude to an apparent traitor in its midst, Downey carried out an investigation of his own, and concluded that the tape had been deliberately leaked by the Bush camp in the hope that the Democrats would use it, and could therefore be accused of foul play. (18)

First pick your voters

In Florida's Seminole county alone, 15,000 absentee votes were registered, mainly for service personnel - traditionally, Repub-lican supporters - posted abroad. New York lawyer Harry Jacobs announced that he would sue Seminole county's election supervisor, Sandra Goard, after overhearing a county election official say that Goard had allowed two Republican officials to fill in 'missing' voter identification numbers on at least 2,000 postal vote forms. And in Martin County, just north of Miami, another Republican election supervisor allowed fellow supporters to remove 'faulty' ballots, fill in information, and return them a few days later. (19)

Jacobs's two separate cases - over the 15,000 disputed Seminole votes, and 10,000 disputed Martin votes - were both turned down by Floridian Circuit judges who ruled that, despite admitted irregularities in the process for filing applications to receive absentee ballots, 'neither the sanctity of the ballots nor the integrity of the election has been compromised'. Republican George W. Bush won the absentee vote in both counties -- by 10,006 votes in Seminole and 6,294 votes in Martin. (20)

If you can't steal them, invent them

The absentee ballot situation is compounded by the fact that any postal vote can be counted if it arrives within ten days after the election, so long as its postmark indicates that it was posted before polls closed. In fact, Florida's Attorney General Robert Butterworth ruled that postal ballots could be accepted if the applicant's handwritten date of completion was valid, even if the envelope in which it was received had no postmark! (21) Suspicious? Not half.

'By not requiring the requester or the elector to provide social security numbers on ballots, the Election Reform Act ignores a potential fraud problem in absentee voting. Moreover, persons who present themselves at the poll must provide identification; absentee voters are not required to present identification.' (22)

Purging the voters

You can't, realistically, get the dead to vote for you in this age of instant phone-ins and under the watchful eye of the US media. So what you can do, instead, is effectively 'kill' people who will vote for the other side, and then shrug your shoulders about it. No-one is hurt, no votes have been fraudulently cast, nothing to worry about.

Under Florida legislation, ex-felons who have served a prison term are disbarred from voting, so the electoral roll has to be 'purged' regularly. By happenstance, this 1868 law was enacted by Southerners unhappy about the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War, who knew that blacks would get into trouble with the (white) law in disproportionate amounts (because most other whites resented emancipation, too). This assumption, apparently, still holds true: African-Americans make up 13 per cent of the US populace, but 55 per cent of the prison population. And, by happy coincidence, African-Americans make up 10 per cent of the US voter population, and (on average) 90 per cent of them vote Democrat.

Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harrison decided to enforce the letter of the 1868 law, and a list of thousands of 'felons' resident in Florida was ordered purged in early 2000, just as Texas governor Bush entered the presidential race. County election officials in Florida noticed that the list of 'felons' which had been provided by state officials in Texas, through a firm called ChoicePoint (23) was in fact completely wrong. No-one on it was a felon at all. (24)

ChoicePoint provided a new list in May 2000. This one named 58,000 persons, 54 per cent of whom were black: the white remainder (including Hispanics) would, as Mark Mauer of the Washington Sentencing Project pointed out, be overwhelmingly made up of the poor - also solid Democrat voters. An informal 10-county review conducted by Greg Palast of The Observer found this list a minimum 15 per cent wrong to begin with.(25) One county conducted an expensive formal check of its portion of the list, name by name, and found it 95 per cent wrong. (26)

The list of 'felons convicted elsewhere but now resident in Florida' was then handed to DataBase technologies (AKA ChoicePoint) of Tallahassee, who were contracted for $4m to perform manual verification of the list by telephone. But, because of the way the list was generated, any convicted felon in the USA could knock out a Floridian voter with the same surname and year of birth. All in all, this is estimated to have cost the Democrats 22,000 votes (27) - even though the state of Florida has no right to bar votes from people who weren't convicted in Floridian courts in the first place. (28) The error rate for a further list of (native) Floridian felons is unknown. Drawn up by Harris's office, this new list - issued and purged in June 2000 - contained a whopping 700,000 names. (29)

Blind them with science

Here, fate has already lent you a helping hand. There are so many marginal candidates in 2000's election that the names are arranged on the ballot in two vertical columns, with the check-boxes in the middle, alternately corresponding with each name on either side on the way down. This Floridian 'butterfly ballot' asks voters to check the third central box to vote for the second candidate in the left column. This unprecedented format proves so confusing that over 6,000 Jewish voters end up voting for right-wing anti-Semite Pat Buchanan. Compound this with antiquated voting machines, and you're in business.

The vote-counting system in Florida is automated. Voters register their choices by 'punching' a hole in the check-box that corresponds to their chosen candidate, using manual-operation machines. This is handy, because the build-up of 'chads' (punched-out bits) will clog the machinery, meaning that successive generations of chads are less and less likely to be punched completely through. The ballots are then conveyored over a light-source, and optical recognition software counts each vote by the location of the light-emitting hole in the card - a hole which won't be there if your vote wasn't punched right through. This is done either centrally (at one station for the entire county) or at each polling station in turn, depending on the precinct. As might be expected, the centrally-counted precincts are the poorest financially, and also experience the highest ballot-rejection rates, as the gradual build-up of dislodged 'hanging chads' blocks more and more votes from being counted by the software. The US Commission on Civil Rights stated:

'About 70 per cent of African-American registrants resided in counties using technology with the highest rejection rates -- punch-cards and optical scanning systems recorded centrally, compared with 64 per cent of non-African-American registrants. These [centrally-counted] counties included 65 per cent of all ballots cast in Florida's 2000 presidential election, but 90 per cent of rejected ballots.' (30)

You want to recast your vote? Tough. Consider yourself lucky you got to vote at all. Many polling stations were inexplicably closed early or moved without notice. (31)

The intimidation trick also comes in handy. On election day, Darryl Gorham, driving some neighbours to vote, ran into a police roadblock straight out of America's segregationist past.

'There were four or five Florida highway patrolmen standing in the middle of the street. They were stopping everybody. They had seven or eight cars stopped on the side of the road and waiting. They inspected the headlights, taillights, indicators, licence, registration, tags, everything....I've lived in Florida most of my life, but I have never seen a roadblock like that.'

Cars were kept waiting for up to 20 minutes. Many drivers, taking time out from work to vote, gave up and turned back. A Florida highway patrol spokesman said that the four patrolmen in question had set up the checkpoint without authorisation from superior officers. (32)

So add it all up: you've smeared your opponent; you've got uncheckable postal votes in your favour; your opponent will suffer from the fact that the vast majority of his core support groups will have their votes miscast, not counted, or never made at all. By George, do you know, I think it could probably swing a close presidential election. If you were lucky enough to be able to arrange all the above, somehow, that is. By the way, did I mention that Florida's governor is your brother? Well, anyway, the stage is set for your opponent to concede, which he does. Congra ..!

Wait! There is some dispute over the result from sore losers who cannot accept the fact that you have won, fair and square. Gore retracts his concession upon learning that your margin of victory in Florida is smaller than the legally-acceptable margin of error. This, under Florida law, means you recount the votes manually. Which leaves you with another question: since the voting machinery was faulty, what standards do you use for counting an attempted vote? A dimpled chad? Three-cornered chad? Hanging chad? Ballots bearing more than one attempt to cast a presidential vote? And whichever route you take will not count those who were wrongly prevented from voting at all.

Eventually, it was shown that 45,608 of the 'invalid' Floridian ballots were for Gore, as opposed to 17,098 for Bush. An examination of the 'dimpled' chads (punched but only dented) of Palm Beach County alone gave Gore a net gain of 682 votes. (33)

But not to worry: it's all irrelevant. Before the recounts can be finished, the (Republican-controlled) US Supreme Court will halt manual recounts at a point when your initial lead has dwindled to a mere 537 votes. Explaining this decision, the Supreme Court declares that continuing the recount would

'threaten irreparable harm to [the] petitioner [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of the election'.

No, you haven't misread that.

At last: congratulations! You are now the president of the United States of America!

On-line sources

Notes

1 Andrew Culf, 'Labour vote rigger named', the Guardian, 14 December 1996.

2 Editorial, 'Rig of the year award', the Guardian, 14 December 1996

3 Adam Sherwin, 'Anti-Labour fraudsters facing jail', The Times, 10 March 2001

4 Nick Davies, 'Vote early, vote often', the Guardian (G2), 9 May 2001

5 David Fickling,'Call for postal vote probe', Metro (London), 5 June 2001

6 Alan Travis, 'Labour buries its leftist image', the Guardian, 6 October 1998

7 Anne Perkins, 'Fake parties crackdown', the Guardian, 15 May 1998.

8 Martin Wainright and Stephen Morris, 'Police investigate postal vote "coercion" claims', the Guardian, 2 June 2001

9 Sherwin, note 3

10 Fickling, note 5

11 Davies, note 4

12 Richard Norton-Taylor, 'MI6 destroyed notes on "red letter" that doomed first Labour government', the Guardian, 23 June 2000; Colin Challen, Price of Power: The Secret Funding of the Tory Party, (London: Vision, 1998, pp.19-20). Perhaps it should be pointed out here, for the benefit of those who see the intelligence agencies as a possible threat to democracy, that a 1999 investigation by the Home Office's chief historian found that in the case of the Zinoviev letter affair there was 'no evidence of a conspiracy in the institutional sense.' That is to say, MI6 as an organisation hadn't perverted the course of the election - a coterie of like-minded MI6 officers and Tory party workers had taken matters into their own hands.

13 Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay: Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991), p. 272

14 Oona King MP (Lab, Bethnal Green and Bow), 'Losers win', the Guardian, 18 November 2000

15 See, for example, Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (London: Little, Brown, 1997) and Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America, 1947-2000 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001) chapter 12.

16 Martin Kettle, 'Nixon "wrecked early peace in Vietnam"', the Guardian, 9 August 2000

17 Damien Whitworth, 'Bush forced to withdraw "rats" advert'; The Times, 13 September 2000; Kathleen Hall-Jamieson Dirty Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992,) pp 94 - 100

18 Martin Kettle, 'Republicans hit by dirty tricks claim', the Guardian, 17 October 2000. Suspicion centred upon Yvette Lozano, an assistant to one of Bush's senior media strategists. Lo and behold, it transpired that Lozano had been caught by CCTV, posting a package at the Texas post office from which Downey received the tape.

19 Julian Borger, 'Private challenge to absentee votes is Gore's last hope, the Guardian, 5 December 2000

20 www.cnn.com/2000/LAW/12/08/absentee.ballots.ruling.pol/

21 US Commission on Civil Rights, Draft Report, Voting Irregularities During the 2000 Presidential Election; June 2001, chapter 7: www.usccr.gov/vote2000/stdraft1/ch.1htm

22 US Commission on Civil Rights, Draft Report, Voting Irregularities During the 2000 Presidential Election; June 2001: Epilogue

23 BBC2, Newsnight, 'What really happened in Florida?'; BBC TV, broadcast 16 February 2001

24 Julian Borger, 'How Florida played the race card', the Guardian, 4 December 2000

25 Gregory Palast, 'A blacklist burning for Bush', the Observer, 10 February, 2001

26 Newsnight, note 23

27 Newsnight, note 23

28 Palast, note 25

29 Borger, note 24

30 US Commission on Civil Rights, Draft Report, Voting Irregularities During the 2000 Presidential Election; June 2001, Chapter 2

31 US Commission on Civil Rights, Draft Report, Voting Irregularities During the 2000 Presidential Election; June 2001, Chapter 2

32 Borger note 24

33 Editorial: 'Bush pushes his luck; Florida findings should give him pause', the Guardian, 30 January 2001