GOP's list of voter irregularities in Milwaukee
Last Updated: Nov. 10, 2000
Following is the text of a list of allegations of voter irregularity and fraud in Milwaukee collected by the Wisconsin Republican Party and turned over to the Milwaukee County district attorney's office on Friday:
Incident: Marquette students were seen taking 10 or more ballots at a time.
Incident: Ballots were taken out of the polling place.
Incident: Individuals entered the voting place with more than one addressed envelope and asked which one would allow them to vote in that location.
Incident: A voter was asked by another voter to vouch for her residence in the ward. He said he wouldn't, and the woman appealed to another person in line. The other person claimed to poll workers that she is his roommate.
Incident: A voter was told that she had already voted upon arriving at her polling place. She was asked to sign an affidavit verifying who she was and was not told what happened to her first ballot.
Incident: Polling place had a "help yourself" pile of ballots. Voters could have easily voted more than once.
Incident: Ballots were left sitting on a chair prior to being fed through the machine. Poll workers were seen looking through them.
Incident: UWM student voted on campus. Another voter showed his off campus address to a poll worker. The poll worker told him, "you can't vote here, put down (address of dorm) instead." Same student said friends were bragging about having voted for Gore five or six times.
Incident: Voter was told that his marks on the ballot were too dark, and asked to re-do the ballot. The voter did not see the other ballot destroyed.
Incident: Ballot machine was not operating. The ballots were being stacked in a pile for workers to run through later.
Incident: Ballots may have been left unattended in some areas of Milwaukee due to a broken down truck.
Incident: Marquette students voted 5 or 6 times for Al Gore.
Incident: Two ballots were given to a man wearing a Milwaukee County Public Schools jacket. When he tried to return a ballot, he was told that he should have two.
Incident: Poll workers told a voter to "vote democrat".
Incident: A voter tried to register to vote at the 4th Precinct in the 72nd Ward of Milwaukee. He was not asked for identification or proof of address. Poll workers tried to prevent him from filling out a registration card. Registration cards that he observed only had a signature, no address.
Incident: Ward 296, District 16, called the city clerk to verify what was needed to re-register at a new address. When they re-registered, they were not asked for any proof of residence.
Incident: Non-registered voters were not asked for identification at the 6th District polling place.
Incident: A new voter was not required to show any identification at the Cumberland School in Whitefish Bay.
Incident: A Marquette student had moved since voting in the April primary. Poll workers told her "not to worry about it and just go ahead and vote" when she attempted to change her address.
Incident: A voter was given three different ballots due to mistakes he made on them. The two previous ballots were not seen destroyed.
Incident: Ballot machine in Wauwatosa was broken, and until the machine was fixed, ballots were stacked next to the machine.
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Chicanery Roils Election 2000
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By Kelly Patricia O’Meara
omeara@insightmag.com
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A recount, extended polling hours, cigarettes traded for votes and a Clinton invitation urging noncitizens to vote have led to charges of fraud in the presidential election.
Even Ann Bancroft’s performance in The Miracle Worker didn’t come close to the level of drama Americans witnessed Election Day when, within hours, presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush both won and lost the state of Florida. Since then the nation has taken a kind of collective inhale as the 2000 presidential bout moved into the 15th round.
While vote fraud was being whispered elsewhere, the debacle that unfolded around balloting in West Palm Beach, Fla., raised questions among Democrats about the vulnerability of the voting process. Never mind that both Democrats and Republicans in Florida approved the ballot cards prior to the election, the old Clinton/Gore impeachment fighters were out in force to say the process established by a local Democratic election official was improper — if not illegal — and to press for legal action that would give 3,000 votes to Gore.
In the Palm Beach case, “fraud” and “cheating” were not words being used to describe what appeared to be votes cast inadvertently for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan in what historically has been a liberal Democratic district. But there is no doubt that this election, like most before, did suffer its share of election shenanigans.
For instance, as reported by WorldNetDaily on Nov. 6, President Clinton signed a pre-election mailer, paid for and distributed by the California Democratic Party, urging Hispanics there to get out and vote. The mailer read: “Here is your personal Voter Identification Card. Sign your name, then detach your card. Bring your card with you to your polling place on Election Day. It will help your voting go more smoothly.”
On the surface the detachable card seemed harmless and might even be helpful to inexperienced voters. The problem is that some who were sent these mailers are not U.S. citizens and, therefore, not eligible to vote. Given the confusion shown by old hands at punch-card voting in Palm Beach County, one only can imagine the confusion among noncitizens receiving a letter from the president directing them to vote in the election and giving them an authorizing credential.
A lot of immigrant games have been under way, some legal and some otherwise. It is no secret that the Clinton administration has been instrumental in vastly increasing the number of immigrants becoming naturalized citizens. For instance, 1.7 million resident aliens have become U.S. citizens in just the last two years, with California (54 electoral votes) taking in 1.6 million of these. According to Deborah Phillips, who chairs the Voting Integrity Project, a Virginia-based nonprofit group that investigates claims of election fraud and teaches citizen poll watchers what to look for to thwart election fraud, “The voter rolls have so many fraudulent names and addresses and, in most jurisdictions, you don’t even have to provide any form of identification to prove you are who you claim to be.”
Phillips says, “The problem is that it’s just easy to do — voter fraud is easy. I don’t think this is an immigrant problem. We’ve interviewed a lot of noncitizens whose names have been found on the voter rolls. Usually they’re surprised to find that they’ve been registered to vote and are scared because they know they could be kicked out of the country for this. It’s my hope that we don’t see a repeat of what occurred in 1996 when noncitizens were abused by telling them they could vote — as was the practice during the [Bob] Dornan/[Loretta] Sanchez race in California,” in which incumbent congressman Dornan claimed he was defeated by organized voting of illegal aliens.
Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), says the president’s mailer is just more of the same. “This is right out of Tammany Hall — 1900s-style ethnic manipulation — a case of visas for votes. The piece the president signed is unethical; it’s an effort to convince ethnic groups that they owe some allegiance to Democrats for getting their citizenship. The funny thing is that most immigrants aren’t voting for more immigration; they’re voting for more spending. What used to be called graft now comes in the form of promised spending.”
Stein says, “It should be alarming to people who care about the process that the Democrats are encouraging this kind of behavior. What’s clear is that the Democrats don’t seem to have a problem with vote fraud. Their response to charges of fraud in the Dornan/Sanchez contest was that nothing happened. In fact, they [Democrats] fight anything that has to do with cleaning up the process. As it is now, you don’t even have to have proof of citizenship to vote. States historically control all vital records, but when it comes to immigration it’s a situation of the state having to keep up with the federal rolls. False claims of citizenship are almost impossible to disprove and if you try you are labeled anti-whatever. This is just another case of the politicalization of immigrants and in numbers that haven’t been seen in a long time.”
Because of the much-heralded Clinton/Gore interest in soliciting the immigrant vote, it is interesting to note that the U.S. Department of Justice last week put out a press release announcing the establishment of a special unit consisting of U.S. attorneys across the country to look into field reports of corrupt voting practices, including “such crimes as intimidating or bribing voters, buying and selling votes ... and special protections for the rights of minority voters.”
To further ensure a legal vote, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that the Justice Department would dispatch 317 “federal observers” to 18 counties in nine states. Her native Florida was not among the states listed for special attention.
While some do not consider it out-and-out fraud unless there is a physical quid pro quo for a vote, in Georgia an Election Day incentive came in the form of a raffle prize. In the Atlanta area voters could present their “I voted” stickers and fill out a raffle ticket to win a $1,000 Benelli Super Black Eagle 12-gauge shotgun. The raffle was sponsored by the National Federation of Republican Assemblies to help encourage voter turnout of people eager to defend the Second Amendment.
The innocent Georgia incentive, however, takes a backseat to the tactics displayed by rogue Gore people in the Milwaukee area. A local news crew from WISN-TV caught volunteers for the vice president passing out packs of cigarettes to homeless voters outside City Hall. When questioned, the recipients admitted they were given cigarettes but claimed they weren’t bribed because they weren’t told about the free cigarettes until after they had arrived at the polls.
These are sideshows compared to the heavyweight fraud that has been documented in electronic voting, which has been referred to as “not a door without locks, but a house without doors.” The problem with electronic voting was well-documented in the 1993 book Votescam: The Stealing of America by James and Kenneth Collier. One reason voters should be suspicious of electronic voting is that manufacturers of the machines own the secret codes and regard them as trade secrets, effectively ruling out even the possibility of ensuring program integrity.
Yet, as Insight went to press, GOP presidential candidate Bush appeared to be unconcerned about voter fraud. A senior Republican Party official tells Insight that “there really wasn’t a lot of fraud to speak of. There were some irregularities in St. Louis, when a state judge — who is a former staffer for House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt — ordered the polls to remain open an additional three hours, but that was quickly overturned when an appeals judge closed them down less than an hour later.” The same official explained, however, that “because it appears that the late votes put [the late Gov. Mel] Carnahan ahead of [Republican Sen. John] Ashcroft, the Republicans retained lawyers to look into possible fraud in the [gubernatorial] contest.”
But Ashcroft refused to play the lawyerly game and conceded gracefully, whereupon Democrats began to claim GOP fraud for Bush. Even so, the Texas governor sat quietly in Austin awaiting recounts in Florida.
Down in Florida, a representative of the state’s Republican Party also played the country-club game. “The situation in Palm Beach isn’t about cheating or fraud. It is about confusion and counting. There are 67 counties and thousands of precincts that have to carry out a recount. And the point is that in Palm Beach it is a Democrat who signed off on the ballot, believing the design would be more reader-friendly in large print. Under Florida election laws when a race is within 0.5 percent of the votes cast, the secretary of state is mandated to carry out a recount. Without a finding of intentional fraud, it seemed unlikely that a new vote would be considered.”
What seemed likely was that the Palm Beach controversy finally might shine a light on the confusion of voting methods employed throughout the country and force some much-needed reform. One area in which to start could be Clinton’s “motor-voter law,” which allows people to register to vote when applying for driver’s licenses but does not require proof of residence. Until issues such as this are addressed nationwide, voters will fumble in the dark and the high drama will continue.
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ELECTION 2000
Did the INS import votes?
'Leave it to Clinton and Gore to desecrate
the citizenship process,' says legal group
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By Jon E. Dougherty
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
The Immigration and Naturalization Service's Florida district was engaged in a "systematic" program of speeding aliens through the citizenship process in an effort to enhance Democratic voter turnout on election day, according to a legal watchdog organization.
Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest legal group that has launched a number of lawsuits against the Clinton administration, says an INS source told the group's lawyers the program in question "is nearly identical to the now infamous 1996 'Citizenship USA' program."
Then, Judicial Watch said, thousands of aliens -- some with criminal backgrounds -- were "improperly and illegally rushed through the naturalization process in order to obtain Democratic votes for the presidential election."
The Judicial Watch charges about the 1996 election have been confirmed by David Schippers, the former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee who prosecuted President Clinton's impeachment.
In his book, "Sellout," Schippers said, "My staff and I agreed that we needed to focus on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which appeared to be running out of control."
Specifically, Schippers revealed when he and his investigative team "came to the subject" of the INS, an "investigation by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and congressional committees had already indicated that the White House used the INS to further its political agenda.
"A blatant politicization of the agency took place during the 1996 presidential campaign when the White House pressured the INS into expediting its 'Citizenship USA' (CUSA) program to grant citizenship to thousands of aliens that the White House counted as likely Democratic voters," said Schippers -- a Democrat who twice voted for Clinton.
"To ensure maximum impact, the INS concentrated on aliens in key states -- California, Florida, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Texas -- that hold a combined 181 electoral votes, just 89 short of the total needed to win the election," Schippers wrote of the '96 election effort.
Ironically, the former impeachment prosecutor found a major connection between the operation and Al Gore.
"The program was placed under the direction of Vice President Al Gore. We received from the GAO a few e-mails indicating Vice President Gore's role in the plan," Schippers said. "He was responsible for keeping the pressure on, to make sure the aliens were pushed through by September 1, the last day to register for the presidential election."
Four years later, in the lead-up to the 2000 election, the Florida INS ran an effort called the "Backlog Reduction Program," said Judicial Watch, which it describes as "a neutral, bureaucratic-sounding title designed to lower the program's visibility with the media and the general public."
As part of the program, INS examiners and clerks who "met or exceeded headquarters' goals and quotas [for naturalizing aliens] ... were rewarded with various types of bonuses, including an extra 40 hours of paid time off," the source told Judicial Watch.
The legal watchdog group said its source also reported that some of the naturalization processes were allegedly performed illegally.
"As part of this program," the group said, "non-English speakers have had naturalization interviews illegally conducted in the alien's native language, as well as a case where an alien -- without any residence, family or business ties in the U.S. -- was naturalized only three days after returning to the U.S. from an 11-and-a-half month absence from the country."
"This sounds like another illegal 'import-a-voter' program by the Clinton-Gore administration," said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. "Leave it to Clinton and Gore to desecrate the citizenship process."
"Judicial Watch will pursue these charges no matter who comes to occupy the White House," added chairman Larry Klayman.
In 1996, Schippers' book reveals, the Clinton administration was clearly "circumventing normal procedures for naturalizing aliens -- procedures that check backgrounds and weed out criminals -- and consequently they were handing out citizenship papers to questionable characters."
The impeachment prosecutor, who for years prosecuted Mafia cases in Chicago, said the idea for using the INS to rapidly naturalize new potential Democratic voters was first introduced to the White House by then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros in a memo.
"The memo, from the California Active Citizenship Campaign (ACC), complained of a backlog of alien applications for naturalization in Los Angeles. It contained the magic words: 'INS inaction [on the backlog] will deny 300,000 Latinos the right to vote in the 1996 presidential elections [sic] in California,'" Schippers said, quoting the Cisneros memorandum.
Schippers said that INS Commissioner Doris Meissner -- who announced last month she would be stepping down -- warned President Clinton against taking such action via the INS, adding that it could be viewed as politically motivated.
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JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
A Blatant Conflict of Interest
Theresa LePore should recuse herself from the Palm Beach vote-count process.
Sunday, November 12, 2000 1:03 p.m. EST
If you would like to know exactly how your next president will be determined, read this Saturday night dispatch from the Associated Press:
During the manual count of votes in Palm Beach County, Fla., officials switched tests mid-count to decide the validity of the ballots.
In the morning, the canvassing board said that they would count a vote if any of the corners of the bits of paper punched out of the cards called "chad" were punched.
The board then decided that they would instead use the "sunlight test" if they could see sun come though an indentation, it would count.
About a quarter of the way through the counting, however, a board member determined that the light test was flawed and told the other members to go back to the first test.
The change in procedures will undoubtedly slow down the hand count as board members had to go back and recount all of the votes previously counted using the new rules.
After six hours of playing Carnac the Magnificent, holding up ballots and trying to divine the "intent" of the voters who cast them, the three-member Palm Beach County election canvassing commission completed its hand count of four sample precincts and took up the question of whether they had turned up enough "errors" using the new liberalized new standard to justify a complete recount of the county's ballots.
County Judge Charles Burton, the commission's chairman, urged caution. He put forth a motion to ask the Florida Secretary of State's office for advice before proceeding with a full hand count. But he was overruled. The vote for the complete recount, which came after 2 a.m. today, was 2-1.
The two other members of the canvassing board are Carol Roberts, a county commissioner, and Theresa LePore, the county elections supervisor. Ms. Roberts is a highly partisan Democrat who met with President Clinton in Palm Beach last year while she was contemplating a run for Congress. Ms. LePore, an elected Democrat, is the designer of the infamous "butterfly ballot" that both Democrats and impartial observers say caused confusion on Election Day.
Ms. LePore says she designed the ballot to make the print bigger for seniors, the group complaining the loudest about it. But she sent sample ballots to every voter and all candidates before the election and didn't receive any complaints. Nonetheless, she has come in for bitter criticism. The AP says she "might be the most reviled Democrat in the country" because her ballot "may have cost Al Gore the election." Ms. LePore has gone into near-seclusion and has hired a lawyer to defend herself against lawsuits.
It is for that reason that Ms. LePore should have recused herself from the decision to launch an unprecedented hand count of all presidential ballots in Palm Beach--and why she should recuse herself from all subsequent decisions about this election. She has a blatant conflict of interest. Ms. LePore has worked in the Palm Beach election office since she was 16. As an elected official, she obviously would like to continue in office. If she did not approve the controversial hand count in the heavily Democratic county, it's obvious she would have no political future.
Two months ago, the same Palm Beach County election commissioners rejected a request for a hand count in a disputed GOP primary election for a state legislative seat. Beverly Green begged for a hand count of her 13-vote loss but was rebuffed. "It wasn't that close. The manual count is historically when it's single digits," said Ms. LePore at the time. A state House district is smaller than Palm Beach County, but a single-digit margin in such a district would be the equivalent of only about 100 votes countywide. Clearly Ms. LePore & Co. are applying a double standard.
The decision to proceed with the hand count was made by a single vote--Ms. LePore's. Do the American people want a single low-level politician who fears for her job to decide who will be the president of the United States?
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Gore, Hungry for Power
By George F. Will
Sunday, November 12, 2000; Page B07
So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton's understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: "It depends on what the meaning of 'vote' is."
The mendacity of Al Gore's preelection campaign is pertinent to the postelection chaos. He ran with gale-force economic winds at his back and with a powerful media bias pulling him along. (Even on Election Night: by calling Florida for Gore before all Floridians had voted, the networks almost certainly hurt Republican turnout in Florida and out west.) Yet Gore probably lost. Why? Consider his political ethics, which flow from his corrupting hunger for power.
He staggered Bill Bradley in an Iowa debate by asking why Bradley voted against flood relief for Iowa. Bradley voted for $4.8 billion of relief, and opposed--as did the Clinton-Gore administration--only an amendment to add $900 million. When Gore made a false claim about traveling to Texas to inspect disaster damage with the head of federal emergency services, his heap of fabrications reached critical mass, triggering ridicule and draining credibility. He is, strictly speaking, unbelievable.
His serial mendacity should be remembered during his seamless postelection transition to desperately seeking lawyering strategies and a friendly court to hand him the presidential election. Gore is the distilled essence of contemporary liberalism, which enjoys imposing its will--about abortion, racial preferences, capital punishment, tobacco, firearms, etc.--through litigation rather than legislation. Liberalism's fondness for judicial fiat rather than democratic decision-making explains the entwinement of the Democratic Party and trial lawyers.
Election Day saw Democrats briefly succeed in changing the rules during the game in Missouri: Their lawyers found a friendly court to order St. Louis polls to stay open three hours past the lawful 7 p.m. closing time. Fortunately, a higher court soon reimposed legality on the Democrats and ordered the polls closed at 7:45. Now in Florida, Democrats want to change the rules after the game.
The Democratic Party dotes on victims, but what, exactly, victimized those 19,000 Palm Beach County voters who, as almost 15,000 in the county did in 1996, botched their ballots by punching two candidates for president? It is absurd to say it is "unfair" to do what the law requires--disallow improperly marked ballots. And it is sinister when Democratic voters, after leaving polling places where they could have asked for guidance or fresh ballots, suddenly "remember" that they might have misread their "butterfly" ballots.
Those ballots have the punch holes down the center and the candidates' names on the "wings." Gore campaign chairman William Daley, of the famously fastidious Cook County Daleys, says such ballots are indefensible--at least he said that until chief Bush strategist Karl Rove displayed a Cook County butterfly ballot. The Palm Beach ballots were designed by a Democrat and approved by a process that included Democrats, and sample ballots were published in newspapers and mailed to voters--all without eliciting pre-election complaints.
Will instances, real or claimed, of incompetent voting with these ballots (Gore's hired semanticists call this "disenfranchisement") invalidate a presidential election? Not likely. The leading Florida case on confusing ballots holds: Confusion about a ballot will not void an election if the voter, taking "the degree of care commensurate with the solemnity of the occasion," can find the right name. The vast majority of Palm Beach voters could. Unless Florida's Supreme Court, which has approvingly cited this case in other rulings, overturns it, the "confused voter" claims are baseless.
By Nov. 17, Florida's absentee ballots--with a large military, hence Republican, component--will have been counted, probably sealing Bush's win there. By then, millions of as yet uncounted absentee ballots in California and elsewhere may have made Bush the popular vote winner nationally. Even so, Gore operatives probably will still toil to delegitimize the election. Their actions demolish the presidential pretensions of the dangerous man for whom they do their reckless work.
Jesse Jackson, the Democrats' rented ranter, would not have taken his magical mischief tour to Florida, there to excite a sense of victimization, if his party opposed that. All that remains to complete the squalor of Gore's attempted coup d'etat is some improvisation by Janet Reno, whose last Florida intervention involved a lawless SWAT team seizing a 6-year-old. She says there is no federal role, but watch for a "civil rights" claim on behalf of some protected minority or some other conjured pretext. Remember, Reno is, strictly speaking, unbelievable, and these things will continue until these people are gone.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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Allegations Of Voter Intimidation By Democrats Swirl In Miami
Friday, November 10, 2000
William LaJeunesse
African-American voters make up 15 percent of the electorate in Florida. Al Gore won their overwhelming support on Tuesday, receiving an unprecedented 93 percent of the black vote, seven percent more than Bill Clinton got in 1996.
AP/Wide World
Wednesday: The Rev. Jesse Jackson greets Haitian leaders in Miami.
But questions are now circulating about some of those voters being unfairly and illegally influenced — even intimidated — by Democratic campaign workers in certain precincts of Miami's Little Haiti.
A near-perfect turnout in a heavily Democratic district helped sweep the state's first Haitian-American state legislator, a well-known activist and attorney, into office with more than 80 percent of the vote.
The Republican candidate, a political novice, is crying foul, saying his opponent's supporters prodded some voters into voting a straight Democratic ticket.
More than 100,000 Haitians live in Miami-Dade County, many of them in Little Haiti. Most are new to America, new to democracy and are unfamiliar with the U.S. election process.
That leaves them vulnerable to intimidation, say campaign workers and a prominent Haitian minister.
"I believe there should be an investigation into the Haitian vote," said Rev. Phipps St. Hilaire of Christian Churches United. "There were a lot of calls here from people who said there were people who intimidated them."
Phipps said he received at least three dozen complaints from constituents that Democratic campaign workers for Al Gore and state assemblyman Philip Brutus unfairly and illegally violated the 50-foot rule around some precincts in Little Haiti.
The rule prohibits workers from interfering with voters' access to the polls or trying to pressure them.
Some campaign volunteers actually entered the precincts, Phipps said, telling voters what holes to punch and forcing sheets of paper into their hands with the numbers to punch listed on them.
Pauline Charles, a campaign worker for Brutus's opponent, Republican Reggie Thompson, said she saw volunteers helping voters fill out their ballots.
"I heard him tell him, 'Say no to all of this, punch this number and make sure you vote for Gore. Punch number 85, I mean 86 for Brutus.' And you know, giving them exact numbers to the point where he had it written down on a piece of paper just in case they got confused and they'd take the piece of paper and punch in the numbers," Charles said.
"It was wrong," said co-worker Kathy Brinson. "It was wrong for my candidate. We were outside, 50 feet away from the building like the rules said and [the election official] was letting him inside and nothing was said. It wasn't fair."
Charles and Brinson complained to election officials repeatedly. Finally, they called the police, and election officials removed the political partisans from the voting area.
But critics say countless Haitian voters at several precincts were unfairly influenced to vote for a straight Democratic ticket.
"It's not a matter of whether you had a chance to win the race. But you'd like to think that in a democracy, you'd like to hear everyone has an equal chance," Thompson, the aggrieved candidate, said.
— FOXNEWS.com's Sharon Kehnemui contributed to this report
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