Obama's Foul Tricks In Texas

From My DD
"...I was a volunteer field organizer in El Paso, Texas and investigated irregularities for three weeks after the election.

As a Democratic Coordinated Campaign Regional Director in 1996 and as a volunteer on campaigns in the 1990s, I have the ethical obligation to report what I saw in Texas.

When California 22nd CD Republican candidate Tom Bordonaro famously tried to suppress the vote by phone banking under a false name, many of us in the Capps campaign immediately said that we would walk away from a campaign if our side were similarly unethical. That moment kept replaying through my head election night in El Paso. Simply put, the Obama campaign made Tom Bordonaro look ethical.

Lois Capps is correct when she wrote that Sen. Obama is inspiring. However, many of the actions of his campaign that I witnessed and investigated are criminal.

I know this information is jarring, and puts DNC delegates in an uncomfortable situation, but if the time comes for delegates to endorse or get behind a consensus candidate, this information should be available. As I wrote to Rep. Capps, I apologize for not illuminating this earlier.

My observations in Texas were that caucuses were broadly illegitimate. In a few well-run counties, Hillary's caucus vote was the same or better than the popular vote, but in chaotic counties, she fell behind by double digits. While Texas is the only state to have both a binding popular vote and a caucus vote, we saw similar results in Washington State, where Obama's numbers plunged in the unofficial primary compared to the caucuses .

This stands out: only four major Texas counties were orderly enough to report most of their caucus results election night, and in three of these, caucus preference mirrored the popular vote (HRC popular/caucus): El Paso (69/75), Austin/Travis (37/34), San Antonio/Bexar (56/57). In the case of Austin, I have read reports that that both sides ran their caucuses well.

These counties had exceptional organizations, but it should not take heroics to run a fair election.

On election night in El Paso, it became obvious that the Obama field campaign was designed to steal caucuses. Prior to that, it was impossible for me to imagine the level of attempted fraud and disruption we would see. It was far worse than any GOP campaign I have organized against on the Central Coast, worse than Tom Bordonaro's, worse than Andrea Seastrand's, worse than the Dole campaign whose supporters vandalized our headquarters.

We saw stolen precincts where Obama organizers fabricated counts, made false entries on sign-in sheets, suppressed delegate counts, and suppressed caucus voters. We saw patterns such as missing electronic access code sheets and precinct packets taken before the legal time, like elsewhere in the state. Obama volunteers illegally took convention materials state-wide, with attempts as early as 6:30 am. Some of this was presented in a press release from Clinton Campaign Counsel Lyn Utrecht, but I witnessed worse than what she disclosed.

In one example of fraud that I witnessed, one of my precinct captains, an elderly Hispanic woman, called me to report that BHO supporters had illegally seized control of the convention. During our series of phone calls, Mrs. "A." reported that the Obama people took the convention materials and did not have a legal election of officers. Like nearly all of El Paso, BHO people would have lost such an election in this majority-Hillary, Hispanic, mostly elderly precinct convention.

The Obama people ordered Mrs. A. to sit across the room during the delegate calculation, and excluded Hillary supporters from the process. Mrs. A. overheard an Obama supporter call in a false delegate count to Austin. In a 13 delegate precinct where Obama should have won approximately 4 delegates, the Obama supporters attempted to award 19 delegates to Obama. This was not innocent. During my attempts at cell phone diplomacy, the Obama "chair" hung up on me, and refused to talk to the ethical Obama organizer I was paired with at another precinct convention. As with all major attempts at fraud that we identified, this delegate count was rectified in private at the county TDP headquarters, according to TDP rules, but there were no public charges or sanctions. It is my opinion that people should be in jail, but there is not a mechanism for this sort of prosecution, certainly not within TDP rules.

Although I have only volunteered in one state, virtually every Clinton staffer I have talked to has similar stories from other caucus states. While the Hillary field campaign operates and feels very much like typical Democratic campaigns, the Obama campaign is something new to Democratic politics. From my perspective, it looks like it has copied the worst attributes of Republican campaigns, but with unprecedented zeal.

Ironically, only in very well-organized areas like El Paso were we able to even identify the scale of the attempted irregularities. In these areas, we were also able to rebuff most attempts at fraud, correct fraudulent delegate counts, and protect our voters. In less well-organized areas, we did not have enough eyes and ears to identify or stop fraud, and our numbers plunged.

Although affidavits have not been made public, I have copies and records of the voter complaints for which I did interviews. Although the Hillary campaign has not gone public with evidence of fraud, the national legal team has approximately 200 such affidavits and 2000 voter complaints. The campaign intends to win the popular vote without airing these charges in public, but I suspect the campaign will provide authorities with this evidence upon request.

My own sense is that this information should not be withheld from delegates, since it both casts the Obama campaign as stunningly unethical, and it severely undermines the general credibility of caucuses. It also points out that perception and reality are upside down. The campaign that will "do anything to win," including the illegal acts documented in affidavits, is not Hillary's...."