Steve Pappas' Lonely Crusade for Democracy

In a democracy, there are few crimes as serious as stealing an election. That’s why the most dramatic news of last week wasn’t the heavily-covered Senate theatrics over AIG’s employee compensation plan, but instead, a ruling from a small-town judge in a coastal town in central California that has made one man’s lonely crusade for democracy just a little lonelier.

The crusader is Steve Pappas, a failed candidate for 3rd District Supervisor of Santa Barbara County, California. According to the County Clerk, Pappas lost the November 8, 2008 election by 803 of 35,621 votes to Doreen Farr, a slow-growth environmentalist candidate. The official results show that Pappas captured a sizable majority of votes from the larger and more conservative area of his district, but lost by a similar margin in and around the smaller but dense college community of Isla Vista, home of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). As a demographic, college students are not ordinarily enthusiastic voters even with rock star presidential candidate Obama blanketing the airwaves with a youth-oriented message and promising increased funding for student grant and loan programs. Frequently, students never end up registering to vote in the district after moving into the dorms. That’s why Pappas must have been surprised to find out that, according to Santa Ynez Valley Journal reporter, Nancy Crawford-Hall’s review of the election records, nearly 100% of registered voters turned out to vote at UCSB precincts — and sometimes more than that. As Crawford-Hall explains in her December 11, 2008 column:

“…within the UCSB precincts, there are four precincts with more ballots than voters registered; one at 101.13 percent, one at 101.51 percent, one at 104.19 percent and one at a whopping 130.12 percent. How does that happen? Of the nine UCSB precincts, there was no voter turnout lower than 93.37 percent and the range, other than the over 100 percent precincts, went all the way up to 98.71 percent. Even the Isla Vista precincts had turnouts way above average but not as high as UCSB precincts… I can’t begin to imagine how someone managed to get a turnout 30 percent higher than anyone in the nation…”

Not surprisingly, after Crawford-Hall began investigating further, she found that in the month or so before the election, a large number of left-wing voter registration drive folks from out of town, rumored to be over a thousand in just one weekend, descended onto Isla Vista and managed to collect over 10,000 new voter registration cards — an unprecedented number. This was towards the end of the registration period and the County elections office conveniently did not require these first-time registrants to present photo identification at the polling place as Pappas’ legal counsel argues is required under the federal Help America Vote Act. Pappas’ team believes several other safeguards were ignored, as well, conveniently leaving the door open to massive voter fraud in the Isla Vista area. Crawford-Hall has written in a column entitled “We’ve Been Acorned” that there was a connection, at least financially, between what happened in Isle Vista and ACORN, an increasingly notorious and controversial organization that has faced voter fraud allegations before.

But, last Monday, as the House Judiciary Committee was gearing up to hear whistleblower testimony on ACORN from an east coast informant and as reporters and concerned citizens were expressing outrage at the idea that the federal government would be awarding ACORN a contract to help conduct the next census, Steve Pappas lost his challenge in Superior Court on the technical and certainly debatable grounds that he does not have standing to proceed under the Help America Vote Act. It was the final ruling in a long line of heartbreak rulings for Mr. Pappas — who is learning why underground efforts to influence elections by groups like ACORN can be startlingly successful. As interest groups and individuals distance themselves in order to avoid alienating the sitting Supervisor, Pappas’ fundraising ability dries up and he finds himself fighting an expensive battle with courts who are extremely reluctant to overturn a certified election result or to disenfranchise voters. Now, with old enemies urging him to accept defeat and avoid the impression he is trying to take the vote away from college kids, he must decide whether to lick his wounds and try to fight another day or appeal and risk further serious political and financial losses.

We don’t know what happened in Isla Vista, but we do know that both voter fraud and the litigation that can follow are harmful to democracy. We sympathize with Mr. Pappas and the pain and stress this fight is causing him. As conservatives and libertarians take back the internet and look forward to electoral challenges in 2010 and 2012, they must get informed and organized about reviewing and, if necessary, changing local election policies to ensure, in advance, that common forms of voter fraud are not permitted. As the Left becomes more belligerent and brave in its methods, the Right must bring those to the forefront of public attention. Not another election cycle should go by in which candidates like Mr. Pappas or Mr. Coleman in Minnesota are left relying on courts to correct systemic problems that could have been corrected before ballots were cast.