Helen Blackwell - "fixing" votes

Morton Blackwell's wife --

The Front
http://slate.msn.com/id/78548/

.... almost everything about the Voting Integrity Project makes you wonder. Though VIP's members assert that they are both independent and nonpartisan, the organization is essentially a conservative front. Five of seven on the governing board are Republicans. The lone Democrat is a college student who designed the VIP Web site. The president is a conservative activist. The chairman of the board is Helen Blackwell, who also serves as the Virginia chairman of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and is the wife of conservative activist Morton Blackwell. James Meredith, the civil-rights-pioneer-turned-Jesse-Helms-crony, sits on the national advisory board. VIP has worked on special projects with the far-right Frontiers of Freedom Institute (Malcolm Wallop) and Americans for Tax Reform (Grover Norquist).

But the problem isn't who they are, it's what they do. VIP started up in 1996 by answering the call from election losers who accused their opponents of fraud. Its first high-profile moment was the investigation in Louisiana into Democrat Mary Landrieu's Senate victory. VIP hired a private investigator to look for evidence of vote stealing and filed a report with the Senate Rules & Administration Committee, whose own investigation dragged on for almost a year. Democrats insisted it was a partisan witch hunt, and in the end the rules committee voted unanimously to drop it.

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The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida
From the book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast
http://www.topplebush.com/article13_election.shtml

Florida's Blackhunt purge began under the cover of the voting "reform" law passed by the state in 1998.

Who is the carrier of this ill "reform" wind? One vector is the high-sounding Voter Integrity Project, based just outside Washington, DC. The conservative, nonprofit advocacy organization has campaigned in parallel with the Republican Party against the 1993 motor voter law that resulted in a nationwide increase in voter registration of 7 million, much of it among minority voters. VIP's founding chairwoman is Helen Blackwell, wife of Ronald Reagan's staffer Morton Blackwell.

Just before the November 2000 election, VIP presented its special Voter Integrity Award to DBT -- at a VIP conference substantially paid for by . . . ChoicePoint's DBT unit, the company that gave Florida the bogus list of 'felons.' Noting proudly that "DBT is the company tasked with helping Florida clean up the State's voter registration records," VIP then launched into a campaign to take DBT's Florida methods to other states. VIP announced it had "entered into an agreement with DBT Online to identify small communities with demonstrated need for similar pro bono voter rolls ëscrubbing.' " Offers were extended to Pennsylvania and Tennessee, with Florida, the states considered toss-ups in the Gore-Bush race. (According to investigator Catherine Danielson, it looks like Bush won Tennessee the way he won Florida, through another odiferous purge operation.)

Notably, when Republican senator Chris Bond, joined at a press conference by VIP's chairwoman, announced he was introducing a bill to force Florida's voting methodologies on the entire nation, then-Senator Bob Torricelli stood with him grinning and agreeing -- which proves one can always find Democrats willing to attend their own political funeral.