Does Charlestown have a voter fraud problem?

Charlestown’s voter registration numbers raise that question.

By Will Collette

"I'm entitled"

In the 2012 election, 4,177 votes were cast in Charlestown for President.

According to Charlestown Town Clerk Amy Weinreich, who also heads the town’s Board of Canvassers, Charlestown has 6,309 registered voters. That gives us a turnout rate of almost  two-thirds of registered voters, which is highly commendable.

But how many of those 4,177 voters in the November election were actually eligible to vote in Charlestown? 

Theoretically, under the state’s controversial new Voter ID law, all of them should be legally eligible to vote, or else they would have been busted by our eagle-eyed poll workers.

However, some troubling evidence raises doubt about whether everyone who voted was legally eligible to vote.

Let’s start with census numbers. The new 2010 Census numbers show that Charlestown’s overall population has fallen to 7,827 full-time residents. Of those, the Census shows that 1,506 are children under 18, who by law are not eligible to vote.

That leaves 6,321 adult full-time Charlestown residents. Meaning that 99.8% of those residents have registered to vote.

That leaves only twelve Charlestown adult residents unregistered. Now, we’re not even considering that an unnaturalized immigrant adult is not eligible to vote. Again, looking at the census data, 182 Charlestown residents gave their ethnicity as Asian or Hispanic (though citizenship is not in these data). Among those 182 people, there must be a number who are not citizens.

And we’re not considering how many Charlestown residents are not eligible to vote due to certain kinds of criminal convictions. I think we can all agree that we have at least a few criminals in our midst.

I spoke with Amy about the numbers. She noted that there are 423 voters currently listed as inactive, meaning they haven’t voted in two election cycles, and they may at some point be dropped from the voter list, especially if it turns out there no longer live in Charlestown. Then, she said, there are approximately 400 voters currently listed as active who may have moved. They, too, may get dropped from the polls as the town receives more information. Amy told me that 43 voters are eligible to be removed from the rolls now.

Since Secretary of State Ralph Mollis introduced a new computerized voter registration system in 2002, the registrations of 1,911 Charlestown voters have been cancelled, mainly because they either died or otherwise left town.

Let’s presume all or most of those 800 people Amy identified as potentially ineligible to vote in Charlestown end up dropped from the Charlestown voter list. That takes Charlestown’s total registration rate down to 87% which is still extremely high.

My theory is that some number of our stridently vocal nonresident property owners have gotten IDs based on their second (or third) homes in Charlestown and registered to vote. It’s not that hard to do since they have tax and utility bills they can use to establish “residence.” I don’t know how they work around the issue of paying income tax in Rhode Island, as all persons who claim Rhode Island as their residence must. For fake Floridians, that’s a tough pill to swallow since Florida has no income tax.

I’m guessing that they maintain dual citizenship, telling Florida they are full-time residents there for tax purposes and telling Rhode Island they are full-time residents here for voting purposes. Or maybe voting in Florida and in Rhode Island.

That's what 2010 Republican candidate for RI Attorney General (and RISC board member) Kerry King did. He even received a homestead tax exemption on the property tax on his Florida home. 

We also see signs of that in the campaign finance reports filed by the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, which largely represents the interests of nonresident property owners.

The CCA raised $15,152 in cash for the 2012 election. The single largest bloc of cash came from nonresidents – at least 60% of the CCA's total income. Where the CCA was required to report the names and addresses of major donors on their campaign finance reports to the state, the CCA listed their Charlestown second home addresses, not their actual residence.

It was easy enough to check those names and addresses against the Tax Assessor’s records to see where those donors actually live, but I suppose the CCA was counting on no one thinking to do that.

While the CCA did not break the law by lying about the true origin of their campaign cash, they did violate the public trust. PLUS, they have provided a very strong clue to solving the mystery of Charlestown’s amazingly high voter registration rate.

The CCA won the 2012 election with their top vote-getter, Town Council boss Tom Gentz winning 1,959 votes. 

However, Gentz was out-polled in Charlestown by five Democrats.  

Rep. Donna Walsh was the overall top vote-getter in Charlestown with 2,547 votes, though technically, husband Henry Walsh was the champ vote-getter in Charlestown with 2,992 votes, though he ran unopposed. President Obama, Senator Whitehouse and Rep. Langevin all had higher numbers than Gentz.

The CCA has its own point of view about 2012's voting patterns. In a rare statement attributed to the CCA Steering Committee, the CCA decries the "master lever," which is actually an arrow that allows a voter to vote for all members of a political party on the ballot with one stroke of the pen.

I'm pretty sure the statement was actually came from CCA-endorsed Town Council member Dan Slattery since the piece directs you to a website by Moderate Party chair Ken Block. Slattery served as Block's Moderate Party state Treasurer.

Ironically, the Moderate Party picked up 54 straight ticket votes in Charlestown even though it didn't have one single candidate on the ballot. Wonder what those 54 Moderate Party voters were thinking?

Anyway, the CCA notes that 604 Charlestown voters chose the straight ticket option in the 2012 election (that includes those 54 Moderate Party geniuses)...and of course, none of those votes went to the CCA because, technically, the CCA isn't a political party. It's a political action committee that happens to act just like a political party.

But there's a big difference between getting votes through voter choice, which is, like it or not, what straight-ticket voting is, than through voter fraud.

With just under 2000 total votes, by a margin of just a few hundred votes, the CCA retained its control of Charlestown’s Town Council and Planning Commission. But did they do it with the help of fraudulently registered voters?