Facts About DJT and The Stolen Alabama Election of 2002

Guest Opinion by Don Siegelman, Governor of Alabama, 1999-2003

Donald Trump has raised concerns about election hacking and electronic voting vulnerabilities repeatedly over many years, both before and after the 2020 presidential election. In his recent address to the nation, President Trump raised concerns about election systems and electronic voting vulnerabilities.

My curiosity led me to research the best known claims of electronic voting miscounts or fraud.

The best example I found is Alabama’s 2002 governor’s election. 

Let me be clear, there is no concrete evidence that this election was stolen because the ballots in question were never hand counted, but there was ample factual evidence to suspect something very wrong had happened.

Oddly enough, this Alabama case of alleged “electronic ballot stuffing” was documented by young Bobby Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is currently one of President Trump’s Cabinet Members, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes about Alabama’s race for Governor in Chapter 28, “Stuffed,” of Greg Palast’s 2012 book, ”The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.” The night of then-Governor Siegelman’s reelection in 2002, it was reported by the Associated Press and all major national news outlets that Siegelman had been elected to a second term. But not so fast! After midnight, the votes changed. Over 6,000 of Siegelman’s votes disappeared. 

Kennedy gave credit for electronic vote-switching to Karl Rove’s Deputy and President Bush’s Southern Political Director, who also worked previously for “Rove and Company” saying that Republicans gave her the credit for “finding the votes that delivered the election” to Siegelman’s opponent. 

According to one political insider who wished to remain anonymous, “Kitty McCullough, Karl Rove’s Deputy, was sitting across from the state Party Chairman in the Alabama State Republican Party headquarters. When the Baldwin County votes gave Siegelman enough to win, reportedly, it was then that a call was made to the Baldwin County Probate Judge, Adrian Johns, who was told, “If these votes stand, we lose the governor’s race.” Afterwards, a new set of returns was posted that gave Riley a thin victory. 

Kennedy says it was Karl Rove’s political client, the State’s Attorney General who then seized all the ballots and blocked a hand recount, and “threatened to jail anyone who attempted to count the ballots.”

Secretary Kennedy adds: “The faux bribery charge received national attention, but not this story of the theft of Siegelman’s 2002 election.” See Billionaires and Ballot Boxes, pp 229-231. 

After his 2002 loss, Siegelman was charged with bribery for accepting a political contribution, not to his campaign, but to promote Siegelman’s pet project, a ballot initiative to provide free Early Learning and free college education to all Alabama high school graduates. Siegelman, however, did not personally profit. The campaign contribution went toward encouraging people to vote for the ballot initiative. 

The Siegelman prosecution was labeled “The most notorious political prosecution in the country,” Atticus v. The Architect: The Political Assassination of Don Siegelman (2017) - IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7966582/ ; Karl Rove Linked to Siegelman Prosecution , by Scott Horton https://harpers.org/2007/10/karl-rove-linked-to-siegelman-prosecution/

President Trump has raised concerns about election hacking and the vulnerability of electronic voting over many years, both before and after the 2020 election. 

In 2016, Trump frequently argued that the election could be rigged and expressed concerns about electronic voting and cybersecurity. In 2020, after the election, President Trump repeatedly claimed that voting machines, including Dominion machines had been manipulated or hacked, although court rulings, state audits, and election officials found no evidence that voting-machine or hacking changed the outcome.

In his recently televised address, Trump asserted that because China had obtained U.S. voter data it raised concerns about our election systems and electronic voting vulnerabilities.

While there is no comprehensive official tally of statements specifically about computer hacking of elections, researchers have documented 68 claims that the 2020 election was rigged; 35 claims that it was stolen; 250 claims involving fraudulent or miscounted votes; and 45 claims involving malfunctioning voting machines during the post-2020 election.

Secretary Kennedy wrote:

“In Baldwin County, Alabama, GOP activists used similar tactics to overturn the 2002 reelection of Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman is best known nationally for his conviction and imprisonment under laughable charges of bribery ginned up by a cast of crooked GOP attorneys, political operatives, and judges acting in concert with Karl Rove. (A federal judge who initially reviewed and dismissed the case urged that the Justice Department should be investigated for false prosecution; the Supreme Court overturned the dismissal.) Congressional hearings on Siegelman's case stalled over Karl Rove's refusal to testify, and the Bush White House claimed to have lost key documents. The faux bribery charge received national attention, but not this story of the theft of Siegelman's 2002 election: 

“Heavily Republican Baldwin County on the "Redneck Riviera" was one of the last Alabama counties to report results during Siegelman's hotly contested race against GOP challenger Bob Riley. At 11:00 that evening, local Republican officials huddled in the basement of the Bay Minette Courthouse, struggling with an electronic tabulator that they claimed had malfunctioned. The tabulator was supposed to count votes that had been collected from voting machines across the county. The GOP officials told Democrats and members of the press gathered outside the tabulator room that there was a "glitch," but they refused to give details. After virtually all the other counties had reported, Republican officials distributed a printout summarizing Baldwin County's election results to officials from both parties, and to Associated Press and local media reporters. The official tally had Siegelman with 19,070 votes to Riley's 31,052. The results-consistent with predictions for this Republican- dominated Gulf Coast county-meant that Siegelman had won the state-wide race and would retain the governor's seat. 

“Republican officials then locked the courthouse for the night and sent poll watchers, the Democratic Party chairman, and the media home. Governor Siegelman gave a victory press conference and called upon Riley to concede. Later that night, however, Republican officials posted another report on the county probate court's website reducing Siegelman's count to 12,736, a deduction of 6,334 votes. The revised tally gave Riley a margin of 3,120 votes out of 1.3 million cast, or a razor-thin victory by 0.23 of a percentage point. Tellingly, neither the lieutenant governor's race, nor any of the down-ballot contests, changed in the new tally by even a single vote. 

“Siegelman next plowed into the same brick wall Al Gore had encountered two years before: a system rigged by Republicans to prevent hand recounts. At eight the next morning, Wednesday, Siegelman and his supporters, attorneys, and a contingent of reporters assembled at the probate court building seeking an explanation for the sudden change in Siegelman's results. But the canvassing board-the body charged with safeguarding the election- had barred the courthouse doors from inside and refused Siegelman's team entry. The board included the probate judge, a representative from the sheriff's department, and the clerk of court-all Republicans. Finally, around 10:15 a.m., the board emerged and announced its intention to certify the election results immediately. Under the statute, the canvassing board should not have certified the result until noon Friday. Siegelman and his team pleaded with them to wait. But the canvassing board insisted that the results were correct and illegally certified the altered election results at 10:30 a.m. A half hour later, Riley delivered his victory speech in Montgomery. 

“In response, the Democratic Party filed recount petitions in all of Alabama's sixty-seven counties. One petition demanded a manual recount of all of Baldwin County's paper ballots. Alabama's administrative code requires that, in the face of such requests, "the box or envelope holding the ballots shall be delivered unopened to the supervising official in charge of the re-count," and that a "recount must be conducted under the supervision of a trained and certified poll official and/or Probate Judge of the County." Faced with this unambiguous language, local Republican officials, including the sheriff and the circuit court and probate judges, all agreed to let Siegelman have a hand count of one of the precincts where large numbers of votes had been switched. That's when Republican attorney general Bill Pryor stepped in. Pryor threatened to jail anyone who attempted to count the ballots, citing an obscure Alabama constitution provision prohibiting the breach of a sealed ballot box in the absence of a court order. Siegelman filed the lawsuit asking the court to unseal the ballot boxes, but he already knew it was a lost cause. 

“It was a Karl Rove courthouse. The Business Council of Alabama had imported Rove from Texas in 1994 to mastermind a GOP takeover of the state's electoral offices, particularly its judiciary, which was perceived as unreliable by the state's corporate interests. Rove brought his rough brand of politics to the races for Alabama's appellate courts, one that soon had judicial candidates accusing each other of bribery, favoritism, and moral turpitude. It worked. The state high court went from solid Democratic to all Republican, except for one lone Democrat. 

"So, we were then left with filing a state lawsuit," Siegelman told us, “Knowing that by that time, Karl Rove had already changed eight of the nine members of the Alabama Supreme Court, so we were facing an eight-to-one Republican majority on the State Supreme Court. Knowing what Al Gore went through, I just felt like the elections contest wasn't going to go anywhere, we were never going to get the recount that we needed, so I announced that we were going to just live to fight another day and we walked away from the contest." Siegelman threw in the towel on November 18, and Riley was sworn in as governor on January 21, 2003, at the state capitol in Montgomery. (President Bush rewarded Pryor for his accomplishments with appointment to a federal judgeship.) 

"Karl Rove's fingerprints were all over this," Siegelman told us. The Alabama Republican Party, apparently proud of its acumen rather than shamed by the corruption, gave its consultant Kitty McCullough (a.k.a. Kelly Kimbrough) credit for the electronic vote switch, applauding her “for finding the votes that delivered the election to Riley." McCullough was Rove's business partner at his political consulting and direct-mail firm K. Rove & Company. 

“McCullough shared the credit with another of Rove's key Alabama operatives, Dan Gans. Gans, a self-described "electronic ballot security expert," had served as Riley's chief of staff during Riley's term as a US representative for Alabama's 3rd District, before going to work on Riley's gubernatorial campaign. Not long after the election, he went to work for the Alexander Strategy Group (ASG), the Washington lobbying and consulting firm run by Rove's friend Jack Abramoff. ASG disbanded in 2006 when it was implicated in the scandal that resulted in Abramoff's imprisonment. Gans would brag on his ASG Internet bio that he "implemented a state-of-the-art ballot security program that was critical to securing governor-elect Riley's narrow margin of victory (3,120 votes)." 

Parenthetically, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove’s fellow College Republican, had laundered $20,000,000 of Indian casino money into Alabama both to defeat Don Sigelman and his proposed education lottery initiative. See “CapitolPunishment” by Jack Abramoff, 2012; also see Atticus v. The Architect, the political assassination of Governor Don Siegelman.

Professor James H. Gundlach, Auburn University, wrote a “Statistical Analysis of Possible Electronic Ballot Stuffing,” April 11, 2003; his full report may be read here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Gundlach_Paper.pdf or at https://docslib.org/doc/2631352/a-statistical-analysis-of-possible-electronic-ballot-box-stuffing-the-case-of-baldwin-county-alabama-governor-s-race-in-2002.

In his statistical analysis of possible “Electronic Ballot Box Stuffing,” in the Alabama Governor’s Race in which he presented at the annual meeting of The Alabama Political Science Association in Troy, Alabama, April 11, 2003, he stated:

“The 2002 Governor’s race in Alabama erupted into controversy when Baldwin County first reported results that suggested that the democratic incumbent, Don Siegelman, had won and subsequently reported other results that gave the election to the republican challenger, Bob Riley by a margin of 3,120 votes out of 1,364,602 cast.

“In this paper I demonstrate how relatively simple statistical techniques can identify apparent systematic electronic manipulation of voting results. This paper consists of four parts. The first part is an overview of the election; the second part is an analysis of county level data that suggests that both sets of results from Baldwin County are anomalous. The third part of the paper is a set of analyses of results from voting districts that identifies and describes some clear patterns in the anomalous Baldwin County final results. The final part of the paper discusses the possibilities of electronic vote manipulation and suggests mechanisms for preventing it in the future.”

“Some election background:

“I first looked at the election results by dividing the state into two components, Baldwin County and the rest of the state. I then look at the results for the 1998 and 2002 Governor’s races for these two components. In the 1998 election Don Siegelman received 742,766 votes in the rest of Alabama compared to 533,772 votes for his the republican, Fob James. In Baldwin County, which is where Fob James lived, Siegelman received 17,389 votes compared to 21,004 votes for James. In 2002, Siegelman received 635,545 votes compared to 623,145 for Bob Riley in the rest of Alabama. In the first set of returns for Baldwin County Siegelman received 19,070 votes to 31,052 for Riley. In the second set of returns Siegelman was reported as receiving 12,736 votes while Riley’s total did not change.

“In addition to the issues reported in the press, the above review suggests three points about Baldwin County’s election results that should make one suspicious.

One is the unusually large increase in the votes for the republican candidate from the 21,004 for James, the local resident in 1998 to the 31,052 for Riley in 2002. While Riley ran better across the state than James did, the only other county that showed such an increase for Riley over James from ‘98 to ’02 was Riley’s home, Clay County, which went from 2,122 to 3,176.

The second factor that raises suspicions is the size of the decline in Siegelman’s reported vote. The difference between the two reported votes for Siegelman is a decline of almost exactly one third of the total votes finally reported for Siegelman. A one third reduction is commonly found in data that is intentionally changed but rarely the result of random errors.

The final point that raises suspicions is that there should be no way to produce two different results with the computerized vote tabulation. That is, the system should not allow access to computer code or procedures that can produce different results. Computers do not accidentally produce different totals. Someone is controlling the computer to produce the different results. Once any computer produces different election results, any results produced by the same equipment operated by the same people should be considered too suspect to certify without an independently supervised recount.

He concludes:

“My hypothesis is that someone was moving a little more than 3,000 Baldwin County votes from Siegelman to Riley by calculating a fifth of Siegelman’s votes in each voting district, rounding it to a whole number, adding the resulting value to Riley’s votes in that district and then subtracting that number from Siegelman’s vote. However instead of subtracting the calculated number they added it to the vote for Siegelman. This is a common error created by using copy and paste to produce the invisible formulas for cells of spreadsheets. The result was a first report of county vote totals that had percentage distributions close to what was expected but a total vote that much higher than expected. Once they went back and fixed the procedure so that it performed as they desired, a reasonable total vote and Riley winning the election, the difference between the first and second reporting of Siegelman’s vote was twice the number of electronically shifted votes. If what I hypothesized happened, then the total votes for Baldwin County was 27,866 votes for Riley and 15,283 votes for Siegelman. This would have produced state totals of 669,039 votes for Riley and 671,652 votes for Siegelman. The only way we will know for sure is if the paper ballots for Baldwin County are recounted.

“In this paper I show how some relatively simple statistical analysis techniques can be used to identify probable electronic manipulation of voting results. The Baldwin County results attracted attention because two results were reported. This was probably due to mistakes made in the data manipulation procedures. If this kind of electronic ballot stuffing is done in the future, voters and candidates cannot count on similar errors to serve as flags to bring the process under review. With a little work before an election building necessary data sets and some more work entering returns on election night and over the next few days, statistical analysis can point to probable ballot stuffing, electronic or otherwise. This could lead to more honest vote counting as well as greater trust in the electoral process and government in general.”

Don Siegelman served as Governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003 and previously served as Alabama Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Lieutenant Governor. He is the only person in Alabama history elected to the State's top four constitutional offices. He may be contacted through https://linktr.ee/donsiegelman.

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Atticus v. Architect, the political assassination of Governor Don Siegelman is available on Amazon. The preview may be seen on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cnm-MLhobzd/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/209816360.