Second Term - A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 1) (2 page)

THREE

 St.
Louis, Missouri

“What the h….Son of
a….What the heck is this? I can’t…believe…this!”

Mike Chapel had given
up cursing years ago when he was saved, but the enormity of his discovery
almost erased his pledge to watch his tongue. But, the ballots didn’t lie. Mike
found the ballots as he was looking for filed candidate filing records to
satisfy a reporter’s Freedom of Information request. His extended search led
him to the back of the storage area in the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners.
Underneath a green tarp, held in place by yellow nylon ropes, and stacked at
the bottom of several card boxes, he found a locked ballot box. The ballot box looked
to him like one normally used to deposit absentee ballots cast by voters prior
to the election. Stenciled on the side of the wooden box were the words ST.
LOUIS ELECTION COMMISSIONERS. It had a narrow slot in the top, a metal hasp and
a large padlock securing its contents. Until, that is, it was pried open by Mike
Chapel, who as a new employee of the election bureau, wondered why it was
locked. He justified breaking it open because he thought it could have been
left over, uncounted, from the last election.

What Mike found, upon
leveraging off the padlock and hasp from the wooden top, was a ballot box
stuffed to the top with ballots printed for the upcoming November election, now
three months away. He pulled out two large handfuls of ballots and soon confirmed
that they were, indeed, this year’s ballots. He knew the ballot well because he
had worked with the Clerk to proof and edit the ballot before the text was sent
to the printer. These were
this
year’s
ballots, he thought, so
why are these ballots in this box, most of them folded, some not? How could
this happen?

He began to spread
the ballots out on the top of the stacked boxes in the storage room. As he
looked at the ballots, all of which were clearly marked with votes for
President, he soon noticed a disturbing trend. Each had a vote for President,
and only a few votes were cast for other candidates for other offices. The
pre-marked ballots that he had discovered hidden in the storage room were
almost all marked in favor of the President. The more he examined the ballots
the more he realized that he had come across evidence of a criminal act….voter
fraud. Only a small handful of the several hundred ballots in the box that he
examined showed votes for the President’s opponent. His estimate was about one
hundred votes for the President for each vote marked for the President’s
opponent.

Mike had been hired
by the Election Commissioners because he was a Republican. By law, the office
had to have some employees of the opposite political party. St. Louis hadn’t
voted Republican since 1949. So, he immediately recognized that he had a
problem. A big problem.

As a token Republican
who had uncovered what appeared to be documentary evidence of voter fraud, he
knew his job would be in jeopardy the minute he talked with anyone about what
he had found. If he went to his supervisor, who quite likely had some
knowledge, if not downright involvement, in the fraud, he would be fired. If he
went to the media, he suspected he would be scapegoated and maybe even accused
of concocting the scheme for public attention, to help his party in the upcoming
election. If he did nothing, just put the ballots back, he could be imprisoned
if someone else found the ballots later. His fingerprints were now on hundreds
of pieces of paper, not easily cleaned off. If he destroyed the ballots, he
knew he could be accused of destroying evidence of voter fraud, a serious
offense. Mike Chapel was stuck.

Not knowing how long
it might be before someone entered the storage room, he took what he thought
was the only prudent course of action. He stuffed the ballots into the bottom
of a large miscellaneous records filing box that he located and slit open. He
then replaced the hasp and lock on the ballot box as well as he could and
stacked the boxes on the ballot box just he had found them when he entered the
storage room. He needed time to think, and pray, and now he could do so without
an immediate need to decide. It was then that he realized that the box he had
discovered was only one of what looked like maybe sixty identical boxes, all
stacked behind the one he found and all locked with identical locks. He pulled
several of the boxes out, confirming that they were all locked. Based on
shaking them and hearing rustling ballots inside, it appeared that they were
also stuffed. Mike knew that they all should have been empty. If the ballot
boxes contained what he now thought they undoubtedly contained, a monumental
fraud was just sitting, waiting to be counted. He knew he had to do something,
but what? Mike Castle, of course, had no way of knowing then what would
eventually happen in American politics and government because of his chance
discovery.

FOUR

St.
Louis, Missouri-Election Offices

It came to him at
2:37 AM. Mike Chapel had tossed and turned most of the night, worrying about
his discovery of voter fraud, his eye on the orange numbers of his alarm clock.
Then he suddenly knew what he had to do. Why didn’t I think of this earlier, he
wondered? I could have gotten to sleep sooner. Mike’s majors at UMSL were
political science and computer studies, which led him to a summer-intern job at
the nation’s second largest voting machine manufacturer, located in Illinois. His
early morning epiphany was simply that he would have to find out if the voter
fraud went
beyond
paper ballots locked away in ballot boxes and hidden
in a storage room. Once he saw his course of action, he slept soundly late into
Saturday morning.

Mike had access to
the St. Louis election offices via a magnetic strip card, first given to him
when he was hired. He had only used it twice, when he needed to catch up on
some work, so he knew the card would grant him entry. He waited until late
afternoon, on the off chance that a fellow employee might come in on a Saturday
morning, but a government employee’s late Saturday afternoon visit, he
concluded, was highly unlikely.

Once he was in the election
offices, located on Tucker Boulevard in downtown St. Louis., he went to his desk
and pulled up on his monitor the listing by serial number for the City’s mechanical
lever voting machines, all four hundred and fifty of them. The large metal machines
were heavy and unwieldy, usually requiring two or more persons to move them.
The City had used them for so long that no one now working in the office knew
how old they actually were. The City had balked at investing in newer electronic
voting machines, one Commissioner arguing that the new machines could be
tampered with, another objecting to the cost.

The machines were stored
in an expansive basement room. Entry to the voting machine storage room, he
knew from prior experience, was not by magnetic strip card, but instead by a
simple Kulwin brass key, tagged with a label saying ELECTION MACHINES STORAGE.
The trick, he realized, was where did the Clerk keep the key? It wasn’t hanging
on the office key rack. He didn’t find the key in the desks in the office, as he
tried all ten desks, but with no results.

Where would the Clerk
keep the key? Not an easy question, with no ready answer. Clearly the key
needed to be located, but where was it? Without the key, he knew he was wasting
his time.

Then, he remembered
where it was. He had previously seen the Clerk upend the BEST DAD EVER coffee
mug on his desk, dumping out an assortment of unused pens and pencils, and
revealing the key. Sure enough. Mike now had access to the basement election
machine storage room. He placed the pens and pencils back in the mug, and
headed to the building’s lower level. He would later regret that he had ever
found the key.

The key worked, just
as he had prayed it would. Inside the storage room he saw what he knew he would
find, hundreds of ancient voting machines The machines had originally been
manufactured by his former Illinois employer, so he had a passing knowledge as
to how they worked. The company kept one of the devices in its front lobby as a
memento to its beginnings in the election tabulation business. He had often
shown visitors how the voting machine worked, with the voter pulling the
curtain closed and then pulling down small levers on the face of the machine
over the name of the chosen candidates.

 Taking a deep
breath, he grabbed the end handle on the closest machine and slowly managed to
leverage the heavy machine out so he could get into the back of the machine. In
order to avoid the possible loss of the keys to the machines, office policy was
to leave the back door key in each machines’ back door lock.

Mike confirmed the
serial number he had pulled down on his PC in his office before coming to the
storage room on the end plate of the machine. This machine would be used in the
upcoming election, based on the serial number. He then moved back in front of
the machine and confirmed that the candidate name strips had already been
installed, showing the name of the President in position 1A and that of his
opponent in position 2A. So far, so good, just as it should be. Maybe this
isn’t what I at first thought, he mused, walking around to the back of the
machine. He turned the key and dropped down the access door. Inside the machine
he could see the metal levers used to rotate individual counting tabulation wheels
for each candidate’s position on the machine. Oh my, he thought. That’s
not
right.

Looking at the many
counting devices across the back of the machine, he could see that almost all
showed five zeroes on the counter wheel, just as they were supposed to, prior
to an election. With some trepidation, he looked to the end counters, for
ballot positions 1A and 2A, the positions for the two major parties’ candidates
for President of the United States. The counter for position 1A, which was to
tabulate votes for the President, showed:

                                      557

Glancing down to 2A,
the counter for the President’s Republican opponent, Mike saw:

                                       47

Well, there you have
it, he thought -
voter fraud
. This machine would be moved to its
pre-selected location in late October and would then be ready for voting on
election day. The first voter would have no idea that he or she was voting on a
machine in which the top race had already been decided, at least on this small
part of America’s voting grid. Mike looked around the room and mentally
calculated what these margins would mean, multiplied by over four hundred
machines, assuming they were all similarly pre-voted. But were they?

Mike pulled out two
more machines, at random, and quickly confirmed his worst fears. All had been
manipulated to give large, varying margins for the incumbent President. He
realized that when one added the normal St. Louis voting imbalance for the
President’s party, that this would be a vote of historic proportions. The
margins from the City would clearly overcome the more rural areas of Missouri,
throwing the State’s electors into the President’s column and helping to propel
him towards a second term.

Mike recognized that
the only way that the pre-cast votes could be caught before the voting started
was by the employees who worked in his office, the very persons who had
exclusive access to the machines. The voting machines would be delivered to the
various polling locations, and then checked by his fellow election officials to
be sure the machines were ready for votes to be cast. The election officials
merely had to initial a one page form attesting that the machines bore no votes
at the beginning of voting, and were thus ready to vote. No one else would, or
could, look at the total vote counter on the machine to confirm a clear machine,
with all counters set at zero, before voting started. Classic vote fraud. Right
before his eyes.

With a sinking heart,
Mike Chapel knew that he would have to go to the media – and, as a consequence,
his job would soon be terminated Great, he thought, an economy with increasing
unemployment, and I go and get myself fired. Brilliant. He took several pictures
with his cell phone of the jiggered voting machines, including serial numbers, locked
them back up and replaced each where they had been when he first entered the
room. As he left the building, Mike called his brother, a lawyer in St. Louis,
who was an officer in the local Republican Party organization.

“Jim….Mike….We need
to talk….Not on our cell phones. Meet me at Panera Bread, the one near your
house….In a half hour. This is important. No….I can’t tell you now….No….I
haven’t been arrested….Not yet….anyway.”

The following Tuesday
Mike Chapel held a well-attended media conference arranged by his brother, on
the steps of City Hall on Market Street, six blocks south of his election
offices. He disclosed his evidence of massive voting fraud planned for the
upcoming Presidential election. Missouri media gave lead item/front page
coverage to his allegations, which were then carried nationwide. Both national
political parties quickly issued statements decrying any fraud, or “attempts to
create fraud where none actually exits”, as the White House Press Secretary
phrased it. The spark lit at the media event soon led to the ignition of an
electoral tinderbox which had apparently just been waiting to burn.

Three
days later, Mike Chapel was arrested and charged with various federal crimes,
including voter fraud, illegal manipulation of voting devices, interference
with a federal election, perjury, unlawful entry to governmental facilities and
hate crime defamation of public officials. His brother, Jim Chapel, was
arrested for conspiracy to commit the same crimes which his brother was accused
of committing. The U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri
announced that the Department of Justice would prosecute the case against the
Chapels, at the same time releasing video pictures of Mike Chapel entering the
St. Louis Election Commissioners office late on the prior Saturday. The DA claimed
that the evidence would prove that Mike and Jim Chapel had engineered the vote
fraud to help their party’s candidates win the upcoming election.

The City of St. Louis
Police Department’s fingerprint section announced to the media that “Mike Chapel’s
fingerprints were found on several hundred fraudulent ballots hidden in a
storage room at the election offices and on an unspecified number of voting
machines and ballot boxes.”

Prior to his arrest
Mike had downloaded his cell phone pictures to several conservative websites.
The pictures went viral across the country, enraging Republicans, tea party
members, conservatives and others, who disbelieved the criminal charges filed,
as they had long suspected that the President’s supporters had plans to fix the
upcoming November elections, using any means necessary.