The news coming out of Appalachia, down in Wise County, is really just staggering. In today’s Roanoke Times, Laurence Hammack writes all about it:
A sweeping indictment alleges a town election fraught with fraud, with two candidates and their supporters buying votes with beer and cigarettes, stealing mail-in ballots and voting repeatedly for themselves in the name of a deceived electorate.
The indictment returned Thursday by a Wise County grand jury contained more than 1,000 violations of election laws — about two crimes for every vote cast in the May 2004 election in Appalachia.
At the center of the alleged conspiracy is Ben Cooper, the mayor and acting town manager of this small town in far Southwest Virginia.
According to the 300-page indictment, one of the goals in electing Cooper and his two running mates to town council was “the control of the town of Appalachia by one person, Ben Ellis Cooper.”
Not only did Cooper and his allies buy and steal votes to accomplish that goal, the indictment alleges, but they also used their stolen mandate to create a corrupt police department that was given the authority to harass their political enemies.
I want to just quote the whole article and post it here, but that wouldn’t be fair to the Times. It’s amazing — 14 people have been charged with over 1,000 crimes, every one more insidious than the previous. I look forward to the day when Chad can blog about this. I expect he could say a great deal about this case.
03/04 Update: It’s my understanding that elections in Appalachian are non-partisan. The area is heavily Democratic though, so to the extent to which this has anything to do with Democrats, it just shows that crooks come in all political stripes.
When do we get to the top dogs…?
I take it these folks are Republicans, yes?
What party did these people represent? I haven’t heard this mentioned in any of the coverage from any media outlet.
Dang! Are there even 1000 people *IN* Wise County? ;)
While reading the article, I kept waiting to see that Bo and Luke foiled the election fraud by hand delivering absentee ballots at the last second.
This is 2006, right?
BTW – why does anyone care what party they were in? Is this some effort to blame George Bush for it?
Waldo,
As I said on my blog, those people do not represent any democrats or republicans that I know.
Here’s an excellent article from coalfields.com via zwire:
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16235023&BRD=1283&PAG=461&dept_id=158544&rfi=6
Does anyone posting here know just how small the town of Appalachia is. The main road through Appalachia is made up of a one half-million road surrounded by 15 or 20 mostly vacant buildings. Not to mention that if it doesn’t rain for four or five days it is also a dust bowl. Appalachia was one of the hardest hit towns when the coal industry went under and has never recovered. It was further devastated with the construction of rout 23 bypassing Appalachia completely. This virtually cut off Appalachia from any through traffic between Norton and Big Stone Gap. It is small even by Southwest Virginia (Lee, Wise, and Scott County) standards. Any party scandal related to the whopping town of Appalachia is laughable. At best the accused persons regardless of their politics were no more than a bunch of thugs who conjured up a scheme to use the town of Appalachia for personal gains.