Polk County acitivist charged with using forgeries on petition

[DoYouEverWonder]

Feb 25, 2005

BARTOW, Fla. (AP) -- A grand jury charged a political activist with submitting signatures he knew were forged for a petition drive, including the name of Polk County's supervisor of elections.

Dewey Smith, 76, of Lakeland, was indicted Thursday on two felony and two misdemeanor charges and was released from the county jail on $7,000 bail. He's also accused of accepting a $5,000 illegal contribution to his political action committee.

Smith faces up 20 years in prison if convicted on the charges, which stem from his drive to cut county constitutional officers' salaries in half. He said the charges are false and part of a vendetta against him by "the political establishment."

Authorities began investigating more than 400 potentially fake signatures last fall, after county elections supervisor Lori Edwards discovered someone had forged her own signature on the petitions.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FL_PETITION_FRAUD_FLOL-?SITE=FLPET&SECTION=STATE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT


I guess if this SOE hadn't seen her own signature forged, nothing would have ever come from it? Makes you wonder how many other people pulled stuff like this in the last election?

[Wilms]

1. It's "News of the Weird"

You should submit it to them.

It's right up their alley.

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/

Now we have a new issue. "Petition Fraud" :eyes:

[whatelseisnew]

2. Right,

another crack exposed while in the meantime a crevasse sits under the surface.

[ClintonTyree]

3. Florida has always had the reputation................

of being a cess pool of political corruption. This pre-dates Jeb's entrance onto the political scene, but the cess pool has widened and deepened since Jeb took over Florida politics. It is now a banana republic with almost no system of checks and balances. Everything comes up Republican in that toxic swamp of politics that is called, Florida.

How I ever lived in that state and maintained my sanity is a question that will puzzle me until the day I die. People who just read an occaisional article in the paper about that state's "problems" have no idea how pervasive political corruption is there. It's like peeling back the largest onion on earth, the layers never end.

Leaving there was the best decision I ever made. For a time I thought of myself as somewhat of a quitter, that I should have remained there and fought the corruption. But the corrpution runs as deep as it's aquafers and I later came to realize that nothing, nothing that I could have done would have made the tiniest scratch in the Republican slime machine in Florida.