All Voter Fraud is Local

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to my friend Dee Dee for the heads up.)

I reminded my readership recently of Tip O'Neill's famous observation that all politics is local. The same is equally if not moreso true for electoral/voter fraud.

The cross-eyed, gap-toothed miscreant in the lead picture above is of Mark Evangelous, a former Marlborough City Councilman who got voted out in the elections last Nov. 1st. At that picayune level of politics, candidates often don't run under a party banner because, you would think, partisan politics has no place in the City Council's day-to-day business concerning zoning laws and allocation for traffic lights, infrastructure repair, etc.

That doesn't mean these local yokels don't have partisan sympathies, however. Case in point: Mark Evangelous, staunch Republican, if his position on "stabilizing the tax rate" is any indication, who was recently indicted by a grand jury for voter fraud and other charges.

Evangelous was indicted for presenting an absentee ballot containing the name of an 89 year-old Marlborough resident who had died earlier last year. Sayeth Kendall Hatch of the Metrowest Daily News:

According to the DA’s office, Evangelous submitted a handwritten absentee ballot application to the city clerk at about 9:45 a.m. on Oct. 28, just four days ahead of the election.

The application was filled out in the name of an 89-year-old Marlborough resident, authorities said.

The resident’s signature was written at the bottom of the application, and a box designated to indicate whether any help was used in filling out the application was left blank, authorities said.

After receiving the form, a city clerk employee checked it against the list of voters registered in the election and found that not only was the applicant not registered to vote, but had died earlier in the year...

Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said in a statement yesterday that the absentee ballot application seemed to be an intentional violation of election laws.

“We allege that this defendant, a candidate in the 2011 Marlborough city election, intentionally forged a signature of a deceased resident in order to provide himself with an advantage in the election,” Leone said. “These allegations are a direct violation of the people’s right to a true and honest democratic process and, under Massachusetts law, are criminal.”

The various reports I've read don't state whether Markie valiantly tried to keep other dead city residents involved in the electoral process but all it takes is one fraudulent ballot to end your political career. So, why, you may ask yourself, would a political candidate risk tanking his political career by personally forging one name on an absentee ballot for political advantage when a single vote hardly matters even in a local election?

"And why," you may also be asking yourself, "is JP, a blogger who specializes in national politics, wasting his time telling us about a local crook?"

Well, because not only do I personally know Mark Evangelous and his twin brother Matt, but these are the same fucks who run Gemini Signs in Marlborough, the same place into which I got Mrs. JP a month after her arrival from Florida. Pay close attention to the video to which I'd linked above when Mark Evangelous in happier times was telling a resident about the importance of "business development" and "job creation."

Job creation? This is the same right wing, miscreant who along with his brother laid off my fiancee after she'd worked her ass off for them as a graphic designer for close to a year while paying her minimum wage for her 18 year's experience. Furthermore, they paid her under the table for the first two months she'd worked there, meaning they're also guilty of tax fraud (I'd reported them to the IRS months after they laid her off).

These right wingers would call in to AM talk radio shows during working hours posing as Democrats only to say that workers can get by just fine on minimum wage (MA minimum wage is a whopping .75 an hour over the federally mandated minimum) and when they laid her off in July of 2010, they cheerfully told her that she'd be able to get by just fine on unemployment, although their insistence on paying minimum wage and keeping people at 32 hours a week guaranteed she would collect only $135 a week or $540 a month, insufficient for even a room in a rooming house.

It's inconceivable why Gemini is the biggest sign shop in town except when you take into account the Evangelous brothers' political connections. They're one of only two sign shops in all of Massachusetts who are authorized to do the signage for state inspection stations. Yet despite having a near monopoly on that signage, they laid off Mrs. JP with no notice whatsoever and with a smile and assurances that we'd get by just fine on her $135 a week for unemployment benefits.

Years later, he's pissing and moaning about taxes while piously going on about "job creation". Basically, he's a bald-headed, pint-sized Mitt Romney.

By the way, this isn't the first time these Greek asswipes got in trouble. Mr. Hatch again:

Evangelous, 51, a former Ward 5 councilor who served for eight years, also caught flak in 2003 when he was ousted by challenger Maura Navin Webster.

Officials called police and state election officials on Evangelous and his identical twin brother, Matt, after several reports of the two dressing in similar clothing and greeting voters at polling places.

So, we have shell game subterfuge, forgery, uttering, electoral fraud and...

My own right wing boss got shit-canned last year for embezzlement. What makes that embarrassing is that he's over 60 years old and got fired by Mommy for gambling away company profits at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut as well as paying his personal bills and even his daughter's auto insurance out of company profits (which resulted in us working for years at a time without raises and his NStar gas bill ballooning to over $11,000, which almost got us cut off).

It only goes to show that not only can you not trust big time Republicans like Mitt Romney, who nonetheless got swept to victory in last night's Florida primary despite still raking in millions from laying off many hundreds of Floridians but you cannot even trust the pikers. Just because they don't run as Republicans doesn't mean they like paying their bills or taxes or actually create jobs and develop business instead of laying off workers to maintain a bloated profit margin and putting virtually every one of their competitors out of business due to collusive agreements for exclusive contracts.

Republicans are scum, period. They are simply dishonest, greedy and stupid from the top of the heap down to the Mark Evangelouses of America who infest our city and town governments. So before voting in your local elections, talk to them, go to their websites, investigate their business backgrounds when applicable and find out where they're really at.

Update: Apparently, not only did Evangelous forge the name of a deceased person on an absentee ballot, the deceased was his aunt, making his voter fraud even scummier. Shame he didn't have enough dead relatives to get him back on the City Council.

Update 2: At the risk of looking and sounding like Glenn Greenwald and his endless fucking updates, let me throw this in, namely an abstract of an old Boston Globe article about the Evangelous brothers' past as slum lords running illegal units while Mark was still in city politics.