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The poll, currently running on the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News websites, asks voters to choose which candidate they believe is telling the truth about Cannon's support for amnesty for illegal aliens.
Initially, voters were flocking to Throckmorton by a 4-1 margin, but beginning on June 1, a series of large sudden jumps in the Cannon vote totals eventually pulled the Congressman into the lead.
The poll's logfiles showed plainly that the sudden jumps were coming from users at two separate computers who were circumventing the poll's one-vote-per-person settings and, in a long tedious process spread over several days, casting hundreds of fraudulent votes in favor of Cannon.
Further investigation revealed not only the names of the users -- but that they shared a common employer: Chris Cannon.
One of the computers that was used during working hours to skew our online poll in favor of Cannon belongs to Dee Dee Rose, district manager and frequent spokesperson for the Cannon campaign, and the IP address (137.18.255.35) assigned to her computer is registered to the domain name: house.gov.
Because there are strict rules governing what may and may not be done on the official domain address for the U.S. House of Representatives, the cheating on our poll may be more than just embarrassingly petty dishonesty.
I called Dee Dee at 801 379 2500 to see what her thoughts were on all this.
Maybe it's campaign policy or something, but when confronted with the facts, she immediately denied everything. She swore that my phone call was the first she had even heard of our online poll, that the only way those votes could have come from her computer was if someone else were using it, but that that was impossible since she had been at her computer all day on the day in question.
Perhaps Dee Dee is telling the truth, but the Cannon campaign's track record on integrity doesn't exactly instill confidence.
There is Cannon himself, of course. Cannon's campaign literature goes well beyond normal spin and is unashamedly deceitful, and his repeated description of his AgJOBS amnesty as a temporary guest worker plan on which he's working with President Bush is, to put it plainly, a lie.
Cannon staffers seem to mirror the boss's character. Cannon spokeswoman Meghan Riding, posing as an average citizen, attended a Throckmorton public appearance and heckled him with accusations of racism so despicably that she drew the wrath of the audience.
Other Cannon staffers have passed themselves off to local reporters as regular voters in order to place anti-Throckmorton "man-in-the-street" quotes in the newspapers, while others spend hours cheating on an online poll in an attempt to deceive the public.
The pick of the bunch, however, is Cannon staffer Marco Diaz, the subject of next week's ezine.
Here's why integrity matters to immigration moderates.
For decades, a majority of Americans has opposed amnesties for illegal aliens. Yet every few years, Congress hands out another one.
How can the wishes of the majority be thwarted in a democracy for decades?
Much of the problem lies with members of Congress like Chris Cannon. In exchange for "contributions" from special interests with a financial stake in immigration, these Representatives -- indifferent to the wishes of their constituents -- promise to work for policies by which those same special interests profit [e.g., see this article about Chris Cannon from the News India-Times].
If the subject is ever brought up back in the district, they simply deny what they are really doing in Washington. And no one holds them accountable.
To us, this sounds just like corruption. We need to place a high value on the personal integrity of our elected representatives.
+== TAKE POSITIVE ACTION ==+
It's important that the Cannon AgJOBS (worse than an) amnesty is shut down for good. One very good way to get this done is to sign up and use the carefully targeted faxing campaigns at NumbersUSA.
It's fast, it's easy, it's free, and it's effective. And right now, it is pointed at a very important target: the Senate.
+== QUOTE OF THE WEEK ==+
"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
c. 350 B.C.
+== EMAIL OF THE WEEK ==+
We received an email from the advertising representative handling our online poll expressing amazement at our stratospheric "click through" rate of .61% (a .03% rate is considered good in the industry). I wrote back wondering what could explain the high volume while noting that, if all the cheating were removed, it would bring the rate down to .51%. The ad rep replied:
Yes but .51 is out of this world. I have only had one other client receive a .24% click through and they were giving away a vacation package to Mesquite (a Nevada border town with casinos), so I would say hot topic!!