Response to Helen Heiland’s “Set the Record Straight” Letter to the Editor (* Read Helen Heiland’s Letter in its entirety following this post.)

 Letter to the Editor:

March 12, 2008

Dear Sir(s):

    I read the letter from Helen Heiland in  March 12^th’s Daily Dispatch entitled “Heiland Sets the Record Straight Over Party Chair” with interest. The letter from East Moline 1^st Ward Alder Person Helen Heiland began, “I feel I have to set the record straight.” She then complains about the appointment of a younger candidate to replace John Gianulis as Democratic County Chairman.  Mr. Gianulis retired primarily because of old age and illness, according to news reports. Mrs. Heiland and Gianulis are contemporaries.

     Ms. Heiland never felt the need to “set the record straight” after she lost the popular vote in the 1^st Ward during the last Democratic election. Nor did reporter Jenny Lee of the Daily Dispatch, who was physically present in the room during the recount at the Rock Island County Courthouse, along with then-Mayor Joe Moreno, Dick Leibovitz and others, feel the need to set the record straight in informing the public that I had received more votes at two 1^st Ward polling places in the recount than Mrs. Heiland. Not one word of this appeared in the next day’s newspaper(s). Mrs. Heiland made this accurate Gianulis-related statement in her letter of March 12^th: “I was picked by him and not elected.”

     Helen Heiland went home from her own victory party (the night of the Democratic election) in tears, because she knew she had lost.  Democratic State Senator Denny Jacobs congratulated me (at Joe Moreno’s VFW gathering) on my upset victory over Ms. Heiland. I went to bed the winner in East Moline’s 1^st Ward. All present that night at East Moline’s VFW Hall for incumbent Mayor Joe Moreno’s Victory celebration were puzzled and upset by Joe’s unexpected loss. But at least I had won, Joe said to me.

     Then, the really interesting part began. The newspapers the next morning announced I had lost the 1^st Ward election “by ten votes” (a nice round number, I remember thinking). The 38 absentee ballot vote(s) cast were announced as  (nearly) all having been cast for Helen Heiland. This was very curious. At least 5 of those absentee ballots were from my immediate family members, my neighbors and one was mine! Yet my announced total was less than half of the votes I personally knew had voted for me.

    Election law experts, statewide, were consulted. They told me I needed to obtain and inspect the requests for absentee ballots, saying, “that’s where the tampering takes place.” It was, indeed, the absentee ballots that (supposedly) gave Helen Heiland her razor-thin margin of victory. County Treasurer Dick Leibovitz’s office refused to show me the requests for absentee ballots.   Mr. Leibovitz’ office tried the “wait until later” ruse, on me (much like the “I’ll let you know” ploy used by Gianulis on Mrs. Heiland, as recounted in her March 12^th letter to the Daily Dispatch).  I was told not to file for a recount until months had passed! Documents I went to the Courthouse to collect, in person, were “not ready,”… “have to be retyped,”… “we’ll mail them to you.”   I was a political novice, but I knew that something was not right. I insisted on being given the documents to file for a recount, showed those documents to an attorney (fortunately), who told me all the statutes on the document I had been given were wrong,  re-typed them myself with the appropriate statutes, and immediately filed for a recount. The absentee ballots were becoming more and more important (just as the Super Delegates will become more and more important at the Democratic Convention in Denver.) And the recount proved that I had won in votes cast in the two polling places of East Moline’s 1^st Ward.  

      It was not until the law firm of Nelson, Keys & Keys agreed to represent me as a client and legally subpoenaed the requests for absentee ballots that the County Clerk’s office would let me examine them. Brett Nelson said, “I like to take cases that make a difference,” something for which I will always be grateful, when other lawyers refused to take the case for fear of political reprisal(s).

     I was the Chief Investigator. I, personally, went door-to-door to every single one of the 38 absentee voters who actually existed (some did not) and asked them, politely, “You don’t have to tell me, but do you mind telling me who you voted for in the election?” The fresh-faced teen-aged girl who answered the door on the right side of the duplex at 2169 6^th St. B said, “Nobody by that name lives here. Besides, my mom wouldn’t vote using an absentee ballot, because she works at the Courthouse for John Gianulis.” Interesting.

        Brett Nelson, Rick Keys and I learned a lot about Illinois election law in a very short time. We learned the names of people bussed in from a retirement center (the old North High School site), which is NOT in the 1^st Ward. We discovered the election judge supporter of Helen Heiland who voted two times under two (slightly different) names. We learned that two people who signed absentee ballots were so near death that they had no idea what document(s) they were signing. It went on and on and on.

      I thought back to my courtesy call on John Gianulis in his office, when he had said to me, “You can’t possibly win. I  guarantee you that you won’t win.” Mr. Gianulis, as Helen Heiland’s letter documents, had made sure that she won each and every election for decades. Few opponents even bothered to declare against her, knowing that she was the Democratic County Chairman’s handpicked candidate.  I foolishly gave in to the entreaties of former students who live in the 1^st Ward and wanted to have their Ward better represented by someone capable of doing the job with greater vigor. I had only a Children’s Crusade of my high school daughter and friends to work for me, but I went door-to-door, personally, 3 times, was endorsed by the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and Democracy for America. I spent $500, total, on my campaign. Meanwhile, Mrs. Heiland and Mr. Thodos were spending thousands (some say $25,000) of dollars at Victory Enterprises, as a team, on their joint campaign. My daughter and her boyfriend and Sonny Soliz, (a former teaching colleague at Silvis Junior High School), hand-painted my large pink-and-black signs.  David vs. Goliath.

     Under Illinois election law’s “proportionate reduction” policy, I discovered, for each fraudulent absentee ballot we discovered, one vote would be taken away from Mrs. Heiland’s vote total and one vote would be taken from mine. The system, in other words, is “rigged” in favor of the incumbent, just like championship-boxing matches are weighted in favor of the title-holder. This is because of the expense of printing ballots and running elections. No challenges are really wanted, especially successful ones that might mean reprinting ballots. As attorney Rick Keys said, “We need more absentee votes to have been cast.” (It was within the absentee balloting that the fraud primarily occurred in the 1^st Ward election.).

     Each absentee voter who had voted for me signed a legally notarized affidavit obtained by a lawyer with a notary seal who went door-to-door (no easy or inexpensive task to accomplish.). The absentee vote total that had been announced was proven wrong.  This, also, was not reported in the press. [So much for Alder Person Heiland’s announced desire to “set the record straight.”]

    Even after the votes were recounted in a room at the Courthouse, with a Dispatch reporter and various officials present, and it was clear that more voters had voted for me at the two polling places in the 1^st Ward than for Helen Heiland, nothing was reported. The absentee voters who voted for me (who had already signed legally-notarized affidavits to that effect) were required to physically appear in court in person the very next morning at 9 a.m., with no time allowed to subpoena them. This was, of course, impossible to achieve.  Most were unable to leave their homes to go to the polls, which was why they voted absentee to begin with.  Mrs. Heiland’s next-door neighbors at 2315 Kennedy Drive, who voted for me, are elderly and incapacitated. One neighbor of mine who voted absentee for me was then visiting her grandchildren in Michigan.

     This was how the election in East Moline’s 1^st Ward was stolen.  I can only assume—from the large amount of money spent at Iowa’s Victory Enterprises to unseat incumbent Joe Moreno—that this is how the election was stolen from the popular Mayor Moreno, city-wide, as well, although I know of other dirty tricks perpetrated against Joe that would put Karl Rove to shame. But Jose “Joe” Moreno did not have the luxury of spending thousands of dollars on his campaign, nor of personally investigating a smaller number of homes and voters, so that he could actually track and find the fraud that had been perpetrated, city-wide, in the election— something that I was able to do. However, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If fraud occurs in an election and the reporters present don’t fully report it, do the voters even know? Does honesty in elections matter, or should we just let the party Grand Poo Bahs select our representatives, letting those people run unopposed year after year and making sure that an opponent running for the right reasons is beaten using any means possible, ethical or unethical? I fear this in our current national election, and I personally experienced this in our local election(s). Let’s really “set the record straight,” which was Alder Person Heiland’s announced desire in her March 12^th letter to the Daily Dispatch.

     I, at least, had the opportunity to track down each and every instance of fraud and “underhanded” (Helen’s term) double-dealing. It was quite an eye-opening and expensive experience for someone never involved in county politics, someone who ran only with a Children’s Crusade of high school kids as campaign workers and didn’t have the luxury of using  franking privileges as Democratic County Chairwoman to mail  campaign literature. Sure, they cheated Al Gore in Florida, but could that sort of thing happen in Rock Island County, Illinois?

     Next time a Daily Dispatch reporter is physically present and hears that the challenger has received more popular votes than the incumbent in a recount, it would be nice to see at least one line mentioning that fact in the next day’s newspaper. That kind of fair and honest reporting is what we count on our free press to do for its citizens. It’s the least we should expect from our newspaper(s). And when a recount is ordered by a Republican judge and that recount finds instances of wrongdoing in the election, wouldn’t that be worthy of mention by the news media?

    I don’t often agree with Helen Heiland’s demeanor, actions (or inaction), and I hope any literature I  distribute is considerably more error-free, but I do agree with her closing remark: “This has been an unbelievable experience.” When Alder Person Heiland wrote, “Is this why we have so much (sic) dissention in the Democrat (sic) Party?”  (after rolling my eyes at the grammar and spelling errors), I  thought: What goes around, comes around (as Eliot Spitzer just discovered).

      Helen’s long-time champion, Democratic County Chairman John Gianulis, (the man who installed her in office and kept her there for decades, regardless of the wishes or votes of  East Moline’s 1^st Ward residents) finally came to the realization that, as a man in his mid-eighties, in failing health, his time had come—and gone. Rather than railing against the man who single-handedly kept her politically viable for decades, Helen Heiland might seriously consider why he folded his tent and left the political stage…and didn’t nominate her to take his place.

                                                                            Sincerely,

                                                                            Connie (Corcoran) Wilson, M.S.

                                                                            CEO, Quad Cities’ Learning, Inc.