BioterrorismBioterrorism as a voter fraud mechanism

Claims of voter fraud, especially on a large scale, are typically more the stuff of urban legend than factual findings, but individual anecdotes do exist. One example is the case of Nevada Republican Roxanne Rubin, who tried to vote twice in the 2012 presidential election but was arrested just minutes after her second attempt, but it can be argued that this is a testament to the reliability of voter fraud prevention measures put in place by municipalities across the country. Rubin later explained that her attempt to vote twice was an experiment to test the voting system.

There are more extreme cases proving the reliability of voter fraud prevention measures. One such instance occurred in the early 1980s, when a guru named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his hundreds of followers, called Rajneeshees, relocated from India to a 64,000-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, a rural area of roughly 21,000 people at the time. Rajneesh’s plan to build more houses on the ranch to accommodate his followers was met with disapproval from county officials, who held the construction permits. Residents of Wasco County shared concerns about the sect’s intentions and its growing power. In 1982, Rajneeshees voted in nearby Antelope’s (population: 50) local elections to win a majority of the town’s council seats, then renamed the town to “Rajneesh,” raised property taxes to extract funds from local residents, and then renamed the local recycling center the “Adolf Hitler Recycling Center.”

Though the Rajneeshees continued to gain legislative power, they accounted for less than 10 percent of the county’s population, and so were unable to convince the Wasco County Commission to issue construction permits. To unseat at least two of the three sitting county commissioners in the upcoming election, the Rajneeshees decided to suppress non-Rajneeshees voters by poisoning thousands of residents with Salmonella prior to election day, and then recruit thousands of homeless people from nearby cities and offering them food and shelter if they voted for Rajneeshees-backed candidates.

The Atlantic reports that when two of the three county commissioners visited the Rajneeshees compound, both men got sick after drinking glasses of water infected with Salmonella, but became well following treatment at a local hospital. The commissioners blamed their illness on the Rajneeshees and continued to deny the group construction permits. To proceed with their plan, the Rajneeshees poured Salmonella-tainted liquid on food items in ten restaurants throughout the county, poisoning 751 people in what would become the largest bioterrorism attack in American history. No one was killed in the attack, so the Rajneeshees contemplated poisoning the county’s water supply and crashing a plane loaded with bombs into the county courthouse, but neither plan came to fruition.

Phase two of the Rajneeshees’s plan to win two commissioner seats by getting homeless individuals in their care to vote for Rajneeshees-backed candidates was made difficult when Oregon Secretary of State Norma Paulus required anyone registering to vote in the county to personally appear at a local eligibility hearing and prove that he or she satisfied Oregon’s twenty-day residency requirement to vote.

The Rajneeshees were left with few options, and after being charged for both the Salmonella poisoning and the homeless-voter vote fraud, Rajneesh was fined $400,000 and three of his deputies were sent to prison before being deported.

Attempts at voter fraud by individuals like Rubin or financially-backed groups like the Rajneeshees have proven over time to be difficult thanks to the voter fraud prevention measures put in place.