Second Term - A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 1) Read Free

that he
examined showed votes for the President’s opponent. His estimate was about one
hundred votes for the President for each vote marked for the President’s
opponent.
    Mike had been hired
by the Election Commissioners because he was a Republican. By law, the office
had to have some employees of the opposite political party. St. Louis hadn’t
voted Republican since 1949. So, he immediately recognized that he had a
problem. A big problem.
    As a token Republican
who had uncovered what appeared to be documentary evidence of voter fraud, he
knew his job would be in jeopardy the minute he talked with anyone about what
he had found. If he went to his supervisor, who quite likely had some
knowledge, if not downright involvement, in the fraud, he would be fired. If he
went to the media, he suspected he would be scapegoated and maybe even accused
of concocting the scheme for public attention, to help his party in the upcoming
election. If he did nothing, just put the ballots back, he could be imprisoned
if someone else found the ballots later. His fingerprints were now on hundreds
of pieces of paper, not easily cleaned off. If he destroyed the ballots, he
knew he could be accused of destroying evidence of voter fraud, a serious
offense. Mike Chapel was stuck.
    Not knowing how long
it might be before someone entered the storage room, he took what he thought
was the only prudent course of action. He stuffed the ballots into the bottom
of a large miscellaneous records filing box that he located and slit open. He
then replaced the hasp and lock on the ballot box as well as he could and
stacked the boxes on the ballot box just he had found them when he entered the
storage room. He needed time to think, and pray, and now he could do so without
an immediate need to decide. It was then that he realized that the box he had
discovered was only one of what looked like maybe sixty identical boxes, all
stacked behind the one he found and all locked with identical locks. He pulled
several of the boxes out, confirming that they were all locked. Based on
shaking them and hearing rustling ballots inside, it appeared that they were
also stuffed. Mike knew that they all should have been empty. If the ballot
boxes contained what he now thought they undoubtedly contained, a monumental
fraud was just sitting, waiting to be counted. He knew he had to do something,
but what? Mike Castle, of course, had no way of knowing then what would
eventually happen in American politics and government because of his chance
discovery.

 
    FOUR
    St.
Louis, Missouri-Election Offices
    It came to him at
2:37 AM. Mike Chapel had tossed and turned most of the night, worrying about
his discovery of voter fraud, his eye on the orange numbers of his alarm clock.
Then he suddenly knew what he had to do. Why didn’t I think of this earlier, he
wondered? I could have gotten to sleep sooner. Mike’s majors at UMSL were
political science and computer studies, which led him to a summer-intern job at
the nation’s second largest voting machine manufacturer, located in Illinois. His
early morning epiphany was simply that he would have to find out if the voter
fraud went beyond paper ballots locked away in ballot boxes and hidden
in a storage room. Once he saw his course of action, he slept soundly late into
Saturday morning.
    Mike had access to
the St. Louis election offices via a magnetic strip card, first given to him
when he was hired. He had only used it twice, when he needed to catch up on
some work, so he knew the card would grant him entry. He waited until late
afternoon, on the off chance that a fellow employee might come in on a Saturday
morning, but a government employee’s late Saturday afternoon visit, he
concluded, was highly unlikely.
    Once he was in the election
offices, located on Tucker Boulevard in downtown St. Louis., he went to his desk
and pulled up on his monitor the listing by serial number for the City’s mechanical
lever voting machines, all four