stuffing the ballot

The crack investigative team of one (Matt Novak) writing for Paleofuture and employing his usual methods of freedom of information request filings serves us a brilliant retelling of the largest bio-terror attack heretofore perpetrated on US soil was a mass food-poisoning calculated to influence the turn-out of a local election back in the autumn of 1984 in rural Oregon.
An outpost of a utopian cult movement (although there was more than a touch of hedonism allowable to the members as well as business acumen with discos, hotels and restaurants owned and run by the community) called Rajneeshpuram established itself in rural Oregon. Members managed to purchase thousands of hectares of forest and even an entire village and campaigned to get themselves elected to town boards to ensure that zoning and building permits were favorable to their cause. The Sannyasins, as followers are known, became more aggressive in their politics, however, including bussing in some four thousand homeless veterans to pad the voter rolls (who were summarily dismissed from Nirvana after registration and abandoned in Portland) and most infamously making over seven hundred residents violently ill with salmonella that’d been pilfered from a university laboratory. It’s thought that this outbreak in September was a trial-run for a bigger attack to be launched in November to make sure their opposition was indisposed and couldn’t make it to the polls.  Be sure to visit the link up top for all the salacious details of this voter-intimidation stunt.