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Alabama was the cradle of the civil rights movement, where much of the battle for voting rights was waged more than 40 years ago, but now there are growing allegations of voter fraud across the state.

The claims have surfaced in eight counties in Alabama, and they include allegations that absentee ballots were sold and traded for cash, crack-cocaine and even piles of driveway gravel.

“They get them, and say, ‘I will give you 40 or 50 dollars,’ so a lot of people are unemployed and will jump for that,” voter Wanda Sanders said.

Some officials, though, are launching investigations in a move to make sure all votes are not only counted but counted fairly and honestly.

Alabama Attorney General Troy King, a Republican, seized absentee ballots from three primarily black counties after allegations of vote-selling surfaced in the June 3 Democratic primary.

“We are not going to allow these people to continue to steal elections with impunity. It cannot be tolerated,” King said.

One election under investigation was won by Perry County Commissioner Albert Turner Jr.

Turner thinks there is voting fraud in his county but denies having anything to do with it.

“They don’t have one person to say they got paid by Albert Turner,” Turner said. “My work is what got me elected. I take care of my people. I fight for my people. That’s what got me elected, not money.”

Perry County District Attorney Michael Jackson said “some people don’t see the harm” in selling their vote, “not understanding the history of what happened in the ’50s and ’60s.”

In nearby Hale County, three people –- including a former county clerk -– recently were indicted on charges of absentee ballot fraud.

And there have been reports of similar absentee ballot fraud in at least a dozen states across the country in recent years.

“How easy is it to steal an election using absentee ballots? Very easy, very easy,” said Faye Cochran, of the Democracy Defense League. “The absentee ballot box is the most vulnerable to voter fraud without changing the loopholes our laws allow of this.”

Since the investigations started there have been even more allegations of vote-buying and absentee-ballot abuse.

But Turner says the investigations are little more than a Republican witch hunt to suppress the black vote.

“You go after black people, you go after black Democrats — you prosecute them for vote fraud, boom.” he said.

King denies any political motivation.

“The ability of a great number of Alabamans to participate at all was bought with the blood of the leaders of the civil rights movement in this very state where votes are being bought and sold,” he said. “And we will not allow their memories to be desecrated by anybody.”

If you have a voter fraud story you’d like to report, e-mail voterfraud@foxnews.com.

FOX News’ Eric Shawn contributed to this report.

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Florida voting officials are relying on new technology this Election Day, in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the problems that marred the 2000 presidential election and made the term “hanging chad” part of the national vocabulary.

The Sunshine State already has moved to a system using optical scan voting machines, which every county was required to do as of July 1.

The machines allow voters to mark their preference on a paper ballot, which is then scanned and registered through the system.

The method is more high-tech than the paper balloting that caused confusion in 2000, but also may be more user-friendly, and hopefully trust-inspiring, than touch screen voting, which doesn’t use paper ballots.

Sarasota elections supervisor Kathy Dent said voters still don’t completely trust that every vote will count, but officials are working hard to ensure a smooth run come Election Day — when the public will not just be judging the candidates, but the method of voting itself.

About 1,200 voters participated in a dry run Tuesday in Sarasota, and no major problems were reported.

“What we want to do is test every element of the equipment in election mode so that we will be able to make sure that everything is working as it’s supposed to,” Dent said.

Florida has four months to get it right.

The optical scan machines will replace the touch screen machines, which have been criticized for their lack of a paper trail.

Christine Jennings, who ran for Congress two years ago, still blames the touch-screen machines for her loss, but she said the new technology is a clear improvement.

“The optical scan is a much better system because there is a paper trail now, so there can be a check and a balance system that the Americans believe in so much,” said Jennings, who is running again this year.

The last time she ran, her campaign claimed the touch screen machines did not register nearly 18,000 votes.

“When people tried to push the screen the X would not appear,” she said.

A Government Accountability Office study discounted her campaign’s claim.

But some election officials and voter rights advocates are worried about the new system and say there isn’t enough time before November to properly test the technology.

“We’ve got new machines with new software that is not proven in the marketplace, and so I’m concerned that we’re once again guinea pigs for new equipment,” said Kindra Muntz, of the Sarasota Alliance for Fair Elections.

There already have been problems. Two weeks ago in Palm Beach County, 700 votes initially were not counted in an election for a city commissioner. Officials said election workers were not aware of some new computer software on the optical scan machines.

Send your stories of alleged voter fraud to voterfraud@foxnews.com.

FOX News’ Eric Shawn contributed to this report.

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By Eric Shawn

Jane Drury voted last year in an election in Stonington, Conn. The only problem is, she died eight years ago.

Her daughter, Jane Gumpel, thought someone must have goofed.

“I was surprised because this is not possible,” she said.

But it did happen. The town clerk’s record clearly shows Drury’s vote, marked by a horizontal line poll workers put next to her name. And it turns out Drury isn’t the only voter who apparently cast a ballot from the grave.

The issue of dead voters showing up on ballot records continues to be a problem for election administrators across the country.

Journalism professor Marcel Dufresne of the University of Connecticut led a class investigation into dead voters and said his group of 11 students discovered 8,558 deceased people who were still registered on Connecticut’s voter rolls. They said more than 300 of them appeared somehow to have cast ballots after they died.

“We have one person who appeared to have voted 17 times since he died,” Dufresne told FOX News.

Dufresne said there is no evidence of any election fraud, but the number of dead voters “shows the system is vulnerable, and it shows that people who are clever and have a little cooperation in the town level, you could use this and get people to vote for people who died.”

Yet Connecticut Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz is adamant that “actually no dead people voted.”

“I want to be very clear about that,” she said, explaining that while votes were cast and counted in the names of the dead, “there was no voter fraud at all in the state of Connecticut.”

“Did we have clerical errors where the wrong voter was crossed off? Yes,” she said.

But ballots cast in the names of the dead were counted in her state and in others. In the 2004 governor’s race in Washington state, officials confirmed 19 votes were cast by people who were dead. Republican Dino Rossi lost that election by only 133 votes.

“It was the closest governor’s race in U.S. history. After the fact we found a number of dead people voted. I don’t know how they voted — you have to talk to Shirley MacLaine about that,” Rossi said.

While in Connecticut, officials say poll workers confused the names of dead people with real voters, some of the dead votes were absentee ballots apparently filled out illegally by relatives.

Removing the names of the deceased from voter rolls could solve the problem of post-mortem voting, but local election officials like registrar Andrea Eppling say that’s not as easy as it might appear.

“The reason why is that if you go into a nursing home in the next town and you die there — we’re not going to find out.” Eppling said that such information isn’t shared by towns and among the states — something Connecticut’s top election official Secretary Bysiewicz says is changing.

“It’s critical that we have clean and accurate voting lists especially as we go into this very high turnout in November,” Bysiewicz said.

Connecticut removed 5,000 of the deceased from its voter rolls in the last two months.
And since the last presidential election, more than 2 million dead people have been identified, and dropped, from the nation’s voting rolls.

Presumably, Jane Drury won’t be voting again, even as her daughter remains stumped that a ballot was cast in her mother’s name in the first place.

“I couldn’t imagine because I didn’t think she voted — it was an impossible situation to me,” she said.

Officials say when it comes to dead voters, most of the problems are simply mistakes, not political corruption. But they admit that as long as the deceased remain registered to vote, the potential for fraud is alive and well.

Tell us your voter fraud story at voterfraud@foxnews.com.

Becky Diamond contributed to this report.

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New legislation being offered in several states aims to make sure people who walk into the nation’s voting booths are, in fact, American citizens.

In Missouri, state Rep. Stanley Cox wants a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote.

“That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable requirement because we certainly don’t want people who are not legal in this country deciding our future,” Cox told FOX News.

Missouri is not the only state trying to make it harder for illegals to cast ballots. Right now, 11 states are considering a proof of citizenship law.

Back in 2004, Arizona became the first state in the nation to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

“We have an illegal immigration problem here — that’s what triggers these laws.” said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Arpaio has made a national reputation cracking down on illegal immigration in Arizona.

“Do you think it prevents people from voting? No I don’t. I think it prevents people who are not here legally from voting,” said Jan Brewer, the Arizona secretary of state who says since the bill passed more than 2,000 non-citizens have been bounced from voter rolls.

“I think it ensures those honest voters that they have integrity in the process and that’s what they demand and should be delivered to them,” Brewer said.

Critics say proof of citizenship also deters legal citizens from voting.

“It makes it difficult to vote if you are someone who doesn’t have the documents in hand,” said Claude Piller, a lawyer with Mi Familia Vota, an outreach group that registers new voters in Phoenix.

Piller said that getting documents like passports and birth certificates can be a challenge for the poor or elderly.
“We believe the impact will primarily be amongst those who never had to prove they were citizens,” Piller said.

If you have stories or suggestions about voter fraud, send an e-mail to FOX News’ Eric Shawn at voterfraud@foxnews.com. 

FOX News’ Eric Shawn contributed to this report.