Prosecuting the GOP Under RICO?

Although I've followed the conduct of the GOP since 2000 in purging voter lists, the electronic voting machines that record more voters than there are eligible voters or record more under votes than is statistically possible, Mark Karlin presented a number of interesting possibilities, including prosecuting under RICO. Interesting concept! [Emphasis mine.]

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Republican Leaders Who Participate in Attacks on ACORN Could be Prosecuted as Part of a Criminal Conspiracy

MARK KARLIN'S EDITOR'S BLOG
October 20
Let the GOP muck-a-mucks across the nation who are participating in a nationwide RNC/McCain diversionary campaign against ACORN be warned: In a new administration of light and truth – instead of Cheney’s dark shadows and Bush’s lies – you may be subject to prosecution for participating in a criminal conspiracy to suppress votes and violate the Voting Rights Act.
We do not exaggerate.
The unrelenting and profoundly dishonest and misleading attempt to brand a national community organizing group as some sort of minority enterprise of ghetto thieves is nothing more than a GOP tradition of using ACORN as a scapegoat to justify voter suppression. And organized voter suppression is a crime. In fact, a creative prosecutor under Obama could apply the RICO Act to the RNC/McCain daily deluge of attempts to get voters to believe that ACORN is engaged in voter fraud and then using that cover to disenfranchise voters.

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As most BuzzFlash readers know, voter registration errors and voter fraud are two entirely different issues. If you register to vote as Mickey Mouse, it doesn’t mean you vote as Mickey Mouse. Does anyone believe that Mickey Mouse will show up to vote, except at Disneyworld? Republican voter drives regularly yield tons of false registrants, as do petition drives in states like California. But very few individuals commit actual voter fraud, the casting of a ballot during an election.

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In fact, in the last five years the DOJ own’s statistics indicate that there have been way less than 20 people in the entire United States convicted of voter fraud, and none of them were connected with an ACORN registration drive. You read that right, less than 20, according to a Washington Post analysis. In fact, the LA Times announced the only actual arrest we have read of this year for voter registration fraud (not voter fraud), and that’s of a Republican in California!

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What the RNC and McCain campaigns are doing is complementing their racist campaign against "the other," the so-called "non-American," and the candidate known as "that one" with a criminal conspiracy to scapegoat a minority community empowerment group that is helping people to obtain their voting rights (1.3 million new registrants for this election, which scares the heck out of the Republican Party). That is what we are supposed to be doing in a democracy; enfranchising people, not disenfranchising people.

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We watched a review copy of a just released documentary, "Boogie Man," last night about the infamous Strom-Thurmond-groomed Lee Atwater. Many of Atwater’s despicable legacies are apparent in McCain’s campaign. But one particular tactic and a comment he made are relevant to the criminal GOP assault on ACORN’s voter registration drive. When confronted about the racist Willie Horton ad of 1988, which helped mine the subconscious bigotry in America and propel George Herbert Walker Bush to victory, Atwater brazenly lied and said that the Horton ad (featuring a photo of a scary black male killer) was not about race, but about a prison furlough program that allowed Horton back on the streets.

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But, of course, it was indeed about kindling racism and the fear that Democrats "coddle" black criminals and let them prey on whites. (Although in the true Republican tradition of hypocrisy, the furlough program concept was initiated by Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.)

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Meanwhile, the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten about the essence of "ProsecutorGate": the Bush Administration firing of U.S. prosecutors who would not initiate sham voter registration and fraud indictments just before the 2004 and 2006 elections. David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, recently spoke out strongly on how the coordinated attack on ACORN – including the involvement of the FBI in violation of their own guidelines regarding such "investigations" so close to an election – reminded him of why he was fired for not participating in a criminal conspiracy to influence the elections.

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Most ominously, remember that most of the U.S. Attorneys who did go along with sham pre-election "voter fraud investigations" (how could it be voter fraud if the election hadn't been held yet?) are still in their positions!

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A recent New York Times editorial noted: "Meanwhile, Republicans aren’t saying anything about another more serious voter-registration scandal: the fact that about one-third of eligible voters are not registered. The racial gaps are significant and particularly disturbing. According to a study by Project Vote, a voting-rights group, in 2006, 71 percent of eligible whites were registered, compared with 61 percent of blacks, 54 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asian-Americans."

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Nor is the Republican Party talking about their multi-faceted approach – largely crafted by Karl Rove – to keep Democratic votes – particularly those of minorities and students – from being counted. They want to have as many new registrants as possible technically disqualified, grant them provisional ballots, and then have McCain declared the winner before the provisional ballots are counted, which they rarely are. The media, in 2000, due to a "turn-around" Florida "Bush victory" call by Bush’s cousin on national television, gave the Bush campaign the foundation to declare that they had "won" Florida and that Gore was trying to "steal" it from them. From then on, Gore was on the defensive, until the Supreme Court "felonious five" legitimatized the theft of the presidency.

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For eight years we have lived with the disastrous consequences of the Republican disenfranchisement strategy that got Bush close enough (remember that he lost the popular vote in 2000 by more than 540,000 votes) to steal the election.

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The Washington Post quoted McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' claim that reports of investigations into ACORN have suggested "rampant voter fraud as it relates to voter registration." [And let's remember Rick Davis' credentials] But the Post did not point out that actual instances of illegal votes cast as a result of registration fraud, e.g., using false names, are extremely rare. Federal statistics show that between October 2002 and September 2005, the Justice Department charged 95 people with "election fraud" and convicted 55, of whom only 17 were convicted for casting fraudulent ballots. (The rest were election judges and the like.) Remember that hundreds of millions of votes were cast over these years, and only 17 persons in the United States were convicted of illegally casting ballots in a federal election.

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Media Matters has noted how the constant RNC/McCain felonious campaign against ACORN performing a just service for democracy affects the gullible and willing corporate media:
CNN reports leave out relevant facts on ACORN voter registration allegations
Summary: From October 6 through October 15, CNN aired at least 54 segments mentioning allegations that ACORN submitted allegedly false or duplicate voter registration applications this year in a number of states.

However, only one of those segments mentioned both of the following two relevant points:

1) that the statutes of most of those states require third parties registering prospective voters to submit all registration forms they receive;

and 2) that actual instances of illegal votes being cast as a result of registration fraud are extremely rare.

Of the 54 CNN segments addressing the allegations against ACORN, two mentioned only the former of those two points, while one mentioned just the latter.

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For those Republican politicians who engage in the unjustified slander of ACORN, which is meant to justify the GOP trying to disenfranchise Americans who have a right to vote for their government, let these enablers of this 8 year assault on democracy (which is just really the new face of "Jim Crow" and poll taxes in another form) know that in an Obama administration, some files (most will have been shredded and the incriminating computer hard drives dumped in the Potomac) will remain that prove the Republican criminal assault on voting rights, and the truth will emerge.

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And the soon-to-be former Bush Administration, DOJ, McCain Campaign and RNC officials who played roles in planning and enabling this effort to limit the right of Americans to vote (the poor, minorities and students, in particular) will have to comply with subpoenas to testify before Congress.

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If Obama wins by a landslide – which is a possibility – and the election is not close enough to steal for the GOP, many Republicans participating in this assault might rue the day that they participated in ProsecutorGate II, which really was itself only the diabolical extension of the Rove/Jeb Bush Florida campaign of 2000 and Ohio campaign of 2004.

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Maybe it is just a dream of those who yearn for the free air of liberty and the rule of law, but perhaps yet the masterminds of the ferocious two-step assault on ACORN’s right to enfranchise voters ( 1) make the organization into an image of black hustlers and link it to Obama, thus inciting a racist image; and 2) then take steps to keep Democrats from voting by making technical challenges to disqualify voters, requiring "Jim Crow" voter identification, and using other more nefarious means to confuse registered voters about their polling places and right to vote) will eventually have their day in court: as defendants charged with the felony of interfering with the right to vote and using intimidation to keep American citizens from electing their government as guaranteed by the Constitution.

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A man or woman should never gamble more than he or she can afford to lose.

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To the U.S. Attorneys who violated the DOJ standards and the law by following orders and pursuing scam charges of voter registration and voter fraud; to the senior FBI officials who are leaking against department policy that they are "investigating" ACORN; to state Republican officials who are following the RNC requests to pursue voter suppression; to all of you, realize that if Obama wins it is not just your careers that are at stake, you may be looking at a change of address to a federal prison.

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And to Michael Mukasey, Attorney General, who thought that he would end his career illustrously with a portrait hung at the DOJ, you may end it instead at a federal detention center in upstate New York.
MARK KARLIN'S EDITOR'S BLOG