Republican Phony Elections!

Republicans can't legitimately win elections!
Republican resort to all kinds of tactics, purging voters, moving polling places with no notice, intimidation, providing inadequate polling stations, hacking the vote, loosing ballots, under counts, over counts and Jim Crow.

PLEASE! Republicans have done this in Massachusetts!

GOP admits voter suppression!

Deliberate steps were taken to discourage voters in Florida!
When you can't legitimately win elections, these are the lengths to which Republicans stoop.
It's time to criminalize this reprehensible behavior and prosecute.

Florida Republicans Admit Voter Suppression Was The Goal Of New Election Laws

By Aviva Shen on Nov 26, 2012

 

 

Floridians endured election chaos and marathon voting lines this year, largely thanks to reduced early voting hours, voter purges, and voter registration restrictions pushed by Republican legislators. In an exclusive report by the Palm Beach Post, several prominent Florida Republicans are now admitting that these election law changes were geared toward suppressing minority and Democratic votes.

Former governor Charlie Crist (R-FL) and former GOP chairman Jim Greer (R-FL), as well as several current GOP members, told the Post that Republican consultants pushed the new measures as a way to suppress Democratic voters. Crist expanded early voting hours in 2008 despite party pressure, but Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) targeted early voting almost immediately when he took office in 2011. Scott’s administration claimed the new laws were meant to curb in-person voter fraud, despite the fact that an individual in Florida is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

Current party members and consultants confirmed the motive was not to stop voter fraud but to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to vote:

Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Republicans, said he knew targeting Democrats was the goal. “In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in 2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close, but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.
Another GOP consultant, who did not want to be named, also confirmed that influential consultants to the Republican Party of Florida were intent on beating back Democratic turnout in early voting after 2008.
[...]A GOP consultant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution said black voters were a concern. “I know that the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves,” he said.

Though the state ultimately went to President Obama, the Republican effort to suppress votes was largely successful. A post-election report found that new voting restrictions led to a huge increase in provisional ballots, which are cast when there is some question of the voter’s eligibility.

While crying voter fraud, the Florida GOP had to confront its own scandal when a voter registration firm they hired turned in hundreds of fraudulent registration forms in several Florida counties. The GOP hastily cut ties with the group when the state opened a criminal investigation into their operations.

Update

African American pastors in Florida said they were “appalled but not surprised” at the Post’s report. One Jacksonville pastor said, “Even while cloaked in the dubious language of ‘voter fraud,’ the real reason for these measures was always clear. African Americans in Florida knew that, and we fought back – by voting.”

 

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/26/1234171/florida-republicans-admit-voter-suppression-was-the-goal-of-new-election-laws/?mobile=nc

 

 

 

Karl Rove: When you're above the law

 

 

From: The Pragmatic Progressive Page

Well, well, well...--Dave.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/15/1199461/watchdog-karl-rove-and-his-crossroads-gps-broke-election-law-by-failing-to-disclose-donors/

 

 

Karl Rove

 

The non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed complaints Thursday with both the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleging that Karl Rove and his secretive Crossroads GPS violated election law and may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to do so.

Under campaign finance law and FEC regulations, 501(c)(4) groups, like Crossroads GPS, can raise unlimited funds from wealthy individuals and corporations without having to disclose their donors. The only time donors to these secretive groups must be disclosed is when donors give more than $200 explicitly “for the purpose of furthering an independent expenditure.”

According to CREW, Rove expressly asked for and received millions of dollars in contributions specifically to fund an independent expenditure effort in support of unsuccessful Republican Ohio Senate nominee Josh Mandel:

Federal law requires any outside group that makes an independent expenditure to disclose the donors who contributed to pay for such ads. Groups like Crossroads GPS normally evade this law by claiming none of their contributions were earmarked for a specific purpose. At an August 2012 fundraiser, however, Rove said an anonymous donor gave Crossroads GPS $3 million specifically for the Ohio Senate race, and told Rove it was a “matching challenge” dependent on the group raising another $3 million for the race. Crossroads GPS ended up spending $6.36 million on independent expenditures in the Ohio race, but did not disclose any donors in nine reports the group filed with the FEC.

CREW also notes that, in a 2011 letter to the FEC, Crossroads GPS said that it “understands the applicable reporting regulations” and that, should it receive “any contributions that are required to be reported,” it would do so as required. Given this, CREW argues, the violations “were deliberate” and “are subject to criminal as well as civil penalties.”

The Rove comment in question was reported in Bloomberg Businessweek in September. That article quoted Rove as saying a donor told him “I’ll give ya’ $3 million, matching challenge,” and that “Bob Castellini, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, is helping raise the other $3 million for that one.” Crossroads GPS would end up spending just over $6 million on the Ohio Senate race.

Tara Malloy, senior council at the Campaign Legal Center, told ThinkProgress that if the allegations are true, it “seems reasonable to assume the main contributor gave for the purpose of furthering that expenditure or at least that these allegations warrant an FEC investigation.” But, she notes, the three Republican appointees on the deadlocked six-member Federal Election Commission often block enforcement efforts of this type and have previously noted a difference between contributions furthering independent expenditures in general — and contributions specifically furthering a particular independent expenditure. Even if Rove raised the money to fund independent expenditures in the Ohio Senate race, that interpretation of the rule would require proof that he discussed with them the exact ads before the donation.

Still, she observed, “The allegations are troubling… One would hope the FEC might investigate this matter.”
Crossroads GPS may also be in hot water for its apparent failure to register as a charity in Virginia, as required by law.

Another Fraudulent Republican Election!

When you can't legitimately win elections, you resort to all kinds of creative tactics.

Let's not forget that Ohio recorded more votes in certain precincts than they had registered voters during the last Presidential election. They couldn't even cheat reasonably.

Coincidence????

It's time to pass laws prohibiting this and put these zealots in prison.

Tue Oct 23, 2012

Sigh. Ohio county sends voters wrong election date, directions to polls

by Meteor BladesFollow

 

attribution: madhaus

 

It was "just a mistake," according to the deputy director of the Republican-run Ottawa County Board of Elections in Ohio. And, you know, I'd really like to believe her. But it's Ohio. The board sent a mailer to 2,300 voters in three northwestern Ohio precincts on Lake Erie near Toledo informing them that their voting location had been moved to a building on the east side of Danbury High School. The actual location is on the west side. Voters were also told Election Day was Nov. 8. It is, of course, Nov. 6.

 

Normally, one might be willing to give whoever generated that screw-up the benefit of the doubt. But Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern, who happens to live in Ottawa County, rightly noted, "There is no excuse for a board of elections or Secretary [of State Jon] Husted's office to botch their most basic job, notifying voters when and where to exercise their right to vote." He called upon Husted to review all the board's correspondence for the past year "to ensure that there are no other errors that could disenfranchise voters."

According to the Deputy Director Carol Ann Hill, the board realized the error soon after it sent out postcards to voters and said it was "sending out a new mailer, as we speak, with an apology."

Hill described the error as a "costly mistake," though she said she did not know how it happened, or how much it would cost taxpayers. [...]"We want people to vote, that is our reason to be here," said Hill. "It was just a mistake. It is troublesome to make a mistake, but there was no effort to suppress the voting of anyone."

Sure. Okay.

 

Hill's boss, JoAnn Friar, said the mistake was the consequence of substituting text from last year when the election was on Nov. 8.

Asked to explain how two errors were included in one short announcement, she replied, “If you’re going to mess up, do it right.”

Uh-huh.

 

Meanwhile, in Maricopa County, Arizona, the Elections Department learned that a document containing the wrong date for the election has gone out to more voters than it originally had explained was the case. The department distributed a document with voter-ID cards in which the date of the election in English was correctly stated as "November 6th," but in Spanish it said "8 de Noviembre," the 8th of November. A spokesperson had said that only people who picked up the document over the counter, not by mail, saw the mistaken date. Perhaps as few as 50 people had received the document, a spokesman said.

Now, however, it turns out that the document went to a larger, unknown number of citizens because it was passed out at three Maricopa locations.

An honest mistake? Perhaps. But, unlike the old days of Jim Crow, voter suppression is now all about shaving vote totals. A couple of percentage points here, a couple there, add up.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/23/1148821/-Sigh-Ohio-county-sends-voters-wrong-election-date-directions-to-polls?detail=hide


 

GOP Election Shenanigans #2

The excerpts below were published on November 3 (click on the link to read the entire article), the day before the Presidential Election. The author has explained how voting and the ballots can be manipulated, but there was far more to the GOP attempts to deny the vote through intimidation, failing to provide adequate polling places, failing to provide adequate machines in polling places, moving polling places, misleading mailings and misinformation, and of course, Black Box Voting.

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That a Democrat prevailed against such overwhelming election tactics should not lull us into a false sense of security. Our flawed voting system needs to be corrected. And prosecution is a given.

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How McCain Could Win

It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
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That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.
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Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!
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Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.
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Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.
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Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).
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And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
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The Ugly Secret
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Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled," unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
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This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
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That's what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004.
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A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
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Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation's vote registries. And that's just the start of the steal.
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If the noncount were random, it wouldn't matter. But it's not random. A US Civil Rights Commission analysis shows that the chance a black voter's ballot will "spoil" or be blank is 900 percent higher than a white voter's.
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Does that mean the election's stolen and you should forget voting and just go back to bed for four years? Hell, no. It means you vote and vote smart, learn how to pry their filthy little hands off your ballot (there's a link at the end).
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How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps
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Here's how they can pull off the steal. Take out your calculator and add it up.
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Step One: The "Dumpster" Vote - Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots
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Then there's New Mexico, with those one in nine Democrats missing. I spoke with San Miguel County elections supervisor, Democrat Pecos Paul Maez, who was none too happy that 20 percent of his voters, the majority poor and Hispanic, were not on the voter rolls, especially because he was one of the missing. He blamed the state for using a suspect contractor to tag names for the Big Purge, as required by the Help America Vote Act. The contractor that conducted the New Mexico purge, Electronic Systems and Software (ES&S), was founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
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Step Two: "Verification" (and Elimination) of New Voters
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In California, a Republican secretary of state rejected 42 percent of new registrations ....
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That's also what happened in Florida to the 85,000 new registrants.
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Step Three: New ID Laws
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New ID laws will add to the turn-aways, provisionals and rejecteds on Tuesday by at least two million - and that's way conservative, assuming the new laws in swing states are only one-fourth as restrictive as Indiana's.
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Step Four: Spoiling Ballots
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In the last election, 1,389,231 ballots were zeroed-out, "spoiled," because the machines lost them, couldn't read them, mangled them or simply didn't register them. But it's not random, not by a long shot. In New Mexico in 2004, I found that 89 percent of blank and spoiled ballots were cast in minority precincts - a sum of uncounted ballots way over the Republican "victory" margin in that state.
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In the primaries and in 2006, the "spoilage" and blank ("undervote") totals were horrific. There is every reason to believe the "spoilage" total will be as high as in the 2004 election. That is, no less than one million votes, overwhelmingly in minority districts, will just vanish. ("Spoilage" is not the same as vote tampering. There is the concern that "black-box" computers will switch your vote via an evil software hack job. That's another matter completely - and more votes lost if it happens, a sum I'm not including here.)
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Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots
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...the GOP has a new game for trashing your absentee vote. In states like Florida, some FTFs (First-Time Federal voters) will have to include a photocopy of their ID in with the absentee ballot. Bet you didn't know that. They're counting on you not knowing that. In Florida, for example, you have to place the ID photocopy outside the inner envelope, but inside the outer envelope - Got that? - or your vote is toast. I've spoken to one student voter, who lost his vote for failing to use the two envelopes - though he only received one.
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Greg Palast is the co-author of "Block the Vote," in this month's Rolling Stone Magazine, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast and Kennedy are also co-authors of the investigative comic book, "Steal Back Your Vote." Palast, who reports on election fraud for BBC Television, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation fellow for investigative reporting. Prior to his becoming a journalist, Palast was a forensic economist, fraud investigator and taught economics and statistics at Indiana University. palast@gregpalast.net

Georgia Pits and Republican Election Fraud Clarified

Although I don't always have time to read comments, in answer to one that caught my attention How is this voter fraud? in response to Georgia Pits, allow my limited attempt to explain.

Of necessity, the media needs to be faulted for failing to report on the enormity of the issue and ignoring, as they mostly do, the facts.

Prior to Bush v Gore, Greg Palast had reported on the BBC the surrounding issues. He even presented the information to the US media that failed to report. Not one single US newspaper or television outlet reported the facts of the voter purges supervised by Katherine Harris. And that fails to include the widespread voter intimidation, relocating polling places with inadequate public notice, relocating polling places to those with inadequate parking, failing to provide an adequate number of properly functioning voting machines, and much else. (In one of his books, Greg Palast has explained the statistical anomalies of some of the votes. Again, the book[s] are available at your public library. The author has provided links to the information which is public.) Mary Francis Berry conducted hearings, broadcast on CSPAN that the Corporate Wasteland Media failed to cover or comment on.

Inquiry into new claims of poll abuses in Florida

Official: Florida disenfranchised minority voters

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program

Subsequent elections have been much the same. Except for dedicated groups working to correct the process or working to circumvent attempts to stymie voters by employing early voting on PAPER BALLOTS, court action and an unparalleled voter education process to ensure that voters were made aware of their legal rights, the Corporate Wasteland Media was silent.

The author of the comment is fully aware of my contempt for the mindless US media, but for those unfamiliar, you might consider reading "The Republican Noise Machine ...." It's available at your public library. Since we watch little television, I am struck by the mindless prattle on the infrequent occasions when we do and found a comment from Natalie Jacobson that seems apt:

One of the reasons for her departure, she says now, was the celebrity-driven and corporate-run culture of the TV news industry.
"The business had changed to the point where I didn't feel I could do the kind of journalism that I enjoyed doing - digging into issues and people - and that's not any one person's fault," says Jacobson, who helmed her last newscast solo on July 18, 2007. "Also, big conglomerates own these media outlets. Disney owns ABC. Disney is an entertainment company whereas . . . it's become a bottom-line business more than it used to be."

As to "voter fraud," my understanding is that's an entirely different animal, defined by laws, that has to do with Mickey Mouse registering to vote and then appearing at a polling place, with identification and attempting to cast a vote. That's a crime and occurs infrequently. (see info below)

Failing to hear a more appropriate term applied, Election Fraud seems appropriate. It might include collecting absentee ballots and agreeing to deliver them and then not doing so (how did someone get the information? Can they be identified?); voter mailings deliberately intended to deceive or mislead; voter purges; voter suppression; voter intimidation; voter 'threats' (someone made me aware that tires had been slashed in one predominately "Democratic" precinct); 'matching lists' sorted too close to an election to adequately notify voters; failing to appropriately provide for overseas military ballots; provisional ballots that don't get counted; failing to provide adequate voting machines or paper ballots; relocating polling places without adequate public notification; and much else.

Rep. John Conyers conducted hearings and published the results What Went Wrong In Ohio: The Conyers Report On The 2004 Presidential Election.

My suggestion, instead, is to publicly threaten prosecution under RICO and move forward with investigations. The current Administration has politicized criminal investigation and prosecution to a level unparalleled in the history of this country. Prosecuting the GOP Under RICO?

The following is an assortment of articles, some specific to Georgia --

This sorry saga began with the election of Saxby Chambliss over Senator Max Cleland, triple amputee, Vietnam veteran, amidst one of the sleaziest campaigns.

The venomous Ann Coulter had this to say and hopefully, since this is Veterans' Day, some might truly grasp this:

Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman – or what Cleland sneeringly calls "weekend warriors." Luckily for Cleland's political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.

Max Clelland

Personally, I give Georgia voters more credit than Saxby Chambliss' campaign.

Georgia

The following is an archived article that I was unable to locate on their site:

Verified Voting Newsletter

Volume 2, Number 11, on September 28, 2004

GEORGIA:

One of the first states to jump headlong onto the paperless

touchscreen bandwagon was Georgia, but it hasn't been a bed

of roses. This month GA was stung by a scorecard issued by

FreeCongress.org which gave it the lowest grade of the

fifty states (an F-). GA group CountTheVote.org reported

that July's primary found some counties with equipment

malfunctions, and voters disenfranchised by delays due to

insufficient emergency paper ballots in the polling places.

Voter GA

The following article is outdated, but in its entirety, provides a broad overview. There are several quotes below that seem unrelated, like the section on Abramoff. Even if you didn't follow the corrupt mess Abramoff created, just the inclusion of his name should raise suspicion.

Will The Next Election Be Hacked?
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The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised "sleepovers" before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.
Even worse, many electronic machines don't produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. "Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election," Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. "Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I'd ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election."
Chris Hood remembers the day in July 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.
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It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.
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Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004.
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The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines.
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Sinking in the sewage of the Abramoff scandal, Ney agreed on September 15th to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges - but he has already done one last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from both parties sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes, Ney used his position as chairman to prevent the measure from even getting a hearing before his committee.
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The result was that HAVA - the chief reform effort after the 2000 disaster - placed much of the nation's electoral system in the hands of for-profit companies. Diebold alone has sold more than 130,000 voting machines - raking in estimated revenues of at least $230 million. "This whole undertaking was never about voters," says Hood, who saw firsthand how the measure benefited Diebold's bottom line. "It was about privatizing elections. HAVA has been turned into a corporate-revenue enhancement scheme."
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In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a damning report on electronic voting machines.
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In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. "We became one of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective, slow and unreliable," says Richardson. "I said to myself, 'I'm not going to go through this again.' The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems, is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is counting."
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You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important - and too hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests.
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Verified Voting
BlackBoxVoting
CommonCause: In Georgia, we're contacting 100,000 voters who do not have a valid driver's license to make sure they know they'll need a current photo ID in order to vote.
What's Really Happening in Georgia
Politico
The Obama campaign struck back, with campaign lawyer Bob Bauer asking Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate the “systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of voter fraud” by the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee, and also any possible involvement by the Justice Department and White House officials.
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But faulty registrations rarely turn into illegal votes. While ACORN has admitted to errors in its registration process, documented cases of illegally cast ballots remain rare. A five-year investigation by the Bush administration resulted in the convictions of only 26 voters found guilty of voting more than once, registration fraud, or ineligible voting. “This is not a plan that was hatched yesterday,” said Daniel Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “The Republican party is using the whole ACORN rap as a justification for the stringent ballot security measures they are urging.”
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Our Founding Fathers left us a spectacular framework that has allowed us to adapt to a changing world. It would seem that the integrity of the vote needs to be sacrosanct.

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We are left with the choice of defending and protecting that right or becoming just another Banana Republic.

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I hope I answered your query.

A Warning from Robert F. Kennedy Jr

Voter suppression is real. It’s a crime. And it’s happening to YOU.
But there’s something that you can do to prevent it. That’s what this guide is about. Start with page 19: ‘7 Easy Steps to Steal Back Your Vote.’
For many years, top investigative reporter Greg Palast and I have been exposing voter suppression.
This is a deliberate strategy to keep minorities from voting, senior citizens from voting, young people from voting in an effort to suppress the vote and maintain their hold on power.
Our concern is not partisan. We need every American to vote: Democrats and Republicans. You can do all the campaigning you want in a battleground state like Ohio or New Mexico, but if your voters aren’t counted, you’re going to lose the Presidency–and our democracy.

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Steal Back Your Vote! The Investigative Comic

Rachel Maddow interviews Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. --

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BBC Report - Greg Palast - David Iglesias Interview
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California GOP: Ooops!

Claim partisan politics all you want, these charges are going to stick! Check out the LATimes article for sleazy GOP tactics.

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Ontario police arrest man in voter fraud case
Mark Jacoby, who owns a firm hired by the California Republican Party, violated state laws with his own registration, authorities say.
By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 20, 2008
SACRAMENTO -- The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

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State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

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Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

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The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.

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Dan Goldfine, an attorney for Jacoby, on Sunday denied any wrongdoing by his client and called the charges "baseless."

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He said the arrest outside an Ontario hotel, which involved seven squad cars and nine police officers, was part of a "long pattern of harassment against Mr. Jacoby for an entirely valid voter registration effort."

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Goldfine said the case that prosecutors are bringing against his client involves charges that are rarely pressed.Jacoby was released on bail Sunday evening from the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, Goldfine said.

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After complaints by voters and Democratic Party officials, several agencies launched investigations into Jacoby's activities. They included the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, which issued the warrant for his arrest earlier this month on felony charges of voter registration fraud and perjury."

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We contacted people at the addresses where he registered, and they have no idea who he is," said Dave Demerjian, head deputy of the public integrity unit at the L.A. County district attorney's office.

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Goldfine said his client does business in many states, traveling frequently, and his permanent address has been his parents' Los Angeles County home, where he received mail and registered to vote.

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Demerjian said his office is continuing to investigate allegations that YPM workers improperly re-registered voters with the GOP.Several dozen voters recently told The Times that YPM workers said they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Other voters said they had no idea their registration was being changed.

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YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.

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In a written statement Sunday, the state Republican Party called the charges against Jacoby "politically motivated." The party said the charges do not support accusations from voters and Democratic officials that YPM has been duping voters into joining the GOP.

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The statement accused Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who announced the arrest, of "using her office to play politics."Bowen is a Democrat.

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

Michigan GOP Admits to Voter Fraud Conspiracy

Michigan -- another state targeted for disenfranchisement by the GOP.
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How low on the food chain must the GOP be to disenfranchise those whose homes have been foreclosed?

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This from Michigan Liberal (read the full details with links in the blog):

LANSING –An agreement announced today by Obama for America, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Michigan Republican Party, the Michigan Democratic Party, the Macomb County Republican Party, the Macomb County Democratic Party, and plaintiffs Duane Maletski, Sharon Lopez, and Frances M. Zick protects the voting rights of foreclosure victims.

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The settlement acknowledges the existence of an illegal scheme by the Republicans to use mortgage foreclosure lists to deny foreclosure victims their right to vote. This settlement has the force of law behind it and ensures that Republicans cannot disenfranchise families facing foreclosure.