Repub voter suppression machine in full swing

[Cuchulain]

They're at it again. The same vote caging and other schemes to suppress minority votes. Remember Katherine Harris and ChoicePoint Inc. in Florida in 2000? The shenanigans in Ohio in '04?

http://www.michiganmessenger.com/407...lose-your-vote

http://www.truthout.org/article/near...le-caging-ohio

This crap is going on all across the country. Here's an explanation:
http://www.clcblog.org/blog_item-152.html

http://www.brennancenter.org/content..._voter_caging/

[Cuchulain]

I told you so....

New film by Greg Palast w/RFK jr, 'Steal Back Your Vote'. Check out the trailer. Fired DOJ attorney (attorney-gate) David Iglesias is near the end of the clip.
http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/

Rolling Stone article by Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy Jr:
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.
Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There's more:

- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.

The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.

"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."

The investigators level a deadly serious charge:

"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."

Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.

[Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]

Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org http://www.gregpalast.com/rolling-st...lready-stolen/

Interview w/Mr Iglesias on PBS:
NOW: In retrospect, do you believe they were rightly motivated or do you believe they were motivated by partisan politics?

DI: They were clearly partisan. I can't reach into their minds and tell you what they were thinking but I am very disturbed to read accounts of what appears to be "voter caging" in Arkansas and other parts of the country. There appears to be a growing body of evidence that suggests that there's voter suppression going on throughout the country. I'm not sure if that happened in New Mexico. All I know is there was an attempted pressure put on me by local Republicans to indict voter fraud cases. I resisted that. I thought I was going to be protected by the Bush Justice Department and I was wrong in that assumption.

NOW: How would you characterize the act of enlisting a U.S. attorney in activities that will benefit a political party at the polls?

DI: It's reprehensible. It's unethical. It's unlawful. It very well may be criminal ... I know it's a marked departure from prior administrations, both Republican and Democrat, who understood that U.S. attorneys, as chief federal law enforcement officials, have to stay out of politics. And that's consistent with what Former Attorney General John Ashcroft told me in the summer of 2001. When he said, "Politics cannot enter into your decision making as a US attorney." http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/330/david-iglesias.html

Bush WH, as it has done so often, alters report from it's own agency:
'The original report said most experts believe that “false registration forms have not resulted in polling place fraud,” but the final report cites “registration drives by nongovernmental groups as a source of fraud.”
“By attempting to sweep this draft report under the rug, the E.A.C. is throwing out important work, wasting taxpayer dollars and creating a cloud of suspicion as to why it is acting this way,” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/wa.../11voters.html

[yodajazz]

Thank you, thank you. But where do you get such good information? I have already sent this to some people but didn't know how to name the source. I just called an un-named source.

As for the content, being from Ohio, and doing some reading, I know well things can be done to suppress voters right's. I know that Republican leadership would spread some of the techniques if they were not already in practice. In 2004 here, Black did a purge of voter rolls three times the margin of the Republican victory margin. I'll have to check my facts on this. In addition people with disputes were allowed to cast provisional ballots, Blackwell decided not to count them. He had misinformation on the states own website. People who went to the wrong precincts as a result, were told to cast provisional ballots, which were then not counted.

Also people need to know if private contractors with political ties are responsible for tabulating the electronic vote.

[Oli]

Yoda, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday on the Voter Registration Challenges.

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaind...480.xml&coll=2

Good news for the folks in Ohio.

[Cuchulain]

Thank you, thank you. But where do you get such good information?

You're very welcome, yodajazz. What can I say? I'm a political junkie. I like to understand what's going on.

Thom Hartmann of Air America has been all over the Republican voter suppression ploy and the Diebold horseshit. Here http://airamerica.com/content/thom-h...r-fraud-update he talks with Brad Friedman of http://www.bradblog.com/. Brad says that the ACORN lies are the October surprise, but the millions of Americans who will find themselves illegally purged from the voting rolls will be the NOVEMBER surprise.

I've been following Greg Palast's (http://www.gregpalast.com/) work for years and RFK Jr has been another heavyweight on voting rights.

Don't get too confident about an Obama victory regardless of the polls. These REICHwing scum will do anything to keep the WH. They're scared to death of a Democratic Attorney General.

[Cuchulain]

ACORN responds to REICHwing attacks and explains ongoing Republican efforts to supress Democratic voters: Check out the other vids from brave new films.

[Cuchulain]

Here's a simple explanation of the lies about ACORN. My earlier posts in this thread explain why The Republicans are attacking ACORN. And yes, I'm gonna keep bumping this because it's too important to be ignored.

The Truth About ACORN
Cynthia Gordy

For the past year and a half, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now-the national community organizing group better known as ACORN-coordinated a massive voter registration campaign. The group enrolled 1.3 million mostly young, mostly poor voters around the country. But when some voter registration cards were reportedly found to be signed by Mickey Mouse and members of the Dallas Cowboys, among other suspicious names, John McCain and other Republicans accused ACORN of padding the rolls with thousands of phony voters. ACORN is now reportedly under investigation for "voter fraud" in at least 12 states, including the battleground state of Ohio and Nevada, where the organization's Las Vegas office was raided by state authorities earlier this month. ESSENCE.com asked Bertha Lewis, national chief organizer for ACORN, about these charges and why the organization says the accusations are unfounded and overblown.

ESSENCE.COM: ACORN's voter registration campaign turned in applications signed by phony names or multiple applications for the same person. How did this happen?
BERTHA LEWIS: I think it's important for people to know exactly what is happening. We do massive voter registration to low- and moderate-income folks. The Right Wing and Republicans, specifically, have been coming for us since the 2000 and 2004 elections. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent U.S. attorneys after us to investigate and try to find a prosecutable action. In 2006, the reason he stepped down is that he fired eight attorneys because they kept coming back to him saying, "There's no evidence; ACORN is clean." They constantly tried to come after us and attack us, and not once anywhere has it been proven that we systematically engage in this activity.

[Editor's Note: Gonzales resigned as attorney general in 2007 amid controversy over his handling of the firings of several U.S. attorneys, which members of Congress alleged were politically motivated. He also faced allegations that he had lied to Congress under oath.]

ESSENCE.COM: Okay, but how do you explain these latest charges?
LEWIS: All we have are unfounded allegations and exaggerations. We find it peculiar that two weeks before the election, all of a sudden they find a few thousand suspicious cards. This was an 18-month effort by 13,000 workers. So naturally, less than 1 percent of our cards may be suspicious. But all of this so-called evidence they have against us-we're the ones that said, "Look at these cards and investigate." We flagged any suspicious cards because when you do voter registration you have to turn in every card, even if it has Mickey Mouse on it. We have to turn it in. We're the ones that fired workers for turning in suspicious cards. We believe this is really about the Republicans' attempt, once again, to suppress the vote. We believe the reason behind it is because we've registered 100 percent low- and moderate-income people. Seventy percent of those folks are Black and Brown and half of them are under the age of 30. So at the very least, you will have over a million new Black and Brown lower- and moderate-income young voters coming out to the polls. They historically have been disenfranchised, and now you have this enormous turnout, and most of them arguably are Democratic.

ESSENCE.COM: How did the fraudulent registration cards come about? Are you saying they were all accidental?
LEWIS: For those who are actually serving time right now, they have said on television and in the press, "Hey, I wanted to get paid. Why should I stand in the hot sun, why should I stand in the freezing cold, why should I walk block after block? I can just sit down, make up these names, and get paid." They've confessed to this. So if anyone has been defrauded, it's ACORN. We had 13,000 workers for over 18 months. We know a couple bad apples may defraud us. We were paying them by the hour; they came back with suspicious cards just to get a paycheck. If we think they're doing this, we fire them immediately and turn in their personnel records to law enforcement. Every ACORN worker over the past eight years who's been convicted-guess who turned them in? ACORN did.

ESSENCE.COM: How might voter registration fraud lead to actual voter fraud?
LEWIS: What they're trying to put into people's minds is that Mickey Mouse and Tony Romo would actually show up to vote. Let me give you some real facts: Between 20002 and 2005, only 38 people were accused of attempting to vote under someone else's name. None of them had anything to do with ACORN. Your chances of being hit by lightning are greater than the chances of people actually doing a fraudulent vote.

ESSENCE.COM: Some Republicans have tied voter registration problems to Barack Obama, claiming that he once worked for ACORN. Isn't there a conflict of interest here that taints his campaign?
LEWIS: Let me go all the way back. ACORN is the largest grassroots community organization in the country. We are community organizers. As you know, Barack Obama was a community organizer. As a young attorney, he, along with a lot of other attorneys, represented a coalition of community organizations that were trying to make sure that the Justice Department enforced the motor voter law [also known as the National Voter Registration Act, which requires state governments to provide uniform voting registration opportunities at drivers' license registration centers, disability centers, schools, libraries, and mail-in registration]. The Department of Justice was actually his partner in that. Now, our ACORN Political Action Committee has endorsed Barack Obama. They are trying to say that because they (the Obama campaign) gave money to an organization called Citizens Service-which subcontracted with us to do nominal get-out-the-vote activities for the primaries-that somehow or another there's an evil connection.

ESSENCE.COM: You're talking about the $800,000 that the Obama campaign provided for Citizens Services?
LEWIS: The Obama campaign gave Citizens Services $800,000 to conduct get-out-the-vote activities in the primaries. Citizens Services hired a few of our organizers to work on a couple of weekends. They subcontracted with us and a number of other groups. We got a total of approximately $80,000 to do "get out the vote" for the primaries. The Republicans are trying to make it seem as though ACORN got all of this money, but it's not true. We never received a penny from the Obama campaign to do any voter registration. In fact, we've never received a penny directly from their campaign to even do voter work.

ESSENCE.COM: If the investigation continues into November 4, does that mean people who registered with ACORN may not get to vote?
LEWIS: Well, they're claiming that the organization is under investigation. Here's what we're encouraging everyone to do. If you have registered, especially with ACORN, contact your local board of elections and tell them your name, where you live, and that you registered to vote. Tell them you want to make sure that you are on the rolls to vote. You can also go to our Web site, Acorn.org, and contact us. We will make sure that attorneys and election specialists can help people make sure that they're on the rolls. We are confident that everything will be fine.

ESSENCE.COM: If Obama wins, are you prepared for accusation that you've helped him steal this election?
LEWIS: I think it will be a way of setting up doubt, and challenging the results by saying they're tainted. We've seen it happen before. But we have hundreds of chapters across the country, and ACORN members are going to be vigilant because we will make sure that low- and moderate-income folks aren't left out. So we are going to fight, whether it's in the courts, at the ballot box, or challenging regulations. We are geared up and prepared for the dirty tricks that the Republicans have perpetrated before. They might come up with some new ones, but we're going to be prepared. http://www.essence.com/news_entertai...-CNN-Acornlink

[Cuchulain]

BILL MOYERS: What's the evidence that say the Republican Party is disenfranchising millions of people?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, first of all, all of these voter purges, the caging of voters, as I described before.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I mean, the Brennan Center report two weeks ago said perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have been improperly purged from the rolls without even knowing about it. But they didn't talk about millions.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I, in the aggregate, it does and could easily add up to millions of voters because we're talking about a very, very broad range of devices, you know, both legal and illegal that will have a dramatic effect and that will add up. If hundreds of thousands of people are disenfranchised nationwide simply through voter purges alone, you see? That is significant. If the caging of voters results in the disenfranchisement of another 200,000, 300,000, we're talking here about numbers that definitely do add up, you see, and that make a difference, are meant to make a difference come Election Day.

BILL MOYERS: This term "caging," what's a simple understanding of that?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: It's really very simple. The Republican Party, in a particular state, will get a list of the names and addresses of Democrats and send them letters that look sort of like junk mail, you know? Often they'll have windows in the envelope, the kind of thing that people are going to be inclined to throw away. And if people don't open those envelopes and take out forms that are in them and fill them out and send them in, their names will be stricken from the voter rolls on that basis. They've also been known to send these kinds of forms to people who are overseas serving in the military. Well, they're not home to check their mail, so if they don't fill out the forms, their names are stricken from the voter roll. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10...anscript3.html

[thx1138]

Repubs fighting back the only way they know how: voter fraud:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6559

[Cuchulain]

Thanks thx1138.