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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:05pm PT
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The entire subject of registration to vote, and voting, is the subject of a scathing editorial in today's New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17fri1.html?hp
"But for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to."
"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."
"Much of the blame for this lies with overly restrictive registration rules. Earlier this year, the League of Women Voters halted its registration drive in Florida after the state imposed onerous new requirements."
A 'system' that in effect disenfranchises 1/3 of the voters, in part due to fabricated concerns that a trivial number of non-eligible persons would be registered, is a national embarrassment. I believe that in most developed democracies, voter registration is handled by civil servants, and over 90% of eligible citizens are registered to vote.
The continuing Republican attack on democracy.
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:09pm PT
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bluering- More activist judges deciding elections. This country is going downhill fast.
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Ben Rumsen
Social climber
No Name City ( and it sure ain't pretty )
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:31pm PT
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Who are these people that are too stupid to register to vote without ACORN ? Does ACORN help them wipe their ass too??
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paganmonkeyboy
climber
mars...it's near nevada...
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:36pm PT
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didn't read the whole thread, but there is an article in the new rolling stone about teh mssive voter purges the repulican party has done across america
Colorado purging 1 in 6 voters this year...2.7 million new voter registrations rejected...
news is on palast's site...
http://www.gregpalast.com/rolling-stone-its-already-stolen/
good thing the army is on american soil now - mad voters might actually revolt, given that the economy is collapsing and the uber rich are starting to get a little blatant about the class warfare...
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Ben Rumsen
Social climber
No Name City ( and it sure ain't pretty )
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:40pm PT
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They are purging voters because they are fraudulent. Man, if someone really steals an election through widespread voter fraud ( and don't bring up the hanging chad BS from 2004 ), that will be trouble. Good thing I have lots of guns and 1000's of rounds of ammo..........
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:41pm PT
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"overly restrictive registration rules"
pray tell...does the nyt fail elaborate on these "overly restrictive" rules or did the hiker just think the specific rules are not relevant...if the nyt says it's so, it must be so?
by the way, is photo identification "overly restrictive"?
and does the nyt believe that thousands of illegitimate forms submitted just weeks before the election--which i'd call a dump--is not cause for concern...it takes time and money to verify each form
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paganmonkeyboy
climber
mars...it's near nevada...
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:50pm PT
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the last two presidential elections were the only 2 where exit polls did not patch the results.
in all cases the race went red when the exit polls were blue.
when it happens again, we will all grumble and feed our kids and our money deeper into the war machine.
god is soooo f*#king proud of us all...so's jesus ;-) you now he was with the money changers and not the poor...
idiots...
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klinefelter
Boulder climber
Bishop, CA
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:52pm PT
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Again, elections are not won by padding the voter rolls with fraudulent ballots, but by suppressing votes in key areas. ACORN and related stories will be smokescreen for the real fraud.
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paganmonkeyboy
climber
mars...it's near nevada...
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Oct 17, 2008 - 01:58pm PT
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yeah - it gets you on the 'list' ;-)
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klinefelter
Boulder climber
Bishop, CA
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Oct 17, 2008 - 02:01pm PT
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fattrad, what's with all the ominous, cryptic warnings about voting a certain way? Are the Republicans planning their kristallnacht?
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Oct 17, 2008 - 02:29pm PT
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We have no documented evidence in any recent election of systematic voter fraud committed through spurious registration. Those claims were at the crux of the DoJ scandal, in which the Bush administration fired federal prosecutors for failing to pursue voting fraud charges. (They didn't pursue them, even though they were conservative Republicans, because there was no evidence of voter fraud.)
There are other means of election fraud. The Texas Democratic machine stuffing ballot boxes back in 1960; the systematic voter suppression carried out in essentially each and every election in southern and mid-southern states; Willie Brown's SF opening polls early in favorable districts. But we have virtually no documented cases (despite the devotion of 8 years of Republican investigators nationwide) of voter fraud through fake registration.
http://www.slate.com/id/2202428/
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paganmonkeyboy
climber
mars...it's near nevada...
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Oct 17, 2008 - 02:32pm PT
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don't forget the sworn testimony before congress from the programmer clint curtis in florida that was paid to write the vote flipping software for the republican party...
actual footage :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3hUPP_bdOo
no joke...
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Arid-zona
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Oct 17, 2008 - 03:28pm PT
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If you can't afford to get a new photo ID every time you change addresses then you SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO VOTE.
It's that simple. People who are THAT poor or dumb having an equal vote with everyone else is ridiculous. Overly restrictive voting laws my ass.
Bluering is right. Just cause the NYT says its so doesn't mean it's so.
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jstan
climber
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Oct 17, 2008 - 04:23pm PT
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a8VcTV6qWpA8&refer=home
Ohio Democrats Win at Top U.S. Court in Voting Fight (Update3)
By Greg Stohr
Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court, siding with Democrats, freed Ohio officials from a lower court order that might have limited participation by new voters in next month's presidential election.
Today's ruling means Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner doesn't have to provide county election boards with lists of new registrants whose information doesn't match up with government databases. A federal trial judge had ordered Brunner, a Democrat, to supply the lists by today.
The Supreme Court said Republicans who sued Brunner ``are not sufficiently likely to prevail'' because the federal law they invoked doesn't authorize private suits. The two-page unsigned order was issued on behalf of the full court, without any published dissent.
Brunner said the judge's order could have affected as many as 200,000 Ohioans, potentially forcing them to cast provisional ballots instead of regular ballots. Democrats likely would have been disproportionately affected by the judge's order because of the party's efforts to register new voters this year.
Ohio is a crucial state for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in his race against Democrat Barack Obama. Without Ohio's 20 electoral votes, McCain would have to carry every other state that voted for George W. Bush in 2004, plus one that voted Democratic. Recent polls indicate Obama has pulled even or ahead in Ohio, a state Bush won by less than 118,000 votes four years ago.
Weeding Out Fraud
The Ohio Republican Party accused Brunner of ignoring her duty under a federal law to help weed out fraudulent registrations. The dispute was one of several fights that have made Ohio a center of legal controversy leading up to the Nov. 4 election.
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis in a statement said Brunner is seeking to ``minimize the level of fairness and transparency in this election.''
Brunner ``has fought at every opportunity the appeals of the people of the state and the county boards of election to provide an oversight of this election so it's done in a free, fair and open matter,'' said John McClelland, spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party.
Democrats hailed the ruling. The decision ``allows Ohio to move about the business of ensuring a free, fair, open and honest election without the threat of widespread voter suppression by the GOP,'' Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said in a statement.
`Myriad Discrepancies'
Brunner was elected secretary of state in 2006. She succeeded Republican Ken Blackwell, who was the target of Democratic criticism leading up to the 2004 election.
Brunner said in court papers that preliminary analyses showed ``myriad discrepancies'' in voter information. ``Many of those discrepancies bear no relationship whatsoever to a voter's eligibility to vote a regular, as opposed to a provisional, ballot,'' she said.
Brunner said the mismatches ``may well be used at the county level unnecessarily to challenge fully qualified voters and severely disrupt the voting process.''
The Ohio Republican Party argued that the 2002 Help America Vote Act, known as HAVA, requires Brunner to share the mismatches with county boards so they can investigate potential fraud before counting votes.
Republicans faulted Brunner for her ``steadfast refusal to provide the HAVA `mismatch' data to the county boards of elections in a meaningful way.''
In its decision today, the Supreme Court said it wasn't addressing the underlying question about Brunner's duties under HAVA.
Court Order
The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld U.S. District Judge George C. Smith's order on a 9-6 vote.
More than 660,000 new voters registered in Ohio this year, many of them motivated by the chance to participate in the state's contested March 4 Democratic primary between Obama and New York Senator Hillary Clinton. While the state doesn't require party registration, Obama's aides say their party has a significant edge among new voters.
In Ohio and other states, would-be voters whose eligibility is in doubt can cast provisional ballots, which will count only if eventually validated by election officials.
The case is Brunner v. Ohio Republican Party, 07A332.
To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: October 17, 2008 14:20 EDT
END OF REPORT
If I remember correctly in the 2004 Ohio election the number of polling places specifically in black neighborhoods had been decreased sufficiently that voters had to wait a long time, as it turned out, in the rain.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Oct 17, 2008 - 06:54pm PT
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There was fraud all right, but Acorn is the victim not the perpetrator. Acorn paid people, some of whom were not well-qualified, $8 an hour to register voters. These employees were not supervised. Some just filled out forms with random names (like the Dallas cowboy lineup) and charged Acorn for work they didn't do. There was no conspiracy for anyone to go and vote those registrations, and Acorn flagged most of them as fraudulent before turning them over to the registrars (as they are required to do.)
But if you are looking for a group engaging in a conspiracy to defraud the voters read this. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fraud18-2008oct18,0,1216330.story
McCain won't mention them because they're Republicans.
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Oct 17, 2008 - 06:59pm PT
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Who cares, anyway? I'm voting Diebold. I've heard they even let Canuckleheads vote. As long as they vote Republican, anyway.
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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Oct 17, 2008 - 07:02pm PT
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Premier Election Solutions = Diebold
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Oct 18, 2008 - 07:32am PT
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Rox, Acorn now pays by the hour, as listed in the "facts" I posted from them earlier in this thread.
I hope everyone checks out Pagan's video. The electronic voting machines HAVE been used to cheat elections. That's part of the REAL emergency in voting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3hUPP_bdOo
Look for a McCain win if he can get close enough to claim bradley effect
PEace
Karl
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philo
Trad climber
boulder, co.
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Oct 18, 2008 - 10:29am PT
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Paganmonkeyboy that was a great link! All hail the whistle blowers.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Oct 18, 2008 - 10:42am PT
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And here's the thing, the "Acorn" accusations are a meaningless smokescreen for the real fraud, which won't be given due attention after the "Acorn" disinformation clouds people's awareness. This just in
from
http://www.gregpalast.com/rolling-stone-its-already-stolen
"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."
One in six names purged in Colorado. Let's see what happens
the whole rolling stone article is here
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote
Peace
karl
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