771 search results for ""voter fraud""

“If you’re going to do something make sure what the law says about it first”

by digby

That was said by one of our freedom worshiping GOP politicians. Without irony:

The teacher who heads up New Smyrna Beach High School’s student government association could face thousands of dollars in fines. Her transgression? Helping students register to vote.

Prepping 17-year-olds for the privileges and responsibilities of voting in a democracy is nothing new for civics teachers, but when Jill Cicciarelli organized a drive at the start of the school year to get students pre-registered, she ran afoul of Florida’s new and controversial election law.

Among other things, the new rules require that third parties who sign up new voters register with the state and that they submit applications within 48 hours. The law also reduces the time for early voting from 14 days to eight and requires voters who want to give a new address at the polls to use a provisional ballot.

Republican lawmakers who backed the rules said they were necessary to reduce voter fraud. Critics — including U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who testified before a congressional committee — said the law would suppress voter participation.

[…]

Cicciarelli was on maternity leave in the spring when the Republican-led Legislature adopted the new rules, largely on party lines. Supporters said it was necessary to prevent voter fraud, though elections supervisors like McFall said they haven’t had a problem.

“I don’t see it,” she said in a telephone interview last week from her office in DeLand. “I truly don’t see it.”

But supporters of the law view it as an attempt to be proactive at a time when elections are becoming so contentious that the potential for fraud is always a threat.

“There are reasons for the law,” said state Rep. Dorothy Hukill, a Republican from Port Orange who voted for it. “Part of the reason is to protect people like (the students), so they know they’re being registered properly.”

It’s still easy to register to vote, Hukill added, even if it means third-party groups that want to hold registration drives might have to do some more homework in advance.

“It does point out the need for more public education,” Hukill added. “I applaud the poor teacher’s efforts to get her students involved. She just didn’t know. It just goes to show if you’re going to do something, make sure you know what the law says about it.”

We know what this is all about, of course. I have no idea how many of these students might be of the wrong race, so perhaps they just got caught in the net by mistake. But it occurs to me that if this keeps up the Republicans are going to regret doing what they’ve done. What makes them so sure that their voters are so smart and dedicated that they won’t mind jumping through these ridiculous hoops to get registered to vote? It’s not as if they are all educated elites …

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The long march to dismantle democracy

by digby

I’ve been writing about the conservative movement’s long term project to disenfranchise Democratic voters since I started this blog. I had hoped that after the debacle of the 2000 election, the Democrats would take this issue seriously and put some weight behind substantial election reform. This was not to be. As usual, nobody wanted to look in the rearview mirror or play the blame game and now the results are possibly catastrophic.

This piece by Ari Berman in Rolling Stone tells the tale of that project finally coming to fruition. And it’s chilling;

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

There are a lot of scary things going on in our political and economic culture right now. The growing police state, the dysfunctional governing structures, the economic failure and corruption. But this one goes right to the heart of our democracy and attacks it head on.

The movement has been leading up to it for decades, but it’s picked up speed in the last 12 years. They impeached a Democratic president and stole an election in a two year time span. They fired US Attorneys for failing to rig elections and dismantled the voting rights section of the DOJ. They’ve packed the courts with anti-democratic judges and filed cases before them to create a sense of systematic voter fraud that doesn’t actually exist. And last November they made their move into state houses all over the country and wasted no time in creating laws to disenfranchise as many liberal voters as possible.

Democrats had better hope that the coming elections aren’t close. If they are, there’s just no way they can win with these laws that are coming on line. And that’s the plan.

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The Tea Party sounds the alarm

by digby

In my email this morning:

Watch for Obama to “Steal” the 2012 Election

Obama, Holder, and their entire illicit crews should all be in prison. They are all criminals. Obama will receive at least $1 billion and possibly up to $2 billion from George Soros, foreign communist countries, and other criminal organizations to “buy” the election.

There definitely will be voter fraud going on throughout the 50 states but definitely to the greatest degree in “battleground states.” Watch for ballot box stuffing, phony votes, “fixing” of voting machines, voting illegal aliens, voter intimidation, and union thuggery going on before and on November 6, 2012.

We must keep a jaundiced eye on ACORN, The New Black Panthers, SEIU, and other such criminal organizations to implement Obama’s plan again to “steal” this election.

These criminals do not believe in freedom, liberty, and the American way of life. Harry Reid allegedly stole the 2010 senate election through voter fraud. Expect the worst in the 2012 election because it will happen. Remember, we are dealing with criminals bereft of any honesty or integrity. Vigilance!

They’re really working themselves up. There’s this too:

HOW IS RACIST BARACK OBAMA, WHO MAY NOT BE AN AMERICAN BORN CITIZEN, AND ERIC HOLDER, ANOTHER RACISTS, WHO HAS DISGRACED THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, GET AWAY WITH BREAKING THESE CIVIL RIGHTS LAWS?

WHAT ABOUT THEIR TIES TO ACORN?

In Nevada, former Acorn executive Amy Busefink was convicted of voter fraud. In 2008, Acorn submitted 400,000 fraudulent voter applications in Nevada. Nevada only has a population of 2.6 million. That includes children, illegals and those who cannot vote. The real number of voters is substantially less than 2.6 million. Imagine what 400,000 fraudulent votes could do to an election?

400,000 was just the fraudulent voter registrations that were discovered. A close friend of Tea Party Nation recently told us, “In 2010, the left was test marketing a variety of voter fraud techniques. In 2012, they will use them everywhere to try and steal the election.”

We cannot allow the election to be stolen. We are fighting back. On February 4-5 a special event will be held to help fight back against voter fraud.

What is the event? Read about it on Tea Party Nation.

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips announced earlier that “voter fraud” was going to be their main issue going into 2012 and it’s looking like he’s being true to his promise.

*I’ve been getting a lot of stuff about Holder and Obama being racists lately, having something to do with an African coup and the new black panthers. Who knew?

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ACORN vendetta

by digby

I’m getting a lot of wingnut email these days. As per usual, when they win they get even more aggressive because they can’t believe that the other side hasn’t completely capitulated in the face of their victory. (Democracy isn’t something they are entirely comfortable with.)

Anyway, here’s just a taste of the chainmail I’ve been forwarded this week:

Dear Speaker Boehner:

Please do not allow this to happen. America is counting on you and the GOP to STOP the Commies, Traitor to Freedom and the Socialists.

It seems like almost everyday Obama and The Democrats find new ways to destroy our America.

Could the party of treason turn any further to the left?

* Posted by Judson Phillips on January 23, 2011 at 7:27am in Tea Party Nation Forum

Some in the Tea Party movement argue there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republican and Democrat parties. Those who argue this point need to take a look at what is going on in the party of treason.

The GOP is certainly not perfect. Although, at Tea Party Nation, we generally advocate allying with conservative Republicans, the Democrats have jump whole-heartedly into the lap of socialism. There is not even a pretense anymore.

The new executive director of the Democratic National Committee is one Patrick Gaspard. Most people have never heard of Patrick Gaspard.

Currently Gaspard does for Obama what Karl Rove did for George W. Bush. Becoming executive director of the DNC means that he will run the day-to-day operations of the DNC. He will control the DNC machinery.

And he is a total and committed socialist.

Gaspard joined the White House with a confusing resume that includes stints at ACORN, the SEIU and the Working Families Party. In Acorn, he was the political director for New York. In 2007, Gaspard became a registered lobbyist for SEIU. (Say, didn’t Obama say something about no lobbyists working for him?).

In 2001, Gaspard sent a letter saying that he was working for the Working Families Party in New York. The WFP is a small 3rd party in New York that is a socialist party. The WFP was also the political party for ACORN.

The ACORN tree is kept deliberately vague. Something like a mafia family trying to hide from the Feds. But there is no doubt that Gaspard is up to his ears in it. Gaspard is a student of Alinisky and like Obama grew up idolizing radical communists who hated this country and wanted to see this country turned into a socialist hellhole.

And this man is now running the DNC.

The conservative wing of the Democratic Party can forget about anything now. Oh, wait; the party of treason no longer has a conservative wing. The socialists in the Democratic Party have done a good job of purging conservatives from the party, at least at the national level. Can anyone name a conservative Democrat in the House or Senate? Not a moderate, a conservative. Someone who is branded a conservative by a conservative rating, such as the American Conservative Union’s ratings?

Gaspard’s ties to ACORN should trouble anyone, other than committed socialists, which is why you will hear no complaints from the Democratic Party. Recently in Las Vegas, a former Executive with ACORN, Amy Busefink, was convicted of voter fraud. ACORN itself will go on trial in April for voter fraud. In 2008, ACORN tried to register over 400,000 fake voters in Nevada, a state of only 2.6 million. Busefink also worked with Project Vote. Another distinguished alumni of Project Vote, a subsidiary of ACORN, is Barack Obama.

Socialism is the enemy of freedom and the Democratic Party should probably now be called the Socialist Party. Almost everyone in the leadership of the party of treason at one time or another was a member of a socialist party, from the Democratic Socialists of America, to the New Party to the Working Families Party.

When Ronald Reagan went to the White House thirty years ago this month, he set a goal of destroying Soviet Communism. He succeeded. We must set a goal of destroying socialism in this country before it is too late.

The Tea Party already signaled that they are going to turn their sights on “voter fraud” also known as minority vote suppression.

Here’s Patrick Gaspard:

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Rebuilding The Coalition

by digby

Ron Brownstein points out that a large majority of white people voted Republican in the last election and says this means that he may need a new coalition:

Fully 60 percent of whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives; only 37 percent supported Democrats, according to the National Election Poll exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Not even in Republicans’ 1994 congressional landslide did they win that high a percentage of the white vote.

That’s of people who actually voted, which means that it was also skewed older — which explains a lot. And I’m afraid Adam Serwer’s going to get a wag of the finger for suggesting that the Republicans have been exploiting “white” anxiety for nefarious purposes. But he’s right:

If you’re curious as to why we spent the late summer discussing the New Black Panther Party, the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, Shirley Sherrod, and birthright citizenship, I think you have your answer. Ever since the first genuine race pseudo-scandal, Barack Obama suggesting the the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly” in arresting Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home — Republicans sensed an opportunity in exploiting the anxieties of white voters. So it’s no surprise that formula — blowing a minor incident out of proportion to suggest the president has, as Glenn Beck put it, “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” has been replicated over and over again ever since. Republicans characterized the Affordable Care Act as “reparations” and Finreg as “racial quotas.” With few opportunities for future legislation in the new Congress, Republicans have already signaled their interest in investigating the NBPP case and the Pigford Settlement, which Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has compared to reparations for slavery (It actually involves USDA discrimination against black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s.)

It’s not that this is the only thing they used to get out their vote, of course. The “socialism” and “Muslim” tags were just as potent. Still, this is one of their base strategies designed for the mid-terms and the Tea Partiers newfound obsession with “voter fraud” indicates that they’re not done yet.

Brownstein also thinks that the exodus of these white voters from the Democratic Party may not be temporary, but rather a genuine ideological defection. (Why only white people had an ideological conversion is unexplained.) But this is very interesting:

That resistance could, in turn, increase the pressure on Obama to accelerate the generation-long transformation of the Democratic electoral coalition that he pushed forward in 2008. With so much of the white electorate, especially working-class whites, dubious about the president’s direction, to win a second term he will likely need to increase turnout and improve his showing among the groups that keyed his 2008 victory—minorities, young people, and white-collar white voters, especially women. In 2012, Obama may be forced to build his Electoral College map more around swing states where those voters are plentiful (such as Colorado, North Carolina, and even Arizona) and less on predominantly blue-collar and white states such as Ohio and Indiana that he captured in 2008. David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist, said in an interview that “it would be a mistake to take exit polls from a midterm election and extrapolate too far” toward 2012. Conditions—and the composition of the electorate—will change a great deal by then, he said. But he acknowledged that Obama must “reset” the public perception about his view of government’s role. Axelrod, who plans to return to Chicago next month to help direct the president’s reelection campaign, also made it clear that he sees as a “particularly instructive” model for 2012 the case of Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado, who won his contest last fall by mobilizing enough minorities, young people, and socially liberal, well-educated white women to overcome a sharp turn toward the GOP among most of the other white voters in his state.

Hmmm. How does that square with what seems to be an open embrace of the center right by the administration and the Villagers’ insistence that he must fight for those “independents” who want austerity and tax cuts more than anything else in the whole wide world, I wonder? I’m guessing that they believe that “success” however it’s defined will be what brings over all those “minorities, young people and socially liberal, well-educated white women.” And it might. That’s probably a group that is generally still idealistic about Obama and inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I don’t think this is a given — Obamamania can’t be replicated. (And I have to point out that these are people who are more likely to be influenced by the grumpy professional left than anyone else.)

This is very interesting if true and we may see something different than the predicted re-election strategy if it is. Stay tuned.

Update: Atrios is absolutely right that the older (white) skew in this last election was as much a result of the elderly being manipulated into thinking that Obama was going to turn them into Soylent Green as it was about race. (I do expect that for some of them, the fact that it was a black man trying to turn them into Soylent Green was what made it believable.)

And it’s certainly true that if they want to get back any of these voters, talking up social security cuts isn’t going to get it done. The GOP proved in the last election that they have no problem marshaling Independent Expenditure groups to shamelessly lie outright to this demographic to scare them into voting their way. It won’t matter at all if the cuts only affect people who were born after the year 2000 — they will be easily convinced that Obama is throwing them into the streets immediately. He is, after all, a scary black man.

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Tea Party Priorities

by digby

In case you were wondering what the Tea Party is up to in the new year, here’s Judson Phillips of the Tea Party Nation:

Two years ago, the Tea Party movement exploded onto the political scene. It was like nothing modern politics had seen.

From coast to coast, rallies were held. These were not small rallies but rallies with thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people attending.

A funny thing happened as 2009 ended, the rallies faded away. 2009 was the year of the rally. 2010 became the year of the election. Tea Party groups from across the country threw themselves into the electoral process.

The results were amazing.

But now, 2011 has come and the question is now, what is the Tea Party to do in 2011?

In 2011, there are no Federal elections. Three states will elect governors, four will vote on their legislatures and three will hold judicial elections.

Across the country, Tea Party groups are going to need to do a couple of things. First, we need to take over our local Republican Parties. Many county Republican parties have reorganizational conventions in 2011. These conventions are events where the officers of the county party are elected. In most places, it is a simple vote. Those who show up get to vote. In other words, an organized Tea Party group can get in and take over the GOP.

At Tea Party Nation, we have encouraged Tea Party activists to get involved in the local GOP for one very good reason. This is a two party system, whether we like it or not. There are only two parties and the socialists have absolute control over the other party. By taking over local parties, we can help promote Tea Party candidates at the local level. Conservatism begins at home and it may be good that we sweep liberals out of Washington, but it is something of a pyrrhic victory if we win Washington, yet lose at the state and local level.

The other thing taking over the local party will mean is the creation of a Tea Party farm team. The conservative who is going to win a congressional race five years from now is the conservative we are going to elect to the state legislature this year. RINOs continue to get elected because RINOs in many areas still control the party apparatus.

The second thing that must be a Tea Party priority is stopping voter fraud. Liberal hero and man voted most likely to be an ACLU board member, Joseph Stalin, once said, “it’s not who votes that counts, it is who counts the votes.”

In this past election, the left made a concerted effort at voter fraud. This fraud effected elections. Now, in many areas, for a conservative to win, not only do they have to have a majority, they have to have a fraud proof majority.

At Tea Party Nation we have received a lot of information about what happened and will be making some of the news public in the next few weeks. What is very disturbing was a pattern of “test marketing” certain types of fraud. Certain types of voter fraud that we saw in limited amounts in 2010, we will see across the country in 2012.

The Tea Party movement must united across the country and work to eliminate voter fraud. In some states it will be easy. In socialist states like California or corrupt, I mean Democrat controlled states, like Illinois, it will be very tough. If we are going to win, we must. If we do not eliminate liberal voter fraud, our votes won’t matter because they will not be counted.

Stopping voter fraud is going to be a major project for Tea Party Nation this year.

In Texas, there is a group that is doing an outstanding job of fighting voter fraud. The group is called True the Vote. What they do can be taken and duplicated in almost any state or locality. On January 15th, they are going to have a conference in Houston, TX. They are going to talk about what they did and how you can work in your community to prevent voter fraud. The cost is $50. If want more information, visit their website, Kingstreetpatriots.org.

Stopping voter fraud must be a top priority for us this year. The left knows it cannot win free and fair elections. They can only win by cheating. We must stop them now or Chicago style elections will become the norm for the United States. We must stop this fraud, while we still can.

I think this explains why Issa is ostentatiously announcing that he’s actually going forward with ACORN and New Black Panther investigations.

Far be in from me to suggest that this might have some sort of racial component. That would be very wrong because we know that Tea Partiers have absolutely no racial motivations. But it is worthwhile to recall that the conservative movement’s obsession with “Voter Fraud” has always been about race. If they can get the Tea partiers to do this dirty work, all the better. (And it will keep them occupied so the plutocrats can continue to loot the treasury.)

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Tea Party Patriots Keeping It Real

by digby

Following up on the vote suppression scandal down in Texas, TPM obtained copies of some of the emails received by the registration group being targeted by the Texas Tea Party group King Street Patriots “True The Vote” :

“i hope everyone of you American hating A-holes are thrown in prison for cheating our country and trying to assure socialism.GO TO HELL.”

“I see you’re all into fraud. Why do you want to change Texas? You want it to be like a third-world nation? Texas is great – and you want to change it into a third world state. No thank you. Your fraud won’t work. You were caught red handed. Live with it. We know all about it.”

“Citizen’s from all over Texas will be coming to Houston to watch you fraudulent Marxist pigs. Be forewarned, you will be watched at every turn, and your corrupt Marxist organization will be targeted!”

“You liberial scumbags should be hung by the neck in public ! We are on to your voter fraud. Keep it up you MOTHER FUCKERS and you will soon be put down for a long dirt nap! Your nothing but a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NI**ERS and greasy mexican sp*cs! The WAR is comming and we are going to dispose of each and every one of you while we take OUR (White) nation back.”

And lest we think this is just some unaffiliated cranks:

King Street Patriots leader Catherine Engelbrecht even went as far to as to accuse the group of being the headquarters of the New Black Panther Party.

The good news is that the Tea partiers don’t have a racist bone in their bodies. Just ask them They’ll tell you so. (It’s just the “bad ones” they don’t like.)

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Operation Tea Drunk Eagles

by digby

TPM reports

Poll watchers in Harris County, Texas — where a Tea Party group launched an aggressive anti-voter fraud effort — were accused of “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters who were waiting to cast their ballots as early voting got underway yesterday.

Now, TPMMuckraker has learned, the Justice Department has interviewed witnesses about the alleged intimidation and is gathering information about the so-called anti-voter fraud effort.

“We are currently gathering information regarding this matter,” Justice Department spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement confirming the Civil Rights Division’s involvement.

Harris County, the biggest county in the state, is where a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots launched an anti-voter fraud initiative called “True the Vote,” which recruited poll watchers and amped up fears over groups like the community organizing group ACORN.

Chad Dunn, a lawyer who is representing the Texas Democratic Party, told TPMMuckraker a number of witnesses have been interviewed by Civil Rights Division lawyers already. “We’ve gotten a number of reports — quite a few out of the Houston area — that poll watchers, King Street Patriot training poll watchers, are following a voter after they’ve checked them out and stand right behind them,” Dunn said. There’s at least a dozen reports that they could confirm with witnesses, he said. “Interestingly, it’s all in the polling places in Hispanic and African-American areas,” he added.

Terry O’Rourke, the first assistant in the Harris County Attorney’s office, told TPMMuckraker that there have been allegations of poll watchers talking to voters, which they are not allowed to do, as well as hovering over voters as they are waiting to vote. He said the complaints came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods of the county.

“There are far more poll watchers in this election than we’ve ever had before. The Republican Party has 300 poll watchers on their ready list,” O’Rourke said. He can’t say for certain that they are connected to the Tea Party. “None of the people who walk in the door have Tea Party buttons on,” he said.

Former Voting Section Chief John Tanner, who resigned from the Justice Department in 2008 after he commented that voter identification laws were an imposition on white people because “minorities die first,” is representing the county attorney’s office.

“There are a lot of allegations out there on both sides. I think the county’s perspective is that they are trying to do everything possible to protect the rights of all voters,” Tanner told TPMMuckraker. “[The county has] faced a lot of difficulties,” Tanner noted, including the fact that the warehouse storing voting machines burnt to the ground.

O’Rourke said Tanner made a request on Tuesday to have federal election monitors sent to the county. County Attorney Vince Ryan met on Tuesday with the Democratic and Republican chairmen in the county after he received complaints of possible voter intimidation on the first day of early voting as well, the same day the Houston Chronicle printed a story detailing the allegations

O’Rourke said the chairs agreed to share their lists of poll watchers with one another, and Ryan sent out a notice to all of the election judges and alternates on Tuesday, reiterating the role of the poll watchers.

Meanwhile, the Texas Democratic Party is accusing the Tea Party group of working alongside the GOP on their anti-voter fraud effort. The Texas Democratic Party expanded a lawsuit alleging collusion between the GOP and the Green Party to include the King Street Patriot Tea Party group, the Austin Chronicle reports. The GOP’s website features a page promoting poll watching initiatives.

Voting rights experts have said they are concerned that independent groups like this Tea Party group would not be sure of the rules.

Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, told TPMMuckraker last week, “It’s much harder to disseminate information because there’s not a central repository of information that everybody’s listening to. It seems less likely they’ll have some good information on what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.”

“A lot of folks are probably newcomers to the political process and so there’s some of that newness as well,” she added. “We are worried by these disaggregated private policing efforts that… are going to be much more difficult to monitor and to control against illegal activity, again, knowing or inadvertent. I think that really changes the landscape a lot.”

As TPMMuckraker has reported, Tea Party groups have picked up the mantle of voter fraud allegations, which voting experts say are not as much of a problem as groups made it out to be.

Again, I get wingnut chain emails every single day filled with ACORN conspiracy mongering setting forth the “fact” that because the voter registration rolls often have erroneous information that means that there is massive vote fraud, which has never been shown to have happened in the modern era. They are all convinced that ACORN cooked the books to make it possible for an army of African Americans and illegal immigrants to vote illegally. I’m sure they’re very sincere in their belief that the only way Democrats can ever win elections is by stuffing the ballot box. It fits in perfectly with their worldview.

However, that’s not the real reason this “voter fraud” campaign. The reason they do this is because it gives them an excuse to “hover” also known as “intimidation” which, they hope, translates into making people think twice about voting. After all, busy people may not think it’s worth their while to stand in line and then have some Tea Party asshole breathing down their necks while they’re trying to vote. And for good reason, many members of the minority communities are cautious about dealing with the authorities and don’t think it’s smart to go looking for trouble from a bunch of white busybodies. That’s the whole point.

It’s the same as it ever was. But they’re getting much more aggressive in this, as they are in all things.

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Cranking Up The Old Eagle Eye

by digby

GOP vote suppression 2010:

Republican Senate candidate Mark Kirk caught on tape discussing his plan to send “voter integrity” squads to four predominantly African-American Chicago neighborhoods on election day. Kirk calls them “vulnerable precincts … where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat.

Well, that’s not a big surprise is it? It’s how they roll.

This is a November 1,1966 Miami News story called “Vote Officials Warned. ‘Beware of foul-ups at the polls like 1964’:

“In the 1964 general election, Goldwater backers helped create the greatest foul-up in election history through the wholesale challenge of prospective voters. Effects of the slowdown were felt from Key West to Pensacola, especially in Dade County.

It was part of the GOP’s “Operation Eagle Eye” which the Democrats charged was an effort to cut the Democratic vote in big population centers.”…

“Operation Eagle Eye,” national Republican officials said, was to make sure that people not qualified or registered properly were not permitted to vote. The Democrats charged, however, that it was designed to intimidate minority voters.

Mrs Englander said today, “I’m told attempts will be made to confuse our Negro voters and other minority groups. This could materially affect the vote for Bob High (Democratic nominee for Governor) and all the other Democratic nominees.”

It’s embarrassing that Democrats have allowed this nonsense to continue all this time. It’s been out there and obvious for decades. And to make matters even worse, they have allowed the Republicans to not only engage in this methodical intimidation, they’ve enabled them to simultaneously gin up pseudo-scandals about “voter fraud” based upon sloppy voter rolls that has never been shown to result in any kind of systematic election fraud. It’s political malpractice at this point.

If you’re interested in the gazillion pieces I’ve written on this subject, you can look here.

h/t to Rick Perlstein

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Illegal Strategy

by digby

I wrote back in 2006 that I thought the Republicans would probably blame their losses on illegal immigrants illegally voting. It didn’t happen, but I figured that they’d eventually put it together since it’s such a perfect theme to piggyback on the work the Democrats already did in bringing attention to the holes in the voting system and perverting it to their own cause. And here we are.

Brietbart’s outfit (naturally) is on the case saying that a conspiracy between the “Soros Funded” SOS project (to elect decent Secretaries of State who enable rather than prohibit voting), the unions and millions of illegal immigrants to steal elections may tip races that otherwise would have gone to Republicans.

You can read the whole thing over there, but here’s the outline if you don’t want to soil your browser:

Here are the disconnected dots that are detailed below:

* First Dot: The SOS Project
* Second Dot: The SEIU’s Shenanigans
* Third Dot: 11 Million Illegal Immigrants
* Fourth Dot: The Fake ID Industry & Meg Whitman
* Fifth Dot: Voter Registration
* Sixth Dot: Union GOTV Strategies
* Seventh Dot: Early Voting
* Connecting the Dots

They illustrate the story with this picture, no caption, no explanation, as if it self-evidently proves their point:

You get the idea. This story is as old as the hills in American politics, of course. But the “illegal” voting theme has a particularly interesting history considering that it was heavily practiced by some of the most illustrious early members of the modern conservative movement. Here’s Rick Perlstein on the vote suppression effort in 1964, called “Operation Eagle Eye” in which Chief justice John Roberts’ predecessor, William Rehnquist, participated as a young man:

The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself.

Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.

“‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

“‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.

“‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’

I wrote about vote suppression until I simply couldn’t write about it anymore. But it’s all in the archives. This piece hits some of the highlights.

*And to those who insist that these stories of voter registration rolls being overrun with dead people and illegally registered names need to get a grip. Our system has always had a lot of extraneous names on the rolls. People move, people die, there are people registered who shouldn’t be. What study after study has shown is that in the last 50 years or so there has never been any systematic voter fraud, meaning people actually voting more than once or voting when they aren’t entitled to vote. The voter rolls themselves don’t affect elections. It’s the votes that count — and when it comes to manipulating the votes, it’s Republicans who have made an industry out of keeping legal voters from being able to cast votes and keeping legal votes from being counted.

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