771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Suppressing November

by digby

I’ve written reams about rightwing voter suppression efforts over the years, and like other single subjects (like tasers) I get a fair amount of blowback from people who say “enough already, we get it.” Still it’s worth reminding even those in the know, if only to establish a record all over the internet that some archeologist may someday find in the virtual ether.

It’s important to be aware of this especially now that we have a an energized and batshit insane right wing ready to pull out all the stops. (We’ve already seen their capabilities with the destruction of ACORN.)The following story from Glenn Smith who’s been following this from the trenches in Texas for a long time sounds the alarm:

TrueTheVote’s video is well produced. Participants speak in calm and knowing tones, disguising the racist agenda behind their project. We don’t yet know where the group’s money comes from. But they have money.

As I’ve said before, right-wing voter suppression campaigns are the most under-reported political scandal of the last 50-100 years. But there’s never been anything like the criminal destruction of all the voting machines in the nation’s fourth largest city. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the machines in Houston were destroyed by an arsonist. Warehouses don’t regularly and spontaneously combust at four in the morning, especially warehouses containing all the voting tools in a pivotal city in a pivotal election.

In other details, the suppression campaigns follow a familiar pattern: raise suspicions of widespread voter fraud. Accuse “others” of stealing elections from us (read: white people). Threaten would-be voters with criminal charges. Limit polling locations in poor and minority precincts. Distribute spurious “felon lists” that disenfranchise legal voters who happen to share a name with a felon. Staff phone banks that make election calls to minority and poor voters giving incorrect polling locations and dates. Dress up vigilantes in cop clothes to intimidate would-be voters.

Regular Huffington Post contributor Greg Mitchell wrote one of the best accounts of such a suppression and intimidation campaign in his book about the 1934 California governor’s race, The Campaign of the Century. At least since then, voter suppression has been a part of nearly every election cycle.

Here’s the slick video:

It’s important to keep a special eye on Hispanic precincts and border areas. I have a feeling we are going to see quite a few reports of “illegals” voting this time out.

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Why They Took Out ACORN

by digby

Since we are heading into an election and the subject of race and immigration are coming once again to the fore in American politics, this seems like a good time talk about voter suppression.

For now, I’ll just reprise this post from 2008, which hits some of the highlights:

Validating Voter Suppression

by digby

Following up on D-Day’s post below about the Supreme Court’s decision on voter ID in Indiana, and particularly his point that Obama is greatly expanding the pool of first time voters who might be affected by this ruling, I would just remind everyone of a couple of things.

First of all, let’s not forget that this may be the biggest political land mine the Bush administration has set for Democrats. “Voter fraud” was, you’ll remember, at the bottom of the US Attorney scandals and one of their main tools for suppressing the Democratic vote. This is the realization of a very long term plan to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, like all aristocrats, know that if enough average people vote, they will lose. Period.

I have been writing about this since before I started this blog. It’s at the heart of the Florida debacle in 2000, where they illegitimately purged voter rolls and relied on arcane interpretations of the rules to deny people the fundamental right to have their votes counted. It goes all the way back to the reconstruction period and has continued right up to Ohio in 2004.

The Supreme Court has just legitimized the notion that “voter fraud” is a problem when, in fact, every study shows that it simply does not exist in any systematic way and that the voter disenfranchisement that results from such laws is a far more serious problem.

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 confience 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.’

It didn’t stop there. As a result of the massive voter registration efforts of Jesse Jackson during the 1984 and 1988 campaigns, the republicans institutionalized their vote suppression efforts and created the Voting Integrity Project and the Republican National Lawyers Association to create bogus claims of voter fraud. I’ve written reams about this, but this post from last year highlights an important study that directly pertains to the voter registration drives that D-Day mentions:

With the news from Steve Benen coming out of Wisconsin and from Christy about Minnesota, regarding a couple more of those “Good Bushies” in the Justice Department, I thought it might be a good time to bring up a little something I found the other day on the blog Wot Is It Good 4. A commenter there pointed to this very interesting paper (pdf) presented to the Center For Voting Rights just before the 2004 election on the issue of voter suppression.

I was surprised to see that the Republican National Lawyers Association (where Rove delivered his speech last spring in which, among other things, he mentioned as “problems” those states from which the targeted US Attorneys hail) was pretty much formed for the express and exclusive purpose of training and deploying lawyers on matters of purported voter fraud (aka minority vote suppression.) Neither did I know before that they played a pivotal role in the Florida Recount.

The report gives the history of minority voter suppression in America (a very ugly story) and brings it right up to the 1980’s, particularly the huge voter registration effort in the black community by the Jesse Jackson campaign which apparently scared the bejeezuz out of the Republicans:

Democratic activist Donna Brazile, a Jackson worker and Albert Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, said “There were all sorts of groups out there doing voter registration. Some time after the ’86 election, massive purging started taking place. It was a wicked practice that took place all over the country, especially in the deep South. Democrats retook the Senate in 1986, and [Republican] groups went on a rampage on the premise they were cleaning up the rolls. The campaign then was targeted toward African-Americans.” As in the past, Republicans justified the purges in the name of preventing the unregistered from voting. But Democrats charged vote suppression.

[…]

The Republicans’ perceived problems arising from too heavy a reliance on volunteers began to be addressed with a different strategy in the mid-1980s. From Operation Eagle Eye onward, the major Republican ballot security programs had borne the imprimatur of the party high command, overseen by the RNC and implemented at the grassroots by local organizations and commercial political operatives. In the mid-1980s, the situation began to change. GOP ballot-security skulduggery in the city of Newark and environs had led to a consent decree in 1982 presided over by a federal judge in New Jersey, according to which the RNC promised to forego minority vote suppression.19 In 1985, several months before the RNC was hauled back before the same judge as a result of illegal purging efforts in a 1986 Louisiana senatorial campaign and agreed to submit all future ballot security programs it oversaw to the court for its inspection, a new organization was created—the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA).

A group of lawyers who had worked on the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984 were behind its founding, and it was designed “to be a sort of Rotary Club for GOP stalwarts,” according to a contemporary article in Legal Times magazine. The RNC helped the association get off the ground with a $5,000 loan, although today the RNC claims no official connection with it. By 1987 the RNLA had active chapters in several states and the District of Columbia, and planned to hold its first annual convention early the following year. A lure for attendees, the planners hoped, would be continuing legal education credits and a possible appearance by Attorney General Edwin Meese III and President Reagan.20

The RNLA turned out to be much more than a Rotary Club for GOP lawyers, however; it became the predominant Republican organization coordinating ballot security. By its own account, in early 2004 it had grown to “a 1,900-member organization of lawyers and law students in all 50 states.”21 Its officers were experienced lawyers who knew their way around Washington as a result of having served in Republican administrations at the national and state levels and in major K Street firms. Michael Thielen, its current executive director, who earlier worked for the RNC, describes the organization as follows: Since 1985 the RNLA has nurtured and advanced lawyer involvement in public affairs generally and the Republican Party in particular. It is accurately described as a combination of a professional bar association, politically involved law firm and educational institute. . . . With members now in government, party general counsel positions, law firm management and on law school faculties, the RNLA has for many years been the principal national organization through which lawyers serve the Republican Party and its candidates.22

Its prestige in Republican party circles undoubtedly got a boost from its involvement in the Florida ballot recount battles of November-December 2000, when, according to one of its members, Eric Buermann, the RNLA was “extremely helpful . . . by sending lawyers to Florida to work on the recount, providing expertise as needed, and coordinating volunteer lawyer response.” It was this helpfulness which apparently led Buermann, the state’s Republican Party general counsel, to coordinate a collaboration between the RNLA and Florida legal response teams in 2002, so that, in the words of anRNLA newsletter that year, “there will be a permanent structure in place to keep the lawyers active and organized during off-election years.”23

Actually, the collaboration was even broader, involving the National Republican Campaign Committee and the RNC as well.24 The Democrats, on the other hand, also were developing a large network of lawyers that year—10,000, by one estimate—to counter vote suppression efforts. The nationwide deployment of thousands of lawyers in both parties led one journalist to predict “a new era in US politics after the Florida debacle two years ago—the age of the lawyers.”25

Executive Director Thielen gives this account of the organization’s involvement in the 2000 recount: “After election day, RNLA members were dispatched by party organizations and campaigns to multiple locations within several states. When it became clear that the final result in Florida would determine the outcome of the presidential election, members were concentrated there.” Thielen adds, “had it not been for the preeminent litigators retained by the campaign entities and the volunteer attorneys who spent weeks defending the intent of voters before canvassing boards, the will of thenation’s voters would surely have been thwarted.”

What an odd thing to say. The “nation’s” voters clearly preferred Al Gore. It was only through that regrettable anachronism of the electoral college (and cheating in Florida) that had Bush within stealing distance.

Underlining the organization’s enhanced status among Republicans, White House counsel Albert Gonzales told the group, “You know, I must confess I groaned when I was first asked whether I would be willing to address another group of lawyers. However, when I found out this group included many lawyers that helped secure the election for George W. Bush, I quickly reconsidered.”27

The RNLA’s pride in its Florida efforts is expressed by trophies it presents to honorees at special receptions, consisting of lucite blocks that, as described on the organization’s Web site, “contain a commemorative message in honor of the Florida recount team, and contain actual ‘Chads’ from Florida dispersed throughout the Lucite. They [sic] were only a few hundred created and are not for sale but rather only presented to distinguished members and guests of the RNLA.” Not surprisingly, an RNLA lawyer, Hayden Dempsey, formerly a lawyer for Governor Jeb Bush, is heading Lawyers for Bush, the president’s legal defense team in Florida in 2004.

[…]

With the rise to prominence of the RNLA, the Republican Party’s nationally directed ballot security programs appear to have been transformed. While Operation Eagle Eye was directed from the command posts of the RNC by professionals, the people on the ground—poll-watchers and challengers—were often amateurs, which is to say Election Day volunteers who may have had only cursory training. The RNLA, born in the Reagan era, has gradually assumed the role of the party’s overarching anti-fraud enforcement agency. In the process, the organization has professionalized ballot security (its spokespersons seem to prefer the term “ballot integrity”) with a cadre of highly trained, aggressive, and mobile lawyers who can go anywhere in the nation on short notice. Indeed, they don’t even need to be mobile, in many cases. As one of the organization’s newsletters put it: “Ironically, when the Democratic National Committee bragged of sending in a thousand lawyers each to Missouri, Florida, and Texas for election day operations, the [RNLA] Field Operations Committee already had chapters organized in those states and did not need to send out of state lawyers to assist with the elections.”

Now, I realize that Obama is concentrating mostly on registering college students who are first time voters, so it’s a little bit different. But there are plenty of hurdles there too, with arcane residency requirements and the very serious possibility that some college students won’t have local “government issued” ID. I assume there will be tons of outreach using the new social networking tools to educate these voters about what’s required, but there’s always the danger that at least a few will just not bother — and say they did. That’s certainly happened in the past.

This is a terribly pernicious ruling that legitimizes the view that “voter fraud” is a bigger threat than disenfranchisement. That is the opposite of what this country needs right now, with rampant cynicism about the franchise already infecting the body politic. This ruling gives fodder to every wingnut lawyer in the country to say that if there were no voter fraud in this country, there wouldn’t be any need for a Supreme Court ruling that allows states to protect against it.

It’s important to remember that the thrust of many of these latest laws are to suppress the Latino vote, many of whom are reluctant to show up at polling places only to be treated like second class citizens and viewed with suspicion. Life is short. The same, of course, holds true for African Americans, even today. Simply slowing the lines with demands for proof of ID is enough to suppress the votes in urban precincts with too few voting machines. And then there are the handicapped and elderly who often just don’t have the same type of ID as the rest of us. But then that’s the point. These people must be made to jump through hoops in order to exercise their right to vote.

Oh wait. That’s not quite right, is it? After all it was none other than the majority in Bush vs Gore who made it a point to reaffirm that “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

Perhaps we ought to change that.

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The Messiah Compulsion

by digby

There are many post-mortems in the press and the blogosphere today and they all have interesting things to say. Quite a few are saying that the Democrats should adopt a more populist tone and aggressive economic policy, something which many of us have been advocating since the economic meltdown last year. The long months of ugly health care deal-making and coddling of bankers has only made it more essential — but possibly too late. It’s obvious that the zeitgeist out here in the country is angry, frustrated and scared and people want some acknowledgement of that. The spectacle of elites diddling each other while Real America burns naturally tends to lead to bad results.

The Democrats are all running around this morning looking panicked and freaked out which doesn’t give anyone confidence. Everyone seems to forget that a year ago, Obama only had 58 votes in the Senate and everyone was in a state of near hysteria over his massive institutional power and soaring mandate. Now he has 59 and he’s suddenly impotent. But this reaction was sadly predictable. And the message from the media and their centrist muses is also predictable — move right immediately. SOS.

So it’s hard to see today exactly where this is going, particularly on health care which many people are saying should be passed piecemeal — “just the popular parts.” I’ll be looking forward to a bill which says that health insurance must cover everyone and can’t cancel anyone but which has no cost controls. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be popular for long. So, that’s very much in flux as well.

Anyway, there are obviously many factors here, and frankly, because there were no exit polls done, we will probably never know exactly what combination of factors drove this race in Massachusetts. My personal opinion is that Scott Brown ran a vague campaign based upon personal charisma in the Barack Obama mode and became this year’s vessel for protest against the status quo. The tea partiers are claiming him, as is the GOP establishment. And the media has declared him a maverick independent. Nobody knows who he *really* is, but in this era it seems that everybody’s just looking for a young, handsome hero with a beautiful family to step in and save the day. (In fact, I think this particular paradigm was set by the special election of Arnold Schwarzenneger in California in 2003. As usual, as California goes … oh lord.)

All the happy supporters at Scott Brown’s victory party last night were shouting “yes we can.”

It’s fairly clear that this inchoate desire for “change” going forward is not going to benefit liberals much, and it’s not just because they are erroneously perceived to be in charge in Washington. And that’s because I think people are very much undestimating the conservative propaganda arm, and its creation, the teabaggers.

Dave Weigel writes about them in the Brown race:

The volunteers, journalists, and donors who entered the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel on Tuesday were greeted by enthusiasm that didn’t usually belong to Republican campaigns in Massachusetts. The room was packed–no one else allowed in–only an hour after the polls closed. And among the throngs were Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler, leaders of Tea Party Patriots, who’d flown in from Georgia and California to watch the final stretch of Scott Brown’s Republican U.S. Senate bid. Meckler held up a Flip Video camera, panning it across the room to film Brown supporters as they chatted and lined up for food and drinks.

“What you’re seeing here in Massachusetts is a reflection of what’s happening all across the country,” said Meckler. Democrats, after all, had tried to turn the momentum against Brown by attacking his endorsements from Tea Party groups and painting him as a tool of out-of-state right-wingers. In a fundraising appeal, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had even called Brown a “far-right teabagger Republican.” Laura Clawson of Daily Kos derisively called him “the first teabagger senator.”

“Clearly, they’re paying attention to us,” said Martin. “They’re not ignoring us.”

[…]

A few steps away from the stage where Brown would make his victory speech, a team of conservative activists–some from the state, some not–focused on how they’d brought together their movement to outsmart and outspend one of the country’s most effective Democratic machines. Two months ago, several of them had worked for the insurgent campaign of Doug Hoffman, a first-time candidate who ran on the Conservative Party ticket for a House seat in New York’s 23rd district, forced the Republican Party’s moderate candidate out of the race, and narrowly lost what had been safe GOP territory. Those activists looked at Brown as Hoffman 2.0, a candidate and a campaign that learned the right lessons from that experience and leveraged them into a winning effort.

“They were better funded than Hoffman,” said Eric Odom, the executive director of the American Liberty Alliance. “More importantly, NY-23 lacked any sort of a coherent get-out-the-vote effort. That dominated here. Phone banks, visibilities, giving everybody something to do.” Tea Party activists, said Odom, had flooded into the state. A few feet behind him stood Hannah Giles, the young conservative activist who’d posed as a prostitute for video stings of ACORN, and who had come to the state for (mostly unsuccessful) crowdsourced investigations of possible “voter fraud.”

Brown’s short campaign–he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a “taxpayer march on Washington”–masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.

“I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,” said Willington. “Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.”

[…]

From that point, Brown became a cause for the Tea Party movement and the people who’d backed Doug Hoffman…

[…]

Every negative Coakley storyline was amplified and made infamous by the same means. On January 14, the Wall Street Journal–owned, like The Weekly Standard and Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp–ran an op-ed on Coakley’s record as attorney general, putting the spotlight on a gruesome case of sexual abuse involving a curling iron. The story, aired out earlier by the Boston Globe but not yet known to activists, became infamous, as did Coakley’s verbal stumbles. At Brown rallies attended by TWI, there was universal awareness of Coakley’s gaffes and the curling iron case.

[…]

“He’s almost like a messiah,” said Deborah Strange, a former Ted Kennedy supporter–although she’d voted for George W. Bush and John McCain–who sat resting her bad knees as Brown gave his victory speech. “He’s given us hope. He’s given us hope.

Read the whole thing. That story is important. Political messiahs have a pretty short shelf likfe these days, but the Republican propaganda arm is stronger than ever. And it would behoove all of us to spend some time watching exactly what it is they are saying.

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Acorn-grate

by digby

BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): In terms of what kind of ramifications could be coming its way — could it go all the way to the White House because of the fact the president —

FUND: Well, just remember, President Obama was not only a top trainer for ACORN, he was their lawyer back in the 1990s. His campaign transferred $835,000 and apparently tried — to ACORN during the 2008 campaign and apparently tried to conceal it. So there are lots of ties. Now, the White House, of course, doesn’t want anything to do with ACORN right now. But what I think we’re going to find is that ACORN was a giant attempt to evade tax laws and basically use nonprofit status and tax-exempt status while at the same time having other front groups do blatantly political work.

Media Matters corrects the record:

In fact, Obama represented ACORN in one lawsuit — alongside the Justice Department and several other organizations — and reportedly said he participated in two one-hour trainings with ACORN as a volunteer.

But no matter. ACORN is the new euphamism for the “N” word and all they have to do is drop the word with a wink and a nod and the racist underbelly knows what they’re talking about. In fact, John Fund’s “special beat” is voter fraud, which is yet another Atwaterite euphemism for the “wrong people” (if you know what I mean…)

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Illegitimacy

by digby

Republicans have been working on a theory of voter fraud for decades, which is designed to suppress the vote and call into question the legitimacy of any Democratic victories. We know this. It is documented. I and many others have been writing about this for years. So this should not surprise anyone who follows this issue:

PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters
nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack
Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately…

Overall 62% of Americans think Obama legitimately won the election to only 26% who think ACORN stole it for him, as few Democrats or independents buy into that line of thinking.

I had always thought they were gearing up for a full blown assault on “illegal immigrant” voting (and I would imagine that’s in the pipeline as the demographics continue to shift.) But with the election of an African American, the ACORN thing was more salient to the racist base.

The conservative movement has long held that Democrats can never be legitimate office holders because it is an article of faith that a majority of the country believes as they do. The Village agrees — they are always going on about how “this is a conservative country.” So they can’t compute how a person who doesn’t run openly and proudly as a conservative Republican could possibly legitimately win an election.

Policy is irrelevant to all this, by the way. This is about tribal identity and culture, not politics and governance.

Update: Greenwald has more on the assault on ACORN today.

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Keeping The ACORNs In Their Place

by digby

John Fund and Rush Limbaugh have been darkly predicting an outbreak of voter fraud by the ACORN conspiracy that is threatening to take over the world. Indeed, the rank and file is worried that ACORN has even infiltrated the campaign of the teabagging darling Doug Hoffman.

Dave Weigel reports from NY 23:

Outside, two dozen Hoffman supporters lined the sidewalks with signs that attacked Owens as a “Pelosi puppet” and an agent of ACORN. “I was at a Tea Party, but this is too slow a process for me,” said John Dewitt, a contractor from Adams, N.Y. “I’m more on the violence side. I’m more of the Civil War, revolutionary kind of guy. I’m of the old school–you kick them in the ass and be done with it.” The Hoffman backers outside of the Biden event all said they’d attended Tea Parties. Some were affiliated with Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. All worried that ACORN was going to show up in the district, or even at the Biden event–a paranoia that led to some minor awkwardness when an African-American Hoffman worker walked by. “This guy’s with ACORN,” said Dewitt. “Definitely, not from around here,” said businessman Erik Dunk.

Those ACORNs are a bunch of shiftless welfare queens who are disenfranchising Real Americans. Crooks and Liars has the goods.

Oh wait:

The teabaggers are turning to threats and intimidation out there in NY-23 land.

Elizabeth Benjamin writes in the NY Daily News:

It’s getting ugly out there. I just got off the phone with former state Democratic Chairwoman June O’Neill, who informed me the police had been called to at least two polling sites in St. Lawrence County due to overzealous electioneering (O’Neill called it “voter intimidation”) by Doug Hoffman supporters.

“We’ve gotten reports that people are standing there, covered with Hoffman stickers and yelling anti-choice stuff at voters,” said O’Neill, a St. Lawrence native who has been running the party’s GOTV effort for Bill Owens in NY-23. “Apparently, there’s some woman claiming to be a commissioner,” O’Neill continued. “Commissioner of what, I don’t know. She’s from Texas, I think, and she won’t leave.” “This is not the way we roll in the North Country.”‘

O’Neill also said she had received anecdotal reports of problems at polling sites in Gouverneur, which is Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava’s hometown. But she couldn’t immediately confirm this. I called over to the St. Lawrence Board of Elections and got GOP Elections Commissioner Debbie Pahler on the line. She confirmed that the police indeed had been called, but she downplayed the incident, saying it’s “a routine procedure here in the county.”

“We had electioneering within the 100-foot polling marker,” Phaler said. “It’s my understanding that they were asked to leave and wouldn’t leave.” “If people are electioneering within the marker and don’t stop when we ask them to, our inspectors are instructed to call law enforcement to assist them. I don’t think anybody was arrested.”

O’Neill also said she had received anecdotal reports of problems at polling sites in Gouverneur, which is Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava’s hometown. But she couldn’t immediately confirm this.

As Amato astutely points out, this is just the teabaggers bringing their tried and true townhall methods to the polling booth. There’s nothing wrong with people standing outside polling booths intimidating voters and screaming in their faces, right? Uhm. No.

Seriously, I was vaguely supportive of the idea that people should be allowed to scream at their political leaders. They sign on for it and their constituents don’t have any obligation to be polite to them. (Packing heat at political events, not so much.) But intimidation outside polling booths is the most undemocratic thing you can do. Election day is the one day when everyone should be dignified and serious and let people vote in peace.

I guess it figures that the party of the deep south would be inclined to resort to this. Vote suppression has long been their preferred method of winning. But listening to them whine about being victims of mythical voter fraud while they are doing everything they can to make voting as difficult as possible for their oppostion is almost more than I can take. The “I know you are but what am I” politics of the right is as exhausting as dealing with a psychopathic five year old.

Update: Hans Von Spakovsky is back in business. Keep your eye on this. Von Spakovsky is one of the leading vote manipulation operatives in the GOP and they are testing out memes in this election.
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Wingnut 3.0

by digby

Howie’s favorite ‘lil up and coming Republican leader is quite a piece of work. And some of his constituents aren’t happy about it:

After barnstorming through southeastern Wisconsin talking about health care reform before returning to Washington D.C., Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, is now at the center of the immigration debate back home. His appearance last month, along with several other members of Congress, at an event in Washington, D.C. has angered members of a local immigrant rights group. The Milwaukee-based group Voces de la Frontera is organizing local high school students to march outside Ryan’s Racine office Tuesday to protest his appearance at the “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” event in September sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Organizers said the event was intended “to remind Congress and the new administration that rampant illegal immigration, efforts to grant amnesty, and taxpayer-subsidized health care benefits to millions of law-breakers are hot button issues for the American public. FAIR has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its position on immigration issues and its founder’s views on a wide variety of issues. Dr. John Tanton, M.D., FAIR’s founder and now a member of its board of directors, is the organization’s intellectual leader, according to Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He’s a central player in the organization. He’s not some ancillary guy. He’s got this terrible legacy,” Beirich said of Tanton, who ran the organization for a few decades and now serves on its board. “Frankly he’s an extremist. He’s funded white supremacist groups. He’s hung out with white supremacists.

Keep in mind that Paul Ryan was going after ACORN long before any videos showed up, for “voter fraud” — and you know what that means: the felons and the illegal aliens are trying to take everything you worked for by voting illegally. That he appears at a FAIR event, which is tantamount to appearing at a KKK rally, is pretty unsurprising.
But I doubt that everyone in Wisconsin knows that their fresh faced young congressman is consorting with flat out racists. (Some do, I’m sure, and approve.) But this guy is being groomed for national office. And like so many of his brethren, he’s caught in this trap made by his crazed conservative base.

Indeed, you have to read this excellent piece in Salon, complete with timeline, about how Glenn beck has become the master strategist of the GOP:

Something strange has happened to rank-and-file Republicans since President Obama took office. These past few months, standard-issue gray lawmakers have sounded like fire-and-brimstone demagogues. Conspiracy theories and over-the-top legislation to fix imaginary wrongs are flying wildly around formerly mainstream GOP circles.It turns out that like so much of what ails the world today, this can be traced back to Glenn Beck. Some fifth-term Iowa senator might be railing against death panels, but it’s really Beck’s voice you’re hearing. With his show on Fox News, Beck has successfully positioned himself as the weirdo right’s ambassador-at-large to the rest of the world. When the patron saint of the Tea Parties lets his freak flag fly, seemingly normal right-wing functionaries have been known to line up and salute. Republicans parrot Beck’s crackpot notions and pet issues routinely — sometimes running with his manias the morning after he first airs them.

If there was no history of lunatics ever ascending to great heights of national power I would be inclined to ignore this stuff. But after the 20th century, I think that would be foolish.

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Engineers Of The Train Wreck

by digby

Blogometer picked up this interesting tidbit from Red State that perfectly illustrates the right’s problem:

Meanwhile, RedState’s hogan wants Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to replace ex-Republican Arlen Specter (D-PA) as the Ranking Member on the Judiciary Cmte: “Jeff Sessions should be Republican Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee. Not [UT Sen.] Orrin Hatch. Not [IA Sen.] Chuck Grassley. […] To have Orrin Hatch or Chuck Grassley at the helm would be an unmitigated disaster. Each are cut from the same cloth — that of the old guard Republicans in the Senate who have given us the train wreck that the Party has become. They would hire terrible staffers who would neither be the smartest lawyers nor actually conservative — and, potentially, maintain a significant number of Specter’s former staff. Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, would field a talented team who could educate America on just who America is getting in the next Supreme Court justice.”

Sessions is an ignorant ideologue who was denied a federal judgeship when it turned out he was a raging bigot:

Sessions entered national politics in the mid-’80s not as a politician but as a judicial nominee. Recommended by a fellow Republican from Alabama, then-Senator Jeremiah Denton, Sessions was Ronald Reagan’s choice for the U.S. District Court in Alabama in the early spring of 1986. Reagan had gotten cocky by then, as more than 200 of his uberconservative judicial appointees had been rolled out across the country without serious opposition (this was pre-Robert Bork). That is, until the 39-year-old Sessions came up for review.

Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers–including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.–on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions’s focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause célèbre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU ) “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to “pop off” on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes “loose with [his] tongue.” He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “piece of intrusive legislation,” a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings

All of that’s a GOP qualification for elected office in Alabama, so being rejected on that basis naturally vaulted him into the Senate. Making him the ranking member today means the Republicans will put their ugliest face forward during judicial confirmation hearings. But hey, it’s their long, ongoing funeral.

The assertion that he’s the guy with the smart staffers may very well be true. I don’t know. But the idea that it’s Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley who are to blame for the Party’s fortunes, while confederate radicals like Sessions are the great hope for the future makes me laugh. And it’s a perfect illustration of the GOP’s problem. Hatch and Grassley are to the right of the vast majority of Americans at the moment but have longstanding mainstream conservo-cred. Sessions, on the other hand, is the very picture of the harsh, hard-right movement conservatism that the country has rejected. Bring him on.

These wingnuts truly seem to believe that the reason people voted for a left leaning Democratic government across the board was because they actually wanted a far right government. If that makes sense to you, then you must be a conservative too.

Elections Are A Minor Inconvenience

by dday

Minnesotans want Norm Coleman to concede, by a two-to-one margin, so they can move on with full representation in their government. And the DNC has turned up the pressure by demanding that Coleman concede. But Norm Coleman and his business buddies don’t care.

A group of several dozen of the most influential business lobbyists in Washington is vowing to raise and spend whatever it takes to bankroll Norm Coleman’s upcoming appeal fight, in the wake of a three-judge ruling declaring that Al Franken defeated Coleman in the Minnesota Senate race.

The group of lobbyists, which calls itself “Team Coleman,” is made up of some of the biggest players in D.C.’s permanent lobbying establishment, and includes executives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Restaurant Association and others.

“We will raise as much as is necessary,” Dirk Van Dongen, a leading member of Team Coleman and the president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, told me in an interview. “We’ll keep raising money as Norm needs it. We continue to be active in raising resources for Norm to carry out this fight to the end.” […]

But Democrats are likely to point to the lobbyists’ fundraising as proof that they’re merely keeping this battle alive to keep the seat vacant and prevent Dems from getting a leg up in the big upcoming policy battles involving the business lobbies, such as the battle over the Employee Free Choice Act.

Van Dongen (who is the father of WhoRunsGov editor Rachel Van Dongen) rejected that claim.

“That’s a side benefit,” Van Dongen said, when asked if the goal was to keep the seat vacant. “But this is all about us doing everything we can to be sure that Norm has had a fair election and to get him back in his Senate seat. We’d be doing exactly the same thing if the Republicans were in the majority.”

Well, there you have it. The amount of corporate money plowed into a doomed-to-fail project is a small price to pay for the “side benefit” of keeping that 59th Democratic vote out of the Senate. I wonder if Team Coleman funded any of the tea parties, too.

And we’re beginning to see this obstruction and delegitimizing of the election system as a pattern. In NY-20, where Scott Murphy has moved into the lead on the strength of absentee votes and is heavily favored for victory if the numbers continue to flow in at this level, the Republican candidate Jim Tedisco and his buddies from the Brooks Brothers Riot Roger Stone and John Sweeney have decided that their best option is to suppress as many votes as possible, and use the language of “voter fraud” to deny legitimate voters the franchise. Despite the fact that actual cases of fraud are almost nonexistent. Not even the junior Senator from New York has been spared.

This just in from Columbia County: when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s absentee ballot came up in the queue, the poll watchers for Jim Tedisco objected to it, saying the senator was in the county on election day and should have voted in person.

Gillibrand’s office maintains that she wasn’t in the county on Election Day.

And today, a judge said that most of Tedisco’s 1,200 objections are invalid. But this statement by a Tedisco ally says it all.

They’re not doing it because they believe the votes to be illegitimate, really. What they’re doing, in the days and now hours leading up to the court hearings that will decide the outcome of the race between Republican Jim Tedisco and Democrat Scott Murphy, is creating a fact on the ground for the judiciary to overturn, if it dares […]

“It’s always better to be ahead-that’s the whole goal of this process,” said Nick Spano, a Yonkers Republican and former state senator who came out on the right side of a lengthy recount process in 2004, eventually winning by 18 votes.

This will never end. The Coleman and Tedisco cases can be put on a continuum. Conservatives now see electoral results as simply a starting point. They have adopted the cries of “stolen elections” from 2000 and 2004 and turned them right around. It was all so very predictable. They’ve had a plan for stealing elections for years and years, and Coleman and Tedisco are just following the playbook.

The latest and most elaborate of these jokes is the urban legend that American elections are rife with voter fraud, particularly in the kinds of poor and minority neighborhoods inhabited by Democrats. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that fraudulent voting would be a major target of the Department of Justice. As the New York Times reported last month, the main result of this massive effort was such coups as the deportation of a legal immigrant who mistakenly filled out a voter-registration card while waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles.

But the administration has remained ferociously committed to suppressing voter fraud — as soon as it can find some. In April of last year, Karl Rove warned a Republican lawyers’ group that “we have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem.

“I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”

The goals here are to intimidate and alienate people from the voting process, suppress as many votes as possible, and delegitimize the victory, even if the Democrats manage to run the legal gauntlet and win. Eventually, Al Franken and Scott Murphy will be seated in Congress. But there’s no harm for the Republicans to just keep on with the same dirty tactics, with a look to the next election, when they can whisper about how “the Democrats stole the last one.”

…Howard Dean on Hardball today: “This could be a national pattern … this looks like a national attempt by the Republicans to keep people out of office if they have a D after their name.”

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Patience, Grasshopper

by digby

One of the things you have to admire about the conservative movement is their patience. (I think it comes from their reverence for the tactics and strategies of Chairman Mao.) They are willing to take the long road to achieve their goals and when it comes to vote suppression, they are planning far,far ahead. Byron York writes:

Take some time today to read John Fund’s excellent overview of the problem of voter fraud. One particularly interesting aspect of all this is that, with overwhelming evidence of fraud by ACORN and other groups, some on the left seem to have conceded that there is significant voter registration fraud out there — but insist that that will not translate into the casting of fraudulent votes. Of course some of those same people are the ones who oppose common-sense measures, like a photo-ID requirement, that can help prevent voter registration fraud from turning into voter fraud.

Step one accomplished. They have created the delusion that there is massive registration “fraud” — the left has even apparently agreed to it — which leads inexorably to the idea that voter fraud will follow. Therefore, we need stringent voter ID laws. It’s common sense, after all.

The point of all this, of course, is to suppress the vote of the poor, ethnic and racial minorities, immigrants — all the people who are likely to vote Democratic. There is zero data to support the charge of voter fraud and there is zero evidence that the ineligible voter registrations are the result of some sort of mass conspiracy to commit voter fraud. So there is nothing common sensical about requiring people to show photo ID, make ethnic minorities and recent immigrants have to face a gauntlet of Minutemen outside the doors and then have to have particular forms of ID to prove they are who they say they are.

But we’re going to do it anyway. Just watch, even though 2000 and 2004 (and possibly this one as well) featured egregious examples of Republican voter purging, vote caging, long lines etc, the most enduring electoral integrity issue will be ACORN and vote fraud. They are taking it one step at a time until little by little, they make it more unpleasant and difficult for lower income, elderly and immigrant citizens to vote. And if they can cast doubts on the election of any Democrat who represents such people all the better.

The aristocracy always protects its prerogatives, even when, once in a while, the serfs raise a ruckus.

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