771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Again And Again

by digby

This is now completely out of hand.

The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election.

A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation to The Associated Press. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of inquiries in several states, including a raid on ACORN’s office in Las Vegas, for any evidence of a coordinated national effort.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election.

Two spokesmen for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, on Thursday said the FBI has not contacted the group.

It’s hard to believe they are doing this again, but they are. You’ll recall that this was done back in 2004 as well. And one of our heroes in the US Attorney’s scandal, David Iglesias, was still on the team then giving juicy quotes to the media:

Voter Probes Raise Partisan Suspicions
Democrats, Allies See Politics Affecting Justice Department’s Anti-Fraud Efforts

By Jo Becker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 20, 2004; Page A05

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias in New Mexico launched a statewide criminal task force to investigate allegations of voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election. The probe came after a sheriff who co-chairs President Bush’s campaign in the state’s largest county complained about thousands of questionable registrations turned in by Democratic-leaning groups.

“It appears that mischief is afoot and questions are lurking in the shadows,” Iglesias told local reporters.

But Democratic Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron, named to the task force to allay concerns that the probe was politically motivated, said the investigation is unnecessary.

“This is just an attempt to let people know that Big Brother is watching,” Vigil-Giron, New Mexico’s chief electionsofficial, said in an interview. “It may well be aimed at trying to keep people away from the polls.”

The probe is one of several criminal inquiries into alleged voter fraud launched in recent weeks in key presidential battlegrounds, including Ohio and West Virginia, as part of a broader initiative by U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft targeting bogus registrations and other election crimes. The Justice Department has asked U.S. attorneys across the country to meet with local elections officials and launch publicity campaigns aimed at getting people to report irregularities.

But that wasn’t good enough. In January, right after the election Iglesias said:

Most of the complaints were completely without basis. At the end of the day we decided we did not have any cases we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt … we cannot prosecute rumor and innuendo.

Rove was not happy about that and it got Iglesias on the hit list. He could have avoided that if he’d played ball like the Milwaukee US Attorney:

The exterior facts are these. We know that Steven Biskupic, the U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee, was initially put on a list of those to be fired by Karl Rove’s office. Then suddenly Mr. Biskupic got deeply engaged in a series of truly dubious cases, all of which had a distinctly Rovian political flavor. First, Biskupic became one of the nation’s most enthusiastic participants in the “voting fraud” fraud. He brought an array of insane cases, including one against a grandmother, which were detailed by The New York Times in an acid review of Biskupic’s mercenary political style. These cases generally involved voters who made honest mistakes about registration, but were prosecuted anyway (with many convicted). The targets were always Democrats who were from the major threat communities publicly identified by Rove—minority groups from the inner city. And the prosecutions were transparently pursued for purposes of voter suppression (i.e., an arguably criminal agenda).

I suspect they were trying to build a Justice Department case that there was a massive voter fraud conspiracy by bringing a bunch of cases against individuals in order to establish a “pattern.” Unfortunately there just aren’t very many cases of legitimate voter fraud by individuals or anyone else.

(Iglesias’ explanation in his book for his original words is somewhat unsatisfying, but in the end he didn’t follow through. And his treatment by the Bush administration, after being a good soldier, but not corrupt enough to illegally indict people, ended up radicalizing him.)

I don’t actually blame the Bush administration for continuing their voter fraud fraud and calling in the FBI in the month before an election. Why shouldn’t they? Nothing really happened as a result of their corrupt practices before, so what could possibly happen to them now that they are lame ducks? And I’m sure they feel pretty confident that the Obama administration isn’t going to want to keep this controversy on the front burner by investigating why the FBI decided to engage in partisan politics in October of 2008. The Obama administration will have its hands full trying to deal with the mess Bush has left and is unlikely, in any case, to want to feed the meme.

The only problem is that this is going to become a rallying cry on the right. Obama and his terrorist friends “ACORN” (which I guess is now kind of like S.P.E.C.T.R.E. or C.H.A.O.S)stole the election. they will use every argument we used against Bush’s installation over the past eight years and will twist us into pretzels explaining why it isn’t the same at all. It will keep the character assassins well employed, with underground DVDs, books and talk radio shows. And it will give justification to the neanderthal base of the Republican party to go completely insane — and keep the pressure on the Republicans to obstruct with everything they’ve got.

You would have thought after a bogus impeachment and dubious elections in both 2000 and 2004 the Democratic party would have stopped ignoring this ongoing (and increasingly successful) propaganda campaign against non-existent voter fraud and its vote suppression effects. It’s not like the Republicans have been afraid to use whatever means they have at their disposal to seize power or cripple the other side with phony scandals and character assasination. Obama may win big and he should have a mandate. But this meme could cost him some much needed credibility when he needs it the most. The press is swallowing this story in big huge gulps and the pushback is inadequate.

Some folks are stepping up with the right message:

People for the American Way (PFAW) will take out a full-page ad (PDF link) in The New York Times charging the right wing with misleading the public in the ACORN voter registration controversy. The ad also challenges the press for failing to examine the fabrications made against the voter registration group and turning a blind-eye toward the right wing’s ongoing effort to disenfranchise voters. The media’s frenzy surrounding the situation has now reached a fever pitch and enabled John McCain’s outrageous and baseless comments in last night’s presidential debate accusing ACORN of “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” “What’s really threatening to destroy the fabric of our democracy are right-wing efforts to suppress millions of newly registered voters, both Democrats and Republicans around the country,” said Kathryn Kolbert, President of People for the American Way. “ACORN should be commended for registering 1.3 million Democrats and Republicans to vote in this historic upcoming Presidential election,” said Kolbert. “Instead, CNN and other typically independent news outlets have focused on sensationalistic stories about a few bad apples instead of investigating the systematic voter disenfranchisement that the right wing has engaged.”

Oh and if you wonder if the Republicans are actually engaged in intimidation and vote suppression, here’s the latest from Milwaukee:

The Wisconsin Republican Party has issued a call for volunteer poll watchers for Election Day, and the criteria is a little specific, seeking especially folks made of sterner stuff. Jonathan Waclawski, the party’s election day operations, wrote in a Sept. 8 e-mail that he needed contact information for people “who would potentially be willing to volunteer … at inner city (more intimidating) polling places. Particularly, I am interested in names of Milwaukee area veterans, policemen, security personnel, firefighters etc. … If you have any connections with such organizations, please pass that information on.” The e-mail fell into the hands of an Obama supporter, who passed it to the Obama campaign, who released it today after a news conference with its campaign director and general counsel, who discussed voter registration, voter education and voter protection. The Obama team pointed to Waclawski’s e-mail as ground-level tactics that could create concerns among voters. “This is much ado about nothing. I don’t see anything wrong with this,” said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman with the Wisconsin GOP. “Intimidating was referring to the polling places, not to poll watchers who would be intimidating,” she said. “The way I read this we are looking for people to go to intimidating places.

They aren’t even trying to cover their tracks.

Update: for a nice primer on the DOJ rules about investigating “voter fruad” in the days before an election, here’s Paul Kiel at TPM. More here at TPM about today’s action.

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We Are All Joe The Plumber Now

by dday

There were early reports by Internet sleuths that the ubiquitous Joe the Plumber, the manifestation of the guy in “Swing Vote” come to life, was not a registered voter in the state of Ohio. As it turns out, he is, but with a slight misspelling – and if all elections systems were run by Republicans, that would be more than enough to disenfranchise him.

Purging voters or blocking their registration because of data errors is disenfranchisement by typo,” said Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal group involved in litigation in those states. “Joe is a perfect example. If he were anew voter, he would be being challenged right now as not eligible to vote.”

“Joe the Plumber is not committing voter fraud by having his name spelled differently on two different lists,” he said.

Republicans have argued that there are safeguards against improper purges, and state officials say their lists are more accurate, and their purges more careful. They also note that voters whose registration is challenged can vote by provisional ballot.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty wrote that “if there’s a typo in the voter rolls, I trust local election officials to sort it out and ensure that that provisional ballot is used and subsequently counted once it’s certain that the voter in question is the person on the registered voter list.”

“Provisional ballots are not a substitute for actually voting,” said Waldman, who pointed to data suggesting provisional ballots are rejected at a high rate, and that voters who are told their names don’t appear on the rolls often simply walk away.

And he produced cases in which typos similar to the one affecting Wurzelbacher have knocked citizens off the rolls.

For instance, Florida officials in 2006 removed the name of Jose Lopez-Sandin, after officials typed his name in as “Joseph Lopez-Sandin.” They also removed the name of Anne Nguyen after election officials typed her name as “Ann Nguyen.”

“Because he’s the famous ‘Joe the Plumber’ it seems like an obvious typo, but this is the sort of error that will keep people from voting,” Waldman said.

The idea that Jim Geraghty has so much “trust” in local election officials is laughable. Because the Republican Party has spent the better part of 40 years trying to break that trust.

There is a current lawsuit in the state of Ohio that would force the Secretary of State to check hundreds of thousands of new registrants, by Friday, against government documents and databases, which is explicitly not required by the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The insertion of “Friday” is important, since this is clearly impossible. We know this is going to result in thousands of Ohioans losing their right to vote at the very minimum. People like Joe the Plumber, who because of a typo would be pushed to use a provisional ballot were he a newly registered voter. (Other reports say this is less of a problem, but I’m going on the word of the Secretary of State).

Our grip on the franchise of voting is so tenuous that a mishit letter at the DMV, poor penmanship on a voter registration form, could be all that stands between you and ineligibility. And this has been exploited by experienced voter suppression operatives in the Republican Party, a number of whom work on John McCain’s campaign, who
have raised this bogus spectre of voter fraud, against all known evidence, to try and lower turnout, historically in lower-class and minority regions of the country. Last night John McCain accused ACORN as “destroying the fabric of democracy.” Physician, heal thyself.

A few braver Republicans are speaking up about this coordinated effort to undermine American confidence in elections and delegitimize any Democratic President.

Florida’s governor says his fellow Republicans may be exaggerating claims of voter fraud in the state.

Gov. Charlie Crist said Wednesday that he has confidence in Secretary of State Kurt Browning, who says there’s only been a scattering of isolated incidents.

Crist said in the closing days of any campaign “there are some who sort of enjoy chaos.” There may be more of that going on than fraud, he said.

I can identify those “some” for you, Gov. Crist. They are the members of your own party who use chaos to create opportunities, in voting as well as governing.

UPDATE: Outrageous. The FBI is now directly investigating ACORN, turning the federal government into an aide for voter suppression. More at my site.

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Eye On Eagle Eye

by digby

In case you’re wondering what the right wing bloggers are obsessing about these days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that they have an ACORN in their bonnets:

Michelle Malkin: ACORN Watch: RICO suit filed in Ohio RedState: More On The Non-Existent Threat Of Voter Fraud Hot Air: Now Minnesota joins the ACORN parade

National Review Online – The Corner: ACORN Ace Of Spades HQ: Minnesota Investigating ACORN, Too Riehl World View: What To Watch For In MN ACORN Investigation Instapundit: Still more on what ACORN is doing.

Here’s a taste:

Wizbang: Outright Fraud v. Phantom Suppression:

“ACORN – An ever cooperative organization with standards so lofty they struggle to meet them. They are merely providing a public service.”

A convenient loop when your very defense is your offensive strategy: Overwhelm the local systems and staffs, thereby increasing the likelihood of fraudulently inflating vote totals with multiple-instance voters completing multiple ballots. But rest assured, ACORN is cooperating fully and eager to assist in investigations. With so much to cross-check and verify, they should have internal findings for investigators in a timely manner. Sometime around, say, January 30th.”

Back in the day I used to get criticized by certain people for not talking more about the black box voting and touch screen systems. I always replied that I thought it would take a whistleblower of epic gravitas to prove such a thing, but in the meantime we were developing a theme of stolen elections that the right wing would gleefully appropriate the minute they were in danger of losing an election. And I knew this would gall me beyond belief since the one consistent thing conservatives of both parties have done since the beginning of popular voting was to try to keep the riff raff from casting a vote. When the Democrats were the southern party, they certainly did their best to keep blacks from voting. But ever since the Southern Strategy, it’s been the Republicans who made a fetish of it.

Here’s a little history lesson from Perlstein:

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.’ Bailey said the Republican program, called “Operation Eagle Eye,” is really “a program to cut down the vote in predominantly Democratic areas by harassing, frightening, and confusing the voters.” He continued: “‘The strategy is to help Senator Goldwater by cutting down the vote in large cities in states with many electoral votes. “‘As such, it is an admission to the American people that if all Americans were free to vote they would overwhelmingly elect Lyndon B. Johnson, but if millions of Americans could be prevented from voting, Senator Goldwater might succeed.’ “‘Operation Eagle Eye’ was publicly established by the Republican National Committee on October 13. To make the program nation-wide a ‘ballot security’ official–the very name suggests that voting is illegal or at least dangerous–was named in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. “‘In one state, Minnesota, ‘Operation Ballot Security’ issued a seven-page single-space private memorandum detailing a variety of methods for challenging voters at the polls, with instructions to discourage helpful judges in Democratic precincts, to cut off waiting lines in Democratic precincts but not in Republican precincts, and to encourage stalling in Democratic precincts while preventing stalling in Republican precincts. “‘The Minnesota document goes so far as to state its purpose, not as encouraging each American to exercise his right to vote freely but ‘to safeguard the investment of time, money, and effort that the Republican Party, its volunteers, its candidates, and their volunteers have made in this election.’ “As for specific instructions, the Republican memorandum says: “‘If any questions or dispute arises, refer to the pertinent authority cited below and (when it is to your party’s interest) insist that the law be followed.’ (Emphasis added). “‘Stalling in booths is a common trick when lines are long in order to discourage those waiting. In GOP precincts, keep lines moving.’ “Memorandum like this leave no doubt in my mind that the Republican strategy for November 3 is the excessive, indiscriminate and unnecessary challenge of every voter. “How else will ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ work? A Wall Street Journal article of October 22 by Stanley Penn told how. “Penn quoted one ‘ballot security’ official as saying he planned to equip his poll watchers with cameras to frighten people into believing that voting irregularities can be photographed. He wrote: ‘The official notes that even if poll watchers don’t now how to use the cameras, potential Democratic wrong-doers may be frightened off.’ Here is an example of using a camera to intimidate a voter. “‘Another example used by Penn was a booklet written by Louisiana Republican ‘ballot security’ chief James A. Reeder, who urged his party to make all efforts to enlist the help of sheriffs and local police on eleciton day. The booklet explained why: ‘We are advised that all sheriffs in the State of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.’ “This booklet is one of the most damning aspects of this so-called ‘Operation Eagle Eye.’ When a political party publicly aligns itself with law enforcement officers in behalf of its candidate, this is certainly not the best way of promoting freedom of choice among the voters. this is the worst sort of intimidation. “‘Operation Eagle Eye’ is not the only Republican group that is working along these divisive lines. “In Chicago, the Republican ‘Operation Double Check’ was responsible for the charge by Elroy C. Sanquist Jr., GOP candidate for attorney general, that more than 4,000 voters on the city’s Democratic rolls were ineligible. “Then there is the ‘Honest Ballot Association,’ which Journal reporter Penn unknowingly described as ‘nonpartisan’ in its plans to send 500 lawyers and volunteers to New York precincts alone. “But the ‘Honest Ballot Association’ was the prime force in a voter intimidation campaign conducted in Detroit two years ago, a campaign that now appears to have been a dry run for the Republicans nation-wide effort this year. “In Detroit, less than a month before election day in 1962, an organization called ‘The Committee for Honest Elections’ was established and immediately proceeded to: “–Mail 159,000 copies of a letter misrepresenting the Michigan election law to ‘high mobility’ areas that were predominantly Democratic. The letter created the impression that anyone who had moved 30 days before the election could not vote. It also appealed for informers to come forward and report suspected cases of voter fraud. “–Plan to flood these Democratic areas with fliers that said: ‘WANTED–FOR VOTER FRAUD.’ “–Recruit 600 ‘challengers’ who would use ‘Honest Ballot Association’ credentials to indiscriminately challenge voters on election day. “‘Fortunately, sufficient publicity and court action blocked these measures for the most part and the planned voter harassment and intimidation was rendered ineffective. “I deeply resent ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ and these other programs that seek to deprive our citizens of their Constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. “‘Operation Eagle Eye’ is not even founded on the principles of freedom of choice and freedom to vote. It speaks only of alleged frauds, alleged wrongdoings. Even the press release announcing its formation did not seek to encourage voters. It sought to frighten them with this headline: ‘GOP Launches Nation Wide Campaign To Prevent “Any Repetition of 1960 Voting Fraud Scandals.”‘ “I believe the only way to have a fair election in this country is to encourage voters of both parties–not just of one party–to come forward, along with independent voters. This has been the basis on which the Democratic National Committee has conducted the entire 1964 campaign. “We want Americans to exercise their right of freedom of choice.”

plus ça change…

It’s not like this ACORN bs is unprecedented, is it? They do this stuff over and over and over again and they’re doing it again. After Jesse Jackson’s 1980s registration drives, they totally professionalized Operation Eagle Eye and now it’s a national program. The right wing bloggers can pretend that vote suppression is a phantom all they want, but the evidence is clear. (On the other hand, the evidence of systematic voter fraud is simply non-existent.)

It appears that Obama is on course to win big enough that this won’t work. And although the wingnuts have learned a thing or two about how to extend these themes beyond election day and keep their base riled up to obstruct and delegitimize the new president, the country is facing an economic crisis which tends to focus people’s minds a bit. So, I’m hopeful that this won’t have salience beyond a few cranks.

Still, we’ve never been in this particular place before. Obama is black and that seems to make the lizard brains on the right start foaming at the mouth even more than usual. And even if that weren’t so, they have developed a conceit ever since Reagan that they are entitled to the presidency and a Democrat simply cannot legitimately win the White House. They will be tested this time out, but I doubt they’ll give it up.

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Forgetting Yesterday

by digby

As we go down the rabbit hole of voter fraud once again, it seems as if it would be a good idea to revisit the recent history of GOP program of vote suppression. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that after the US Attorney scandals, which were tagged directly to illegal attempts to prosecute bogus voter fraud,that the press is swallowing this ACORN stuff whole.

Just as a reminder, here’s an article from Salon from a year or so ago about Rove and his legacy of election stealing:

By evil chance, I spent the Saturday night before Election Day 2000 at a jolly dinner for high-level Republicans. Most of the talk over the entrees concerned why then-candidate George W. Bush had been too pusillanimous to tell the voters that Al Gore was not just a liberal, but a Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist. But as the desserts circulated, so too did a piece of comic relief — an anonymous leaflet explaining to voters that because of heavy voter registration, the rules had been changed: Republicans would vote on Tuesday, Democrats and independents on Wednesday. I think of that dinner whenever I read about the widening scandal of the U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzo is probably the most endangered man since William Tell’s son Walter. The pattern behind the scandal, however, transcends Gonzales’ fate or that of his underlings. At least part of the U.S. attorneys plot seems to derive from the “election fraud” hoax that Republicans are trying to perpetrate in order to gain control of the country’s voter lists. So nailing this inept crew of thugs won’t be good enough. We need laws protecting the right to vote from the kind of phony, partisan prosecutors that Gonzales, Rove and Co. were trying to put in place, and from the punitive, restrictive voter-ID laws that are a prominent part of the far-right political agenda. Republicans do cherish their little practical jokes — the leaflets in African-American neighborhoods warning that voters must pay outstanding traffic tickets before voting; the calls in Virginia in 2006 from the mythical “Virginia Election Commission” warning voters they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls. The best way to steal an election is the old-fashioned way: control who shows up. It’s widely known that Republicans do better when the turnout is lighter, whiter, older and richer; minorities, young people and the poor are easy game for hoaxes and intimidation. 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.” One of the aims of the abortive purge of U.S. attorneys was to punish those who refused to toe the line on the new emphasis on alleged voter fraud. A few fired prosecutors would serve as examples to the rest –- either move to criminalize the election process or face dismissal. But the assault on voter fraud was a solution looking for a problem. As part of the Help America Vote Act, Republicans insisted on creating the Election Assistance Commission, which commissioned studies of the asserted problem. When the studies failed to turn up evidence of fraud nationwide, appointed Republican officials on the EAC insisted that the language say only that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud in elections” — the same approach to inconvenient evidence that’s made the Bush global-warming policy the envy of the world.

Today, they’ve trotted out Village Wise Man John Danforth, who almost certainly gave the entire village a collective thrill up their legs. He is a high priest of bipartisan seriousness and if he says there’s a problem with voter fraud I have little doubt that the establishment will immediately start fulminating about it despite the fact that Karl Rove and the GOP have been up to their necks in vote suppression for years. Danforth and Rudman (also on deck to help) wouldn’t lie. They are “above politics” don’t you know.

Their full blown propaganda campaign of the moment is aimed at furthering several different related goals. The first is to freak out the local registration offices, many of which are run by small town bureaucrats who are either subject to the propaganda or are GOP partisans themselves. They want to create a feeling of chaos around the voting processes and call the absentee ballots into question.

The second is to intimidate voters into not participating and making it difficult for those who do. They want people to believe that they will be grilled and scrutinized when they try to vote and perhaps make lines long and the process so arduous that people will give up.

Third, if the election is close, they will challenge its validity in court. After all, that worked like a charm in 2000. But barring that — and it looks like it won’t be close enough to do that — they are laying the ground work to delegitimize the victory. That is an essential tool for rebuilding their movement and crating justification for the kind of character assassination and obstructionism that is their specialty.

If Ann Kornblut on MSNBC a few minutes ago is any indication the press sees this as a “both sides do it” sort of thing. Democrats complained about Bush vs Gore and vote caging and phone jamming and the vote suppression program in Ohio over the past two very close elections. Therefore, it’s equivalent that the Republicans would complain about voter fraud and ACORN. The difference, of course, is that vote suppression was so inculcated in to the republican governing apparatus that they fired the US Attorneys for failing do their bidding and bring false voter fraud cases. That should be just a little bit of a heads up about who’s doing what here.

The media needs to talk to Iglesias and McKay and some of the others involved in that scandal to remind themselves about the kind of systematic pressure that was brought to bear to effect the outcomes of elections during the Bush years. It might just wise them up to how absurd this hissy fit about ACORN really is. (But I doubt it … )

Update: here’s a good overview on the voter fraud fraud.

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The Fraud Of Fraud

by digby

It’s becoming clear that the fraudulent GOP “vote fraud” project is up and running at full speed and will likely be a huge story for well beyond the election. Rick Perlstein had an interaction with John Fund recently, who said right out that Democrats didn’t believe in election law and would try to count illegal votes. He’s selling books so perhaps his hyperbole is just salesmanship, but his prediction that a close election will be thrown into doubt because of Republican efforts to challenge every provisional ballot sounds quite plausible to me.

The process of turning ACORN into a terrorist sleeper cell has begun and I see little hope that they aren’t going to be successful. The press is clearly fascinated by the right wing caricature of a group of shiftless “community organizers” trading crack for Obama votes in the inner city and have done exactly zero research into the issue, so the reporting has been hysterical.

I have written many times about this report (pdf) from 2004 about the history of Republican vote suppression efforts and I urge you to take the time to read the whole thing if you haven’t. This has been a tool of conservatives of all parties since the beginning of the Republic, but it’s only been since the 1980s that the Republicans professionalized it with the formation of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The report shows that the Jesse Jackson campaign’s successful new voter registration efforts was a particular impetus for GOP efforts to promote the false allegation that there is systematic voter fraud in the land.

This is the first election where we may see the full effect of this project. The Republican National Lawyers association were a vital part of the Florida recount (they even give out an award to certain lawyers featuring some of the famous Florida chads) but this may be where the true genius of the project lies. We are going to have what appears to be a substantial Democratic victory by an African American with a strong minority constituency. The totals may not be close. But by ratcheting up this spectre of “voter fraud” in advance, they are helping to lay the groundwork for delegitimizing a president Obama in the eyes of a large number of Americans.

That the media is running after this story like a bunch of toddlers gleefully chasing puppies is typical, but still disheartening. It was only a couple of weeks ago that a special prosecutor was named in the US Attorney firings after the Inspector General found that that some of them, notably David Iglesias, were fired because they failed to prosecute bogus voter fraud cases. In light of that you would think that the press would be a bit skeptical of voter fraud allegations by Republicans.

Instead you have this:

CNN’s Drew Griffin took his network’s Special Investigations Unit to Lake County, IN yesterday in an attempt to document election problems in the area. Did he discuss the active and legitimate voter suppression campaign taking place there, in which local Republicans are blocking early voting in three Democratic leaning cities? Not at all. Instead, he focused on faulty registration cards submitted by the current bete noir of the conservative movement, the community organizing group ACORN. What’s worse, his report (and most other media accounts) grossly misrepresented the intent and professionalism of ACORN’s registration efforts. (video at the link) In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days. What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. […] The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ‘suspicious.’ ” Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana. So what explains all the faulty registration forms? There are two probable causes. One is that some registration forms can contain simple errors. That means the registrant didn’t intend to subvert the election process, but rather just made an honest mistake. The other scenario involves the canvassers themselves. If employees want to boost their performance in the eyes of their boss or simply don’t want to do the work of finding legitimate new voters, they could turn in forged or faulty registration forms.* This is illegal and can wreak havoc on registrar’s offices, but there’s no evidence these imaginary people turn around and vote in November. Given Indiana’s strict voter ID law, it would actually be next to impossible for anyone to cast a ballot under the name of a submarine sandwich chain or a dead person. But these facts haven’t stopped conservative critics and some in the media from incorrectly implying that ACORN’s faulty registrations prove the organization is trying to forge votes and steal the election in November. An editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily said, “[John] McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest.” CNN even set up Griffin’s segment with a graphic that read “Voter Fraud?”

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that he is.

McCain’s ad featuring ACORN (which dday discussed yesterday) has been removed from Youtube. But here’s the script:

JOHN MCCAIN: I’m John McCain and I approve this message.

ANNCR: Who is Barack Obama?

A man with “a political baptism performed at warp speed.”

Vast ambition.

After college, he moved to Chicago.

Became a community organizer.

There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN.

He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

What did ACORN in Chicago engage in?

Bullying banks.

Intimidation tactics.

Disruption of business.

ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans.

The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.

No wonder Obama’s campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, “Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.”

But Obama’s ties to ACORN run long and deep.

He taught classes for ACORN.

They even endorsed him for President.

But now ACORN is in trouble.

REPORTER: There are at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms.

ANNCR: Massive voter fraud.

And the Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front for get out the vote efforts.

Pressuring banks to issue risky loans.

Nationwide voter fraud.

Barack Obama.

Bad judgment. Blind ambition.

Too risky for America.

It looks right now as if the election might not be close enough for the Republicans to make a plausible case for outright theft of the election through voter fraud. But as I said, they are certainly laying the groundwork for a propaganda campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama. The beauty of the voter fraud fraud is that they win even when they lose.

The conservatives’ long term goal is to make citizens so cynical about the electoral system that they just don’t vote. the fewer people who participate in democracy the easier it is for the aristocracy to maintain control.

ACLUORN

by dday

As the McCain campaign sinks into the fever swamps and goes about as far as you can go before someone cries “racism,” they’ve teamed up their irresponsible behavior and incitement to riot with the project to delegitimize the election itself. They just released a Web video highlighting Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN.

This is all they’ve got left, so they’re going with it. A dark, twisted conspiracy theory based on ignorance and deep-seeded xenophobia and hatred. And the BBQ-stained media is helping them along by highlighting the couple thousand voter registration forms (at MOST, and that’s probably exaggerated) that ACORN alerted election authorities about being fraudulent, instead of the 1.3 million voters they registered accurately, most of them in low- and middle-income communities. This is an attack on people’s right to vote and participate in politics.

In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days.

What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. […]

The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ‘suspicious.’ “

Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana.

They turn THEMSELVES in and these idiots on the right think they’re scamming the election. They’re nothing but a scapegoat.

In addition, as Adam Serwer notes there is a dinstinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. To my knowledge Mickey Mouse or Moamar Qadafy or George Jetson has never attempted to vote in a national election, even if their “registrations” got by the eyes of censors, which they wouldn’t, if election officials paid attention to ACORN flagging the bad forms. In fact, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud whatsoever, and this has been verified dozens of times. Josh Marshall explains in a piercing post:

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don’t remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to.

In the main I would agree that it’s not a good idea to pay people to register voters, especially on a per-registration basis, because it incentivizes employees to falsify forms to keep their numbers up. In the end, the only people harmed by bad voter registration forms are ACORN themselves, because it means they overpaid their workers. I would say the same thing about signature gatherers for ballot initiatives. I would support that legislation if it came up for a vote. But the conservatives never introduce such legislation, even though they yell and carp about this every couple years. They don’t want to fix the problem. They want an organization they can point at and demonize, and ACORN fits the bill. They want to use the power they have through the right-wing media and the Republican National Committee and even the Justice Department to push this narrative of Democratic perfidy and black people stealing elections.

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That’s the key. What you’re hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

Meanwhile, there’s a very real story about thousands of voter registrations being blocked in swing states, mass purges of the voter rolls, and all kinds of fallout from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed by Republicans and signed by George W. Bush. But that doesn’t get mentioned, because there’s no group like ACORN to tar and feather.

If you’re poor, if you’re struggling, if you are a minority, Republicans don’t want you to vote. And furthermore, they don’t care if this backfires. They mean to call into question the election and the office of the Presidency itself under a Democratic Administration. They win either way.

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Delegitimization Project

by dday

The polls are surging, the fundamentals of the election are in the favor of the Democrats, and time is running out. That’s why today, the Republicans kicked their ground game into high gear.

Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state’s office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

ACORN, which is going to supplant the ACLU as the organization conservatives blame for all the world’s ills, routinely flags suspicious voter registration applications for election officials generated by their registration drives. This does not sound like the work of an organization dedicated to stealing elections – the whole “we turn ourselves in” part works against that. This is from ACORN’s statement today:

Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 “problem application packages,” which involved 33 former canvassers.

On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19^th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.

Today’s raid by the Secretary of State’s Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls.”

So you have 46 bad applications out of 80,000 new voters registered in Clark County. And of course the thing about bad voter registrations is that they are easily flagged and almost by definition cannot result in a fraudulent vote. If someone submits a registration form with the names of the Dallas Cowboys on them, that won’t result in the Dallas Cowboys voting in Nevada. The same with duplicate voter registrations. It would be the most time-consuming and least likely to be successful vote stealing effort in history.

But that’s hardly the point. The Bush Administration sought to make this a priority months ago by creating joint task forces to investigate voter fraud. The Attorney General of Wisconsin, in a bid to become the next Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell, openly boasted about taking action – with the Justice Department – over this non-existent problem at the RNC (how nonpartisan of him):

“We are out there front and center everyday and you’ll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don’t have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal,” he continued.

This isn’t about stopping the scourge of voter fraud. It’s about using that as a crutch to stop people from voting, to put up obstructions and increase the burden among Democratic communities. They put fliers in black neighborhoods warning of prosecution if black people vote, and they distribute false information designed to get students to be afraid to vote at their colleges. Voter fraud is the hook on which they hang this cloak of suppression.

Here’s Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A recently unearthed e-mail from a Republican strategist in New Mexico shows the unbridled cynicism that underlies claims about fraudulent voting. Patrick Rogers, former lawyer for the New Mexico Republican Party, was among the party hacks pushing for criminal investigations into alleged voter fraud. He clearly was hoping that the threat of legal sanctions would intimidate Democrats and aid Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), who was in a tight race for re-election. According to a new report from the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general, Rogers wrote in September 2004:

“I believe the [voter] ID issue should be used at all levels — federal, state legislative races and Heather’s race. … You are not going to find a better wedge issue. … This is the single best wedge issue, ever in [New Mexico].”

The McCain campaign is doing the same thing with this perverse charge that Barack Obama’s contributions are “shadowy” and “suspect.” Because donors under $200 don’t have to be itemized on FEC reports, they are essentially attacking the strength of Obama’s small-donor base in much the same way that these bogus fraud allegations attack the strength of Democratic voter turnout.

This may not be enough to turn the tide of the election, but will certainly be enough of a seed of doubt for the right wing noise machine to cultivate for years, delegitimizing an Obama victory and setting the stage for another wave of backlash politics. If you thought the right had a persecution complex while in the majority, wait until you see it in the minority.

…it’s been brought to my attention that the Secretary of State and the Attorney General of Nevada are Democrats. The investigation is part of a joint task force with the US Attorney of Nevada and the FBI, in addition to state officials. I seem to remember the US Attorney scandal being about firing prosecutors who wouldn’t vigorously pursue voter fraud allegations. I’ll leave it to you to decide who’s running the show here, the state or the feds.

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You Don’t Get Your Oversight

by dday

Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten won’t be testifying to Congress anytime soon. Not until their Dear Leader is on an island somewhere:

Time will run out on this year’s congressional session before the battle between two branches of government can be resolved, according to the ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The ruling essentially pushes any resolution on the politically charged case until next year.

“The present dispute is of potentially great significance for the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches,” wrote the panel of judges, two of whom were appointed by Republicans.

Still, the judges wrote, “Even if expedited, this controversy will not be fully and finally resolved by the judicial branch … before the 110th Congress ends on January 3, 2009. At that time, the 110th House of Representatives will cease to exist as a legal entity, and the subpoenas it has issued will expire.”

There you have it, folks. The White House has basically altered the relationship between the executive and legislative branch permanently. Future Presidents now know that if they push aggressively enough, if they evade oversight and subpoenas and dare the Congress to stop them, nothing will come of their actions, no matter how illegal they are.

It’s worth going back and understanding what the White House actually did in this case, a series of events now illuminated by the recent OIG report on Justice Department politicization, the facts of which did nothing to persuade the circuit court that decisive action needed to be taken. We now know that the executive branch, led by Karl Rove, absolutely played a role in the firing of US Attorneys in 2006. There are emails between Rove and officials in New Mexico proving his role in the firing of David Iglesias, for example, because of Iglesias’ refusal to swiftly prosecute Democrats and bogus voter fraud cases. They made room for a political friend of Rove’s, Tim Griffin, at the US Attorney’s office in Arkansas by firing Bud Cummins. And they conspired with Senator Kit Bond to remove the federal prosecutor in Missouri:

In Missouri, evidently, Republican politics are exceptionally bloody, with clans fighting like rival mobs whose carnage spreads to other locales and sweeps in innocent civilians.

This is what former U.S. attorney Todd P. Graves discovered when he was ousted in January 2006 by the Justice Department. He got his first inkling of trouble in 2004 not from the department, but from an aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), whose office was then embroiled in a bitter dispute with Graves’s brother, a U.S. congressman.

In a telephone call, the aide angrily warned Graves that if he did not intervene on Bond’s behalf — against his brother’s chief of staff — the senator “could no longer protect [his] job.” Graves refused, and a little over a year later, he was bounced from his Kansas City office after Bond’s staff made repeated complaints to the White House counsel’s office.

More on the Graves firing here.

This is all out in the open despite pervasive, continuous stonewalling on the part of White House officials, refusing to comply with any and all investigations into their conduct, including the OIG report put together by their own Justice Department. But the evidence is nonetheless clear and thorough.

The White House’s active involvement in the firings, as depicted in the report, can be divided into two broad categories: First, its role in initiating and promoting the overall plan to remove an unspecified number of U.S. attorneys — traditionally treated as apolitical prosecutors who operate independently from the political agenda of the administration — deemed insufficiently committed to the Bush agenda. And second, its apparent work in pushing specifically for several of the most high-profile dismissals.

You can see the wealth of evidence at the handy link from TPM Muckraker. It need not be repeated here.

What must be repeated is how easily the White House has evaded any accountability for these clear crimes of politicization of the Justice Department. They took advantage of the lack of teeth in such federal statutes like the Hatch Act, which offers remedies only to the firing of those responsible, by having the perpetrators resign. They allowed an investigation to be released but only one coming from an internal monitor, not an independent investigation from Congress or a special counsel. The report was so damning that the Attorney General was forced to name a prosecutor to investigate the crimes further, but he refused to make her independent from the DoJ, and he gave her a 60 day mandate so that the investigation could not spread beyond the current Presidential term in office, after the election and before the new President begins his term. And now, as that investigation will be wrapped up before Miers, Bolten or anyone else would ever have to testify, their testimony will not factor into this accelerated timeline.

Indeed, in order to get Miers and Bolten on the record, the House Judiciary Committee would have to file subpoenas all over again, as they will have expired, and go through the exact same stonewalling. Thus far absolutely nobody has paid even the smallest price for the US Attorney purges, other than moving from their cushy jobs to some other cushy wingnut welfare sinecure.

This is the crisis of accountability we are facing due to the expansiveness of executive power over decades and consistent enabling from the Congress as they fail time and again to enact basic oversight in real time. This scandal represents the failure of our system, a loophole in the Constitution that extremists have successfully exploited.

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Depressing

by digby

… but not surprising:

The presidential campaign, in the almost all-white counties of southwestern Virginia, has produced an outcome that few people expected: a frank discussion of race. Voters sometimes sound as if they are reasoning with themselves and working through their own complex views as they talk through the choice they face this November.

“I’ve never been prejudiced in my life,” said Sharon Fleming, 69, the wife of a retired coal miner, who spends hours at the union hall calling voters on behalf of Obama. “My niece married a black, and I don’t have a problem with it. Now, I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama.”

Obama beat Hillary Rodham Clinton convincingly in the Virginia Democratic primary, but his supporters have known they face a challenge in this part of the state, just as Obama has faced challenges elsewhere among white voters from rural and working-class households.

He took 64% of the primary vote statewide but just 9% here in coal-rich Buchanan County, for instance, and 12% in neighboring Dickenson County. Though he is now the Democratic nominee, many voters are cool to him — even some of the party’s own leaders and precinct captains.

“I haven’t found in my precinct one out of five that will vote for Obama,” said Tommy Street, the party’s vice chairman in Buchanan (pronounced buck-AN-in) County.

Street, 78, counts himself among the doubters, citing Obama’s alliance with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He has always voted Democratic, he said, but this year plans to leave the presidential ballot blank.

Some here blame Obama’s troubles on his mixed-race background (his mother was a white Kansan, his father a black Kenyan). Others say his journey from Hawaii and Indonesia to Harvard and big-city Chicago politics makes him an oddity.

[…]

Ben and Beth Bailey sat in the back and clapped politely, but they remained unpersuaded. They said they were likely to break from their tradition of voting Democratic and might well not vote at all.

Obama “just doesn’t seem like he’s from America,” said Beth Bailey, 25. Ben Bailey, 32, noted that Obama’s middle name is Hussein, “and we know what that means.”

Beth’s father, Josh Viers, is the party’s Whitewood precinct chairman, responsible for working the polls and urging Democrats to vote the party line. He came around to backing Obama only recently, and reluctantly.

“Am I racial? Am I prejudiced? No, I’m not,” said Viers. Still, he is frustrated that his job is to persuade other Democrats to back a black man.

“Somebody in Buchanan County or in the United States can look at him and say, ‘He’s not my color,’ ” said Viers. “Why put yourself in that position? We had a shot four years ago, and the people listened to lies, rumors, negative ads and got us beat. Bush got him a second term, and look what it got us.”

Viers said he will do his best to help Obama on election day. But local Democratic leaders said they could not rely on all of their precinct chairs to follow suit.

These attitudes are dying out, but they obviously aren’t gone yet. I heard an NPR report from rural Pennsylvania he other day in which the people interviewed sounded very much like this, so it isn’t just the south. But we knew that.

Probably of more importance is the fact that Virginia, like virtually all the swing states is very likely to be the scene of some shenanigans with the electoral system itself:

On July 31, 2008 Montgomery County held 47,604 voters. On October 1, the number increased to 51,796 voters. While the number may not seem like a titanic increase, Wertz said that, on average, voter rolls stay roughly consistent from year to year, especially in more transient communities such as those that house large universities. This influx of voter registration forms filled up by students is causing hassle in the Montgomery County Government Center. At one point, Wertz had received 3,000 in one week’s time. Registrars from other districts and volunteers have been staffing the registrar’s office nearly around the clock, often working through the weekends and until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. to process all of the new registrations. Wertz said he “can’t even fathom the number” of eventual registrations.In the 2004 election, 45,079 citizens were registered to vote in Montgomery County, up from 41,063 in 2000. In Blacksburg alone the tally was 14,779 on July 1, 2008. The number rose to 14,821 on Aug. 1, 2008 and 15,401 on Sept. 1, 2008. The total number of registered voters in Blacksburg in the 2004 election, as of Sept. 1, 2004, was14,166.These numbers may have been exacerbated by a surfeit of misinformation from voter registration drives concerning absentee balloting. Wertz expressed concern over reports reaching him from students and parents about misinformation coming from campaigners. Campaigners are reported to have been “telling people that they should not vote absentee. That by voting absentee their votes would not be counted. ‘The only time that absentee ballots are counted is when it’s a tight race,’ (campaigners) were telling people,” Wertz said.[…]
Republican Del. Dave Nutter said that he had seen polling data suggesting that 80 percent of Virginians may turn out to vote on Election Day. The high voter registrations in the several different districts is sure to cause long lines on Election Day, Wertz said. Further, a spike in registrations from the E-1 district, encompassing the majority of student residence halls on the south side of campus, from 3,526 registered voters on June 3 to 4,829 on Oct. 1, makes E-1 the largest voting precinct in Montgomery County.Elected officials, political parties and poll workers alike foresee a crowded Nov. 4. …To quicken the pace at the polls, students should attempt to bring their voter registration card, mailed to the address at which they registered, with them to the polling site. Failing this, any first-time voter will have to produce a form of government-issued identification — a driver’s license or a Hokie Passport — or proof of their local residence, such as a utility bill or car registration …
First-time voters, however, without some form of identification will be asked to fill out the identity statement. Then, these voters will cast a provisional ballot, a paper ballot that will be counted along with absentee ballots at the close of polls if no irregularities arise.[…]
An issue that could thwart these preventive measures is a practice known as voter caging. The procedure for challenging a voter’s registration in Virginia is as follows: Virginia Code 24.2-651 states that “any qualified voter may, and the officers of election shall, challenge the vote of any person who is listed on the poll book but is known or suspected not to be a qualified voter.” Officers of elections can, however, remove anyone from a polling place for being unduly disruptive of the voting process, Wertz said.A political tactic with a history of challenging minority voters, the practice involves the challenging of voter rolls of a given locale in the hopes of disenfranchising legitimate voters. While not necessarily illegal, challenging can pose significant problems in terms of discounting those without documentation and may cause general frustration, leading to longer lines. In Ohio in 2004, 35,000 people were challenged while going to the polls. While representatives of both Republican and Democratic parties have said that neither side has plans to challenge voters, the flood of student voters and students’ typical leftward leanings may leave the question of voter caging heavy on the minds of some.”If Virginia proves to be, as many speculate, a battleground state, the stakes are higher. The games are dirtier. If we see come Election Day, Virginia could come in play; unfortunately we will probably see some attempts to prevent people from voting,” Willis said.

John Fund, who wrote a book recently about the (bogus) right wing issue of voter fraud, is talking constantly about how the Democrats are going to try to get election officials to count the votes of people who are unregistered via the provisional ballots.One of the reasons why they would want to do this, aside from making the lines so long that people will not be able to devote the time, is to throw the election into doubt and have the courts intervene, (which we know they are willing to do.) I suspect that it isn’t going to be close enough at this point to work, but if it is, the fact that Obama will be winning with a lot of new younger voters and minorities is likely to create the myth that he is an illegitimate president.

The Right loves nothing more than to take a liberal complaint and project it back into our faces like a laser beam. If the jokers over at the Corner can shriek about sexism against Palin, as if they all wear funny hats every day in solidarity with Bella Abzug, then they can surely claim that the Democrats stole the election. You know they’re going to if they can.

Here is a web site with state by state election laws. If you aren’t registered, you need to do it quickly and you need to read carefully about what the state law requires at the polling place. You may have to bring a DNA sample and the family Bible in some states these days, since the Supreme Court decided that even though there are no known cases of systematic voter fraud, the Republicans should still be able to suppress the vote by making it a royal pain in the ass.

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The Katherine Harris Legacy

by digby

The Brennan Center is following the vote suppression efforts around the country and released a new study yesterday that sends chills down my spine:

Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law released one of the first systematic examinations of voter purging, a practice—often controversial—of removing voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls—click here for report. After a detailed study of the purge practices of 12 states, Voter Purges reveals that election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Upon the release of Voter Purges, today the Brennan Center and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law began filing public records requests with election officials in 12 states in order to expose the purges that happened this year.

“Purges can be an important way to ensure that voter rolls are dependable, accurate and up-to-date,” said Myrna Pérez, counsel at the Brennan Center and the author of the report. “Far too frequently, however, eligible, registered citizens show up to vote and discover their names have been removed from the voter lists because election officials are maintaining their voter rolls with little accountability and wildly varying standards,” Myrna Pérez stated.

pull quoteAccording to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, between 2004 and 2006, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls. While the secret and inconsistent manner in which purges are conducted make it difficult to know exactly how many voters have been stricken from voting lists erroneously, Voter Purges finds four problematic practices with voter purges that continue to threaten voters in 2008: purges rely on error-ridden lists; voters are purged secretly and without notice; bad “matching” criteria mean that thousands of eligible voters will be caught up in purges; and insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to erroneous or manipulated purges. The report reveals that purge practices vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that there is a lack of consistent protections for voters, and that there are often opportunities for mischief and mistakes in the purge process.

“The voter rolls are the gateway to voting, and a citizen typically cannot cast a vote that will count unless his or her name appears on the rolls. Purges remove names from the voter rolls, typically preventing wrongfully purged voters from having their votes counted. Given the close margins by which elections are won, the number of people wrongfully purged can make a difference. We should not tolerate purges that are conducted behind closed doors, without public scrutiny, and without adequate recourse for affected voters,” said Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center

CBS news did a story on it last night. You can see the segment here.

Much of this “purging” is undoubtedly innocent. But when you have national vote suppression projects like those initiated by the Republican National Lawyers Association, scandals like the US Attorney firings around the same issues, and a decades long campaign to create a sense of crisis around something that doesn’t exist in any meaningful way — voter fraud — this kind of thing becomes a lot more suspicious.

We have special challenges with this election that make this election potentially open for all kinds of shennanigans — the Democrats have registered millions of first time voters, who, by definition, have no experience with the system and can often be manipulated in the face of difficulty at the polls. And, as ever, creating difficulties and delays alone tends to keep some people from voting because they just don’t have the time to spend in long lines.

I would suspect, just as an observer of human beings over the years, that even honest Republican election officials have been persuaded by their party’s own propaganda that their primary responsibility is keeping people from voting illegally. I’m sure they think they are doing their patriotic duty by ensuring that felons and illegal immigrants and unregistered young voters can’t vote. And if some legitimate Democratic voters are kept from casting a vote, well — it’s the price we pay for vigilance.

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