A view from Main Street America by a congenital Democrat and truth-seeking attorney. Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community. Posting on the Internets since 2004.
Showing posts with label Voter Registration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voter Registration. Show all posts
Indiana judge rejects Republican party lawsuit seeking to shut down early voting in Lake County, Indiana (Indiana's second-largest county).
Wisconsin judge rejects state Attorney General von Hollen's lawsuit trying to have all new registrations checked against flawed state databases. (No coincidence, von Hollen is a Republican and co-chair in Wisconsin for John McCain's presidential campaign.)
In Ohio, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has issued two directives: (1) election officials cannot challenge voters on Election Day or reject absentee ballots based solely on discrepancies from verifying new voter registrations, and (2) county election workers cannot uses mismatches as the basis for not counting an absentee ballot.
The Nevada Secretary of State has ruled against a Republican Party motion to have voter registrations invalidated for typos.
Bad:
Military ballots are thrown out in Fairfax County, Virginia because while they comply with federal law, they don't comply with a Virginia law requiring the voter's current address be on an absentee ballot.
In recent weeks, the McCain campaign has been attacking ACORN, a widely respected voter registration organization, claiming ACORN knowingly participated in "voter fraud." In reality, this is just another calculated attempt by the McCain campaign and the RNC to suppress new and marginalized voters.
You can help spread the truth about ACORN by hosting a house party. Have your friends over and make new friends while watching ACORN's video and Brave New Films' REAL McCain series to keep the dialogue going about these issues.
This is from the statement issued by the Michigan Democratic Party:
An agreement announced today by Obama for America, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the Michigan Republican Party, the Michigan Democratic Party, the Macomb County Republican Party, the Macomb County Democratic Party, and plaintiffs Duane Maletski, Sharon Lopez, and Frances M. Zick protects the voting rights of foreclosure victims. The settlement acknowledges the existence of an illegal scheme by the Republicans to use mortgage foreclosure lists to deny foreclosure victims their right to vote. This settlement has the force of law behind it and ensures that Republicans cannot disenfranchise families facing foreclosure. [emphasis added]
Republicans deny that the settlement acknowledges the vote suppression scheme. I will link to the settlement agreement if and when it comes online.
Brad Friedman breaks the story on the arrest of Republican vote suppressor in California, live on Fox yesterday.
A new article in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Greg Palast about the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots.
In California, the head of the firm the Republican Party hired to register voters -- that has been charged with fraudulently getting voters to change their registration from Democratic to Republican -- has himself been charged with voter registration fraud. Touchscreens in West Virginia switching Democratic votes for Obama to votes for McCain.
Ballot confusion in North Carolina. You vote for President at the top of the ballot, then your next choice is to vote a "straight Democratic ticket". Problem? You must vote separately for President. This trouble was caused by a racist 1967 law that was intended to prevent North Carolina Democrats from voting for a liberal Presidential candidate (like Kennedy, Johnson, or Humphrey) while voting for Democrats in local races.
CNN reporter Drew Griffin correctly reports, “Our research is showing — this more looks like a fraud perpetrated on ACORN,” not by ACORN. The people who ACORN paid by the hour to register voters committed fraudulent acts against the organization.
Obama attorney Bob Bauer: Republicans are already under investigation for ginning up fake voter fraud claims (in the U.S. Attorney scandal); we're not going to let it happen again.
yahoo: A sculpture is photographed by a visitor at Sydney's Tamarama Beach in Australia Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008. Sculpture by the Sea is Australia's largest annual outdoor exhibition of sculpture, free to the public. The 2008 exhibition will feature over 100 sculptures from seven different countries and will run for three weeks. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)
This dailykos diary has clips from the Bill Maher show from HBO last night.
Jere from A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory has many photos and videos from the Red Sox amazing Game 6 5 comeback win [Freudian slip, there].
While ACORN is being excoriated for voter registration fraud for having workers fill out bogus registration forms, then flagging them as bogus before sending them in to the states, Republicans hired a firm to deliberately defraud voters into changing their registration from Democrat to Republican. Read this LATimes article on the firm hired by the California Republican Party -- Young Political Majors, or YPM -- which has a long, documented history of voter registration fraud. In California, they duped people into changing their registration to Republican by telling them they were signing petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. That's fraud with intent to commit fraud.
The McCain campaign finally released a 2-page summary of Cindy McCain's tax returns (pdf file); she's clearly middle class as she makes only $4.2 million per year, not $5 mill.
1. The big news is that the Supreme Court delivered a quick rebuke to the wingnutty 6th Circuit, overruling their decision to order the Ohio Secretary of State to have to "review" 600,000 new voter registrations against driver's license and social security databases. This prevents disenfranchisement by typo, whereby perfectly qualified voters are denied the right to vote because a letter in their name was entered incorrectly (that would have made JoeSam the Plumber ineligible, as his name is Wurzelbacher, but the registrar has him listed as Worzelbacher).
[It must be noted that the decision, while good in protecting voting rights on the eve of this election, denies the GOP a private right of action to enforce the statute. That means that only government action can enforce that law. That is a bad principle in civil rights cases when you have a virulently anti-civil-rights administration like the Bush Administration, who allow civil rights violations to proliferate by not bringing such action. Good decision on this narrow case, made on a terrible basis for many future cases.]
David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election. "I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.
Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.
3. The AP (the AP!) factchecks the McCain campaign's allegations about ACORN and rejects them.
[I]n alleging voter fraud, McCain goes too far. To commit fraud, a person would have to show up on Election Day with identification bearing the fake name.
4. In perhaps the best news, the Obama campaign is aggressively tying the bogus ACORN investigation and the U.S. Attorney Scandal, including conducting a telephone conference with the media today:
The General Counsel of the Obama campaign is currently holding a media conference call to "Announce Major Action Taken Today To Address Illegal Conduct and Improprieties in the Sham "Anti-Fraud" Campaign Orchestrated By McCain-Palin and the RNC."
Check out this letter from the Obama campaign to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking for an investigation into ties between Bush's Justice Department and the McCain campaign's "systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud." I.e., don't try ginning up voter fraud prosecutions from the Justice Department in this election, my friends. This Democrat won't be caught napping.
Barack Obama is a fighting Democrat, and it's been a long time since we have seen a Democrat wage such a tough, disciplined fight.
Tuesday's order directs [Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer] Brunner to verify new registrations by comparing that information with data from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the Social Security Administration.
The 6th Circuit is one of the most conservative, Bush-Bush-Reagan laden federal courts in the country. Not surprising that a decision which could disenfranchise tens of thousands of new voters comes from such a conservative circuit.
Somewhere tonight, Hans von Vote Suppressor is smiling.
Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Texas Governor Rick Perry, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all have supported ACORN's work and appeared with members of the organization -- all in the past three years.
And now ACORN is the boogeyman, because Republicans don't have any issues to run on. Oh, and don't forget that many of the leaders of ACORN are black. Race-baiting, anyone?
Obama, ACORN and "voter fraud" - dispelling the myths
Republican Zombie Lie #1: ACORN is going to steal the election through voter fraud.
Ridiculous. ACORN is an anti-poverty organization. They advocate for affordable housing (including a campaign against foreclosures by predatory lenders), better schools, a living wage, reform of immigration laws, health care, and paid sick days, among others. Here's a video that describes the work ACORN does. As part of their work they have launched a voter registration project along with Project Vote, another 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
States and the federal government all require that voter registration be non-partisan. In most states, it is required that if you register voters, BY LAW you must turn in every registration form. (That's to keep a group from registering voters and then only turning in the registration forms for people they think will vote for their candidate, or the way they want them to.)
ACORN pays people to do voter registration, often people who are unemployed and have a hard time getting jobs otherwise. (Again, that's part of their mission, ending poverty. One way to do that is to give an unemployed person a job.) And sometimes, not often but sometimes, those people cheat and turn in forms with the entire roster of the Dallas Cowboys on them, or some other fakery. By law ACORN is required to turn in those registration forms, even if it knows they are fake.
And that's the only fraud involved here, voter registration fraud. The Dallas Cowboys do not show up to vote. Poor people are not going to the polls and pretending to be Tony Romo and Terrell Owens. The fraud is perpetrated by the paid help who cheat ACORN. ACORN actually flags bogus registrations when they turn them in to the states to alert them that there is a problem. Therefore, as this Cincinnati Enquirer column points out, bogus registrations are a pain, not a problem.
There are almost no cases of actual voter fraud where a voter voted frauduently. The Bush Administrations's push to crack down on (nonexistant) voter fraud has only resulted in 120 prosecutions -- and only 86 convictions -- in the past five years. That's not .00001 percent of the voting electorate. Infinitesimally small.
And the current Republican obsession with ACORN? It's a made up issue. John McCain has supported ACORN over the years, including his appearance at an ACORN-sponsored event in March of 2006:
John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event ACORN co-sponsored in Florida.
That's right, John McCain was for ACORN before he was against it.
And here's John McCain extolling the virtues of ACORN in his address to the group. Remember, this is March of 2006, 2 1/2 years ago, John McCain was "telling immigration rights activists at a rally in Miami that they "are what makes America special."
Don't let the Republicans defraud you into believing that ACORN is going to steal the election, or that ACORN is a bad or scary group. They're just using this as an excuse to attack Obama, because they have no plan to fix the economy, and no other way to win the election other than lies and deception.
The New York Times reports today on vast purges of eligible voters from the voting rolls. Although the Times concludes that the purging does not appear to be coordinated by one party, since Republicans are always the party in favor of vote suppression, I doubt that this is just a coincidence. The Democrats have registered millions of new voters, and Republicans are carrying out a sustained campaign to disenfranchise as many as possible.
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.
[]
States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.
The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.
Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters.
In addition to the six swing states, three more states appear to be violating federal law. Alabama and Georgia seem to be improperly using Social Security information to screen registration applications from new voters. And Louisiana appears to have removed thousands of voters after the federal deadline for taking such action.
Under federal law, election officials are supposed to use the Social Security database to check a registration application only as a last resort, if no record of the applicant is found on state databases, like those for driver’s licenses or identification cards.
The requirement exists because using the federal database is less reliable than the state lists, and is more likely to incorrectly flag applications as invalid. Many state officials seem to be using the Social Security lists first.
In the year ending Sept. 30, election officials in Nevada, for example, used the Social Security database more than 740,000 times to check voter files or registration applications and found more than 715,000 nonmatches, federal records show. Election officials in Georgia ran more than 1.9 million checks on voter files or voter registration applications and found more than 260,000 nonmatches.
A coalition of civil rights and voting rights groups has filed a motion to intervene in the Wisconsin Attorney General's suit against Wisconsin election officials. AG Van Hollen sued to force election officials to purge voter rolls if the election list does not match exactly with other databases, like those for driver's licenses and social security numbers.
The AG's suit would force election officials to remove someone from the list for typographical errors or minor differences like middle initials or titles.
For extra credit, guess the political party of Wisconsin Attorney General van Hollen? (First two guesses don't count; of course, he is a Republican!)
You may have voted before, but the Republican National Committee is making a concerted effort to knock voters off the rolls. It's worth your time to check to make sure you are still registered.
In Montana the Republicans are challenging everyone who filled out a change-of-address card in the last 18 months in seven Democratic-leaning counties. If you've filled out a change of address card recently, go check your registration.
In Virginia, the Republicans are challenging college student's residency, asking for tax returns for registration, and warning students (falsely) that they will lose their financial aid or health insurance if they vote in Virginia. If you're a college student, go check your registration.
In Mississippi, a local election official purged 10,000 voters from the rolls from her home computer. If you are not on a first-name basis with your local election officials, go check your registration.
In Georgia, 700 voters were purged from the voter rolls even though many of those 700 had never committed any crime, never even received a parking ticket. If you've never committed a crime, go check your voter registration.
The RNC is sending fake "Vote by mail" applications to Virginia voters. The woman who received it took to a local election official, who told her this:
1. He had heard about similar fake applications being mailed out in other states.
2. The envelope contained the second part of the application for absentee voting, but not the first--a cover letter explaining exactly what the procedure was and who was eligible.
3. Most disturbing were the instructions on the inside flap of the envelope telling people to "vote early by mail." Virginia DOES NOT have either EARLY VOTING or VOTE BY MAIL. The envelope tells potential voters they can complete and sign a card, place a stamp on it, and drop it in the nearest mailbox.
I'm sending this to my sister who lives in Virginia (and who is leading the family contest to register new voters). Get the word out.
The official told my husband the RNC had been specifically told not to do this, and apparently they mailed them out anyway.
I confidently reported a few week ago that the Veterans Administration had rescinded its policy against allowing voter registration drives in VA hospitals and care facilities.
Guess what? They were lying. The VA has a new policy: anyone trying to register voters has to be screened. Guess what? That screening won't be completed in time to get these veterans registered to vote. Because they might vote Democratic.
Just because victory is declared in Washington does not make it so.
One week ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced a new policy to allow voter registration drives on VA campuses, responding to pressure by lawmakers and the media that the VA was suppressing the vote of wounded former soldiers. That new policy was greeted with 'mission accomplished' press statements by members of Congress who have been pushing the VA to change its policy for several years.
But on Monday, as the Senate Rules and Administration Committee held a hearing in Washington on a bill to ensure veterans living at VA facilities could be helped with voter registration, a legal motion was being filed in federal court in California alleging the VA was still blocking efforts to register voters in time for the 2008 presidential election.
Following last week's announcement of VA's new voter registration policy, a VA facility in San Francisco blocked a non-profit group, Veterans for Peace, from registering voters, the legal motion said. The filing said the VA was seeking to require Veterans for Peace members to go through the process of screening VA volunteers, a process that would delay registration efforts. In contrast, the VA does not require screening for most other visitors.
"The VA has disenfranchised veterans and interfered with the freedom of political parties and nonpartisan groups to associate with their members and with other citizens who reside on VA campuses," the motion said. "This Court should prohibit further interference with voter registration at any VA campus for the imminent federal election."
Scott Rafferty, the Washington-based attorney who filed Monday's motion on behalf of a California labor organizer who in 2004 was blocked from registering voters on another VA facility in California, said there were political reasons behind the agency's refusal to register veterans.
“Veterans’ experience in war gives them a powerful voice," Rafferty said. "The VA wants to stop them from using their right to speak out and to vote. The VA knows that many veterans oppose the Administration’s conduct of the War, the overextension of the military, and its inadequate support for returning warriors.”
The Veterans Administration, under pressure from citizens, Congress, veterans groups, and state election officials, has reversed its ban on voter registration in Veterans Administration facilities.
What the heck happened in Georgia? Tristero at Hullabaloo points to an article in the NYTimes Review of Books explaining how the US helped Georgia rise to Russia's bait, with predictably disastrous consequences. (No one could have anticipated that Russia would fight back. Where have we heard that before?)
Voter caging is coming to a state near you. Mebe at dailykos points out that voter lists are being purged right now in Ohio, Louisiana, Michigan, Kansas, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. And this year they're going after absentee ballots. Christy at firedoglake has a new "scholarly" article by Hans Von Vote Suppressor, and predicts that he is setting the stage for this year's election mau-mau by the Republicans, just as his previous articles set the stage for their voter fraud and voter caging shenanigans. Check that you are properly registered TODAY.
dengre at dailykos points out that Sarah Palin's $40 billion dollar natural gas pipeline will be both an environmental disaster and a boondoggle that will cost US taxpayers billions. And like all these hairbrained drilling proposals, there's no guarantee that the giant energy companies won't just sell all the gas to China anyway.
Josh Marshall outlines why the Charles Gibson interview of Sarah Palin will be unwatchable: Gibson has agreed to interview her over several days. He won't ask tough questions, because he won't want his access cut off. Journalism is dead, long live the bought and paid for corporate media.
Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast rips into NBC for dropping Olbermann/Matthews from their debate and election night coverage. Because the Republicans complained. No liberals on TeeVee! They're giving us David Gregory, the man who demonstrated his lack of journalistic integrity by dancing backup to Karl Rove at a White House press dinner. Lackey, anyone? Booman Tribune calls this the first GOP scalp in the war on the media.
Alaska blogger Mudflats (Palin: Republican Party Infiltrator?)has a video of the Vice Chairman of the Alaska Independence Party (the secessionists) claiming that Sarah Palin was indeed a member, and that she is only now a Republican to carry out their mission. Their founder Joe Voegler famously said:
“The fires of Hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government, and I won’t be buried under their damn flag!”
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