VOTER SUPPRESSION

INCLUDES REDISTRICTING AND MACHINES

numerous gop controlled states pushingvoter ID (see sep newer node) , anti-abortion and pro-gun legislation.

SEE THREE

capt 3/18

also includes voter fraud scam

see Redmap pgm gerrymander

mod: see voter disenfranchise, voting machine, camp finance reform,

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we vote tues b/c it was farm mkt day (hochshield?)

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-war-against-voting-rights-became-a-pillar-of-the-conservative-agenda/

no lnx

How the war against voting rights became a pillar of the conservative agenda

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly April 1, 2020

Included in the stimulus bill put together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats was a provision that established “a national requirement for both 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail.” That one apparently got under Trump’s skin.

Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn’t win elections

Trump: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020

Trump basically admitted that if more people voted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” A lot of people assume that he said the quiet parts out loud when it comes to Republican efforts to suppress the vote. But just as Trump represents the culmination of many of the foundational principles on which the modern-day GOP was founded, the party has demonstrated over time that they aren’t particularly fond of democracy.

As Katherine Stewart documented in her book, The Power Worshippers, Paul Weyrich is often credited as the founder of the modern-day conservative movement. Even though he was not a particularly religious man, he developed a coalition between Goldwater Republicans and the religious right, which became the base that has elected every Republican president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

Here is something Weyrich said at a gathering of religious leaders back in 1980.

Weyrich clearly stated that he didn’t want everyone to vote. He went on to say that, for Republicans, “our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” That was basically an admission that the majority of Americans don’t support Republican principles.

As far back as 1980, the whole idea of a so-called “moral majority” was a lie—and people like Weyrich knew it. Rather than attempt to reflect the will of voters, Republicans simply decided that, as Zachary Roth put it, “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” Voter suppression was therefore embraced as a conservative principle.

More recently, Ari Berman documented the decades-long battle against the Voting Rights Act that was waged by our current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—John Roberts.The seeds of that battle were planted while Roberts served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, as well as his time in the Reagan Justice Department. It culminated in the Shelby vs Holder case when the Court overturned key elements of the Voting Rights Act, leading to a new wave of voter suppression efforts in the states.

Last year, when House Democrats passed a bill that included democratic reforms to campaign finance, ethics and voting rights, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the quiet parts out loud when he called them a “Democrat Politician Protection Act.” Once again, the inference is that, if more people vote, Democrats will be elected.

Those are just a few examples from the last forty years. But since our founding, rich white men have tried to limit the franchise to themselves. Here’s what Roth wrote about Alexander Hamilton’s only major speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

Hamilton said the system should allow the “rich and the well born” to maintain their supremacy, since they would oppose radical change pushed by “the many.” The goal, he said, was to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

It is only through the blood, sweat, and tears of various movements that voting rights have been expanded in this country as a foundational principle of democracy. Obviously, that battle still rages on.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/

no lnx

AUGUST 17-24, 2015 ISSUE

How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement

A botched voter purge prevented thousands from voting—and empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics.

By Ari Berman JULY 28, 2015

On November 7, 2000, Willie Steen, a Navy vet who had served in the Persian Gulf during Desert Storm, went to cast his ballot for president at the St. Francis Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida.

He brought his 10-year-old son, Willie Jr., to the polls for the first time. They waited a half hour to reach a poll worker. When Steen gave the poll worker his name, she searched a list of registered voters in the precinct and told him, “You can’t vote. You’re a convicted felon.”

“You must be mistaken,” a shocked Steen replied. “I’ve never been arrested in my life.” He worked at a hospital, a Tampa orthopedics center, that wouldn’t employ anyone with a felony conviction.

The poll worker gave him a number to call at the board of elections, but no one picked up. The 75 people behind him in line grew antsy. Few would look him in the eye.

He left in embarrassment, struggling to explain to his son what had just happened. After fighting for his country abroad, he wasn’t able to exercise his most fundamental right at home. “I felt I was shafted,” Steen said. “I think there were a lot of things that weren’t done properly. My name was dragged through the mud.”

He later found out from journalist Greg Palast that he’d been confused with a convict named Willie O’Steen, who had committed a felony between 1991 and 1993, when Steen was in the Persian Gulf. Little did Steen know that the same thing was happening to voters across the state of Florida—and disproportionately to voters like him, who were African-American.

Before the election, Florida sent its county election supervisors a list of 58,000 alleged felons to purge from the voting rolls. Florida was one of eight states that prevented ex-felons from voting. The felon-disenfranchisement law dated back to 1868, when the state banned anyone with a felony conviction from voting unless the governor issued a pardon. The law targeted newly emancipated African-Americans, who during slavery were far more likely to be arrested than whites, including for such offenses as looking at a white woman. This racially discriminatory policy was still on the books in 2000. Blacks made up only 11 percent of registered voters in the state, but 44 percent of those on the purge list, which turned out to be littered with errors.

Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, the antics of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and thousands of Jews accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach were among the stories that captured the headlines during the chaotic 36-day Florida recount between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The widespread and wrongful purging of registered voters was the most consequential—and least discussed—aspect of the Florida election.

“The parties and the candidates did not want to focus on the racial impact of decisions that were made in Florida,” said civil-rights lawyer Judith Browne Dianis. “It was one of those moments when race was being swept under the rug.”

The NAACP sued Florida after the election for violating the Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result of the settlement, the company that the Florida legislature entrusted with the purge—the Boca Raton–based Database Technologies (DBT)—ran the names on its 2000 purge list using stricter criteria. The exercise turned up 12,000 voters who shouldn’t have been labeled felons. That was22 times Bush’s 537-vote margin of victory.

No one could ever determine precisely how many voters who were incorrectly labeled felons were turned away from the polls. But the US Civil Rights Commission launched a major investigation into the 2000 election fiasco, and its acting general counsel, Edward Hailes, did the math the best that he could. If 12,000 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls, and 44 percent of them were African-American, and 90 percent of African-Americans voted for Gore, that meant 4,752 black Gore voters—almost nine times Bush’s margin of victory—could have been prevented from voting. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the purge cost Gore the election. “We did think it was outcome-determinative,” Hailes said.

The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. “Other people began to see that in very competitive elections, you could make a difference by keeping certain voters from participating,” Hailes said. Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot, and remade a Supreme Court that would eventually gut the centerpiece of the VRA.

* * *

On election night in Florida, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes. Because of the closeness of the election, an automatic recount began two days later in every county. Hundreds of lawyers flocked to Florida. Ben Ginsberg, national counsel for the Bush campaign, called it “Woodstock for constitutional lawyers.”

Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks,nicknamed the Cabal.

“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.

Ted Cruz, then 29, put together George W. Bush’s legal team in the 2000 election fight.

Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.

Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.

Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable.”

The Bush campaign, which led by 327 votes after the automatic recount, wanted as few disputed ballots accepted as possible. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount, which favored Gore, Bush appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount four days later, on December 12, thereby declaring Bush the winner of the election. No justice put his name on the unsigned 5–4 opinion.

The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred.

Fifteen years later, Cruz and Jeb Bush are run- ning for the GOP’s nomination for president, and Roberts is celebrating his 10th year as chief justice of the United States.

* * *

On January 11, 2001, Jeb Bush testified before the Civil Rights Commission during its investigation into the election problems in Florida. “What, if anything, did you do to ensure the election laws were faithfully executed?” general counsel Hailes asked the Florida governor. Bush said that he wasn’t responsible for the problems in Florida, including the voter purge.He blamed Katherine Harris. “It is the responsibility of the secretary of state as part of our Constitution,” Bush answered.

“You had no authority, no responsibilities, and took no actions with regard to the election?” Hailes pressed.

“No, the secretary of state and the 67 supervisors of election were responsible for that,” Bush said.

But blatant warning signs were ignored by Bush and the state well in advance of the election. On the orders of state officials, names were added to the purge list if there was only a 70 percent matchbetween a name on the voter rolls and a name in the state’s felon database. This meant that voters could be tagged as felons even when middle initials, suffixes, nicknames, and even race and sex data didn’t match perfectly. Hence the confusion of Willie Steen with felon O’Steen.

DBT warned the state that it was compiling “false positives.” Bucky Mitchell, a senior attorney for the Division of Elections, told the company, “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches and let the supervisors make a final determination rather than exclude certain matches altogether.” Voters were deemed guilty until proven innocent. The election supervisors became responsible for Florida’s intentionally lax record-keeping.

In May 2000, after the first supposedly corrected batch of names was released, the election supervisor in Madison County found herself on the purge list. Ion Sancho, the election supervisor for Tallahassee’s Leon County, was the only election official to go through the list one by one. “We went for a five-for-five match,” he told Vanity Fair. “Those were criteria such as name, birth date, race, sex, Social Security number. When we applied that to this list of 697 that we got in 2000, I could verify only 33.”

Nonetheless, the highest-ranking officials in Florida did not urge the election supervisors to disregard a list that many knew was deeply flawed. “Once the problems emerged, Governor Bush could have made it clear that it wasn’t acceptable to wrongly take voters off the rolls,” says Matthew Corrigan, professor of political science at the University of North Florida and author of Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida.

In January and February 2001, the Civil Rights Commission listened to 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses during three field hearings in Tallahassee and Miami—including Bush, Harris, the state attorney general, and numerous county election supervisors. The commission’s final report found evidence of “widespread voter disenfranchisement”—which likely violated the VRA—and concluded that an “overall lack of leadership in protecting voting rights was largely responsible for the broad array of problems in Florida during the 2000 election.”

A strenuous dissenting statement was filed by the conservative intellectual Abigail Thernstrom, whom Bush had appointed to the Civil Rights Commission at the beginning of his presidency, and Russell Redenbaugh, a Philadelphia businessman appointed by Bush’s father. Thernstrom had been the leading critic of the VRA since the 1980s, arguing that the law represented “an instrument for affirmative action in the electoral sphere.”

The civil-rights panel had focused on the wrong set of voting problems in Florida, the two commissioners asserted in their dissent: “The Commission should have looked into allegations of voter fraud, not only with respect to ineligible felons, but allegations involving fraudulent absentee ballots in nursing homes, unregistered voters, and so forth. Across the country in a variety of jurisdictions, serious questions about voter fraud have been raised.”

Despite this dissenting statement, a majority of the commission called on the Justice Department to immediately prepare litigation against Florida and its governor for violating the VRA. By then, however, it was too late: The Bush administration followed Thernstrom’s lead and prioritized prosecutions of voter fraud over investigations into voter disenfranchisement.

* * *

A thousand miles north of Florida, a similar electoral calamity, with equally profound ramifications, unfolded in St. Louis.

On Election Day 2000, Mahina Nightsage, a 41-year-old community organizer, went to her polling place of 20 years. But this time, she found that her name was not on the registration rolls. Her local alderman told her to visit the board of elections downtown to find out what had happened.

When she did, Nightsage saw a scene that resembled an election in a Third World country. Hundreds of voters were lined up around the block and packed inside, standing on tables to get the board’s attention. Nightsage waited two and a half hours before the board processed her paperwork and she was able to return to her polling place to vote for Gore.

Not everyone was as lucky. “There were many people who had been waiting for hours, and they just left,” Nightsage said. The line of jilted voters in the heavily Democratic city was predominantly African-American.

The problems started before the 2000 election, when the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners sent voter registration cards to all eligible voters. Those whose mail was returned as “Attempted—Not Known,” “Not Deliverable as Addressed,” or “Forwarding Order Expired” were labeled “inactive” and removed from the rolls. More than 50,000 voters in St. Louis were placed on inactive status between November 1996 and November 2000. None were notified about the change in their status. Thus, thousands of voters like Nightsage arrived at the polls on Election Day only to learn that they were no longer on the rolls.

The Gore campaign filed an emergency suit late that afternoon asking a court to keep the polls open an extra three hours so that everyone could vote. When a circuit court ordered the polls open until 10 pm in St. Louis, the Bush campaign filed an immediate appeal. Forty-five minutes later, the Missouri Court of Appeals rescinded the order and closed the polls. Only 100 additional voters had been able to cast ballots during the brief additional time. “As of 10:00 pm on election day,” a Justice Department lawsuit later stated, “individuals were still standing in line at the downtown headquarters of the Board of Elections.”

The brief extension of polling hours infuriated Missouri Republicans, who had gathered at an election-night party at the St. Louis Marriott West Hotel. Missouri Senator John Ashcroft watched in disbelief as the election returns showed him losing to a dead man.

Ashcroft’s opponent in the closely watched Senate race, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, had been killed in a plane crash three weeks before the election. His name remained on the ballot, and his wife, Jean, ran in his stead.

Republicans viewed the extended poll hours as a last-ditch attempt to illegitimately oust Ashcroft from office. “I know there are very serious allegations of fraud and corruption as it related to the conduct of the election in the city of St. Louis,” Ashcroft said.

Missouri’s senior senator, Republican Kit Bond, was far more blunt. “Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election,” he screamed into the microphone at the Marriott, slamming his right fist on the podium in anger.

How else could a sitting senator lose to a dead man? For Missouri Republicans, St. Louis became the contemporary version of the 1960 election in Chicago, when ballots from dead voters allegedly elected John F. Kennedy president.

Ashcroft lost by 49,000 votes—a result that would not have been determined by 100 extra people voting from 7 to 7:45 pm. Nevertheless, Bond sent the FBI and the US Attorney’s office a 250-page report alleging “a major criminal enterprise designed to defraud voters.” Less than two months later, Bush nominated Ashcroft as attorney general, and a new right-wing voter-fraud movement was born.

Soon after Bush’s inauguration, his administration embarked on a dramatic effort to restrict voting rights. With Ashcroft in charge, longtime civil-rights lawyers were fired from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which enforced the VRA, and replaced by ultraconservative zealots like voting-section chief Brad Schlozman, who vowed to “gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section.” US Attorneys in states like New Mexico, Washington, and Missouri were fired for refusing to prosecute trumped-up cases of voter fraud.

Georgia’s strict voter-ID law, the first of its kind, was approved by the Justice Department under the VRA, despite objections from state lawyers and clear evidence that the law would disproportionately burden black voters. According to the Justice Department’s report, Representative Sue Burmeister of Augusta, the lead Republican sponsor of the bill, told department lawyers that “if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. [Burmeister] said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.”

Most significantly, these new reactionaries soon found crucial allies in John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the two Supreme Court justices appointed by the Bush administration. In April 2008, the Court approved Indiana’s voter-ID law in the first major voting-rights case heard under Roberts. The Court backed the measure even though Indiana presented no instances of voter impersonation that the law would stop, which signaled that states could implement new voting restrictions merely by invoking the specter of voter fraud, even if such fraud had not actually occurred. (The author of the decision, John Paul Stevens, has since admitted that “the impact of the statute is much more serious” on poor, minority, disabled, and elderly voters than he’d initially recognized.)

Five years later, in a decision written byRoberts, the Supreme Court invalidated the centerpiece of the VRA: the formula that required states with the worst histories of voter discrimination to approve changes to their voting systems with the federal government.That decision has led to new voter-suppression efforts in states like North Carolina and Texas, and has set a chilling precedent for voting rights in the Obama era.

The result has been the most significant effort to restrict voting rights since the Jim Crow era. From 2011 to 2015, 468 voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states. Half the states in the country have passed new laws making it harder to vote. None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for the 2000 election in Florida.

Ari BermanTWITTERAri Berman is a former senior contributing writer for The Nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States

Voter suppression in the United States concerns allegations about various efforts, legal and illegal, used to prevent eligible voters from their right to vote. Where found, such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election.

Methods

Impediments to voter registration

Some laws and administrative practices have made it more difficult for people to register to vote. Florida enacted a deadline for the submission of voter registration forms in 2011, with penalties for late filing.^[1] The law ended the voter registration work by one organization, the League of Women Voters, whose spokesperson said, "Despite the fact that the League of Women Voters is one of the nation’s most respected civic organizations, with a 91-year history of registering and educating voters, we will be unable to comply with the egregious provisions contained in [this bill]."^[2]

Photo ID laws

Purging of voter rolls

On August 24, 2016, Rolling Stone magazine published a report by investigative reporter Greg Palast entitled, “The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters: Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Trump'sadvisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?” Palast reported that “In January 2013, Kobach the [Secretary of State of Kansas] addressed a gathering of the National Association of State Election Directors about combating an [alleged] epidemic of ballot-stuffing across the country. He announced that Crosscheck had already uncovered 697,537 'potential duplicate voters' in 15 states, and that the state of Kansas was prepared to cover the cost of compiling a nationwide list. That was enough to persuade 13 more states to hand over their voter files to Kobach's office.”

Palast alleges that virtually all of these 697,537 'potential duplicate voters' failed to meet Kobach's claims that they matched first, middle, and last names, birth dates, and the last 4 digits of people's Social Security number: Palast interviewed Donald Alexander Webster Jr., an African-American registered in Ohio; Crosscheck claimed that D. A. Webster, Jr., was also registered as Donald Eugene Webster (no "Jr.") in Charlottesville, Virginia. D. A. Webster, Jr., assured Palast he had never been to Charlottesville. Both of these individuals “were subject to losing their ability to vote,” Palast reported. Voting twice is a felony, but Palast failed to find any prosecutions of double voting.^[12]

In his documentary "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (2016), Palast explains that over 7 million voters—almost entirely voters of color—were on the Crosscheck lists by the time of the 2016 presidential election, allegedly because these voters had all voted multiple times in previous elections (although no one from these lists had been prosecuted for voting twice, which is a felony crime with a five-year jail sentence). Palast explains that these cross-check lists were produced only in GOP-controlled states and that the names on the list were common last names of Latinos, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans, such as "Garcia," "Hernandez," "Washington," and "Lee."^[13] Since the election, Palast has appeared on the independent media news program Democracy Now! and has explained that on election day, approximately 1.1 million voters of color found themselves bumped off the official voter rolls through Crosscheck.^[14] In 2017, researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Microsoft found that for every legitimate instance of double registration it finds, Crosscheck's algorithm returns approximately 200 false positives.^[15]

In 2008, more than 98,000 registered Georgia voters were removed from the roll of voters because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. Some 4,500 voters had to prove their citizenship to regain their right to vote.^[16] Between November 2015 and early 2016, over 120,000 voters were dropped from rolls in Brooklyn, NYC.^[17] Officials have stated that the purge was a mistake and that those dropped represented a "broad cross-section" of the electorate. However an WNYC analysis found that the purge had disproportionately affected majority-Hispanic districts. The board announced that it would reinstate all voters in time for the 2016 Congressional primary.^[18] The Board of Elections subsequently suspended the Republican appointee in connection to the purge, but kept on her Democratic counterpart.^[19]

In 1998, Florida created the Florida Central Voter File to combat vote fraud documented in the 1997 Miami mayoral election. Many people were purged from voter registration lists in Florida, because their names were similar to those of convicted felons, who are not allowed to vote under Florida law. According to the Palm Beach Post, African-Americans accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls but were only about 11% of Florida's voters.^[20] This may have cost Al Gore the presidency in the 2000 US presidential election.

Limitations on early voting

In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers requested data on various voting practices, broken down by race. They then passed laws that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans. Among other things, they cut back on early voting.^[21] Later, the North Carolina GOP sent out a press release celebrating the decline in early voting by African Americans.^[22][23] Early voting is important for voters who do not have flexible working hours and cannot take time off on a weekday to vote.

Felon disenfranchisement

Further information: Loss of rights due to felony conviction and Felony disenfranchisement

In 2004, 5.3 million Americans were denied the right to vote because of previous convictions. Thirteen states permanently disenfranchise convicted felons; eighteen states restore voting rights after completion of prison, parole, and probation; four states re-enfranchise felons after they have been released from prison and have completed parole; thirteen states allow felons who have been released from prison to vote, and two states do not disenfranchise felons at all.^[24] Some states require felons to complete a process to restore voting rights, but offender advocates say such processes can be very difficult.

The United States is the only democracy in the world that regularly bans large numbers of felons from voting after they have discharged their sentences. Many countries including Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Norway, Peru, Sweden, and Zimbabwe allow prisoners to vote (unless convicted of crimes against the electoral system).^[25] Some countries, notably the U.K., disenfranchise people for only as long as they are in prison (however, this has been challenged by the European Court of Human Rights).

In Florida during the 2000 presidential election, some non-felons were banned due to record-keeping errors and not warned of their disqualification until the deadline for contesting it had passed.

This form of vote suppression in the United States disproportionately affects minorities including African-Americans and Latinos.^[25][26][additional ^citation ^needed] Disenfranchisement of felons is opposed by some as a form of the medieval practice of civil death.^[26]

wiki

History

In Western countries, felony disenfranchisement can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman traditions: disenfranchisement was commonly imposed as part of the punishment on those convicted of "infamous" crimes, as part of their "civil death", whereby these persons would lose all rights and claim to property. Most medieval common law jurisdictions developed punishments that provided for some form of exclusion from the community for felons, ranging from execution on sight to exclusion from community processes.^[4]

In the United States

Background

The United States is among the most punitive nations in the world when it comes to denying the vote to those who have been convicted of a felony offence.^[5][6]

In the U.S., the constitution implicitly permits the States to adopt rules about disenfranchisement "for participation in rebellion, or other crime", by the fourteenth amendment, section 2. It is up to the states to decide which crimes could be grounds for disenfranchisement, and they are not formally bound to restrict this to felonies; however, in most cases, they do.[citation ^needed] Felons are allowed to vote in most states of the US. Between 1996 and 2008 twenty-eight states changed their laws on felon voting rights, mostly to restore rights or to simplify the process of restoration. Since 2008 state laws have continued to shift, both curtailing and restoring voter rights, sometimes over short periods of time within the same state.^[7]

Current practices

As of 2008 over 5.3 million people in the United States were denied the right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement.^[8] In the national elections in 2012, the various state felony disenfranchisement laws together blocked an estimated 5.85 million felons from voting, up from 1.2 million in 1976. This comprised 2.5% of the potential voters in general. The state with the highest number of disenfranchised voters was Florida, with 1.5 million disenfranchised.^[5]

Reform efforts

Felony disenfranchisement was a topic of debate during the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Rick Santorum argued for the restoration of voting rights for convicted felons who had completed sentences and parole/probation.^[9] Santorum's position was attacked and distorted by Mitt Romney, who alleged that Santorum supported voting rights for felons while incarcerated rather than Santorum's stated position of restoring voting rights only after the completion of sentence, probation and parole.^[9][10] Former President Barack Obama supports voting rights for ex-offenders.^[11]

In the years 1997 to 2008, there was a trend to lift the disenfranchisement restrictions, or simplify the procedures for applying for the restoration of civil rights for people who had fulfilled their punishments for felonies. As a result, in 2008 more than a half million people had the right to vote, who would have been disenfranchised under the older rules.^[12] Since then, more severe disenfranchisement rules have been passed in several states.

State reforms

In 2007, Florida's Republican Governor Charlie Crist pushed to make it easier for most convicted felons to regain their voting rights reasonably quickly after serving their sentences and probation terms.^[13] In March 2011, however, Republican Governor Rick Scott reversed the 2007 reforms. Felons may not apply to the court for restoration of voting rights until seven years after completion of sentence, probation and parole.^[14]

In Iowa in July 2005,Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack issued an executive order restoring the right to vote for all persons who had completed supervision.^[12] On October 31, 2005, Iowa's Supreme Court upheld mass re-enfranchisement of convicted felons. But, on his inauguration day, January 14, 2011, Republican Governor Terry Branstad reversed Vilsack's executive order, disenfranchising thousands of people.^[15]

Nine other states disenfranchise felons for various lengths of time following their conviction. Except for Maine and Vermont, and as of September 2016, California, every state prohibits felons from voting while in prison.^[12]

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http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-ken-blackwell-was-controversial-as-1499624226-htmlstory.html

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-blackwell-voter-commission-20170709-story.html

no link

Former Ohio official who accidentally released Social Security numbers is on Trump's voter fraud panel

Ken Blackwell

Ken Blackwell's appointment to President Trump's voter fraud commission has drawn increased scrutiny to his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, during which millions of voters' Social Security numbers were accidentally released. (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press)

Kurtis Lee Contact Reporter

The Republican gubernatorial primary was just weeks away, and then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had his sights set on securing the nomination.

Blackwell had served as mayor of Cincinnati and state treasurer before becoming Ohio’s top elections official, so a bid for governor in 2006 seemed a logical next step in his political career.

But in March of that year, his office caused a stir: The full Social Security numbers of 1.2 million Ohio voters were posted accidentally on the secretary of state’s website.

A month later, in a separate incident, Blackwell’s office inadvertently distributed voter lists with the Social Security numbers of 5.7 million voters. The numbers, by law, are supposed to remain private.

“It wasn’t good at all,” said former Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland in an interview. “Sloppy … that’s what it was.”

While the two blunders didn’t prevent Blackwell from securing the nomination that May, he went on to lose the governor’s contest to Strickland. That contest and the Social Security debacle combined to make Blackwell well-known — at least briefly — outside Ohio. Now, it appears he’s about to step into the national spotlight again.

Blackwell, 69, has been tapped to serve on the Trump administration’s bipartisan voter fraud commission, an endeavor election officials nationwide have called a waste of time.

The panel, officially called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, asked secretaries of state nationwide to provide voters’ personal information, including names, addresses and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The commission has faced intense pushback from both Democrats and Republicans, while a watchdog group has filed a lawsuit arguing the commission’s request breaches privacy laws.

Here's why a growing number of states are pushing back against Trump's voter fraud commission

Blackwell’s appointment to the committee — which is scheduled to hold its first meeting July 19 in Washington — has now drawn increased scrutiny to his tenure as secretary of state. For years, Blackwell has voiced concerns about voter fraud, while some have alleged he worked to suppress the vote in Ohio.

In 2004, two years before the incidents with the Social Security numbers, Blackwell ordered that county clerks not accept voter registrations turned in on anything less than 80-pound stock paper — the thickness of a postcard.

County clerks called the requirement unnecessary, and voting rights advocates alleged he was attempting to suppress the vote in a key swing state during a presidential election year. Under the intense criticism, Blackwell pulled back his order.

That same year, Blackwell ordered clerks to throw out provisional ballots if a person voted in the wrong precinct. A federal appeals court ultimately upheld Blackwell’s directive, though critics called it another attempt to suppress voting.

To one Ohio resident, Darrell Estep, the most troubling part from Blackwell’s time as secretary of state was the handling of Social Security numbers.

In 2006, Estep, a trucker who hauls automobiles around the country, was among those whose personal information landed on the secretary of state’s website. It remained on the site for several weeks.

“This was my privacy, and it was hindered,” Estep said Saturday from his home in Mount Orab, Ohio, about 40 miles east of Cincinnati. At the time, he filed a lawsuit against Blackwell and his office. In a quickly reached settlement, Blackwell agreed to remove the numbers from the website.

A month later, in April 2006, Blackwell’s office accidentally distributed voter lists — on 20 CDs to, among others, campaign consultants— that had the full Social Security numbers of 5.7 million voters. The disks were eventually returned to Blackwell’s office.

As for the Social Security numbers posted on the website, technical issues delayed their removal for almost a year....

717

Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, tasked with investigating vulnerabilities with the country’s voting system, may actually be driving voters to cancel their voter registration in counties across the U.S. This sudden upsurge stems from a June 28 request made by Kris Kobach, Kansas' secretary of state and vice president of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, asking states to provide their voter roll data. Kobach is seeking voters’ personal information, including their addresses and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

According to the Colorado Independent, election officials in Boulder, Colorado have witnessed about 200 people cancel their voter registration, with 70 more asking for confidential status, which requires them to sign an affidavit “saying they feel their safety is at risk.”

Even more people are canceling their voter registration across the state. In Denver, there has been a 2,150 percent increase in balloters removing themselves from voter rolls since Kobach issued his call. Arapahoe County has seen 365 requests to cancel voter registration so far this year, with 42 percent of those cancellations coming in the past week alone. Mesa County also saw an uptick in voter cancellations, while only 30 people canceled in 2016. Sixty people did last week.

So far, 44 states have refused to comply in whole or in part with the election integrity commission. Colorado is not one of those states, as Secretary of State Wayne Williams has agreed to provide all of the information requested.

Election officials say those who are canceling their registrations are doing so because they do not want their private information given to the federal government. Despite the upsurge in cancelations, many voters in Colorado say they will re-register after July 14, when Secretary of State Williams hands over voter information to the commission.

Still the increase in voter cancellations is alarming, especially with the 2018 midterms right around the corner. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 3 percentage points, underscoring the importance of all eligible voters participating in upcoming elections.

The election integrity commission has grown out of one of Trump’s most frequently peddled lies: that millions of people illegally voted in last year’s presidential election. The falsehood has been repeatedly debunked, and studies on voter fraud in past years have shown it is virtually nonexistent. On the other hand, legislation that suppresses voters—most of which is pushed by Republicans—has proven stunningly effective. Many voting rights advocates are already raising concerns that the Trump White House will use the election integrity committee as a pretext for more draconian measures.

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/four-key-tips-understanding-election-2016

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-state-of-americas-voting-rights-in-one-map/

palast interview12/5/16 previous longer

https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-december-5-2016/

http://www.risingupwithsonali.com/election-integrity-post-mortem-voting-rights-and-vote-recounts/

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https://www.thenation.com/article/the-gops-attack-on-voting-rights-was-the-most-under-covered-story-of-**2016/

We’ll likely never know how many people were kept from the polls by restrictions like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting, and barriers to voter registration. But at the very least this should have been a question that many more people were looking into. For example, 27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives, according to Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

I documented stories of voters in Wisconsin—including a 99-year-old man—who made two trips to the polls and one to the DMV on Election Day just to be able to vote, while others decided not to vote at all because they were denied IDs. When Margie Mueller, an 85-year-old woman from Plymouth, Wisconsin, wasn’t allowed to vote with her expired driver’s license, her husband, Alvin, decided not to vote either. They were both Democrats. “The damn Republicans,” he said, “don’t want Latinos and old people to vote.” Andrew Voegele, a schoolteacher, recently moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin and was forced to cast a provisional ballot yesterday that will not be counted unless he surrenders his Minnesota license and spends $34 for a Wisconsin driver’s license by Friday. The ACLU filed a court order last night to have his vote count. Over 200 people in Wisconsin petitioned the DMV on Election Day to get a voter ID.

How many people were turned away from the polls? How many others didn’t bother to show up in the first place? These are questions we need to take far more seriously. In 2014, a study by Rice University and the University of Houston of Texas’s 23rd Congressional District found that 12.8 percent of registered voters who didn’t vote in the election cited lack of required photo ID as a reason they didn’t cast a ballot, even though only 2.7 percent of registered voters actually lacked an acceptable ID. Texas’s strict voter-ID law blocked some voters from the polls while having an ever larger deterrent effect on others. Eighty percent of these voters were Latino and strongly preferred Democratic candidates. On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina. These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places.”

Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it’s fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy. The media devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced. I want to salute the people that did cover voting rights doggedly, including Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog; Michael Wines of The New York Times; Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post; Alice Ollstein, Kira Lerner, and Ian Millhiser of Think Progress; Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo; Zack Roth, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton of MSNBC; Mark Joseph-Stern and Jamelle Bouie of Slate; David Graham of The Atlantic; Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, in addition to great local reporters like Bryan Lowry of the Wichita Eagle; Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel; and Colin Campbell of the Raleigh News & Observer. ProPublica organized an essential Electionland project with reporters across the country. But when it really mattered, too many in the media treated the right to vote as a fringe issue instead of the most fundamental issue in the election...

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/05/13111/high-tech-:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{gerrymandering-trial-wisconsin

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WI 6/16

Voter Suppression Measures on Trial in Walker's Wisconsin

By David Armiak — The second day of a trial over measures implemented by Wisconsin's GOP to restrict voting rights in the state commenced Tuesday in Madison.

ALEC Legislators "Giddy" About Voter Suppression Potential of Voter ID

The expert testimony followed Monday's bombshell statements by Todd Allbaugh, a former Republican staffer who worked for then-Sen. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) in 2011 when Voter ID was proposed in Wisconsin.

Back then, Senate elections committee Chair Mary Lazich told the public it was all about preventing voter fraud: "When this bill is finally signed into law, it will provide Wisconsin voters more confidence in the integrity of their elections and will not disenfranchise legitimate voters."

But behind closed doors at a GOP caucus meeting, Albaugh testified that Lazich and other GOP senators were excited at the prospect that Voter ID could prevent some Democratic populations from voting. "She got up out of her chair and she hit her finger on the table and said, 'Hey, we've got to think about what this could mean for the neighborhoods aroundMilwaukee and the college campuses around the state,'" Allbaugh said. Several other senators were "ashen faced" at the discussion.

Allbaugh testified that Sen. Glenn Grothman (now a U.S. Representative), told fellow Republicans, "'What I’m concerned about is winning. You know as well as I do the Democrats would do this if they had power … so we better get this done while we have the opportunity."

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/05/13108/voter-suppression-laws-go-to-trial#sthash.aXiSsLii.dpuf

https://www.propublica.org/article/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-voter-id-laws/

Oregon makes reg automatic/opt out?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/03/16/oregon_automatic_dmv_voter_registration_passes.html

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This past year in Georgia, 40,000 new voters mysteriously disappeared from the voting rolls.

In Texas, some voters gave up and left when a strict new voter ID law kept them from casting their ballot.

And in Missouri, Republicans are trying to change the state constitution to push through new voting restrictions.

Voter suppression is back, and we have to do something to stop it.

Stand with Democrats and sign the petition to renew the Voting Rights Act!

10/14

In an election too close to call that could determine control of the U.S. Senate, ABC News reports that hundreds of thousands of voters have received grossly incorrect voter registration information in the mail from the Koch brothers' right-wing front group, Americans for Prosperity.1

Here's just some of what's in the mailing:

The wrong deadline for registering to vote—cutting the registration window short by five days, critical for working families.
The wrong office for questions on voter registration and the wrong zip code for turning in a voter registration form.
False information about how voters will be notified of their precinct after they register to vote.2

Just as the American Legislative Exchange Council(ALEC) tried to distance itself from its role pushing parts of the NRA's gun agenda and making it more difficult for American citizens to vote, a controversial right-wing operation has announced that it will step in to help carry forward the "voter ID" agenda. The "National Center for Public Policy Research" (NCPPR) announced Wednesday that it will form a "Voter Identification Task Force."

This comes in response to ALEC's announcement Tuesday that it will dismantle its "Public Safety and Elections Task Force" through which corporate lobbyists and elected officials voted behind closed doors to approve "model" legislation that creates obstacles to American citizens voting through restrictive voter ID bills, as well as other damaging legislation, such as reckless gun laws that have been cited to protect violent vigilantes from being held accountable.

NCPPR's press release scolds the 11 corporations, as of yesterday, that have recently announced they had dropped out of ALEC, which has come under intense scrutiny as a result of the Center for Media and Democracy's ALEC Exposed investigation and the efforts CMD, Color of Change, Common Cause, People of the American Way, Progress Now!, and other groups as well as Daily Kos bloggers. A growing number of concerned citizens are speaking up about ALEC across the country.

NCPPR even set up an email for corporations to reach out to if they "regret" their decision to cut ties with ALEC under the theme "we are not yellow." NCPPR asserts that corporations have succumbed to the "left-wing" which is supposedly using a "trotskyite strategy of making relentless demand-after-demand."

NCPPR is not well known but has hosted other attacks on good government and watchdog groups through a site called "GroupSnoop," which posts highly inaccurate "profiles" of organizations like the Center for Media and Democracy.

With NCPPR taking the mantle of fighting voter fraud, NCPPR's historical role in troubling operations is worth a closer look.

Distributing Millions in Charitable Donations as Directed by Jack Abramoff

As documented by CMD's SourceWatch, NCPPR was involved in part of the scandal that brought down RNC buddy and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. According to a U.S. Senate investigation of the financial dealings and influence peddling of Abramoff, NCPPR's founder and president, Amy Moritz Ridenour, directed money received by NCPPR at Abramoff's direction, to other "charities," again at his direction. Specifically, Ridenour admitted that in 2002 she received a one million dollar gift to NCPPR from the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. That tribe had been paying Abramoff to help secure its casino business. NCPPR also received $1.5 million from Abramoff's then-law firm, Greenberg Traurig.

She told the Senate that, at Abramoff's direction, she gave $700,000 of the money NCPPR received to one of his "charities," called the "Capitol Athletic Foundation" (CAF). CAF, which was publicly touting that it was established to help inner city kids get more involved in athetics, reportedly used donations to fund luxury golf trips for (then) Members of Congress, like Ohio Representative Bob Ney. Ney served 17 months in prison for his role in the scandal. CAF also bought sniper scopes and camouflage for West Bank settlers in Israel, among other things.

She also testified that she directed $1.275 million received by NCPPR to another Abramoff entity called "Kaygold, LLC," whose address was listed as that of her then-board member, Abramoff. Ridenour testified that she thought Kaygold was controlled byMichael "Sean" Scanlon, Congressman Tom DeLay's former communications director,who later pleaded guilty to the criminal charge of conspiracy to bribe public officials. Scanlon was publicly known to be working closely with Abramoff.

In addition, NCPPR's Ridenour told congressional investigators that she also gave $500,000 to Scanlon's "Capital Campaign Strategies."

Abramoff was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy for his dealings with legislators, and he resigned from the board of NCPPR. Ridenour was not charged with any federal crimes for distributing tax-deductible donations NCPPR's received to entities controlled by Abramoff and his associates.

NCPPR Has a History of Sending "Fright Mail" to Senior Citizens

Also, as noted in CMD's SourceWatch, about a decade ago, NCPPR came under intense scrutiny for its fundraising tactics. NCPPR had been accused of bombarding senior citizens with "fright mail." According to an article by Diane Walsh of the San Francisco Examiner, NCPPR had contracted out its mailing of repetitive and frightening letters to the direct mail mill, Response Dynamics, which helps right-wing politicians and groups raise money.

NCPPR's leader Ridenour told the press that "her organization sent donors up to a dozen major pitches a month. The appeals are sent on four different letterheads. She said anyone receiving more than a dozen solicitations in a month probably was on mailing lists the National Center has 'rented' from other organizations, which she said were outside her control."

According to comments on Guidestar, adult children of senior citizens targeted by NCPPR are not happy with the group's tactics. One commentor asserted "Amy R. is the Queen of Scare Mail. My father receives 5-15 letters from them per day under four different names (maybe more I hadn't realized the association). He started giving to them in 2009 and gave them thousands of dollars little by little. When I found out he was spending all his money, I started tracking his junk mail and putting him on a charity budget." That commentor added that: "In my opinion, the biggest challenges facing this organization are... Children of the elderly who find out what they are doing" and "They are Parasites feeding off the elderly."

Another commentor in 2010 urged fellow citizens to "Be VERY careful before giving money to this organization. You will be swamped by mail and they do not honor requests to be removed from mailing lists." Yet another commentor stated "the National Center for Public Policy Research has several 'projects' such as The National Retirement Security Task Force, etc. These projects simply acquire the names of older people and mail them requests for donations. These requests are sent with letters intended to scare the recipient into donating. Often these requests are sent via Certified Mail in the hope that the recipient will think the contents more important." NCPPR was cited by three other anonymous commentors for praise who said the group shed light on government corruption.

Who Else Has Funded NCPPR, Aside from Friends of Jack Abramoff?

Over the years, NCPPR has received funding from numerous charitable foundations created by billionaires and millionaires who are funding an array of right-wing ventures to dramatically change American public policy. These include the foundation of the Coors family, Castle Rock Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and theSarah Scaife Foundation. Other NCPPR funders have included the Armstrong Foundation, Brady Education Foundation, Carthage Foundation, Earhart Foundation, Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation, Leadership Institute, Randolph Foundation, Roe Foundation, Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, and the William H. Donner Foundation.

According to Greenpeace's research, NCPPR has also received several hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Exxon Mobil Corporation. Exxon is also a member of ALEC's corporate board and funder of ALEC. So, perhaps it should surprise no one that NCPPR is part of the so-called "Cooler Heads Coalition," an effort of the "Competitive Enterprise Institute," which is focused on part of the oil industry's climate change denial machinery. ALEC has also helped advance this agenda, as noted by PRWatch, opposing regional agreements to address climate change and even hosting a workshop for ALEC politicians last year about "Warming Up to Climate Change," about how increased carbon dioxide is supposedly good for you and leads to longer lifespans.

Now NCPPR Takes on Voter Fraud, along with a Threat?

In the wake of ALEC's termination of its task force that had advanced "Voter ID" legislation that may thwart and chill citizen voting in this year's elections, NCPPR has jumped into the fray, claiming to take up ALEC's mantle on voter fraud, despite the fact that numerous studies have documented thatvoter fraud in the U.S. is exceedingly rare.

In NCPPR's press release on its new role as a watchdog against fraud in voting ends with the following threat, an unusual choice in the wake of the controversy over the shooting of unarmed high school student Trayvon Martin, which helped shine the spotlight on ALEC's pushing the NRA's extreme gun agenda: "Unlike the Center for American Progress, the National Center for Public Policy Research eschews the use of violent references such as 'War Room.' We are, however, inspired by a particular passage in the 1987 movie The Untouchables: 'They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way.' Indeed."

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(Sara Jerving contributed to this report.)

ALEC Exposed

- Corporations

John Christian Adams (born 1968)^[1][2] is an American attorney and former United States Department of Justice official who has accused the department of racial bias in many affairs, most notably its handling of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.^[3][4]

[hide]

Career[edit source | editbeta]

Adams grew up in Hempfield Township in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and graduated from Hempfield Area High School.^[5] Adams received hisBachelor of Arts degree in English from West Virginia University, then his juris doctor from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1993, and was admitted to the South Carolina Bar in 1994.^[6][7] From 1993 to 1997, Adams served as counsel for Jim Miles, the Secretary of State of South Carolina.^[8] In 1999, the Virginia State Bar admitted Adams.^[1]

TheWashington Times noted in February 2001 that Adams filed a formal ethics complaint with the Florida Bar against Hugh Rodham, brother of then-U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, that accused Rodham of violating bar regulations by representing people considered for presidential pardon from former president Bill Clinton, husband of Hillary Rodham Clinton.^[9] Citing United States Department of Justice confidentiality rules, the Florida Bar ruled that Hugh Rodham did not violate any rules.^[10] Adams responded to the Bar by emphasizing that his complaint accused Rodham of illegally taking a contingent fee to represent the two clients appealing for a pardon.^[11] The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2003 that the Transportation Security Administration falsely placed Adams in a No Fly List along with other people with names like "J. Adams".^[12]

In December 2007, Columbia, South Carolina newspaper The State reported that Adams called on increased oversight of the South Carolina Supreme Court in response to a controversy over the court reversing the grades of 20 who failed the bar exam.^[8]

Justice Department Civil Rights Division[edit source | editbeta]

The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division under the George W. Bush administration hired Adams in 2005.^[13] In 2008, Adams was one of three federal attorneys probing Lake Park, Florida for possible bias against African-Americans being elected to town commission.^[14]

In December 2009, Adams's supervisor and Civil Rights Division attorney Christopher Coates stepped down as chief of the voting division in December 2009 amid controversy over his objections to the dropping of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case.^[13] Coates' testimony before the United States Civil Rights Commission supported Adams' allegations,^[15] and the Commission's report that found "a cover-up of a possible racial double standard in law enforcement in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice," and, detailing "a year of DOJ’s intransigence and baseless refusals to comply with our subpoenas," that "the Department of Justice is unquestionably hostile to any serious investigation of these allegations."^[16] In May 2010, Adams resigned from the Justice Department.^[17]

Post-Justice Department career[edit source | editbeta]

After leaving the Justice Department, Adams became counsel for the Election Law Center and a contributor to the center's blog. Additionally, he became a contributor to Pajamas Media.^[5] On June 28, 2010, The Washington Times published a guest commentary by Adams in which Adams accused the Justice Department of racial bias by dropping the New Black Panthers case.^[18] Subsequently, Adams accused Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez of lying under oath in investigative hearings before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.^[5] On July 6, 2010, Adams testified before the Commission on Civil Rights that the Justice Department's decision was driven by racial bias against white Americans.^[19]

During the 2012 Republican presidential primaries in Virginia, Adams represented candidate Michele Bachmann in a multi-candidate lawsuit to add Bachmann and others to the primary ballot in Virginia.^[20] Bachmann and the other candidates lost the lawsuit.^[21]

Bibliography[edit source | editbeta]

Adams, J. Christian (2011), Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, Washington, D.C.: RegneryPublishing,ISBN 1596982772

References[edit source | editbeta]

^ ^a^ ^b^ "John Christian Adams". Avvo. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
Markon, Jerry; Thompson, Krissah (October 23, 2010). "Dispute over New Black Panthers case causes deep divisions". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 7, 2012. "Adams, 42, was assigned as the lead lawyer."
"Ex-Official Accuses Justice Department of Racial Bias in Black Panther Case". FOXNews.com. 2010-04-07. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
Turner, Channing. "Adams: ‘Lawless’ Civil Rights Division Dismissed Black Panther Case". Mainjustice.com. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
^ ^a^ ^b^ ^c^ Gazarik, Richard (July 2, 2010). "Lawyer bashes Obama officials over Philadelphia voter-intimidation case". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
"The Justice Department and the New Black Panthers Voting Rights Controversy". Federalist Society. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
"John Christian Adams search". South Carolina Bar. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
^ ^a^ ^b^ Brundrett, Rick (December 2, 2007). "Supreme Court not off the hook". The State (Columbia, South Carolina). Archived from the original on December 4, 2007.
McCaslin, John (February 26, 2001). "Inside the beltway". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on March 3, 2001.
McCaslin, John (July 26, 2001). "Inside the beltway". The Washington Times. Archived from the original on July 30, 2001.
McCaslin, John (July 30, 2001). "Inside the beltway". The Washington Times.
Gathright, Alan (June 8, 2003). "No-fly list ensnares innocent travelers". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on June 20, 2003.
^ ^a^ ^b^ Reilly, Ryan J. "Voting Section Chief Out Amid Controversy – Main Justice". Mainjustice.com. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
Dubocq, Tom (July 20, 2008). "Feds probe possible racial bias in Lake Park voting". Palm Beach Post. Archived from the original on September 4, 2008.
Foster, Daniel (September 24, 2010). "Coates Testifies at Civil Rights Commission". The Corner. National Review Online. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
Race Neutral Enforcement of the Law? The U.S. Department of Justice and the New Black Panther Party Litigation: An Interim Report, US Commission of Civil Rights, December 3, 2010
Reilly, Ryan J. (May 18, 2010). "DOJ lawyer who brought Black Panthers case resigns". Main Justice. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
Adams, J. Christian (June 28, 2010). "Inside the Black Panther case". Washington Times. p. B1.
Savage, Charlie (July 7, 2010). "Racial Motive Alleged in a Justice Dept. Decision". The New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2012.
Higgins, Tim; Millard, Mike (January 6, 2012). "Virginia’s Cuccinelli Opposes Changes to March Primary Rules". Bloomberg News. Retrieved July 8, 2012.
Kumar, Anita (January 13, 2012). "Perry, Gingrich lose lawsuit to get on Virginia primary ballot". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 8, 2012.

External links[edit source | editbeta]

Categories:

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A Recent History of GOP Voter Suppression in Florida

Ari Berman on October 1, 2012 - 1:04 PM ET

The state of Florida has an unfortunate history of disenfranchising voters. We all remember the “hanging chads” of2000. Less well-known is how Florida wrongly labeled 12,000 eligible voters as felons, 41 percent of whom were African-Americans, and kicked them off the voting rolls that year, which could have very well cost Al Gore the election. Florida attempted another controversial voter purge in 2004, but was forced to scrap the plan after public outcry (history is repeating itself this year). The 2008 election, however, was noticeably smooth in the Sunshine State, producing a surprising victory for Barack Obama.

Following the 2010 election, Florida Republicans concluded that it was a little too easy to vote in the state. “I want the people in the State of Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who is willing to walk 200 miles for that opportunity he’s never had before in his life,” said GOP State Senator Michael Bennett. “This should not be easy.”

Upon taking office in 2011, Florida Governor Rick Scott and the Republican legislature drastically changed the state’s election laws by preventing ex-felons from being able to cast a ballot after serving their time, cutting back early voting from fourteen to eight days, and severely restricting voter registration drives.

As I reported in Rolling Stone:

In May [2011], the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution.

As a result, the law threatens to turn civic-minded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as “good old-fashioned voter suppression,” the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years.

The voter registration restrictions seem particularly ironic in light of the escalating scandal involving Strategic Allied Consulting, the RNC-funded GOP voter registration firm, run by a Republican operative with a history of bad behavior, recently accused of submitting fraudulent voter registration forms in Florida and elsewhere. The scandal makes Republican claims about ACORN sound more than a little ridiculous.

Florida Republicans invoked ACORN as the reason for the voter registration restrictions in 2011, even though ACORN was out of existence by that point. “Can you spell ACORN?” State Representative Dennis Baxley, chief sponsor of the law, told reporters at the time. “Or have you forgot all about that, and some of the problems that we had?”

Yet the law change appeared to be more about political payback than a sincere concern about voter registration fraud. “The first major imposition of restrictions on voter registration drives occurred in 2005, a year after ACORN’s community organizing work resulted in enough signatures to place a citizen initiative on the ballot to increase Florida’s minimum wage,” theBrennan Center for Justice reported. The 2005 law was subsequently blocked in court. But it was taken up again and passed by Republicans in 2011.

From my reporting:

The registration law took effect one day after it passed, under an emergency statute designed for “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare.” In reality, though, there’s no evidence that registering fake voters is a significant problem in the state. Over the past three years, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has received justthirty-one cases of suspected voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests statewide. “No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about,” said Mike Fasano, a Republican state senator who bucked his party and voted against the registration law. What’s more, the law serves no useful purpose: Under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, all new voters must show identity before registering to vote.

A fact-check from the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact Florida labeled as “false” the claim by GOP State Representative Eric Eisnaugle that “Mickey Mouse was registered to vote [in Florida],” and that voter registration fraud by ACORN in 2008 necessitated the new voting restrictions.

According to the paper:

Eleven people hired by ACORN to register potential voters near Homestead were accused of falsifying hundreds of voter registration applications.

ACORN actually turned in the hired workers after officials noticed the discrepancies in the cards. The group of workers turned in 1,400 cards, of which 888 were found to be fraudulent. Included among the fraudulent voter applications: deceased actor Paul Newman.

No one voted in the election using the fraudulent voter applications.

In May 2012 a federal judge blocked the most egregious provisions of the law for violating the First Amendment, and another judge formally overturned it at the end of August. Yet the damage had been done, as groups like the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote were forced to shutter their voter registration efforts for a year during a crucial presidential election.“The entire year was lost for voter registration in Florida,” says Deidre Macnab, president of the Florida League of Women Voters. “The law had a major impact on students, minorities and the elderly.” The voter suppression efforts worked as intended for the GOP—between July 2011 and July 2012, Republicans added 128,039 new voters to the rolls but Democrats registered just 11,365 new voters.

UPDATE: University of Florida elections expert [Daniel Smith says the numbers I linked to above, from the Florida Times Union, are not accurate. "According to the state’s official records,more than 155k voters registered as Democrats in 2011," writes Smith. "Slightly less than 138k voters registered as Republicans in 2011." But the law did hurt Democrats more than Republicans: "28.1% fewer Floridians registered as Democrats in 2011 compared to 2007, and 15.5% fewer Floridians registered as Republicans in 2011 compared to 2007."]

In a deeply sardonic twist, Republicans committed the only voter registration fraud that has occurred since the law was overturned. “It’s kind of ironic that the dead people they accused Acorn of registering are now being done by the RPOF [Republican Party of Florida],” Paul Lux, the Republican supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, told NBC News.

And, unlike with ACORN, Strategic Allied Consulting didn’t alert authorities to the voter registration fraud—that was done by local election officials. Prosecutors are now investigating the group for criminal misconduct. (The case hasn’t put an end to GOP hypocrisy about voter fraud, however. Last week the attorney general of Texas invoked ACORN to justify similar restrictions on voter registration drives in his state, even though no charges were ever filed against the group.) Maybe in 2013 the Florida legislature should pass legislation specially preventing Republicans from running voter registration drives.

Here’s why this scandal matters: the Florida GOP committed voter registration fraud while undermining the right to vote for everyone else—particularly minority voters, who have been historically disenfranchised in the state and are key supporters of Barack Obama and Florida Democrats. The common thread between these different voter suppression efforts has been to make it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot.

• Data from the 2004 and 2008 elections in Florida show that “African-American and Hispanic citizens are about twice as likely to register to vote through drives as white voters,” according to Project Vote.

• African-Americans in Florida were twice as likely to cast ballots during early voting in 2008 as white voters. According to University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith, 800,000 voters in Florida cast ballots during early voting hours in 2008 eliminated by the GOP. A federal court overturned the law in the five Florida counties covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

• An executive order by Scott mandating that felons convicted of nonviolent crimes wait up to seven years before receiving their voting rights disenfranchised nearly 200,000 Floridians who would have been eligible to vote in 2012. Blacks are 13 percent of registered voters in Florida, but 23 percent of disenfranchised felons. (See Brentin Mock’s excellent new story, “Has Florida Created a Trap at the Polls for Ex-Felons?”)

• Eighty percent of the so-called “non-citizen” voters on Florida’s inaccurate and discriminatory purge list were people of color (only one non-citizen on that list of 2,600 was found to have actually voted). Florida has restarted the purge on a reduced scale—but election officials may once again refused to implement it.

So remember this: Republican voter suppression efforts in Florida have been far more destructive than simply handing in a few hundred fraudulent voter registration forms.

NC Passes Voter Suppression Measures as DOJ Moves to Protect Voting Rights in TX

The North Carolina legislature voted July 25 to approve the most restrictive voter suppression measures in the country, making it the first state to pass new laws after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. But the move comes the same day that the Department of Justice announced plans to use other means to protect voting rights. 8/1/13 http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=oyk7jXURstCUQnJSqWABE0t8aUe1dINM

map: http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/user/27458/2013_restrictions_map_0.png

New poll tax charges parents of college students vote?!

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http://www.alternet.org/print/tea-party-and-right/6-ways-rabid-republicans-are-declaring-war-america

......Rabid Republicans are also acting with renewed zeal to roll back voting rights in key Southern states. In North Carolina [7] and Texas [8], GOP-led legislatures are resurrecting a catalogue of Jim Crow-era barriers to minority voting, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning of the 1965 Voting Right Act’s toughest enforcement provision. In North Carolina, the GOP wants to repeal 20 years of best practices [6] that made North Carolina a model of fair and accessible elections. In Texas, the GOP wants to revise political districts to dilute [9] minority representation and pass tougher voter ID laws.

5. The attack on voting rights. The game plan here is as old as Reconstruction: block your opponents from voting. After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, Shelby v. Holder, gutting [25] the Voting Rights Act’s toughest provision that blocked racially discriminatory voting laws from taking effect, GOP-led states—North Carolina [26] this week and Texas [27] previously—have put forth bills to re-segregate voting and elections.

What North Carolina Republicans are pushing through their legislature this week is on par [28] with what Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell did before 2004, when his state re-elected President George W. Bush. Rick Hasen, a University of California law professor, wrote [29], “The bill is a nightmare for voting rights advocates: not only does it include a strict voter ID law and provision shortening early voting and eliminating same-day voter registration for early voting, it is a laundry list of ways to make it harder for people to vote.”

The Shelby decision gives the GOP room to plot redistricting scenarios to lock in safe seats in Congress and locally because the Justice Department’s threatened pushback is on untested [12] legal grounds. Texas Republicans quickly said [8] they would revise district lines, instead of waiting for the 2020 Census, as well as toughen state voter ID laws. These discriminatory steps in key states, coupled with the House GOP’s anti-immigrant bias, underscore the party’s defiant obsession with preserving its political power.

6. The attack on election regulators. Part of the attack on voting is an attack on election officials who were genuinely non-partisan, like North Carolina State Board of Election’s longtime director, Gary Bartlett. He was ousted [30] earlier this year after two decades on the job after a new Republican governor reconstituted the state BOE. Bartlett had spent years making [31] North Carolina’s election rules arguably the most progressive in the South. But the North Carolina GOP is also trying to end public financing for judicial elections, another successful anti-corruption program.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, outgoing Republican members of the Federal Election Commission are trying to ram through [32] rule changes that would tie their successors’ hands with regulating money in federal campaigns. These changes in the arcane rules and ways that elections are run are designed to deter voters and coddle wealthy special interests.

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scotus: prop 8 out, but http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/supreme-court-texas-voter-id_n_3509834.html

House Republicans To Defund ACORN Again, Even Though It Still Does Not Exist

Posted: 06/04/2013 12:37 pm EDT | Updated: 06/05/2013 11:02 am EDT

WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are scheduled to vote on two separate budget bills this week, each of which would reject funding for the poverty activism group ACORN, despite the fact that ACORN disbanded three years ago.

ACORN, also known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, came under heavy fire in the fall of 2009 after conservative videographer James O'Keefe released a set of selectively edited videos that appeared to show its employees offering advice on tax avoidance related to prostitution and child smuggling. Independent investigations by the California attorney general, the Massachusetts attorney general and the Brooklyn, N.Y., district attorney would later clear ACORN of criminal wrongdoing, and an investigation by the Government Accountability Office would clear ACORN of charges that it mishandled federal funds.

But in the fall of 2009, Congress banned federal funding for ACORN using broad language that applied to "any organization" that had been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws or campaign finance laws or with filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. The funding ban also extended to any employees, contractors or others affiliated with any group so charged.

Struggling with the bad publicity and loss of federal funds, ACORN dissolved in early 2010. Just to be sure, however, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) included this language in a government funding bill introduced on May 28 of this year: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors."

Section 545 of a bill put forward the next day by Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) delves still deeper into faux certainty, extending the funding ban to "any prior appropriations Act."

In fact, ACORN has no subsidiaries, because it has not existed for three years. Neither bill defines "successors," but the broad language of the original 2009 funding ban left little room for leeway, extending to "Any State chapter of ACORN registered with the Secretary of State's office in that State," "any organization that shares directors, employees, or independent contractors with ACORN," and any organization that "employs" someone "indicted" for violations that ACORN was initially charged with.

"Is it too late to defund Saddam Hussein?" mocked Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.).

Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), defended the passages as routine language that House Republicans always include. "These provisions are typically carried every year in appropriations bills," Hing said.

Indeed, like a game of legislative Mad Libs, the House GOP routinely inserts a similar provision in appropriations bills it approves. In March, the House signed off on a short-term "continuing resolution" budget with language identical to Culberson's.

The decision of whether to cover prior legislation in the ACORN funding ban is left to individual Appropriations subcommittees, according to Hing. The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, chaired by Carter, traditionally includes the retroactive ban. The Culberson and Carter bills are both set for a vote this week.

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As Supreme Court Hears Challenge to ALEC Voting Bill, Two More States Introduce It

by Brendan Fischer — March 25, 2013 - 7:36am

Topics: Democracy, Politics

Projects: ALEC Exposed

ALEC Bill Introduced in Nevada, South Carolina

In Nevada on March 18, the same day the Supreme Court heard the ITCA case, a version of the ALEC bill was introduced by Sen. Don Gustavson, a member of the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force (which, before being disbanded last year, had adopted the Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act as a "model") and Sen. James Settelmeyer, a member of the ALEC Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force. See the side-by-side here. The Nevada proposal additionally reflects provisions from the ALEC Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act requiring proof of citizenship for public benefits (although the ITCA case only considers those provisions relating to voter registration). ...http://www.prwatch.org/node/12032

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The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court Gearing Up to Restore White Rule Over America

GOP desperation over U.S. demographic changes has spread to the U.S. Supreme Court -- a majority is ready to tear up the most important part of the Voting Rights Act.

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John Stossel (Fox News): “Let’s stop saying everyone should vote.”

Matthew Vadum: Registering [the poor] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country.

Rush Limbaugh: “If people cannot even feed and clothe themselves, should they be allowed to vote?”

Judson Phillips (Tea Party Nation): “If you’re not a property owner, I’m sorry, but property owners have a little bit more of a vested stake in the community than not property owners do.”

Steve Doocy (Fox News): “With 47% of Americans not paying taxes – 47% – should those who don’t pay be allowed to vote?”

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/neo-confederate-supreme-court-gearing-restore-white-rule-over-america

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dailykos:

2008:

He looked at every 2010 race in Arizona from Governor Brewer to Senator McCain and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. The trends lines all did the exact same thing. Someone had manipulated the election outcome, most likely one person inserting a programme inside the system’s central computer… that flipped votes.

The results were astounding.

They showed that Governor Brewer actually lost her election and Gabby Gifford’s razor thin less than 1% point re-election victory over Tea Party Conservative Jesse Kelly was closer to a 20 point victory for her.

Duniho added, “We need to have strong hand count audits to confirm the integrity of these elections. This means comparing hand counts with official reports of the election."

Ohio Precedent

This isn’t the first time Republicans have been charged with vote theft. It happened in the 2004 presidential election, in Ohio and Florida.

In Ohio, GOP consultant Michael Connell claimed that the vote count computer program he had created for the state had a trap door that shifted Democratic votes to the GOP.

He was subpoenaed as a witness in a lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and lawyers for the plaintiff asked the Dept. of Justice to provide him with security because there were two threats made against Connell’s life by people associated with Karl Rove. But in Dec. 2008, before the trial began, Connell was killed in a plane crash outside Akron Ohio.

There were problems in Florida, as well.

A study by the Quantitative Methods Research Team at the University of California at Berkeley found that ano

malies between Florida counties using touch-screen voting and those using other methods could not be explained statistically. Noting the higher-than-expected votes for Bush in three large Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, Michael Hout, a Berkeley professor who did the study said there were strong suspicions of vote-rigging.

“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” Hout said. “The study shows that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero—less than once in a thousand chances.”

Don’t Trust, Verify...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/26/1150485/-Retired-NSA-Analyst-Proves-GOP-Is-Stealing-Elections

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see below

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_mayer

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Those anonymous billboards in Ohio and Wisconsin that equate voting with a possible prison sentence are coming down, to be replaced in some cases by new ones that say, "Voting is a right. Not a crime!"

After initially defending the billboards paid for by a "private family foundation," the advertising company Clear Channel has announced that it will take down the scary billboards. Their message -- "Voter fraud is a felony! Up to 3 1/2 years & $10,000 fine" -- has been presented now in dozens of neighborhoods of poor and minority neighborhoods across Ohio and Milwaukee. In Ohio, Clear Channel will then put up 10 billboards with the pro-voting message pictured above. In Wisconsin, Clear Channel will sponsor digital billboards that encourage early voting.

On a like note, after pressure from the Jackson Free Press and local lefties, Mississippi's Republican Secretary of State has added a message -- at right, in very small type -- on the state's website that says the voter ID law will not be in effect in November. The law has been put on hold by the U.S. Justice Department.

And in Pennsylvania, advocates for voting rights have sued over a state ad campaign that could make you think you need ID to vote in that state, when that hasn't been true for weeks now. One look at the ads going around, and it's easy to see what they mean.

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Einhorn Family Foundation Behind Voter Suppression Billboards

One Wisconsin Now and theGrio have uncovered that the Milwaukee-based Einhorn Family Foundation is the "private family foundation" that funded controversial billboards in Milwaukee which warned: "VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY! 3 1/2 years and a $10,000 fine." The billboards were denounced as voter suppression by Mike Wilder, director of the African-American Round Table, and other community groups. The billboards were put up in largely African-American and Latino communities in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Columbus by media behemoth Clear Channel, but the client remained anonymous.

overview update; 11/2/12

http://www.prwatch.org/node/11815

various frauds:http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/14223-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections-part-i

rove and connell;http://archive.truthout.org/122408J

Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General, Threatens To Arrest International Elections Observers [CORRECTED]

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing Posted: 10/24/2012 2:06 pm EDT Updated: 10/25/2012

Greg Abbott, the Republican Attorney General of Texas, issued a stern warning this week to members of an international delegation expected to be on hand to monitor voting at polling places around the country on Election Day.

In a letter to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which works to ensure the integrity of elections, among other tasks, Abbott warned the diplomatic poll-watchers that their involvement in U.S. elections could have strong legal repercussions.

"It may be a criminal offense for OSCE's representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place's entrance," he writes. "Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE's representatives to criminal prosecution for violating state law." Such a restriction makes election monitoring highly difficult.

The OSCE announced earlier this month that it would send 44 observers to polling places around the country on Election Day in order to monitor possible disputes that could arise in the voting process. The move came in response to a petition from liberal-leaning voting rights groups, including the NAACP and ACLU, that suggested the OSCE's presence could help combat what they fear will be a concerted effort to suppress votes from supporters of President Barack Obama.

Concerns among Democrats have mounted in the wake of reports that right-leaning groups, such as the Tea Party-aligned True The Vote, had plans to dispatch armies of poll-watchers seeking to root out invalid votes. Opponents warn that the volunteer "poll challengers" will engage in intimidation of legitimate minority voters who tend to vote Democratic.

In his letter, Abbott takes issue with the OSCE's supposed opposition to voter ID laws, which won't be in place in Texas after being rejected by a federal court, and adds that the group's efforts at polling places are neither needed nor acceptable.

"If OSCE members want to learn more about our election processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented to protect the integrity of elections," he writes. "However, groups and individuals from outside the United States are not allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas. This State has robust election laws that were carefully crafted to protect the integrity of our election system. All persons -- including persons connected with OSCE -- are required to comply with these laws."

Abbott's opposition is consistent with a growing trend of conservative distrust toward the United Nations and other international organizations. On Tuesday, Florida GOP Senate candidate Connie Mack said that the U.N. should be defunded and "kicked off of American soil." In a statement, Mack appeared to suggest that the broader U.N., and therefore presumably the OSCE as well, was driven by nefarious motives.

��The very idea that the United Nations -- the world body dedicated to diminishing America’s role in the world -- would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting," he said.

UPDATE: 3:10 p.m. EST -- Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), responded in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying that Abbott's threat put the state of Texas at odds with an agreement between the body and state authorities.

“The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable,” Lenarčič said. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.��

Lenarčič took issue with insinuations that officials in the group would meddle with elections, reiterating that they were bound by national laws and regulations, as well as their own strict code of conduct.

“Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way,” Lenarčič said. “They are in the United States to observe these elections, not to interfere in them.”

A release relaying Lenarčič's comments pointed out that the OSCE has observed five previous U.S. elections since 2002, all without incident.

CORRECTION:This article originally reported that the OSCE was created by the United Nations. While the OSCE and UN partner on some operations,they are independent organizations.

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

It may be less than 150 monitors and observers, but a UN affiliated organization (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)) will be in the US on Election Day to report on any perceived irregularities. According to The Hill, the delegation is coming at the request of US Civil Rights groups concerned about the massive national effort by the Republican Party to keep non-GOP voting groups from casting ballots:

Civil rights groups met with representatives from the OSCE this week to raise their fears about what they say are systematic efforts to suppress minority voters likely to vote for President Obama.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP and the ACLU, among other groups, warned this month in a letter to Daan Everts, a senior official with OSCE, of “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans — particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”

BuzzFlash at Truthout, along with other Internet sites, has repeatedly pointed out that voter fraud at the polls is statistically almost non-existent in the United States. However, the Republicans, through such surrogates as the Tea Party leaning "True the Vote" and laws inhibiting the most basic right of democracy – voting – have created an illusionary perception of hordes of illegal voters. (Jane Mayer has written a timely New Yorker article on "The Voter Fraud Myth." )

Voter suppression potentially reaching into the millions for partisan political purposes, based on the disseminating of knowingly false information about the scarcity of voting fraud, is a crime against the Constitution.

The Hill quotes Giovanna Maiola, spokeswoman for OSCE, as indicating that the international mission – given its extremely limited size – will try to focus "on a number of areas on the state level, including the legal system, election administration, the campaign, the campaign financing [and] new voting technologies used in the different states.”

It is appropriate that the United Nations monitor US elections, despite its small contingent. After all, the Republican Party is conducting a war on democracy. What we are seeing is an effort to create a de facto apartheid system of casting ballots for our government.

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Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, has promoted strict voter-I.D. laws. Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

The Voter-Fraud Myth

The man who has stoked fear about impostors at the polls.

by Jane Mayer October 29, 2012

Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter, including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family—Teresa, her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt��living in the Millsdale Street house.

The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. ��You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector,” it said. “The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 A.M. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.”

“My first thought was, Oh, no!” Sharp, who is African-American, said. “They ain’t messing with us poor black folks! Who is challenging my right to vote?”

The answer to Sharp’s question is that a new watchdog group, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, which polices voter-registration rolls in search of “electoral irregularities,” raised questions about her eligibility after consulting a government-compiled list of local properties and mistakenly identifying her house as a vacant lot.

The Sharp household had first been identified as suspicious by computer software that had been provided to the Ohio Voter Integrity Project by a national organization called True the Vote. The software, which has been distributed to similar groups around the country, is used to flag certain households, including those with six or more registered voters. This approach inevitably pinpoints many lower-income residents, students, and extended families.

True the Vote, which was founded in 2009 and is based in Houston, describes itself as a nonprofit organization, created “bycitizensforcitizens," that aims to protect “the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party.” Although the group has a spontaneous grassroots aura, it was founded by a local Tea Party activist, Catherine Engelbrecht, and from the start it has received guidance from intensely partisan election lawyers and political operatives, who have spent years stoking fear about election fraud. This cohort—whichRoll Callhas called the “voter fraud brain trust”—has filed lawsuits, released studies, testified before Congress, and written op-ed columns and books. Since 2011, the effort has spurred legislative initiatives in thirty-seven states to require photo identification to vote.

Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from one member of the group:Hans von Spakovsky. A Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, he is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. “Hans is very, very helpful,” Engelbrecht said. “He’s one of the senior advisers on our advisory council.” Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book “Who’s Counting?,” which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. “Election fraud, whether it’s phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States,�� they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a “spreading” danger, and declare that True the Vote serves “an obvious need.”

Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, “The Voting Wars,” says, “Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn’t part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.” In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, “Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system.” He accused Democrats of “standing up for potential fraud��presumably because ending it would disenfranchise at least two of its core constituencies: the deceased and double-voters.” Hasen believes that Democrats, for their part, have made exaggerated claims about the number of voters who may be disenfranchised by Republican election-security measures. But he regards the conservative alarmists as more successful. “Their job is really done,” Hasen says. “It’s common now to assert that there is a need for voter I.D.s, even without any evidence.”

In Hamilton County alone, the new citizens’ groups have challenged more than a thousand names since March. Some challenges, such as those aiming to disqualify college students who failed to include their dorm-room numbers on their registration forms, were tossed out immediately. But the board accepted nearly two hundred challenges, including those to twenty-six voters registered at a trailer park that no longer existed.

In Ohio, if voters whose eligibility has been challenged come to the polls in November, they may be forced to use a provisional ballot, which will be counted only if officials sanction it—after Election Day. Some experts worry that voters who have been needlessly challenged will feel too intimidated even to show up. “People have other things to do with their lives than respond to inaccurate complaints accusing them of being criminals,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said.

Alex Triantafilou, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Elections, maintains that the challenges have been nonpartisan. But Caleb Faux, a Democrat on the board, says, “I don’t buy it. The True the Vote people are clearly going after Democratic voters: African-Americans, students, and other groups they think are likely to vote Democratic.”

Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, “They’re doing a great job.” Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? “It is impossible to answer,�� he said. “We don’t have the tools in place.” But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.

He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn��t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.

On the appointed day this fall, Teresa Sharp drove to Cincinnati and appeared before the Board of Elections. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and accompanied by six family members, Sharp moved to the front of the room when her name was called. She then ��slammed her purse and papers on the table,” according to Faux, who was present.

Sharp told me, “It was like a kangaroo court. There were, like, ninety-four people being challenged, and my family and I were the only ones contesting it! I looked around. The board members and the stenographer, they were all white people. The lady bringing these challenges, she was white, and reminded me of Gladys Kravitz”—the nosy neighbor on the sitcom “Bewitched.”

When Sharp heard her house described as a vacant lot, and learned that Marlene Kocher—the member of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project who had filed the challenge against her—had not bothered to visit her address, she exploded. “This lady has nothing else better to do?” she said. “I think she needs to get a life!”

Faux recalled that Kocher “apologized and kind of shrunk back.”

“We made a mistake,” Mary Siegel, a leader of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, who has been involved in a local Tea Party group, told me. “We’re just here to protect the voter. We have no idea when we look at the registrations what color or creed or party you are. We just look at where your property is and how many people are living there.”

Sharp said, “I think they want to stop as many black people as they can from voting. I won’t even know until Election Day if I got the right to vote. But if they tell me I can’t vote—it is over. They are going to have to call the police. I am going to jail!”

At the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky emphasized that his devotion to safeguarding voter integrity had nothing to do with racial discrimination or partisan gain: “I’m not in this because I��m on a team. I believe in having fair elections, and I would never be willing to do anything that would encourage or allow cheating in an election. My interest is in making sure that the person who people vote for the most wins.��

Yet many Democrats see his cause as a voter-suppression effort in disguise. Thirty-three states have passed some form of voter-I.D. law, the most severe versions of which demand government-issued cards with photographs and expiration dates. A driver’s license typically qualifies, but many students, elderly people, and poor urban residents do not have one.

According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonprofit institute at N.Y.U. Law School, eleven per cent of the voting-age population lacks the kind of I.D. cards required by the strictest states. Eighteen per cent of Americans over the age of sixty-five do not have such documentation; among African-Americans the figure is twenty-five per cent. Von Spakovsky criticized the study for focussing not on registered voters but on all Americans who are eligible to vote. He cites rival studies indicating that the number of registered voters without I.D.s is negligible.

The vast majority of the lawmakers who have pushed for voter I.D.s have been Republicans. As Bill Clinton has put it, “This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate”—when many young and minority voters stayed home—“than the 2008 electorate.” Clinton said that the “effort to limit the franchise” was the most determined “since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting.”

Republicans who support tighter voter security say that they are not seeking political advantage. But last summer Pennsylvania’s Republican House Leader, Mike Turzai, was caught on tape boasting to colleagues that the state’s new I.D. law was ��going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Earlier this month, a state judge suspended the controversial law’s implementation until after the 2012 election; a federal court has done the same with South Carolina’s new I.D. law.

Congressman John Lewis, the Democrat from Georgia, says of recent efforts to tighten voting requirements, “I thought we’d passed this long ago. But it seems we must fight this fight over and over.” In the nineteen-sixties, Lewis was beaten by police while demonstrating in support of civil-rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act. He said of von Spakovsky, “He’s been the moving force behind photo I.D.s. I don't know if it’s something in the water he’s been drinking . . . but over the years he’s been hellbent to make it more difficult—always, always—for people to vote. It’s like he goes to bed dreaming about this, and gets up in the morning wondering, What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote? When you pull back the covers, peel back the onion, he’s the one who’s gotten the Republican legislatures, and the Republican Party, to go along with this—even though there is no voter fraud to speak of. He’s trying to create a cure where there is no sickness.”

Earlier this year, at a panel sponsored by the conservative organization Judicial Watch, von Spakovsky said that it was “preposterous” for anyone to liken the nationwide crackdown on voter irregularities to “the restoration of Jim Crow.” In support of his views, he cites a liberal icon: the former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In 2008, Stevens helped uphold Indiana’s strict voter-I.D. law in the face of a challenge from Democrats. He wrote, “Examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists,” demonstrating ��that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Nearly all scholars of America’s system of locally run elections acknowledge chronic problems, including administrative incompetence, sloppy registration rolls, unreliable machinery, vote buying, and absentee-ballot fraud. But Robert Brandon, the president of the Fair Elections Legal Network and a longtime reformer, says that the current debate, “which is about people impersonating another voter, is silly.” He adds, “You can’t steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D.s won’t stop that.”

Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name.

When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted��it was just a mistake.” He added, ��I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.” Pastor believes that, compared with other democracies, America is “somewhere near the bottom in election administration,” and thinks that voter I.D.s make sense—but only if they are free and easily available to all, which, he points out, is not what Republican legislatures have proposed. Sabato, who supports the use of voter I.D.s under the same basic conditions, says of the voter-impersonation question, ��One fraudulent vote is one too many, but my sense is that it’s relatively rare today.”

Hasen says that, while researching “The Voting Wars,” he “tried to find a single case” since 1980 when “an election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud.” He couldn’t find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a ��virtually non-existent” problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy.

Lorraine Minnite, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, collated decades of electoral data for her 2010 book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” and came up with some striking statistics. In 2005, for example, the federal government charged many more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with perpetrating election fraud, which has long been a felony. She told me, “It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. It��s like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome.” A report by the Times in 2007 also found election fraud to be rare. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime.

Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of “the Fraudulent Fraud Squad,” told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. “I see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army,” he says. ��It’s just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. They’re providing fake scholarly support. They’re not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it.”

Von Spakovsky is the son of a German mother and a Russian father who met in Bavaria, just after the Second World War, at an American-run camp for displaced persons. They immigrated to the United States in 1951. His father, Anatol, was a White Russian who fought Communism twice: first against the Bolsheviks, in Russia, and later against Tito, in Yugoslavia, where he lived before heading to Bavaria. “He escaped death many times,” von Spakovsky recalled. “He taught me to stand up for what I believe in, no matter what the cost, and I have taken that to heart.” Von Spakovsky says that his heritage has made him especially appreciative of American democracy and sensitive to what he calls its “fragility.”

In America, his parents settled in Huntsville, Alabama, where his father taught philosophy at a local college and wrote poetry. “He was the most intelligent and cultured person I have ever known,” von Spakovsky said, adding that family dinners were more stimulating than the local schools he attended. Although the civil-rights movement created tumult in Alabama during his childhood, he says that he has no memory of it.

After graduating from M.I.T. and Vanderbilt Law School, von Spakovsky became the in-house counsel at a life-insurance company in Atlanta, and volunteered to become a Republican poll watcher at an inner-city housing project. “I was expecting a very boring day,” he says. Instead, he observed election officials asking voters which party they belonged to, “which, of course, you’re not supposed to do in a general election. So the very first time I’m a poll watcher, I walk in and something illegal is going on.”

It was 1992, a turning point in American election law. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, civil-rights groups brought discrimination cases against local election officials, particularly in the South, alleging that bureaucratic barriers—such as requiring people to register at local clerks’ offices—served mainly to intimidate new voters, many of whom were minorities. Voting-rights activists pushed for national legislation that would encourage mass enfranchisement, such as permitting people to register when they got a driver’s license, or to register by mail. Congress passed a bill with these provisions, but President George H. W. Bush vetoed it. Soon after Bill Clinton took office, in 1993, he signed the bill, which became the National Voter Registration Act—also known as the motor-voter law. As minority-voter registration surged, conservatives began warning that permitting more lenient forms of registration opened the door to fraud.

In 1997, von Spakovsky agitated against the National Voter Registration Act and in favor of strict requirements, including the presentation of birth certificates, for voter I.D.s, in order “to prevent impostors from voting.” He became a Republican appointee to an election board in the Atlanta area, which had a fast-growing, increasingly black population. Writing for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research center, he warned that aspects of the National Voter Registration Act might “destroy the security and integrity of the voter-registration system.” The article also recommended regular purges of voter rolls.

By 1999, von Spakovsky had begun attracting national attention. He was the chairman of the Fulton County Republican Party, and served on the advisory board of the Voting Integrity Project, or V.I.P.—a new group, based in Arlington, Virginia. V.I.P. called itself a nonpartisan election-reform group, but it had deep ties to the Republican Party and to the national conservative movement.

One of its founders, Helen Blackwell, was married to Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan aide and the founder of the Leadership Institute, an organization that trains ultra-conservative young activists. (In 2009, one of them, the guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe, took undercover footage meant to suggest pervasive criminality atACORN, the progressive nonprofit group, some of whose employees had pleaded guilty to voter-registration fraud. Although the footage was widely condemned as misleading, the controversy helped lead toACORN’s demise.)

V.I.P. embraced von Spakovsky’s call for voter-roll purges. In 1999, the group met with and gave an award for “innovative excellence” to a company called Database Technologies, which was designing the State of Florida’s procedure for scrubbing its voter rolls of felons and other ineligible people. In 2000, Database’s process led, notoriously, to the erroneous disenfranchisement of thousands of voters—most of them Democrats and many of them black. Asked about this, von Spakovsky said, heatedly, ��I was in Atlanta, and I had nothing to do with the company that Florida hired to clean up its election rolls.”

Von Spakovsky did, however, get directly involved in the infamous recount of the Presidential vote in Florida. Serving as a volunteer observer for the campaign of George W. Bush, he spent time in Jacksonville, where black leaders protested that their voting rights had been denied, and in Palm Beach County, where twenty-eight thousand ballots went uncounted, because examiners concluded that they had not been filled out properly. According to the Palm Beach Post, nearly half of those discarded ballots came from predominantly black and elderly precincts. Von Spakovsky, for his part, recalled the drama on the ground as less than thrilling: “It was a lesson in how really boring vote counting can be.��

After the recount trauma, the Bush Administration announced its crackdown on election fraud, and hired von Spakovsky as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s newly invigorated voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act. He was soon promoted, becoming counsel to the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil-rights division.

The crackdown was infused with partisanship. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. Attorneys, in part because top Administration officials felt that they were too soft on potential Democratic voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington. In 2008, documents unearthed by an inspector general revealed that the push to prosecute had as much to do with political gain as with the pursuit of justice. Republican officials in New Mexico pressured David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for the state, to prosecute Democrats before the 2004 election. A lawyer for the state Republican Party wrote that the voter-I.D. “issue should be used (now) at all levels,” adding, “You are not going to find a better wedge issue.” But an election-fraud task force that Iglesias formed with the F.B.I. found no crimes to prosecute. Because of his failure to find fraud, the inspector general concluded, Iglesias was fired. (He is now a prosecutor in Guantánamo Bay.) John McKay, the U.S. Attorney in Washington State, was also fired after failing to find prosecutable voter fraud.

In 2006, President Bush appointed von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission while the Senate was in recess. When he came up for confirmation, six career lawyers in the voting section wrote a scathing letter of protest, saying that he had a “cavalier�� disregard for legal precedent. They noted that a federal court had struck down Washington State’s attempt to implement his recommendation that eligible citizens be kept “off the rolls for typos and other mistakes by election officials.” They accused von Spakovsky of overruling their judgment that a strict voter-I.D. law in Georgia would result in substantially fewer black voters, and of using a pseudonym to publish an essay in support of voter-I.D. laws while the department was weighing the case. A judge in Georgia struck down the law, likening it to a poll tax. (After considerable modifications, the law was authorized.)

Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section, repeatedly clashed with von Spakovsky and his allies. “I worked at the Justice Department for thirty-six years, twenty-four of them under Republican Administrations,” Rich told me. “The disdain and antagonism that they had for the experience, expertise, and dedication of career civil-rights attorneys was something I had never experienced before. It was just awful.”

Among the lawmakers who spoke out against von Spakovsky’s appointment to the F.E.C. was Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois. He put a hold on the confirmation, effectively blocking it. After two years in limbo, von Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration, and joined the Heritage Foundation, where he continued to inveigh against voter fraud.

In the spring of 2008, as Obama was clinching the Democratic nomination for President, von Spakovsky issued a lengthy report on electoral fraud, titled “Stolen Identities, Stolen Votes.” In an op-ed piece on the Fox News Web site, he argued that “one doesn’t have to look far to find instances of fraudulent ballots cast in actual elections by ��voters’ who were the figments of active imaginations.” Yet the most recent evidence he cited in his report was decades old: a grand-jury report documenting criminal collusion, from 1968 to 1982, among Brooklyn election officials and local machine politicians.

Richard Hasen asked to see the grand-jury report, but von Spakovsky did not respond. (“What am I—his research assistant?” he asked me.) Hasen has another explanation for von Spakovsky’s refusal to produce the document: “He must have known it was weak.” Hasen eventually hunted down his own copy. On his blog, he observed, “Most of this fraud took place forty years ago,” adding, “When election officials collude with those committing fraud, a voter-I.D. requirement would not help in the slightest.” Asked about this, von Spakovsky said, “That’s not what the grand jury said. They recommended voter I.D.s.” The report recommends nine specific procedural changes to help prevent corrupt behavior by election officials, but says of voter identification only that it should be studied as one of several “possible remedies.”

The election of 2008 was a milestone in terms of turnout. The percentage of African-Americans who voted (sixty-five) rivalled the percentage of whites who voted (sixty-six). Penda Hair, the co-director of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, says that this statistic discomfited Republicans. ��Conservatives were looking at it and saying, ��We’ve got to clamp things down,’ ” Hair said. “They��d always tried to suppress the black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”

After Obama took office, von Spakovsky expanded his campaign for voter-I.D. laws and other ballot-security measures. One receptive forum, where he spoke repeatedly, was the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC—a conservative, corporate-funded group that drafts legislative models for thousands of state lawmakers. In 2009, after the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter-I.D. law, ALEC drafted a sample voter-I.D. bill for other states to copy. An accompanying essay in the organization’s newsletter explained how to frame such restrictions so that they would pass muster with the courts. Copycat bills emerged in state legislatures across the country. In 2011 and 2012, Republicans proposed sixty-two such laws, in thirty-seven state legislatures. News21 has reported that more than half of these bills were sponsored by associates of ALEC. Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which runs a Web site called ALEC Exposed, says, “Unlike a think tank, ALEC operationalizes the agenda, nationally.”

Von Spakovsky said, “The idea that there’s some deep conspiracy is just laughable.” His own work, however, has suggested that liberals engage in conspiracies. “Who’s Counting?” opens with an insinuating account of how Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 2008. According to the book, there is “compelling” evidence, compiled by a citizens’ watchdog group, that “1,099 ineligible felons voted illegally” in the contest—“more than three times” Franken’s victory margin. The subhead of the chapter is “Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?”

Fox News and other conservative media outlets have promoted this argument. However, Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, who oversees Minneapolis, told me, ��Those numbers are fraudulent. We investigated, and at the end of the day, out of over four hundred allegations in the county, we charged thirty-eight people. Their research was bad, sloppy, incredible. They are just liars.” Some of the targeted voters weren’t actually felons; others were on probation and hadn’t realized that they remained ineligible to vote. To be convicted of voter fraud, a suspect needs to have criminal intent.

Von Spakovsky told me, “It doesn’t matter whether they”—the felons—“intended it or not. The point is they did vote.” The subject of electoral fraud is now front and center in Minnesota: in November, the state will have a referendum on a state voter-I.D. law.

Von Spakovsky has also presented a more recent case as a scandal. Last year, in an op-ed piece that was nationally syndicated, he wrote, “A 2010 election in Missouri that ended in a one-vote margin of victory included 50 votes cast illegally by citizens of Somalia.�� He told me that these voters “could only speak Somali, even though to become a U.S. citizen you must learn English.” Once again, when the case was examined by a judge, no fraud was found. Although the judge’s ruling had been issued before the column appeared, von Spakovsky didn’t mention it. He told me that the omission was justified, because the judge hadn’t investigated ��the citizenship issue.” Yet the voters’ citizenship was never in doubt. Translation assistance is available at the polls—citizens sometimes have shaky English—and the court had found merely that election officials had not made the voters take an oath before receiving help, as state law required. The judge determined that such a mistake “should not result in the disenfranchisement of the voters.”

With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections.He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovsky’s co-author, told me, “If it’s close this time, I think we’re going to have three or four Floridas.” Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, “If we’re lucky only three or four.” If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, “there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison.” Pursing his lips, he added, “I hope it doesn't happen.” But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_mayer?printable=true&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+trblogposts+%28Hottest+blogosphere+items%29

cf kpfa am show h wasserman solartopia freepress.org, Demos org, AG tx ~ OECD? clearchannel billbd, 9 swing state gop gov, 8 sec of st

romney family owns vote machines? cf jame m nyer; v collier harpers?

http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/gop-voter-registration-scandal-widens-prosecutors-file-criminal-charges

Home > GOP Voter Registration Scandal Widens, Prosecutors File Criminal Charges

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The Brad Blog / By Brad Friedman

GOP Voter Registration Scandal Widens, Prosecutors File Criminal Charges

October 20, 2012 |

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.

“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly [2]. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.

But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September [3], after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.

The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., [4] in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting [5] that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”

He was first hired, says Tanfani, by Strategic Allied Consulting, the firm owned by the disgraced GOP operative and paid Mitt Romney political consultant Nathan Sproul. Even before this year’s registration fraud scandal, which began with Strategic in Florida, Sproul’s companies have long been accused of, though never charged with, destroying Democratic voter registrations in election after election and state after state, going back to at least 2004. Despite that, Sproul was hired by the Bush/Cheney campaign in 2004, by the McCain/Palin Campaign in 2008, and by Romney during the Republican Primary cycle.

Sproul’s company, Strategic Allied Consulting, was hired by the RNC in August for more than $3 million, reportedly as its sole voter registration company this cycle. His company was said to have been fired by the RNC [6] and five different battleground state Republican parties several weeks ago, after fraudulent voter registrations began to emerge across Florida. Some of those questionable applications included address changes for existing voters, such that Florida election officials told the BRAD BLOG [7]they worry voters could find themselves disenfranchised come Election Day. In Florida, as in many states, provisional ballots cast at precincts other than where voters are officially registered will not be counted. So changing the addresses on voter registrations without voters�� knowledge is a serious crime with potentially very serious consequences.

Reilly’s report at TPM says that Small “worked for PinPoint, a company hired to register voters on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia.” In fact, PinPoint Staffing placed ads to hire workers for Strategic Allied Consulting in FL, VA and a number of other states, though the BRAD BLOG [8] has learned that the company removed many of those ads once the scandal began to break in Florida. They have since modified some of their newer ads to hide their ties to the Republican Party.

In response to queries we sent to Sproul late Thursday, his crisis spokesperson, David Leibowitz, attempted to distance his client from the arrest of the Republican Party worker in Virginia, claiming that “the only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers."

It was PinPoint Staffing, in fact, which reportedly hired the man Strategic blamed for the fraudulent registration forms turned in originally in Palm Beach. But while PinPoint continues to seek workers for GOP-related efforts around the country, and as Sproul’s operations continue in “as many as 30 states”, it is the Republican National Committee’s response to the entire affair, including to the arrest today, that may be the most troubling…

The RNC ‘firing’ deception

[9]Colin Small, according to his LinkedIn profile, as captured by the NotLarrySaboto blog [9] (which was the first to highlight the initial report [10] of a man with PA license plates tossing a bag of Virginia Voter Registration Forms into a Harrisonburg dumpster), wasn’t only working for the state GOP or for Strategic Allied Consulting or for PinPoint. He was working as a “Grassroots Field Director at the Republican National Committee,” according to LinkedIn.

Update: [NBC News is reporting [11] this morning that RNC Communications Director denies Small was "directly employed by the RNC" and that he will be "told to take down that." Small is currently in jail and unable to respond to clear up the question, however.]

Last month, several days after fraudulent voter registration forms collected by Strategic Allied Consultingand turned in by the Florida GOP began to be discovered by County election officials in Florida, the RNC claimed to have fired Strategic [6].

Sean Spicer, the RNC’s Communications Director, boasted that the party took “swift and bold action�� after learning of the fraud, claiming they have “zero tolerance” for it or for those who commit it. However, as we summarized in our very first report on this scandal [3], Sproul’s companies have a long history of workers being paid per Republican registration form and for being accused of destroying Democratic ones.

Despite that, they were hired once again this year by the RNC who, Sproul says, asked them to create the new company in June without his name on it to avoid it being tied to him. Not very bold or zero tolerancy of them. Though Spicer said he had no knowledge of that arrangement, Sproul told the BRAD BLOG [8] he stands by his assertion.

Beyond that, last Thursday we reported [12] that Sproul��s firms, including what appeared to be a “clone” operation of Strategic Allied Consulting, calling itself Issue Advocacy Partners, were still found working for Republicans and right-wing ballot initiatives in at least 10 states. Subsequently, on Friday, the *Los Angeles Times*reported [13] that, in fact, Sproul was still “hiring workers for a voter canvassing operation this fall in as many as 30 states.”

On Thursday, following Small’s arrest, Sproul’s spokesman Leibowitz hedged that number by telling us via email: “What we said on the record to various media outlets is that his companies are working in ‘as many as 30 states.’ That could mean 1 state. Or 2. Or 30. You get the idea, I’m sure.”

We do. The idea is Sproul does not want to come clean about his ongoing operations and who it is that he continues to work for, preferring instead to live up to the ��shady” adjective that’s often applied to him in the media. Despite our follow-up request, Leibowitz did not identify the exact number of states that Sproul was still working in, or who was paying him to do so.

Strategic was said to have been hired by state Republican Parties, at the request of the RNC, for voter registration drives in five states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado) and for “Get Out the Vote” campaigns in Ohio and Wisconsin. When both RNC and state GOP officials claimed to have fired them, it seems they didn’t really mean it.

In Tanfani’s report at LA Times late Thursday, Spicer confirms that, really, it may have only been Sproul who the party claimed to be “boldly” cutting ties with. The operations Sproul created for the Party beginning in August, the ones that led to fraudulent voter registrations in Florida and destroyed applications reported in Colorado and Nevada as well, are still in place.

“After Sproul was dumped,” Tanfani reports, “the registration operation that he assembled continued working under the supervision of party officials, Spicer said. He said the workers will continue to do get-out-the-vote work until the election.”

The firing of Sproul and Strategic Allied Consulting was a deception.

Moreover, asThe BRAD BLOG detailed on Tuesday [14]the company’s mailing address, according todocuments released [PDF] [15]by the Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement upon announcement oftheir statewide criminal investigation of Strategic [16](the firm is also beingcriminally investigated in CO [17]), was registered as a corporation last June out of the same law office run by top-level Republican National Committee election attorneys where both Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super-PAC and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity are also based.

Despite Spicer’s attempt to downplay the VA incident on Thursday — ��He made a mistake and he’s being charged with it, which we fully support” — as he similarly did for the FL incidents previously, it’s become clear that the RNC’s deceptive and often illegal registration and canvass operations are toxic, widespread, and very high-reaching.

Ironically, or perhaps not at this point, Romney, who hired Sproul late last year as a “political consultant” for some $71,000, appears to have committed both voter registration fraud *and* voter fraud himself [18] in Massachusetts, when he voted in the January 2010 U.S. Senate Special Election between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. While he owned houses in both California and New Hampshire at the time, he did not own a Massachusetts home until July of that year. Instead, he used the basement of his son’s Belmont, Mass., home as his own registration address in apparent contravention of Massachusetts state residency laws. See our still-growing list of other [very high-profile GOPers recently involved in apparent election fraud crimes [19].]

Trashed registration forms in Virginia

According to FEC filings obtained by CBS 6 in Richmond [20] last month, the Virginia Republican Party reportedly paid some $500,000 to Strategic for registration work before the state GOP claimed to have fired them, several days after the fraudulent forms collected by Strategic and submitted to county Supervisors of Elections by the Florida GOP began to surface in the Sunshine State. As we now know, only Sproul was fired. The voter registration operation itself continued.

Small, the man arrested on Thursday and charged with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors after allegedly having been found to have tossed at least eight registration forms into a dumpster in Harrisonburg, Va. (Rockingham County), was reportedly working for an operation named PinPoint on behalf of the Virginia GOP, according to Reilly at TPM.

In an earlier report on the matter at TPM [21], before Small’s arrest later in the day, Reilly noted that ��Virginia does not register voters by political party, so it would be difficult for someone to discard forms from their political opponents.”

Not really.

Reilly��s assessment does not take into account the very specific and purposely deceptive process used by Sproul’s companies — and, as suggested by evidence we’ve collected, perhaps other Republican-based voter registration outfits across the country �� to identify and register only Republicans to vote, while attempting to filter out Democratic-leaning voters.

In an investigative report earlier this month, the BRAD BLOG detailed [22] video-taped and other evidence from nearly half a dozen states, demonstrating a deceptive, national Republican voter registration strategy where voter registration workers purposely misrepresented themselves as pollster to potential registrants.

Essentially, as detailed in video clips and other testimony in that report, the GOP voter registration workers hired by Sproul were trained to pretend to be taking a poll and to ask voters if they supported Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. If the answer was “Obama”, the potential registrant was thanked and sent on their way. If the answer came back as ��Romney”, they were given the opportunity to register to vote. In that way, the thousands of workers employed by Sproul, the former head of the Arizona Republican Party and Christian Coalition, kept many Democratic-leaning voters from registering to vote at all.

In one YouTube video that went viral last month [23], a young Colorado registration worker — who, it turned out, had been working for Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting on behalf of the state GOP �� is seen doing exactly that. Another videoposted by Las Vegas ABC affiliate Action News 13 [24], shows a worker there playing out the same pollster scheme in Nevada. Sproul shared an email with The BRAD BLOG [8]in which he had boasted to other company officials that the Vegas video tape captured their worker carrying out her training “perfectly”.

In Virginia, where the Pennsylvania man working for the state GOP was arrested Thursday, Chesterfield County’s General Registrar Larry Haake was seen explaining to Richmond’s CBS 6 [20] in late September that he had received complaints of Strategic employees discovered doing the same thing in a library last month.

“They were responsible for people that appeared in some libraries in Chesterfield County, supposedly to conduct voter registration drives,” Haake said, “but they were asking voters for whom they are going to vote.”

Haake says he informed the GOP of the incident at the time, but, apparently, no action was taken.

If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it��s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.

The ��PinPoint’ piece of the puzzle

In that same story on the Sproul/RNC voter registration deception [22], we cited a 9/28/12 report by the *Los Angeles Times* [22] that tied PinPoint Staffing to Sproul.

The article quoted William T. Hazard, the Strategic employee said by the company to have turned in the original fraudulent registration applications in Palm Beach County, Fla. He says he “did nothing wrong”, but told the paper that he was trained “to approach people and ask whom they supported in the presidential election. When people answered with President Obama, he said, he wished them a good day. If someone said Mitt Romney, he asked if they were registered to vote. If not, he handed them forms to fill out.”

He says that it was a help wanted ad placed by PinPoint that led him to the work for Strategic, Sproul, and the Republican Party.

“He got the voter registration job after responding to a Craigslist ad placed by a company called PinPoint Staffing seeking people to do ‘voter surveys’,” the Timesreported at the time. ��The ad specified that all applicants had to be registered Republicans and active voters.��

Further, the paper says, “Although he reported to a PinPoint Staffing office in West Palm Beach, he said, ‘I thought I was dealing with the Republican Party.’”

PinPoint was key to Sproul’s operations. So who are they?

Over our three-week long investigation of Sproul and the GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal, we had collected dozens of help wanted ads posted by PinPoint Staffing that were nearly identical to others published on behalf of Strategic. Some of those ads placed in North Carolina had proved instrumental, originally, to theBlueNC blog’s Greg Flynn [25] in late August when they were key to his uncovering Sproul’s previously-secret ownership of Strategic Allied Consulting.

Many of the PinPoint ads on Craigslist and other sites — seeking “VOTER REGISTRATION SUPPORT” by “REPUBLICAN PARTY SUPPORTER(S)”, for example — were hastily removed from the Internet at nearly the same time that Sproul and Strategic were being outed and supposedly fired. The BRAD BLOG [8]captured many of them before they were taken down, some with the message: “This posting has been flagged for removal.”

We discovered ads by PinPoint Staffing in dozens of cities, in Virginia, North Carolina and Washington D.C., as well as all across Florida, from Pensacola in the panhandle, down to Palm Beach County where the first fraudulent registration forms were discovered [3] in late September.

More recently, PinPoint ads for “Political Jobs” or “Campaign” or “Canvassing” operations began to no longer include references to “Republican Voters” or “Romney” or the ��Republican Party��. Instead they might read “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR YOUR BIG BREAK INTO POLITICS?”. Such ads have been found this month in Virginia, Wisconsin, New York, Arizona and Florida.

During our research on our report last week detailing the state’s where Sproul was confirmed to still be working [12], we found evidence of his continuing operations under the names Issue Advocacy Partners and Grassroots Outreach in Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York, New Jersey and, possibly, Ohio (where the RNC had previously admitted that Strategic had been scheduled to do “Get Out the Vote” work this year before the “firing”.)

At TPM, Reilly reports that “A man who answered the phone at Pinpoint and only gave his name as Ryan said he was not allowed to comment. ‘I really want to stay out of it,’ he said.”

Ads for Strategic placed in late Summer by PinPoint in Alachua, Fla., and in September in Winston Salem, N.C., told perspective employees to “Contact Ryan.”

The phone number given on the ads was from Phoenix, AZ. Sproul’s main operation is based just outside of Phoenix, in Tempe.

“Let me be as unequivocal as possible. Nathan Sproul and his businesses have no ownership interest in Pinpoint,” his spokesperson Leibowitz, hired by Sproul to manage the crisis several weeks into it, insisted to The BRAD BLOG [8] late Thursday. “He doesn’t control it, nor is he affiliated with it.”

“The only connection between Sproul and Pinpoint is that Nathan has, on occasion, used Pinpoint to hire some workers.”

When we followed up to ask if Sproul had used PinPoint to hire workers in FL, VA or anywhere else, whether any of his current companies are still using them, and for what services he has used them in the past, or if he has since stopped, Leibowitz demurred.

“Given that Nathan’s companies have no connection to the Pinpoint-related story you cited earlier, we see no need to go into any further detail.”

Deborah Newell Tornello [26] contributed research to this report.

CORRECTIONS: We’ve updated the piece above to reflect new information made available since publication early this morning. Included in the updates: TPM corrected its report from last night [27] to say that “The Rockingham County Sheriff office originally said Small was 31 years old. The agency later corrected that information to say he is 23��; Small was charged with 8 felony counts and 5 misdemeanors, not 13 felonies as we’d initially described.

This article first appeared at THE BRAD BLOG [28]

See more stories tagged with:

gop [29],

election 2012 [30],

voting scandal [31]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-voter-registration-scandal-widens-prosecutors-file-criminal-charges

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/brad-friedman

[2] http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/colin_small_virginia_gop_voter_registration_fraud.php

[3] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9586

[4] http://kelly.house.gov/

[5] http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-voter-registration-gop-arrest-20121018,0,5352175.story

[6] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9592

[7] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9590

[8] http://www.bradblog.com/

[9] http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b13369e2017c32a0a23a970b-pi

[10] http://notlarrysabato.typepad.com/doh/2012/10/virginia-gop-caught-destroying-voter-registration-forms.html

[11] http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/19/14556980-gop-registration-worker-charged-with-voter-fraud?lite

[12] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9627

[13] http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fired-rnc-consultant-canvassing-campaign-20121012,0,2171682.story

[14] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9632

[15] http://bradblog.com/Docs/ElectionsFraudComplaint_StrategicAlliedConsulting_092712.pdf

[16] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9609

[17] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9622

[18] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9397

[19] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9467

[20] http://wtvr.com/2012/09/27/virginia-republicans-fire-voter-registration-group/

[21] http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/virginia_sheriff_republican_voter_registration.php?ref=fpb

[22] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9600

[23] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9583

[24] http://www.ktnv.com/news/local/166966656.html

[25] http://www.bluenc.com/republican-paid-voter-registration-operation-linked-fraud

[26] http://litbrit.blogspot.com/

[27] http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/colin_small_virginia_gop_voter_registration_fraud.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

[28] http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9643

[29] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop

[30] http://www.alternet.org/tags/election-2012

[31] http://www.alternet.org/tags/voting-scandal

[32] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

nathan sproul,asked to rename co by gop fla

firm fired, working in 6 states incl colo http://bigdanblogger.blogspot.com/2012/10/coordinated-nationwide-gop-voter.html

Earlier this week, 40,000 members of the Daily Kos community sent an email to the Virginia State Board of Elections (VSBOE) demanding an investigation into a voter registration supervisor employed by Pinpoint, a subsidiary of Strategic Allied Consulting, after he was arrested and charged with 13 counts of voter registration fraud.

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Sproul on salon:

Contrast that with the activities of Sproul & Associates, Lincoln Strategies and now Sproul’s Strategic Allied Consulting, along with what was admitted to by the Republican Party today in Colorado, and revealed by a number of recent cases of massive registration fraud by the Republican Party in California. (For the record, ACORN was never hired to do registration work by the Democratic Party, despite inaccurate Republican claims to the contrary.)

In 2006, GOP voter registration firms in California were reported by the LA Times to have turned in thousands of invalid registration forms, as well as fraudulent signatures on petitions in San Bernardino County. In once instance, “About 4,800 of more than 5,600 signatures submitted [by John Burkett Petition Management] were found to be invalid and were tossed out by election officials,” the paper reported.

In 2008, at the height of that year’s GOP/Fox ��News” ACORN “voter fraud�� scam, a group calling itself Young Political Majors (YPM) was hired by the CA Republican Party to do voter registration. The firm was reportedly paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP. YPM was subsequently found to have been changing thousands of voter registration forms from Democratic to Republican. The group’s CEO, Mark Anthony Jacoby, was eventually arrested(see video of my appearance announcing the news on Fox in a live ��Fox News Alert” that year) before he later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.

And, earlier this year, in 2012, the Sacramento Republican Party was found to have hired Momentum Political Services, a firm headed up by a woman described as a“professional con-artist”. The group allegedly turned in thousands of fraudulent voter registrations as part of a $50,000 bounty scheme seeking Republican registrations, as paid for by the GOP in the district of Republican Congressman Dan Lungren.

All the while, Republicans were loudly accusing Democrats of committing “voter fraud” requiring polling place Photo ID restrictions to stop it, even though there are just 10 known cases of in-person impersonation — the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by Photo ID — out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to a recent exhaustive report by the non-partisan investigative news consortium, News21.

Perhaps it’s a case of projection. Or maybe the GOP knows about the fraud that they��re carrying out, so they presume that Democrats must be doing something similar. Nonetheless, when it comes to voter registration fraud, Republicans are the champs, hands down. And it remains to be seen how wide and how high this story will go. This one may have legs.

As to actual voter fraud, it’s Republicans �� and very high profile ones at that, including Mitt Romney himself — who are winning that contest as well. See The BRAD BLOG’s recent report detailing 10+ recent cases of voter fraud and other related election fraud crimes by high profile Republicans right here.

wonk room: FLORIDA: Alex Sink v. Rick Scott

538 estimate: 43 percent chance of Democratic pickup

Florida is under imminent threat from the rising sea levels, fiercer heat waves, and stronger storms of global warming. Clean energy investment and energy-efficiency retrofits could restore hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economically battered state. However, millionaire health care executive Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for Florida governor, is a global warming denier:

Asked if he believes in climate change, he said ��No.” “I have not been convinced,” he said. Asked what he needs to convince him, “Something more convincing than what I��ve read.” [St. Petersburg Times, 7/26/10]

Despite the lingering BP disaster, Scott is open to oil drilling off the coast of Florida. Scott’s campaign attacked his Democratic opponent Alex Sink’s advocacy of renewable energy standards as “leftist energy proposals,” promoting nuclear power instead. Florida’s renewable-industry advocates responded: “Rick Scott needs to say something of substance or stop attacking small business people.”

Scott is a signatory of the Americans for Prosperity “No Climate Tax” pledge and the FreedomWorks Contract From America, and was endorsed by the FreedomWorks PAC.

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Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R)has frequently touted himself as a defender of electoral integrity, but on Tuesday the governor appeared to duck questions about an investigation into a GOP-linked voter registration group that has been accused of engaging in widespread fraud that could create complications for thousands of voters in his state.

A third-party voter registration firm called Strategic Allied Consulting -- run by controversial GOP consultant Nathan Sproul -- was fired by the Florida GOP and RNC last month after the Florida Division of Elections filed a complaint regarding a number of suspicious forms being turned in around the state. The probe has since widened, and the Miami Herald reported Tuesday that a particularly nefarious type of fraud, in which operatives re-register or change voters' information without their knowledge, could lead to unpredictable Election Day obstacles for a large number of Floridians.

"The [Republican National Committee] and the [Republican Party of Florida], they’ve done the right thing," Scott told reporters, according to the *Miami Herald*. "As soon as they had an inkling, they fired the group that was doing that. Again, it’s the right thing to do. If somebody is doing the wrong thing, they shouldn’t be registering voters in our state. So they’re doing the right thing."

Pressed by reporters on how these developing concerns might damage the credibility of Florida Republicans, who have promoted repeated voter purge efforts as supposed proof of their commitment to the integrity of elections, Scott sidestepped.

"My focus is on making sure that I tell people all the time, that in our state, I want people to go register to vote," Scott said, according to the *Herald*. "They need to go talk to the candidates. When you’re running for office, when you’re in your community or in your state, vet the candidates, get involved, pick your candidates, support them, and then go out the vote. That’s where my focus is."

Last week, however, Scott appeared focused on touting his support for voter purges, while again ignoring the controversy regarding alleged instances of voter registration fraud from Strategic Allied Consulting....http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/rick-scott-voter-registration-fraud_n_1951774.html?ref=topbar

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)

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palastbbb

1/13/2013

1/21/2013

HAVA requires centralization and computerization of voter roles, so simplifies fraud 26

written by rove, Ney and Abramoff involved

100k removed since 2006 in AZ alone 27 CO sec of state used HAVA to cut 1/5 2x 2008 obama margin p27

2012 rove Datatrust largest db, every US voter p30, funded by langone just days after CU 31

CU followed by lower ct Speechnow.org

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/03/26/451808/two-year-anniversary-of-speechnoworg-v-fec-ruling/

Two years ago today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in the Speechnow.org v. FEC which allowed for the creation of independent-expenditure only committees, commonly known as Super PACs. Combined with the unlimited corporate expenditures enabled by the Supreme Court’s earlier Citizens United decision, this case brought the campaign finance system to where it is now: more than $80 million spent already this cycle by Super PACs and more than two-thirds of their funding coming from just 46 rich donors.

flint hills corpus christie refining bought by koch to do tar sand

ice man h simmons worth 10b$ rove & gop�� National Lead and waste control spec; 50m to rove 1/2 1%, ROI cd be 2B$ p48 1.2m perry (pres $ for doomed campaign an end run around tight gov camp contrib limit?)

simmons invented hostile LBO of dutch boy, but now refused to pay 1/2 bill/yr to clean schools etc; used plundered $ from co to buy other co's.

oglalla 8 states

perry gave 2m$ to texans for lawsuit reform

TOOMEY, MICHAEL Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $100,000

GARCIA, JOE A Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $50,000

MESSER, BILL Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) �� NONE GIVEN $50,000

TRABULSI JR, RICHARD J Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) �� NONE GIVEN $50,000

WALDROP, G ALAN Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN �� $50,000

ARMENDARIZ, RICARDO �� Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN �� $25,000

GRACE JR, JIM M Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $25,000

SIBLEY, DAVID Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN �� $25,000

STRAMA, KEITH Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $25,000

WITTENBURG, MICHELLE �� Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN �� $25,000

BERRY, JORDAN Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $10,000

LOPEZ, M EDWARD Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $10,000

HULL, MICHAEL S Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $0

TIPPS, MARY L Compensation (Fees, Retainers, etc.) NONE GIVEN $0

tim griffin bill no regs till unemployment under 6% *replay kyoto) reg freeze for jobs act hr 4078 aka nuke destrct act 52

vulture singer bought 10m$ congo debt but got 400M in assets? 55

held up argentina tho settled in RR time; BO doJ busted him amicus in NML v; house fin comm called Olsen

ADM 100k bribes to RMN, 25K to burlars

koch older bro fred jr and david twin bill; kochs steal from indians; Sen Nickles OK wingman of Dole 1990 crim indictment of koch ~; deconcini also threatened (usted for keating $, but not mccain or dole, prosector asst AG Nancy Jones fired.

Kock threw party for dole 150K$; 3mil gal toxics in river; 97 counts; dole cd not shield, so tried to change law, recruited newt; contract WITH Am clause 7 Job creation and wage enforcement act boosted Regl Flex Act decrim poison dump 78; CPI said seemed to be crafted to help them; GP says BY them

Bought Ron Paul Nat'l Taxpayers Legal Fund --> CSE 1984, then took the Wise Use, then Tea Party 79 bbb

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prank call? http://www.rtr.org/videofeed/zEJXe6zTXQw

Ron Paul is a snake in the grass who needs to be arrested and tried for treason immediately before he heads off to his reserved pasture on the Koch plantation.

Ron Paul's handiwork:

http://www.lib.ku.edu/paul/RonPaulCitizensforaSoundEconomy.pdf

Information on Citizens For A Sound Economy (CSE):... more

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chs taylor liberian dictator , pat robertson got b2 to back off 9in return for gild mine) plane unloaded food? then took gear? bbb 83 destroyed docs; speechnow lets off hook? 87

coalition for child fut w/ CU helped newt (w/ hit ads?) : demo child molester, bill yellowtail convicted felon and wife beater, pushpoll senate kansas jewess; 29 vulnerable demos targetted, 12 lost, some by less than 200 votes, incl 2 above 90; dir says forced to sign over 700K blank checks; triad; CU also laundred $, called a coincidence when called on it 91; fred thompson started to go after 3; CU foster friess and triad koch; got gig after red october; gop leaders took his subpoena power 93 Trent lott; no wirnesses

Hillary lawyer for Entergy, after pres bought Indian Pt; Riady hires hubbell; GP thinks deal to shut 2 invest down at same time quid proq 99

clinton Demo Leadership Council koch $, // Cato

cb gray devised pollution credits 100, cbG now w/ TP?! point man to stop cap and trade he invented

f video won’t play go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ybl9roaHe0

Investigative reporter Greg Palast is on a speaking tour for his latest book Billionaires and Bandits: How to Steal and Election in 9 Easy Steps. Palast is best known for exposing the so-called "ex-felon" scrub list that deliberately disenfranchised tens of thousands of law abiding African Americans from voting in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. From his interview on RealNews, I suspect Billionaires and Bandits is probably his most important expose. In it he reveals, for the first time, the true motivation behind the Citizens United case, in which a small group of right wing activists obtained a Supreme Court ruling removing any limitation on corporate donations to political campaigns.

According to Palast, the real agenda behind the Supreme Court case was to keep the notorious Koch brothers (major founders and funders of conservative thinktanks like the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the CATO Institute, and right wing Astroturf groups, such as the Campaign for America’s Future, the Campaign for a Fair Economy and the Tea Party) out of jail for illegal corporate donations they had made to Republican campaigns. In other words, the ruling decriminalized extensive lawbreaking by the Republican Party’s favorite billionaires. Palast stresses it was no accident that Ted Olsen, the Citizens United attorney, also happens to be legal counsel for Koch Industries.

The Koch Brothers’ Long History of Flouting the Law

As Palast reveals at the beginning of the interview, he was an FBI investigator prior to becoming an investigative journalist. During the late eighties, he was directly involved in investigating Charles Koch for illegally siphoning oil (beyond what Koch Industries had for) from Indian reservations. According to Palast, the FBI had videos of the whole operation, as well as numerous witness statements, including one from David and Charles�� younger brother Bill. The US attorney in Oklahoma had already filed an indictment against subject 67C (their code name for Charles Koch) when Koch leaned heavily on Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles (R 1988-2005) who exerted pressure to have the federal prosecutor replaced and had the indictment quashed.

With the possibility of criminal prosecution off the table, brother Bill Koch filed a civil lawsuit over the oil theft under the False Claims Act, which allows private plaintiffs to sue, on behalf of the government, companies and individuals which have defrauded it.

In December 1999, the jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land, and the company paid a $25 million settlement to the federal government.

The FBI next turned its attention to 350 criminal violations of environmental law, mainly due to faulty pipelines dumping oil sludge into rivers. After George W. Bush became president in 2000, the US Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, Attorney General John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which the company pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.

The FBI �� and Congress – Investigate Illegal Corporate Donations

Next on the FBI list of crimes was the smear campaign Koch Industries secretly funded, through Campaign for Our Children’s Futures, in 1994, when corporate campaign donations were still illegal. The campaign, which caused 25 incumbent Democrats to lose their seats, also caused Clinton to lose control of Congress in the 1994 midterms and again in 1996. The illegal campaign donations were funded through an entity called Triad Management Services. Senator Fred Thompson, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee attempted to undertake an investigation into Triad. According to Palast, it was shut down the same day Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (who was also seriously ethically challenged) made a deal with President Bill Clinton not to investigate his illegal campaign donations from the Indonesian billionaire James Riady.

http://ballotbandits.wordpress.com/

http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2012/11/02/how_citizens_united_kept_the_koch_brothers_out_of_jail

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wyly bros wrote dereg in TX w/ gov bush bbb 103 disgusted McC did McC-F, but russ taken out by kochs, McC 180 2010 SEC went after 500m fraud 105

---rnc busted for suppress black vote

weyrich admits fewer voters helps gop; elections not stolen by stuffing but by keeping ballots from being counted

fla AG said 91K convicted felon on rolls, but zero fraud

MCC was going to give high job to tim G but bad pr, so pal matt rhoades mr campaign 122

NM state rep Justine Fox-Young pulled tailgunner; gop iglesias ordered to arrest, but cd find none; allen weh starte chair and pat rogers atty compalined to WH, rove on case, fired for absenteeism for being on job in bosnia war crimes 126 Domenici gop pushes igl; pat rogers after acorn Am Ctr for Voter's rights; tom heffelfinger fired in Minn for defending Nat Am from vote fraud? 131 tim g got igles job

rove creates Fed Election Assistance Commission 133

CO 2008 obama but gop landslide 2010; worst vote machines, so promised to get rid after 2012; purged felons tho not illegal for them to vote; indeed illegal to purge 90 days so time to contest; done by Drew Durnham, ex asst to TX AG (who said he was racst) 184

Donetta co sec of state for job chair of FEAC (still exists but gop won't allow any appts, so empty?)

wsj runs John Fund bs

Tova Wang (legit academic) did book on fraud w/ rw guy, but another book put out undersame name w/ her name 186 [2 guys on booktv?]; her boss donetta davison kept her from testifying; did anyway, fired but beat attack w/ pro bono lawyer 188

ch 20 3 states convicted felon can't vote; in 7 restricted (kkk durung reconstruction); nearly 20 mil cons US 189; no one muck works for con rights except to have guns 190. Fla cut 40k cons who moved there (illegal); BO bately won fla 2008 b/c Crist allowed cons to vote, but he was punished by gop, who re-banned "felon" voterts 196; U Minn Uggen and Manza showed cons blocked elected 2000 B2 196.

w/ HAVA atty G target 2012 OH, CO, Az, WI, FLA.

in fla one ballot said write in, then spoiled anyone who checked name; KH said intent cd not be determined 2000; won by 537, but 180K ballots rejected 203; if chad punched but did not fall, no ct.

NM sec of st indicted b/c of biz contacts vote machines 201. 89% rejected ballots cast by lat, AA and NAm 206

OH ken blackwell hired MR ppl to scrape chads, not qual to testify 203; reject ballots wrong thickness; 94K spoiled votes, often chads; margin of vic 2000 and 2004 204.

2004 did not ct 40K ballots, 4x b2 plurality of 10K (half spoiled, rest provisonal and absentee 204.

diebold no work in humin heat 214

nonpart Fla ion sancho told KH about bad machines; white leon cty would not allow vote 2x/spoil; blackest fla cty had highest spoil rate 217; bad mach cost 5x more and make 20x more errors than optical reader in CO; abramoff lobby for diebold; ney in jail chair gov't ops comm for selling favors to JA in connection w/ HAVA; 1.5B$ subsidy to buy diebold 218�� Hultin systematic lost votes; votes lost when mem chip removed, just looks like undervote or spoil

piute sue BP for uranium in water; ute for steal oil 222

post KH black caucus demanded way for purged to vote, so we get provis; but did not get insur that it wd be CTed; 2008 2.1 prov; 26 mil absenteee will be sent to partisan officials; 1 in 14 or 2 mil tossed for trivial reasons (postage, extra initial or lack of 1, wrong env etc etc) 232 Kochs spent 1 mil $ w/ dB to generate idiotproof absentee ballots in WI 2012 recall gov 233 United Sportsmen of WI sent dems absent req form w/ wrong date and addy 233 john w conners ex of AFP !!

fla illegal to reg voters in church, welfare office or voter reg drive mtgs 235 (GUNS OK IN ALL); jeb made illegal to turn in after 48 hrs or w/ errors, 86'd L of WV till judge overruled 236 june 2012, but post acorn, fear persists (hard time in jail?)

CA majority of voter froms of legal ppl of color rejected; gop brice mcpherson rejected 42%, 14K in LA cty, did not tell them; in LAC all ok: input wrong or challenged by gop bm

Fed law says forms must be in some gov offices, but fla pulled rom welfare and illegal at schools 239

AA AND LAT REG VOTERS IN US DROPPED 2 MIL SINCE 2008 239

pearce az state sen 241 prop 200 voter ID law, said 5 mil aliens reg; most ID laws in battle states 12, esp Fla and WI

2004 OH warren cty last to rept b/c it declared a terrorist emergency lockdown, kicked out press and trucked the balllts off to warehouse controlled by gop guy until b2 got 14k more votes than 2000; scam planned 9 days before (fbi and paper)

baldwin cty Ala similar scam ousted gov don siegelman,rove et al went after, fed judge said DOJ shd be investigated, and dismissed charges, overturned by scotus 260; congr hearings stalled b/c rove refused to testify and b2 admin lost docs. gop said trouble w/ tabulaor but gave printout that DS won and sent all home, then redid # and posted on cty probate ct website, .23% win for Riley 2002 p261 (tho no change in downballot); next aM CANVASS BD BLOCKED ENTRY, ALL GOP; statue says certify fri, but did immediately; demaned recount as alw allows, but AG Bill Pryor cited obascure law; rove imported in 1994 by Biz Council of Al to get state and esp judicual postions 263 crooks and 8:1 al scotus; al gop kudos to Kitty McCullough, aka kelly kimbrough, rove partner at KR &Co 264 prtoer get fed judge gig from b2, hey dind that book of payoff gigs; she got help from Dan Gans, electronic vote expert who had worked for riley, then alex strat gp JA bragged on riley win 265

detroit evicted got purged; trott and trott mortgage mills that gets fee for each evioction 269 McC HQ, legal councel to Mitt, gave 100K$ to restore our f

john paulson GS royal bank of scot scammed? JPsn hedge fund got 3.5 bill when crash?jp 1 bill$

singer and Jp got gm chryler $; 4 of 35 delphi plants survuived; co-invest elliot mgmt; mitt oppsed bailout but got chunk of 3200% ROI 279 singer and p $ to ROF

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Home > Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Karl Rove and the Republican Dark Art of Election Theft

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Seven Stories Press / By Greg Palast [1]

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Karl Rove and the Republican Dark Art of Election Theft

September 20, 2012 |

The following is an excerpt from Greg Palast’s new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps [2], including a comic book by Ted Rall and an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (7 Stories Press, 2012).

Congressman Tim Griffinis a big, BIG supporter of the XL Pipeline. And the Kochs are big, BIG supporters of Congressman Griffin. Koch interests lined up $167,183 for Griffin’s run in 2010. Let me put that in perspective: for $167,183, the average member of Congress would be willing to wash your car��with his tongue.

That kind of money doesn’t come into a GOP candidate’s hands without the helpful hand of Karl Rove.

If you remember, voting-rights attorney Kennedy said Griffin “should be in jail.” A federal prosecutor expressed the same sentiment to me. How Griffin ended up in Congress, not in prison, is the more intriguing story.

It was well after midnight, in the first week of October before the 2004 election, when the e-mails started pouring in.

The chieftains of the George W. Bush reelection campaign were copying me on their most intimate and confidential messages—and Ollie, my research director, pissed me off by waking me in my cheap motel room to tell me this whacky-ass news. I was in the middle of nowhere USA with my election investigation for BBC going nowhere, so I wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit.

But it wasn’t bullshit. It was a miracle. Karl Rove’s right-hand man, Tim Griffin, Bush’s research director (read, smear director), had sent the data for some sick scheme to the chairman of the Bush reelection campaign in Florida, Brett Doster. Griffin, instead of sending copies to��GeorgeWBush.com [3], their internal e-mail domain, sent copies to GeorgeWBush. [4]ORG [4], to my friend John Wooden’s joke site. Wooden passed them on to us for forensic analysis.

Here was the GOP leadership with their pants around their ankles, exposing their cheat sheets.

Holy Mama! Do I have to believe in God, now?

What we’d been handed proved to be an electronic back door into the darkest corners of a criminal vote-suppression machine.

By the morning, we had booked flights to Washington, DC, and Tallahassee, Florida, while Ms. Badpenny, in charge of our investigations, began the decoding work. We knew there was a scheme afoot, but what exactly was it?

Smoking-gun memos rarely read, “Louie, this is how we cheat the public,” or “Brett, here’s the plan to steal Florida.” If they do say that, they’re fake.

These e-mails’ clues were a bit tougher than most to crack. That pudgy little wad Griffin had written to Doster several e-mails with the cryptic subject line "Caging.xls," with Excel files attached, and terse messages like “Here’s another list.”

Each was a very selective list of voters, names and addresses. What struck me right off were names like Rodriguez, Washington and Goldberg—typically Hispanic, black and Jewish. Badpenny and the crew mapped the addresses, and sure enough, it was a perfect scattergram of poor, minority neighborhoods and townships with Gone With the Wind names like “Plantation, Florida.” There was also that list of Yiddish names from retirement homes: the GOP was certainly targeting the Elderly of Zion.

But for what?

At the Bush headquarters in Florida’s capital, campaign director Doster agreed to an interview. But when BBC required me to disclose we had his "caging” e-mails, Doster fled like a bunny into his Tallahassee offices and sent out his mouthpiece, Mindy Tucker Fletcher, clutching a supersized cup of Coca-Cola as big as a mortar shell. She brought a flunky to nod at whatever she said, and a sneering list of explanations, beginning with a corker: the “caging” lists, she said, were a compilation of Republican donors.

Really? Including these folks? Here were the Bush-Cheney “donors” who all lived at the State Street Rescue Mission:��Page after page of names contained residents of homeless shelters.

Want to try again, Mrs. Tucker Fletcher?

A ��caging list,” she explained, was a term of art in the junk mail business referring to returned letters. I knew that. The Republicans, she said, didn��t want to send duplicates to wrong addresses.

You don’t say! So Mindy, you’re telling me that Karl Rove’s top attack dog is now running the mailroom via confidential messages to state party chairmen—for address corrections?

Why don’t I give you one more try, Mrs. Tucker Fletcher. Could these, by chance, be lists used to systematically challenge the registrations of voters of color?

Mindy Tucker Fletcher grinned and said, carefully, “This is not a challenge list. That’s not what it’s SET UP to do.”

Bingo.

You see, we’d already made a couple of visits to experts before stopping by Fortress Bush. After sending the lists to America’s junk mail king Mark Swedlund, who’d helped me on many an undercover investigation, I had a damn good idea what these were—an opinion confirmed, without prompting, by Ion Sancho, Florida’s county elections supervisor, the recognized expert on voting systems��and vote heists. “They couldn’t be anything but challenge lists. And if they are, they’re breaking the law.”

More than one law, actually, especially if the targets have a racial or religious profile. And it would be breaking a consent decree: years earlier, the Republican National Committee was caught challenging black voters en masse at polling stations and had promised, under penalty of perjury, not to do it again.

Now it looked like they were doing it again, but in a most sophisticated way. Bobby Kennedy explained the game: ��They send out letters to poor black and Hispanic voters, first class, with instructions to return, don’t forward, if the letter is not deliverable. The returned [“caged”] letter is then used as ‘evidence’ the voter’s listed address is fraudulent, and the Republican functionary then gets the name struck from voter rolls, or the absentee ballot, if mailed in, is not counted.”

Targeting the black, Hispanic and Jewish vote this way is not just icky and racist, it’s against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Kennedy’s late father Bobby Sr., the US attorney general, and his uncle, President John Kennedy, helped draft. Bobby Jr., looking at the evidence, suggested hard time for Griffin and Rove.

But who was going to prosecute Griffin and company, anyway? Was the Bush Justice Department going to tell Mr. Griffin to ��spread 'em"? Mr. Griffin, of the Bush campaign? Mr. Griffin, assistant to the senior advisor to President Bush?

The Hysteria Factory

In early 2004, George Bush was not a popular president, what with wars and his billionaires leaving so little for the rest of us. But if malcontents, black folk, Latinos, and Jews lost their registrations, didn��t get to vote, were afraid to vote, then swing states like New Mexico, Ohio and Florida could be flipped.

A massive attack on voter rolls to remove names, to block voters from casting ballots, and challenging votes cast should do it. Millions of votes are made to disappear by stealth or just sheer incompetence, but Americans are too enamored of the television story of their democracy that they don’t see it and won’t hear of it.

The chairman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Mary Frances Berry, told me, “Elections aren’t stolen in the vote count—they’re stolen in the no count,” a thought perceptive enough to have her removed from the commission by President Bush.

Rove knows that to win in a nation where white voters were becoming the minority, the number of minority “unvotes�� simply had to be goosed. Registry purges, ballot rejections, blocked voter drives, ID requirements, you name it: anything to block the voter or their vote was critical to the GOP. If Democrats had “Rock the Vote,” Republicans would need to “Block the Vote.”

Paul Weyrich, cofounder, with $50 million from the Koch brothers, of the Heritage Foundation, while dining with Ronald Reagan, put it bluntly:

��Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome—good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

And his “our�� does not include those families in the State Street Rescue Mission.

Now, the best way to steal an election is to accuse the other guy of stealing the election. How else can you get Americans to tolerate the purge of thousands of African Americans from the voter rolls as criminals, to block Hispanic voters at the polls because they don’t have citizenship ID, to throw out mail-in ballots because absentee voters used the wrong color envelope?

The answer: this bonfire of the ballot box—wrongfully purging half a million citizens, not counting 2.7 million ballots, and rejecting 2.9 million registrants��is supposed to��stop voter fraud.

“Whether they admit it or not, the Democrats need lawbreakers such as illegal aliens—who are being illegally registered as Democrats—and killers, rapists, and robbers in order to increase their base of far-left voters.”

That’s Mike Baker, Fox News, who spoke with my wingman Ronald Roberts (which isn’t ��Ronald’s�� real name, but we don’t need every freak we are hunting Googling us).

Baker’s canard of the mama-stabbing Mexican voter wave never stops quacking.

And that was Mindy Tucker Fletcher’s last defense. I asked her, if the voters were not “caged” for the purpose of challenging, would the GOP still use the list to challenge these voters?

Well, of course. “You wouldn’t want someone voting fraudulently, would you?��

No, I wouldn’t, Mindy.

The GOP position is this: If the letters mailed to voters at their registration came back to the cage “undeliverable,” that must mean this schemey voter was using a fake address so they could vote. Or vote twice. Fraud, mass fraud. There were tens of thousands of voters on these lists, so by Republican claims, a tidal wave of criminality.

Who were these fraudulent voters with fake addresses? Al-Qaeda stuffing the ballot box? The Zeta gang from Mexico? Castro’s agents?

Badpenny went sleepless calling every number she could trace, starting with this GOP caging list:

Page after page of felonious voters registered at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville! How evil is that?! Using our own military as a cover for massive vote fraud!

Unless, of course, there was another reason why the seamen and airmen weren’t at home. Badpenny reached one family and asked for the voter.

“Randall’s been posted overseas,” said Mrs. Prausa of her soldier husband.

Oh.

Active military may vote absentee from their US home address. But if GOP functionaries challenge them, their mail-in ballot is rejected—and they don’t even know it.

Go to Iraq, lose your vote. Mission accomplished, Mr. Bush.

Indeed, I went through the lists with experts including Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor. He was getting more and more steamed. Who were the supposed fraudsters? Homeless men who don’t have a name on a bell. Students away at school. Folks who move within their congressional district. And the 20 percent of US voters whose addresses contain typos from entries made by state employees into registry computers.

Every scheme to wipe away the voting rights of a US citizen, every legitimate ballot thrown in the garbage, every legal voter told to scram from the polling station, every diseased means used to defraud the public of the right to vote was justified by the hysterical claim of ��VOTE FRAUD”!

But in all fairness, as a journalist, I had to look into the evidence of voter fraud. So I spoke personally with the attorney general of Florida.

The lawman, Bob Butterworth, assured me that if he found an illegal registrant or voter, he would arrest them, jail them. After all, an illegal voter, simply by the act of registering, had committed (another) felony.

I reminded him that Katherine Harris had found over 91,000 illegally registered felons.

How many arrests had he made from her list? “None.” Zero. Bubkiss. Nada.

I don’t get it. Busting them would be easy: After all, we have their addresses on the registrations. And they show up at the polls.

How many cases of vote fraud on that list? “We’ve opened maybe half a dozen cases,” the Florida AG told me.

Six out of 91,000???!!!

And it turns out those six charges were in error and dropped. Fraudulent voters: zero.

And the tens of thousands of caged voters?��Hundreds of thousands caged by the GOP nationwide? If they were fraudulent voters, why weren’t the jails filled with these felonious villains?

Because, says Dr. Lorraine Minnite, there is effectively no voter fraud in the US. Minnite, a professor at Rutgers University who actually dug into the crime files, discovered six—six!—convictions of vote fraud a year among 170 million voters.

Here’s your crime wave: Over the entire study period, there were��two convictions per year for multiple voting, two noncitizens, and two felons. (They must be the dumbest felons ever, willing to go back to prison just to vote for a school bond.) And that voter ID thief? Doesn’t exist.

The truth is it’s murderously hard to convince folks to register or vote illegally when it’s absurdly easy to get caught and the penalty is long-term prison. Santiago Juarez, who runs voter drives in Mexican American neighborhoods, told me, “How do you organize thousands of people to vote twice? Hell, it’s hard enough getting people to vote once.” Stealing an ID to vote twice ain��t happening.

Professor Minnite summed it up: “The claim of widespread voter fraud is itself a fraud.” In 2012, over five million US citizens will lose their right to vote to prevent a crime committed by 12 individuals.

And the real criminals who are guilty of a couple million counts of violations of the Voting Rights Act, they’re on Fox and PBS or in Congress, aren’t they, Mr. Griffin?

Tears of a Clone

In May 2007, BBC television led the nightly news with my report on new US Attorney Griffin and the ��caging” of US soldier voters.

By the next morning, Griffin resigned and turned in his lawman badge.

While the BBC report was, as usual, ignored by US media, it wasn’t ignored by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman John Conyers reached me in London to tell me he would subpoena Griffin.

Griffin held a truly weird press conference, bellyaching about ��that British reporter,” bursting into tears, and, despite the fact that his name was on the e-mails sending out the caging lists, he insisted, “I never heard of ��caging.’”

Really?

No one believed him. No one but me.

If he didn’t send out caging lists, who did? Who would viciously, criminally, attack the rights of soldiers and homeless and old Jewish grandmas?

“Caging” is a technical term used in the direct mail business. So, who knows the direct mail biz and could use Griffin’s personal computer?

Griffin’s boss, Rove, knows about ��caging.” A lot. He became rich as owner of a direct mail company and was, in college, the CREEP computer whiz-kid who first introduced computer database mining in politics for Richard Nixon.

And he’s infamously careful never to use his own computer.

So who used your computer, Tim? And then made you resign as prosecutor, shut up about the facts...and get the Kochs to buy you a seat in Congress?

Conyers told me he had loads of questions about this for Mr. Rove—who simply ignored the congressman’s subpoena.

So we’ll never know if the creep who sent out the caging lists was Karl Rove, his Rove-bot Griffin, or, a third possibility, Griffin��s own gofer, Matt Rhoades.

While Griffin is now an Honorable Congressman (or, at least, a congressman), at the time, his career, following the BBC exposé, appeared to be toast. Indeed, John McCain dumped a high post for Griffin in his 2008 presidential campaign after the caging connection was made public.

But there is redemption. In 2012, Griffin’s gofer, Matt Rhoades, was named director of the Romney presidential campaign.

A Few Good Men (Very Few)

Bobby Kennedy may think that Griffin’s scheme to remove legal voters from the rolls was illegal, but Bush’s Justice Department was not likely to bust one of their own.

Nevertheless, Griffin wasn’t taking any chances. Neither was his boss, deputy chief of staff to the president and consigliere to the Bush reelection campaign, Karl Rove.

They feared there might be honest federal prosecutors. They could cause problems with The Plan to cage and challenge voters in 2004, in 2008, and beyond.

So, a directive came down from Main Justice in Washington to federal prosecutors nationwide: hunt for fraudulent voters. However, the lawmen were not told about an unwritten footnote to the directives: unsuccessful hunters would soon find themselves hunted.

I too was hunting for fraudulent voters—a good journalist should give evil the benefit of the doubt. So I went to New Mexico to bag myself a killer-rapist-illegal-alien-ID-thief voter.

But I was having a helluva time finding even one, despite three million having lost their vote to prevent this terrible crime.

But then, in October 2008, a state legislator in New Mexico, Justine Fox-Young, held up two pieces of paper in the capitol building showing, she said, 28 cases of someone voting with someone else��s name. It wasn’t a crime wave, but a kind of gentle ripple. So I called her and told to her to fax me the evidence. She didn’t. I called again and asked the crimebuster politician, “Justine, you’ve uncovered felony criminals.”

“Oh, yes!”

Cool. So did she turn over these villains to the federal prosecutors?

Uh-huh.

So, did the prosecutor arrest them? Lock 'em up?

“Not exactly.”

The answer was, not even remotely. I called the federal prosecutor, a rising star in the Republican Party, US Attorney David Iglesias. He found Ms. Fox-Young’s evidence just a load of bollocks, though he didn��t use those words, I’ll admit.

Iglesias hadn’t arrested one single person in the entire state for voter fraud, despite the fact that the GOP campaign to prevent “fraud” in the state had resulted in the rejection of 28,000 voters and ballots, almost all Democrats.

In other words, the guy in charge of enforcing the law had not and would not bust a single person for the crime that justified his party’s pogrom against Hispanic voters all across the Southwest.

I wasn’t the only one to note that Captain Iglesias (he had remained in the Naval Reserve as one of the Navy’s top adjutant generals) was not busting Bad Voters.

Around the same time, I discovered that Allen Weh, chairman of the state Republican Party, and Pat Rogers, the party’s lawyer, complained to the White House about Iglesias failing to cuff these Hispanic voters after sending him 50 names, likely from the caging lists.

In 2008, Iglesias was able to tell me he “ran all over the plateaus of New Mexico with FBI agents” tracking down these fraudulent voters and found nothing but good citizens.

That wouldn’t do for the party apparatchiks.

The Republican Chairman Weh, and his counsel, Pat Rogers, brought in an enforcer from the White House: Karl Rove.

In my line of business I hear a lot that could make you shiver, but what Captain Iglesias told me that day in 2008 was one of the most chilling things I’d ever heard from a US official.

The GOP honchos, state and federal, he said, wanted him to lock up voters no matter the evidence. They wanted him to indict innocent people to justify their vote-blocking laws.

Iglesias told me, “I didn’t help them with their bogus fraud prosecutions.”

Rove’s buddies leaned on Iglesias, but they picked the wrong guy. Captain Iglesias was one of the models for the Tom Cruise character, the crusading military defense lawyer, in the film A Few Good Men. Iglesias told the Rove-bots to stick their phony prosecution demands where the votes don’t shine.

So, President Bush fired Iglesias. And he wasn’t the only one. Seven other US attorneys, good Republicans but ethical ones, were removed by the White House and replaced by pliant Rove-bots.

At first, the US press didn’t notice. Iglesias was officially fired for “absenteeism”—because he was placed by the president on active duty and sent to Bosnia to address war crimes.

The press asked no questions, but one of my fans did when he watched my London broadcast on caging for BBC. Congressman John Conyers has always kept abreast of our investigations for BBC television. Conyers called me, then called hearings. He had plenty of evidence that the firings were illegal.

But the problem, Conyers told me, was that his fellow congressmen wouldn’t go after the real issue, the motive for the firings: suppressing the vote of minority citizens. Conyers, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, had the problem that while he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the majority of them were Republicans or other members of the Congressional “White” Caucus.

The committee would concentrate only on the firings as “political,�� and a repeat-a-press-release US media covered it that way, never getting to the real motive. And most important, the Bush White House stonewalled Conyers�� subpoena for cage-meister Griffin’s boss, Karl Rove.

Conyers forced Griffin’s cronies at the Justice Department to cough up their files on Iglesias�� firing which included this smoking pistol: Iglesias -- Underachiever in very important district. That’s the failure to bust innocent voters.

Absentee landlord. That’s his 40-day assignment for the Navy. Firing reserve officers on active duty is a crime, but hell, that’s nothing compared to the next felony on the list.

Domenicisays he doesn’t move cases. This is Republican Senator Pete Domenici who, said Iglesias, woke him up at home to tell Iglesias to speed up the indictment of a Democrat prior to the election.

Oops. He’s telling a United States attorney to indict citizens, and attacking his failure to “move�� when the senator tells him too.

I asked the prosecutor if Rove had him removed as punishment for not bringing the fake cases. “If his intent was, ‘look what happened with Iglesias,’ if that was his intent, he��s in big trouble. That is obstruction of justice, one classic example.”

Iglesias was screwing them bad. The captain and eight other prosecutors were getting all precious about bringing bogus cases. That was undermining the GOP��s attempt to obtain new voter ID laws. The failure to find illegal voters put the lie to their campaign to prove the nation’s top voter registration organization, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), had registered fraudulent voters. Getting ACORN was Republican operative Pat Rogers�� obsession, which he made into a national cause of the GOP and other politicians in the White Caucus as lawyer for the ��nonpartisan” American Center for Voting Rights. It should have been called, American Center Against��Voting. Everything the group proposed would cut the number of citizens voting by millions.

I wanted to ask Rogers why he brought in Rove and why he had Captain Iglesias gunned down. But Rogers didn’t want to answer my formal request for BBC TV. But I figured he couldn’t pass up the free champagne they would pour at a GOP victory party. At the soiree to which I obtained press credentials under another name, I caught Rogers in half-sip with an unseen microphone that captured his personal reviews of my reporting skills. “He’s an asshole,” he told a crony before greeting me warmly as the cameras rolled.

“Iglesias was not capable in his job.” Which was, apparently, hunting ACORN.

“ACORN hired a collection of people who fraudulently registered persons who are not eligible to vote. ACORN is working for the Democratic Party,” said Rogers. (He wore a flag lapel pin the party handed to all the champagne sippers. They gave me one of the Republican freebie flags. I still have it in the wrapper. Take a look: Made in China.)

Had Rogers unmasked a conspiracy between ACORN and the Democratic Party—covered up from them by US Attorney Iglesias, a Republican? Wow!

“Conspiracy,” said Rogers mysteriously, ��is a loose word.” Rogers is fond of loose words. He’d recently held a press conference waving a list of a half-dozen fraudulent voters registered by ACORN. With his full house of illegal voters, Rogers made a huge splash in the papers. Then Iglesias made a total ass out of Rogers, by not busting even one.

What the hell, even a jerk reporter like me will give Rogers a chance. I checked out all six of these ne’er-do-wells, these fugitives from justice. I began at a diner in Cerritos where I tracked Melissa Tais, notorious for allowing another voter with another signature to use her name so she and her confederate could vote twice.

Actually, what she’d done was fill out one registration form at an ACORN table, but never received the receipt. So, following the law’s requirements, she reregistered, this time signing while holding the form in her hand so the signature was a little shaky—resulting in two admittedly different-looking signatures.

So, did she vote twice? No. County officials hauled her into a hearing and it shook her up so much she wouldn��t vote at all. And that’s what they wanted.

But Iglesias wouldn’t play and ACORN continued to register Hispanic and low-income voters until 2009, when Andrew Breitbart (who has since returned to the bosom of Satan) blew up some cockamamie sting which had nothing to do with voting—and put ACORN out of the registration business. (ACORN’s one-time lawyer, Barack Obama, averted his gaze as the media jackals savaged the poor folks’ group, then paid for his pusillanimity in 2010 when Congress flipped color from Blue to Red.)

The US attorney firings occurred just in time for the 2008 election. Iglesias wasn’t alone, of course. Tom Heffelfinger, Republican US attorney for Minnesota, was on the hit list for defending Native American voters from an attack by the GOP’s Minnesota secretary of state. Iglesias called his buddy in Arkansas who was taken down for similar pangs of conscience, but agreed to step aside without a fight so his friend, President Bush, could make his own choice.

And Bush’s choice was...Tim Griffin.

Now, instead of being prosecuted for crimes, Tim became the prosecutor. At Karl Rove’s behest, Tim Griffin was appointed US attorney for Arkansas.

For more Billionaires and Ballot Bandits visit www.BallotBandits.org [5].

See more stories tagged with:

George W. Bus [6],

tim griffin [7],

karl rove [8],

Mindy Tucker Fletcher [9],

election [10],

gop [11]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/billionaires-ballot-bandits-karl-rove-and-republican-dark-art-election-theft

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/greg-palast

[2] http://www.BallotBandits.org

[3] http://georgewbush.com/

[4] http://georgewbush.org/

[5] http://www.ballotbandits.org/

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/george-w-bus

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tim-griffin

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/karl-rove

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/mindy-tucker-fletcher

[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/election-0

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop

[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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2005: Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Supports Jim Crow’-Style Voting Law

A five-member team in the Justice Department��s civil rights division reviews a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a photo ID or buy one for $20. Four of the five members say the law will disproportionately suppress minority votes because minorities are less likely to have a driver’s license or passport. Division supervisors—Bush administration political appointees��approve the law in spite of the team’s conclusion. A judge later throws the law out, comparing it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax. The single member of the division team who favored the law is a recent political hire, a graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School, aged 44, and a member of the Federalist Society and the Christian Legal Society (see Fall 2002 and After). [*Takeover: The return of the imperial presidency and the subversion of American democracy* (New York City: Little, Brown, 2007)., 297.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Savage, 2007, pp. 297]

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http://click.lists.propublica.net/?qs=39a515ec2da742c79d672eb18b0b0b822a44d41feeb3f0f01da81571b16c4d78 tX ct overturns

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propublica; http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-voter-id-laws FAQ

update:

Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country?

This report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice cites primarily big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms which turned voter ID laws into a "major legislative priority." Aside from Rhode Island, all voter ID legislation has been introduced by Republican-majority legislatures.

News21 also has this report on the close affiliation between the bills’ sponsors and the conservative nonprofit group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Republican figures have championed such laws. For instance, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, recently praised the state's legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting last month. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.

A spokesman for Turzai, Steve Miskin, told ProPublica that Turzai was "mischaracterized" by the press. "For the first time in many years, you're going to have a relatively level playing field in the presidential elections" as the result of these new laws," Miskin said. "With all things equal, a Republican presidential nominee in Pennsylvania has a chance."

Correction July 24, 2012: An earlier version of this story said Texas went to federal court to challenge the DOJ’s denial of preclearance. In fact, Texas filed a lawsuit seeking preclearance from the federal district court two months before the DOJ announced its decision. Also, some states require a government-issued photo that does not have to come from the federal government as first detailed.

Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?

There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.

There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.

One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be

ALEC members drafted a voter ID bill in 2009, a year when the 501(c) tax-exempt organization had $5.3 million in undisclosed corporate and nonprofit contributions, according to Internal Revenue Service documents.

At ALEC's annual conferences, legislators, nonprofits and corporations work together without direct public input to develop bills that promote smaller government.

The group’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force at the 2009 Atlanta meeting approved the “Voter ID Act,” a photo ID bill modeled on Indiana and Georgia laws.

The task force convened in committees at the downtown Hyatt Regency Atlanta that July. Arkansas state Rep. Dan Greenberg, Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce and Indiana state Rep. Bill Ruppel (three Republicans now out of office) led drafting and discussion of the Voter ID Act. ...

...

When did voter ID laws get passed — and which states have the strictest ones?

The first such law was passed as early as 2003, but momentum has picked up in recent years. In 2011 alone, legislators in 34 states introduced bills requiring voters show photo ID — 14 of those states already had existing voter ID laws but lawmakers sought to toughen statutes, mainly to require proof of photo identification.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has a helpful breakdown of states' voter ID laws and how they vary.

Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania have the toughest versions. These states won't allow voters to cast a regular ballot without first showing valid photo ID. Other states with photo ID laws offer some more flexibility by providing voters with several alternatives.

...

Have any states attempted to enact strict voter ID laws but so far been unsuccessful?

Yes. In Wisconsin, two judges have blocked enforcement of the state's photo ID law. An appeal in one case won't be heard until after the November election. Meantime, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire and North Carolina have vetoed strict photo ID bills passed by their Republican-led legislatures last year....

Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country?

Republican figures have championed such laws. For instance, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, recently praised the state's legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting last month. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.

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Mississippi’s voter identification law might prove literally impossible for some of its residents to adhere to.In the state, a measure written by State Senator Joey Fillingane (R) and approved by a ballot initiative requires voters to have photograph identification, which they can only obtain if they’ve got a birth certificate to present. But they can only get a birth certificate using photo ID. (It is worth noting here that Fillingane is a member of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is notorious for its voter suppression efforts).

State officials acknowledge the problem Fillingane’s law might cause:

State officials are running into problems with the new voter-identification law even before the federal government has approved or rejected it. Voters without a photo ID are facing a circular problem: They need a certified birth certificate to get the voter ID, and they need a photo ID to get the birth certificate.

Pamela Weaver, spokeswoman of the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office, today confirmed the catch-22 problem, which the Jackson Free Press learned about from a complaint posted on Facebook. One of the requirements to get the free voter ID cards is a birth certificate, but in order to receive a certified copy of your birth certificate in Mississippi, you must have a photo ID.Not having the photo ID is why most people need the voter ID in the first place.

The law is not yet in place, since the federal government needs to approve it under the Voting Rights Act. That Act forbids state voting laws that have a discriminatory impact on minority voters, and, because of Mississippi’s sordid history of voter suppression, requires that the state’s voting laws be precleared by the Justice Department or a federal judge before they can take effect.

There’s no good reason why the Mississippi law should survive such scrutiny. Voter ID laws are especially likely to prevent certain historically disenfranchised communities from voting — 18 percent of elderly voters lack a valid photo ID, as do 25 percent of black and 20 percent of Asian adults.

---

Instances of voter fraud may be rarer than lightning strikes, but in Pennsylvania more than 758,000 voters may be disenfranchised this election season because lawmakers insist on solving the "problem” of voter fraud. Pennslyvania’s new voter ID law, which will take effect for the first time this November, may prevent 758,939 otherwise eligible voters, who do not currently have an acceptable ID, from voting.

A comparison, carried out by state officials, of registered voters and PennDOT ID databases show that only 91 percent of Pennsylvania’s 8.2 million voters have an acceptable voter ID. In Philadelphia, where voters will be hardest hit by the new law, 18 percent of voters lack proper ID. State officials had previously estimated that 99 percent of voters had acceptable IDs:

http://www.propublica.org/article/hidden-hands-in-redistricting-corporations-special-interests

---===

Walker robocalls voter suppress

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/06/05/495085/wisconsin-voters-report-receiving-robocalls-from-walker-supporters-conveying-false-information/

students prevented: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/06/05/494926/republicans-disenfranchise-wisconsin-college-students/

---

update: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/06/02/494088/all-67-florida-election-supervisors-suspend-governor-rick-scotts-voter-purge/

florida 5/12

http://boingboing.net/2012/06/01/florida-voter-suppression-camp.html

---

From the time I started blogging about a decade ago I've been writing somewhat frantically about the GOP efforts to suppress the vote. This should not be surprising since I started writing online in the aftermath of the most dubious election result in history: the infamous Bush v. Gore.

Vote suppression has been with us for centuries, of course. Jim Crow was built on it. Very famous and important Americans have participated in it, including former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. But according toa 2004 report by the Center for Voting Rightsit wasn't until the Jesse Jackson campaign in the 1980s that the Republicans began to organize nationally:

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

They formed a group called the Republican National Lawyers Association for the purpose of manipulating the voting laws in all 50 states to the benefit of the party. Of course, they said it was for the purpose of stopping "voter fraud" but since there was and is no evidence of voter fraud, vote suppression was the obvious intent. They learned the ins and outs of all local and state voting rules and figured out how to use them for their own electoral advantage. And with the help of other conservative groups like ALEC, they set about making it harder to register and harder to vote. They really made their bones in the 2000 recount, when the call went out the morning after the election for their lawyers to descend on Florida. The rest is history. Well, it's deja vu all over again. Here's Ari Berman:

Back in 2000, 12,000 eligible voters—a number twenty-two times larger than George W. Bush's 537 vote triumph over Al Gore—were wrongly identified as convicted felons and purged from the voting rolls in Florida, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. African Americans, who favored Gore over Bush by 86 points, accounted for 11 percent of the state's electorate but 41 percent of those purged. Jeb Bush attempted a repeat performance in 2004 to help his brother win reelection but was forced to back off in the face of a public outcry.

Yet with another close election looming, Florida Republicans have returned to their voter-scrubbing ways. The latest purge comes on the heels of a trio of new voting restrictions passed by Florida Republicans last year, disenfranchising 100,000 previously eligible ex-felons who'd been granted the right to vote under GOP Governor Charlie Crist in 2008; shutting down non-partisan voter registration drives; and cutting back on early voting. The measures, the effect of which will be to depress Democratic turnout in November, are similar to voting curbs passed by Republicans in more than a dozen states, on the bogus pretext of combating "voter fraud" but with the very deliberate goal of shaping the electorate to the GOP's advantage before a single vote has been cast.

---

Right-Wing Operatives Take Up ALEC's Voter Suppression Agenda

by Lisa Graves — April 19, 2012 - 3:22pm

Topics: Corporations

Projects: ALEC Exposed

115Share

National Center for Public Policy Research Chairman Amy Ridenour testifying before Congress.Just as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) tried to distance itself from its role pushing parts of the NRA's gun agenda and making it more difficult for American citizens to vote, a controversial right-wing operation has announced that it will step in to help carry forward the "voter ID" agenda. The "National Center for Public Policy Research" (NCPPR) announced Wednesday that it will form a "Voter Identification Task Force."

NCPPR is not well known but has hosted other attacks on good government and watchdog groups through a site called "GroupSnoop," which posts highly inaccurate "profiles" of organizations like the Center for Media and Democracy.

With NCPPR taking the mantle of fighting voter fraud, NCPPR's historical role in troubling operations is worth a closer look.

Distributing Millions in Charitable Donations as Directed by Jack Abramoff

Jack AbramoffAs documented by CMD's SourceWatch, NCPPR was involved in part of the scandal that brought down RNC buddy and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. According to a U.S. Senate investigation of the financial dealings and influence peddling of Abramoff, NCPPR's founder and president, Amy Moritz Ridenour, directed money received by NCPPR at Abramoff's direction, to other "charities," again at his direction. Specifically, Ridenour admitted that in 2002 she received a one million dollar gift to NCPPR from the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. That tribe had been paying Abramoff to help secure its casino business. NCPPR also received $1.5 million from Abramoff's then-law firm, Greenberg Traurig.

She also testified that she directed $1.275 million received by NCPPR to another Abramoff entity called "Kaygold, LLC," whose address was listed as that of her then-board member, Abramoff. Ridenour testified that she thought Kaygold was controlled by Michael "Sean" Scanlon, Congressman Tom DeLay's former communications director, who later pleaded guilty to the criminal charge of conspiracy to bribe public officials. Scanlon was publicly known to be working closely with Abramoff.

In addition, NCPPR's Ridenour told congressional investigators that she also gave $500,000 to Scanlon's "Capital Campaign Strategies."

NCPPR Has a History of Sending "Fright Mail" to Senior Citizens

Who Else Has Funded NCPPR, Aside from Friends of Jack Abramoff?

Over the years, NCPPR has received funding from numerous charitable foundations created by billionaires and millionaires who are funding an array of right-wing ventures to dramatically change American public policy. These include the foundation of the Coors family, Castle Rock Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Other NCPPR funders have included the Armstrong Foundation, Brady Education Foundation, Carthage Foundation, Earhart Foundation, Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation, Leadership Institute, Randolph Foundation, Roe Foundation, Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, and the William H. Donner Foundation.

Now NCPPR Takes on Voter Fraud, along with a Threat?

---

(Sara Jerving contributed to this report.)

study showed voter more likely to be hit by lightning than commit fraud npr

---

Already, Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio have passed laws to restrict voter registration drives, end early voting, or require voters to present photo IDs at the polls.¹ ^And now Republicans are scrambling to pass laws in virtually every other key battleground state to make it harder to vote in 2012.

These laws shamelessly target key segments of the Obama coalition from 2008, including first-time voters, poor people, and people of color, and could easilytip a close election to Mitt Romney or whoever the Republican nominee is. We're looking at Florida in 2000 all over again.

The good news is that Attorney General Eric Holder has used the Voting Rights Act to block one of the worst GOP voter suppression laws in South Carolina. But the election won't be decided in South Carolina—and to protect every vote Holder needs to keep going.

===

drum mojo defund 2.o:

A similar dynamic fueled the tort-reform push of the mid-'90s. This one was a twofer: Tort-lawyer bashing had always been a reliable applause line for Republican politicians, but in 1994 conservative ur-strategist Grover Norquist pointed out that the big losers in tort reform are trial lawyers, and trial lawyers contribute huge amounts of money to the Democratic Party. "The political implications of defunding the trial lawyers would be staggering," he wrote. After that, the tort-reform movement exploded.

You can think of this triumvirate—unions, minority redistricting, and tort reform—as Defunding 1.0. And most of it hasn't stopped: Republicans are still battling private-sector unions and pressing for tort reform. But private-sector unions have mostly been beaten, and tort reform has turned out to be a tough nut to crack. So the GOP has moved on to Defunding 2.0, with a brand new trio of pet projects.

One of the prime obsessions of the conservative movement over the past decade has been passage of voter-IDlaws at the state level (PDF). This is not because Republicans think citizens should have to identify themselves to government authorities and Democrats don't. Nor is it because the United States has seen a wave of voter fraud recently. The Brennan Center for Justice has been tracking cases of electoral fraud diligently for years, and its conclusion is clear: Actual voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. In case after case where fraud has been alleged, the number of verified episodes amounts to no more than a tiny handful, typically less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of the votes cast.

This makes perfect sense. Retail voter fraud, in which someone tries to vote under a fake name, is hard to pull off and invites serious penalties. It's almost inconceivable that anyone would try to do it on a large enough scale to swing an election. So why has voter fraud become a cause c��lèbre among conservatives? Here's a clue: In 2007, a University of Washington study found that among whites, the middle-aged, and the middle income, about 90 percent of registered voters had access to a picture ID as required by a new voter law in Indiana (PDF). Among blacks, the young, and low-income residents, the number was just 80 percent. These are among the most loyal Democratic Party demographics in the country. A law that makes it harder for them to vote makes it harder for Democrats to win elections.

Yet the Supreme Court—even though it acknowledged that actual voter fraud is vanishingly rare (PDF)—upheld Indiana's law in 2008. By 2009, a dozen states had introduced (PDF) new voter-ID laws, and conservatives had a second target in their crosshairs: ACORN,much of whose work involved running voter-registration drives targeting poor and minority citizens. ACORN had long been a bête noire of the right, and so when conservative activist Andrew Breitbart released James O'Keefe's video sting purporting to show ACORN staffers advising a flamboyantly dressed pimp on how to run a child prostitution ring, the right-wing noise machine went ballistic. The videos turned out to have been deceptively edited (among other things, O'Keefe never wore his pimp costume when talking to ACORN), but the damage was done: A few ACORN staffers had indeed acted badly, Congress passed a law defunding the group, and ACORN disbanded. (O'Keefe has since moved on to attacking NPR; see "Pimps, Lies, and Videotape.")

---

http://www.prwatch.org/node/11176

alec role:

NAACP Denounces Role of ALEC in "Jim Crow, Esquire" Voting Laws

Submitted by Brendan Fischer on December 9, 2011 - 3:34pm

The NAACP is calling the wave of Voter ID laws passed in 2011 a "coordinated and comprehensive assault" on the right to vote for people of color and the poor, singling out the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as the source of the outbreak. The organization is taking its case to the United Nations this week.

Rev. William Barber, President of the NAACP North Carolina State Conference, says "Jim Crow used blunt tools. James Crow, Esquire uses surgical tools, high paid consultants and lawyers to cut out the heart of black political power."

New Wave of Barriers to the Right to Vote

The 112-year-old civil rights organization released a report Monday highlighting how 25 voting access measures passed in 14 states threaten to disenfranchise millions of people, a disproportionate number of whom are men and women of color. Dozens more restrictions have been proposed and not yet adopted. The measures restrict voting rights in a variety of ways, for example by requiring voters show photo ID (which many African-Americans do not have) or imposing longer residency requirements for voting at a particular address (which could disproportionately affect African-Americans, who statistically move at a higher rate than others).

The group is also highlighting how states are selectively changing the rules for casting absentee ballots, which many African-Americans have used to vote, but not limiting military absentee voting. NAACP president Ben Jealous says Sunday voting has become almost "a right of the Black church. This is a huge day when people will push out their entire congregations to vote." In Florida, for example, 54 percent of black voters used absentee ballots to vote in the 2008 elections, and blacks made up 32 percent of the entire statewide turnout on the last Sunday before the election. Florida has since passed a law shortening its early voting period from 14 days to 8 days.

Proponents of Voter ID and other ballot restrictions assert the laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud. But fraud almost never happens. A person is less likely to commit fraud than get struck by lightning. Stephen Colbert called it "an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere." Voter fraud is so exceedingly rare it is insignificant, but Voter ID legislation will have a statistically significant effect of depriving millions of Americans their right to vote, the report states.

ALEC Source of Outbreak

"The heart of the modern block the vote campaign is a wave of restrictive government-issued photo identification requirements," the NAACP report states. "In a coordinated effort, legislators in thirty-four states introduced bills imposing such requirements. Many of these bills were modeled on legislation," the report notes, approved by corporations and politicians through the corporate-funded "American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a conservative advocacy group whose founder explained: 'our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'"

In the wake of the highest general election turnout in nearly 60 years in the 2008 presidential election (particularly among university students and African-Americans), ALEC directed its focus on "Voter ID." Shortly after the election of the nation's first black president, "Preventing Election Fraud" was the cover story on the Inside ALEC magazine, and ALEC corporations and politicians voted in 2009 for "model" Voter ID legislation. The 2010 census showed that communities of color -- and eligible voters within those communities -- were growing rapidly, at a faster pace than the white population. With new majorities of ALEC politicians in many state legislatures and ALEC alums as governor following the 2010 elections, restrictive voter bills modeled on the ALEC template were introduced in a majority of states across the country in 2011.

"Not surprisingly, the states with the highest voter turnout among people of color in the 2008 elections and population growth among voters of color," notes the NAACP report, "are the states pushing the most restrictive voting laws in the past year."

Disparate Impact, Even If Some Proponents Lack Discriminatory Intent

Requiring an ID at the polls may not be a burden for some populations, but the statistical reality is that many people of color do not have state-issued ID cards, and will be disproportionately impacted by the new Voter ID laws. Nationally, 25% of African Americans (over 6.2 million African-American voters) and 16% of Latinos (over 2.96 million Latino voters) do not possess state-issued photo IDs, according to the report. In states like Wisconsin, those numbers are much higher. According to a 2005 study (pdf), 55 percent of all African American males and 49 percent of African American women do not have state-issued ID cards, nor do 46 percent of Hispanic men and 59 percent of Hispanic women. Those numbers are even greater for younger African-Americans, with 78 percent of males and 66 percent of females between ages 18-24 not having an ID.

The NAACP's Rev. Barber says that traditional notions of racism need not factor into the analysis. "The interest is not [what's in] their heart, it's their policy," he said. "If they implement these policies, and they know who these policies are going to impact, it is disparate racial treatment."

ALEC Meetings Not Representative

Even though ALEC bills directly impact communities of color, it may be little surprise that African-Americans and Latinos are conspicuously absent at ALEC meetings. The 2011 ALEC meeting in New Orleans was overwhelmingly white, based on the observations of those attending. But the lack of representation is striking for an organization purportedly concerned with giving a voice to those affected by government action.

After the Center for Media and Democracy analyzed and made available over 800 previously-secret ALEC "model bills" in July, ALEC's National Chair, Louisiana Rep. Noble Ellington, spoke with NPR's Terry Gross about the organization. Gross asked Ellington, "Why give corporations such a big say in drafting legislation?" Ellington replied, "Well, partly because they're one of the ones who will be affected by it."

ALEC's then-spokesperson Raegan Weber echoed that sentiment in a July Los Angeles Times article, saying that "legislators should hear from those the government intends to regulate."

The NAACP and others have shown that ALEC's Voter ID legislation will disproportionately impact people of color, but experience suggests that representatives of affected populations were absent from the ALEC task forces or board meetings that approved the model Voter ID bill. And it is unknown whether ALEC's legislative and corporate members reached out to communities of color before deciding to vote in favor of the model bill.

NAACP Presents Evidence to U.N.

The NAACP, like other groups representing minority populations in countries around the world, have reached out to the United Nations (U.N.) at times when they believed domestic institutions were failing to protect their human rights. In 1947, W.E.B. DuBois filed a petition with the U.N. on behalf of the NAACP describing Jim Crow laws that denied the right to vote as well as other grievances related to racial discrimination.

This week, the NAACP will again take its concerns to the global stage, presenting evidence to the U.N. Commissioner on Human Rights about the harmful impact of the voter bills. NAACP president Ben Jealous says the organization will be asking the U.N. "to look at what is a coordinated campaign to disenfranchise persons of color." In March the NAACP will send legal experts to Geneva to seek the support of the U.N. human rights council.

===

Gaming the Ability to Vote

It should be understood that the conservative call for freedom and liberty is really a call for their brand of freedom and liberty, and for a world where evangelical Christianity dominates the social and political order. Conservatives (economic and religious, who have joined forces to empower each other’s interests) want to make radical changes to American democracy, and they are succeeding because little attention is being paid to their tactics. Before Scott Walker drew attention to ALEC, it operated openly, but in the shadows.

Democracy is fundamentally and traditionally dependent on men and women who are of good will, and who believe in majority rule. When a majority decides, that decision prevails—or ought to prevail—until a new majority sees fit to change the rules. Most Americans play the game fairly, and accept majority rule as a given, and the American tradition. Contemporary conservatives, however, have little interest in such Queensberry-type standards. They have problems winning at the ballot box, for most Americans reject their agenda -- an agenda that would remove the barriers between church and state, and leave it to the marketplace to regulate multibillion-dollar corporations, created by the state. Conservatives, increasingly, view those who do not exploit ambiguity and the unwritten traditions of our system to their advantage as fools -- people who can be taken advantage of, and whose ignorance and naïveté are, in fact, being exploited.

The Nation writer John Nichols prepared a brief video after he completed his analysis of ALEC’s secret programs, where he does a wonderful job of explaining how ALEC operates and why they do so, as well as their current efforts to (1) suppress voting; (2) eliminate direct democracy, by which the American people have traditionally reached their collective political and social goals; and (3) change existing laws that once restricted the presence of unlimited corporate money in our political system, fostering rulings like Citizens United, which has changed the playing field for the GOP, giving it even deeper pockets from which to control politics and government. (In less than three minutes, John provides a capsule overview.)

http://alecexposed.org/wiki/John_Nichols_Discusses_ALEC

Others have started writing about the GOP's efforts to disenfranchise Americans who are not likely to support them. For example, writing in Rolling Stone magazine, Ari Berman addressed “The GOP War on Voting.” He found ALEC to be the force behind legislation in 38 states “designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.” And, so far, a dozen GOP-controlled states have approved such new obstacles to voting.

Former President Bill Clinton has spoken out about this concerted GOP undertaking. “Why is all of this going on?” the former President asked rhetorically. "This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 [Tea Party] electorate than the 2008 [Obama] electorate.” He added, “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

Ari Berman’s Rolling Stone analysis found the GOP efforts and their new legal successes in disenfranchising Democratic voters to befocused on four areas: (1) Creating barriers to registrations that effectively put groups like the League of Women Voters and Rock the Vote out of business, by imposing impossible time restrictions and onerous bureaucratic requirements; (2) Cutting back early votingavailability, which had increased the turnouts of demographics that favored Democrats, such as working people and minorities;(3) Disenfranchising ex-felons, to whom states like Florida and Iowa had restored the right to vote, and who are disproportionately African Americans and Hispanics, so they tend to vote Democratic; and (4)Requiring photo identification to vote, which affects college students, the elderly, African Americans, and Hispanics. This push for voter IDs has been accompanied by measures making it more difficult to obtain such identification.

In a nation that has long been lackadaisical about exercising the voting franchise, these restrictive hurdles aimed at actual and potential Democratic voters will affect untold millions -- possibly, a sufficient number to deny President Obama reelection in 2012, while at the same time further entrenching Republicans in local, state, and national elective offices. (The National Conference of State Legislatures, which is a truly non-partisan organization, provides up-to-date information about these and others legislative activities in state assemblies. But the NCSL merely tells what is happening, not why, nor what its impact has been, or will likely be.)

Fortunately, these GOP-concocted revisions to American voting rights are being challenged by the ACLU and a number of Democratic groups. In particular, Congressional Democrats are calling on the Department of Justice to employ its powers under the Voting Rights Act where there is clear discrimination. Much of this action to deny Americans the franchise has been undertaken because of gaps in the law, or even support from the law, as with the U.S Supreme Court��s 2008 ruling in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, which authorized voter identification in Indiana. But where the Court gave the states an inch, ALEC is now pushing for a mile.

Resolving the legality of the barrage of new election laws will be costly, and will take decades. Meanwhile, Republicans will have gained and taken their unfair advantage, which will likely only encourage them to further game the system. It’s the way they now play the game, and while it may be nasty and even un-American, they could care less, as long as they are winning.

Republicans simply rely on the reality that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not know what is going on; that the well-funded Republican public-relations barrage targeting Americans will keep the American people focused on less than vital issues; and that the corporate underwriters who fund this devious behavior believe they are doing what corporation are suppose to do, which is to make profits, so they simply laugh all the way to their off-shore banks.

No one knows how this will all play out, but as those who are gathering to occupy Wall Street and other public squares understand, this is not the way it should be. Conservatives and their corporate backers should understand that democracy is fragile, and if they persist, it will break.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/11077

===

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression

Methods of voter suppression[edit source | editbeta]

Impediments to voter registration[edit source | editbeta]

Laws or administrative practices have made it more difficult for people to register to vote. In the United States, Florida imposed a short deadline for the submission of voter registration forms in 2011, with stiff penalties for late filing.^[1] The bill led to the end of voter registration work by one organization, theLeague of Women Voters, whose spokesperson said, "Despite the fact that the League of Women Voters is one of the nation’s most respected civic organizations, with a 91-year history of registering and educating voters, we will be unable to comply with the egregious provisions contained in [this bill]."^[2]

Photo ID laws[edit source | editbeta]

Purging voter rolls[edit source | editbeta]

In 2008, more than 98,000 registered Georgia voters were removed from the roll of eligible voters because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information, leading registrars to conclude that they were no longer eligible Georgia voters at their registered addresses. At least 4,500 of those people must prove their citizenship to regain their right to vote, but opponents say that could be an impossible burden to meet. For example, the state of Georgia gave college senior Kyla Berry one week to prove her citizenship in a letter dated October 2, 2008. Unfortunately, the letter was postmarked October 9, 2008. However, Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts with a passport and a birth certificate to prove it. Commenting on Berry's case and those like it, Wendy Weiser, an elections expert with New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, said, "What most people don't know is that every year, elections officials strike millions of names from the voter rolls using processes that are secret, prone to error and vulnerable to manipulation."^[12]

Felon disenfranchisement[edit source | editbeta]

Further information: Loss of rights due to felony conviction and Felony disenfranchisement

In 2004, 5.3 million Americans were denied the right to vote because of previous felony convictions. Thirteen states permanently disenfranchise convicted felons; eighteen states restore voting rights after completion of prison, parole, and probation; four states re-enfranchise felons after they have been released from prison and have completed parole; thirteen allow felons who have been released from prison to vote, and two states do not disenfranchise felons at all.^[13] Some states require felons to complete a process to restore voting rights, but offender advocates say such processes can be very difficult.

The United States is the only democracy in the world that regularly bans large numbers of felons from voting after they have discharged their sentences. Many countries including Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Norway, Peru, Sweden, and Zimbabwe allow prisoners to vote (unless convicted of crimes against the electoral system).^[14] Some countries, notably the U.K., disenfranchise people for only as long as they are in prison.

In Florida during the 2000 presidential election, some non-felons were banned due to record-keeping errors and not warned of their disqualification until the deadline for contesting it had passed.

This form of vote suppression in the United States disproportionately affects minorities including African-Americans and Latinos.^[14] Disenfranchisement of felons is opposed by some as a form of the medieval practice of civil death.^[15]

Disinformation about voting procedures[edit source | editbeta]

Voters may be given false information about when and how to vote, leading them to fail to cast valid ballots. For example, in recall elections for theWisconsin State Senate in 2011, Americans for Prosperity (a conservative organization that was supporting Republican candidates) sent many Democratic voters a mailing that gave an incorrect deadline for absentee ballots. Voters who relied on the deadline in the mailing would have sent in their ballots too late for them to be counted.^[16] The organization said that the mistake was a typographical error.^[17]

Inequality in Election Day resources[edit source | editbeta]

Elections in the United States are funded at the local level, often unequally. In the 2004 elections, Wyoming spent $2.15 per voter while California spent $3.99 per voter. In contrast, Canada spends $9.51 per voter. Underfunded election areas can result in long lines at polling places, requiring some voters either to wait hours to cast a ballot or to forgo their right to vote in that election. Voters who cannot wait the required amount of time are therefore disenfranchised, while voters in well-funded areas with sufficient voting capacity may face minimal or no waiting time.

Delays at polling places are widely regarded as being a greater problem in urban areas.^[18][19]

Caging lists[edit source | editbeta]

Main article: caging list

Caging lists have been used by political parties to eliminate potential voters registered with other political parties. A political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable, the mailing organization uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent.^[20]

Examples in the United States[edit source | editbeta]

Partisan election administration[edit source | editbeta]

While the majority of the world's democracies use independent agents to manage elections, 33 of 50 state election directors in the United States are themselves elected partisans. Those party affiliations can create conflicts of interest, or at least the appearance thereof, while directing elections. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris served as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign during the 2000 presidential election, and Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell served as his state's Bush-Cheney co-chair during the 2004 presidential election.^[18]

Jim Crow laws[edit source | editbeta]

Main article: Jim Crow laws

In the United States, voter suppression was used extensively in most Southern states until the Voting Rights Act (1965) made most disenfranchisement and voting qualifications illegal. Traditional voter suppression tactics included the institution of poll taxes and literacy tests, aimed at suppressing the votes ofAfrican Americans and working class white voters.^[21][22]

2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal[edit source | editbeta]

In the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal, Republican officials attempted to reduce the number of Democratic voters by paying professional telemarketers in Idaho to make repeated hang-up calls to the telephone numbers used by the Democratic Party's ride-to-the-polls phone lines on election day. By tying up the lines, voters seeking rides from the Democratic Party would have more difficulty reaching the party to ask for transportation to and from their polling places.^[23][24]

2004 presidential election[edit source | editbeta]

Allegations surfaced in several states that the group called Voters Outreach of America had collected and submitted Republican voter registration forms while inappropriately discarding voter registration forms where the new voter had chosen to register with the Democratic Party. Such people would believe they had registered to vote, and would only discover on election day that they were not registered and could not cast a ballot.^{[25][26][27][28]}

Michigan Republican state legislator John Pappageorge was quoted as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.".^[29]

In 2006, four employees of the John Kerry campaign were convicted of slashing the tires of 25 vans rented by the Wisconsin state Republican Party which were to be used for driving Republican monitors to the polls. At the campaign workers' sentencing, Judge Michael B. Brennan told the defendants, "Voter suppression has no place in our country. Your crime took away that right to vote for some citizens."^[30][31]

2006 Virginia Senate election[edit source | editbeta]

During the United States Senate election in Virginia, 2006, Secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections Jean Jensen concluded that incidents of voter suppression appeared widespread and deliberate. Documented incidents of voter suppression include:^[32]

Democratic voters receiving calls incorrectly informing them voting will lead to arrest.
Widespread calls fraudulently claiming to be "[Democratic Senate candidate Jim] Webb Volunteers," falsely telling voters their voting location had changed.
Fliers paid for by the Republican Party, stating "SKIP THIS ELECTION" that allegedly attempted to suppress African-American turnout.

The FBI has since launched an investigation into the suppression attempts.^[33] Despite the allegations, Democrat Jim Webb narrowly defeated incumbent George Allen.

2008 presidential election[edit source | editbeta]

A review of states' records by The New York Times found unlawful actions leading to widespread voter purges.^[34]

A dispute between the Social Security Administration commissioner and the National Association of Secretaries of State about the use of the Social Security database to test the validity of voters led to the shutdown of the database over the Columbus Day holiday weekend.^[35]

Georgia[edit source | editbeta]

Wait times of between 2 and 10 hours were reported during early voting at multiple Georgia locations^[36]

Michigan

Prior to the 2008 United States Presidential Election, on September 16, 2008, Obama legal counsel announced that they would be seeking an injunction to stop an alleged caging scheme in Michigan wherein the state Republican party would use home foreclosure lists to challenge voters still using their foreclosed home as a primary address at the polls.^[37] Michigan GOP officials called the suit "desperate."^[38] A Federal Appeals court ordered the reinstatement of 5,500 voters wrongly purged from the voter rolls by the State:^[36]

Minnesota[edit source | editbeta]

The conservative nonprofit Minnesota Majority has been reported as making phone calls claiming that the Minnesota Secretary of State had concerns about the validity of the voters registration. Their actions have been referred to the Ramsey County attorney's office and the U.S. Attorney are looking into Johnson's complaint. ^[39]

Montana[edit source | editbeta]

On October 5, 2008 the Republican Lt. Governor of Montana, John Bohlinger, accused the Montana Republican Party of vote caging to purge 6,000 voters from three counties which trend Democratic. These purges included decorated war veterans and active duty soldiers.^[20]

Ohio[edit source | editbeta]

Wait times of six hours were reported for early voting in Franklin County, leading to people leaving the line without voting.^[36]

Wisconsin[edit source | editbeta]

The Republican Party attempted to have all 60,000 voters in the heavily Democratic city of Milwaukee who had registered since 1/1/2006 deleted from the voter rolls. The requests were rejected by the Milwaukee Election Commission with Republican commissioner Bob Spindell voting in favor of deletion."^[40]

2010 Maryland gubernatorial election[edit source | editbeta]

In the Maryland gubernatorial election in 2010, the campaign of Republican candidate Bob Ehrlich hired a consultant who advised that "the first and most desired outcome is voter suppression", in the form of having "African-American voters stay home."^[41] To that end, the Republicans placed thousands of Election Day robocalls to Democratic voters, telling them that the Democratic candidate, Martin O'Malley, had won, although in fact the polls were still open for some two more hours.^[42] The Republicans' call, worded to seem as if it came from Democrats, told the voters, "Relax. Everything's fine. The only thing left is to watch it on TV tonight."^[41] The calls reached 112,000 voters in majority-African American areas.^[42] In 2011, Ehrlich's campaign manager, Paul Schurick, was convicted of fraud and other charges because of the calls.^[41][42] In 2012, he was sentenced to 30 days of home detention, a one-year suspended jail sentence, and 500 hours of community service over the four years of his probation, with no fine or jail time.^[43]

2012 Florida[edit source | editbeta]

A Florida law passed in 2011 by the Republican-controlled Florida legislature which reduced the days available for early voting, barred voter-registration activities of groups like the League of Women Voters, and made it more difficult to vote for voters who since the last election had moved to a different county within the state was part of a voter suppression effort, according to several former senior GOP officials.^[44] A majority of early voting ballots cast in 2008 were cast by Democratic voters, and minority voters are more likely to move. The reason given by Republican politicians for the law was to reduce cost and to deter voter fraud, however the former senior Republican officials revealed that the true drivers of the law were GOP political consultants who were seeking ways to suppress the Democratic vote.^[45]

Several factors, including the reduction in early voting, reductions in the number of polling places, and an unusually lengthy ballot that included 11 detailed constitutional amendments, all combined to produce long lines on election day, with waits of several hours.^[46] By one estimate, the result was that at least 201,000 likely voters did not vote, either leaving the line in frustration or not even getting on line when they saw how long it would take.^[46] The majority of them would likely have voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney.^[46]

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VOTER SUPPRESSION

Methods

Impediments to voter registration

Photo ID laws

Purging of voter rolls

Limitations on early voting

Felon disenfranchisement

History

In the United States

Background

Current practices

Reform efforts

State reforms

ALEC Legislators "Giddy" About Voter Suppression Potential of Voter ID

Distributing Millions in Charitable Donations as Directed by Jack Abramoff

NCPPR Has a History of Sending "Fright Mail" to Senior Citizens

Who Else Has Funded NCPPR, Aside from Friends of Jack Abramoff?

Now NCPPR Takes on Voter Fraud, along with a Threat?

Contents

Career[edit source | editbeta]

Justice Department Civil Rights Division[edit source | editbeta]

Post-Justice Department career[edit source | editbeta]

Bibliography[edit source | editbeta]

See also[edit source | editbeta]

References[edit source | editbeta]

External links[edit source | editbeta]

A Recent History of GOP Voter Suppression in Florida

NC Passes Voter Suppression Measures as DOJ Moves to Protect Voting Rights in TX

House Republicans To Defund ACORN Again, Even Though It Still Does Not Exist

As Supreme Court Hears Challenge to ALEC Voting Bill, Two More States Introduce It

ALEC Bill Introduced in Nevada, South Carolina

The Neo-Confederate Supreme Court Gearing Up to Restore White Rule Over America

Einhorn Family Foundation Behind Voter Suppression Billboards

Greg Abbott, Texas Attorney General, Threatens To Arrest International Elections Observers [CORRECTED]

The Voter-Fraud Myth

The man who has stoked fear about impostors at the polls.

by Jane Mayer October 29, 2012

GOP Voter Registration Scandal Widens, Prosecutors File Criminal Charges

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Karl Rove and the Republican Dark Art of Election Theft

2005: Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Supports Jim Crow’-Style Voting Law

http://www.propublica.org/article/hidden-hands-in-redistricting-corporations-special-interests

---===

Right-Wing Operatives Take Up ALEC's Voter Suppression Agenda

Distributing Millions in Charitable Donations as Directed by Jack Abramoff

NCPPR Has a History of Sending "Fright Mail" to Senior Citizens

Who Else Has Funded NCPPR, Aside from Friends of Jack Abramoff?

Now NCPPR Takes on Voter Fraud, along with a Threat?

===

drum mojo defund 2.o:

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NAACP Denounces Role of ALEC in "Jim Crow, Esquire" Voting Laws

New Wave of Barriers to the Right to Vote

ALEC Source of Outbreak

Disparate Impact, Even If Some Proponents Lack Discriminatory Intent

ALEC Meetings Not Representative

NAACP Presents Evidence to U.N.

===

Gaming the Ability to Vote

Methods of voter suppression[edit source | editbeta]

Impediments to voter registration[edit source | editbeta]

Photo ID laws[edit source | editbeta]

Purging voter rolls[edit source | editbeta]

Felon disenfranchisement[edit source | editbeta]

Disinformation about voting procedures[edit source | editbeta]

Inequality in Election Day resources[edit source | editbeta]

Caging lists[edit source | editbeta]

Examples in the United States[edit source | editbeta]

Partisan election administration[edit source | editbeta]

Jim Crow laws[edit source | editbeta]

2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal[edit source | editbeta]

2004 presidential election[edit source | editbeta]

2006 Virginia Senate election[edit source | editbeta]

2008 presidential election[edit source | editbeta]

Georgia[edit source | editbeta]

Michigan

Minnesota[edit source | editbeta]

Montana[edit source | editbeta]

Ohio[edit source | editbeta]

Wisconsin[edit source | editbeta]

2010 Maryland gubernatorial election[edit source | editbeta]