TGIF. This is "Nuts"

GOP lawmaker compares ACORN to the KKK
David Edwards and Nick Juliano
Published: Friday October 10, 2008

The organized assault from the Republican party on an organization dedicated to registering low-income and minority voters continued in full force Friday, with a prominent Republican lawmaker comparing the community organizers at Acorn with the Ku Klux Klan.

The Association of Community Organziations for Reform Now has faced repeated accusations of attempted voter fraud and investigations by state and federal officials of its activities in several key states. Feeney, a three term Florida Republican facing a difficult reelection races, launched wildly unsubstantiated accusations that Acorn has caused dead people to cast votes and somehow allowed the same voter to cast "20 to 30" ballots in a single election.

"This is destructive to democracy," he told Fox News Friday. "I believe Acorn has violated more Americans' civil rights to have their vote counted than any group since the KKK. It's an outrage."

The "fair & balanced" network, which has spent an inordinate amount of time over the last week parroting GOP talking points bashing Acorn and tying the group to Democratic candidate Barack Obama, didn't have an Acorn representative or anyone else to balance Feeney's tirade. Nor did they mention allegations against Feeney himself that he tried to subvert democracy by hacking electronic voting machines.

The Republicans seem far more willing to attack Acorn and trump up allegations of voter registration fraud than Democrats were to call for inquiries into electronic voting or other alleged irregularities four years ago.

President Bush's Justice Department has made a priority of investigating alleged voter fraud, although it's inquiries tend to lead nowhere. The American Prospect's Adam Serwer lays out the flaws in the GOP's claims, as were reported Thursday night on CNN.

CNN is unable or unwilling to make the critical distinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. As I've said before, the former is really easy to do, even by accident, and the latter is extremely difficult and rarely occurs. The sheer volume of ACORN registration forms found in Indiana suggests the forms were deliberately filled out wrong, but they do not in any sense prove that there is a widespread liberal conspiracy to steal the election. More likely, ACORN workers were stealing time and trying to get paid without actually doing their jobs. Given how easily the forms were discovered, it would have to be the most inept scheme in the history of the United States.

In contrast to Republicans' repeated crying about election fraud, comparatively little attention is being paid to thousands of voters being purged from registration rolls across the country. One assumes folks like Feeney would like to keep it that way.

This video is from Fox's Happening Now, broadcast October 10, 2008.

Download video via RawReplay.com

Parties wage war over voter fraud, intimidation

Democrats see vote suppression, McCain alleges fraud by Obama ally

By Tom Curry

National affairs writer

MSNBC

updated 1:30 p.m. CT, Fri., Oct. 10, 2008

WASHINGTON - The fiercest shouting match of this campaign season isn’t necessarily “vote for Obama!” versus “vote for McCain!”

In some states, it is “voter fraud!” versus “voter intimidation!”

Republicans allege Democrats and their allies are trying to subvert the voter registration system, and perhaps the election itself, with an avalanche of inaccurate or fraudulent new voter registrations.

But Democrats charge Republicans are trying to deter would-be voters by discouraging registrations and by requiring voters to identify themselves, in some cases with state-issued photo identification such as a driver’s license.

In one sense, this is simply the intense political combat one would expect to see three weeks before an election, with each side using an issue to fire up its loyal supporters.

But some election officials are struggling with substantial problems as they try to avoid a fiasco on Election Day, Nov. 4.

Republicans have made a group called ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the chief villain in the home stretch of the campaign.

Their allegation: that ACORN has been flooding election officials in states from Nevada to Connecticut with thousands of erroneous and fraudulent voter registration forms.

In Jackson County, Missouri, (which includes Kansas City) election officials said this week that fraudulent registration forms had been handed in by ACORN canvassers.

Nevada raid on ACORN
In Las Vegas, investigators from the office of Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat, served a search warrant Tuesday on the ACORN office, as part of an investigation into allegations of voter registration fraud. Miller’s agents seized computer hard drives and boxes of documents.

ACORN defended itself in the Nevada incident, saying its workers verify the information on new voter registration cards before turning them in to election officials.

But ACORN did acknowledge that some errors were made.

“While the vast majority of our voter registration canvassers do a great job, there have been several times over the past ten months that our Las Vegas Quality Control program has identified a canvasser who appears to have knowingly submitted a fake or duplicate application in order to pad his or her hours,” the group said in a statement.

It complained that “It was surprising that law enforcement officials appeared suddenly at our Las Vegas offices yesterday, because ACORN and its attorneys have already been proactive in providing information about problematic cards and any employee suspected of misconduct.”

President Bush won Nevada in 2004, but recent polls show Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain statistically tied in the state with his Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama.

Obama ties to ACORN
Obama has long had ties to ACORN. In 1995, he was one of the attorneys who represented the group in a suit against the state of Illinois for not implementing the federal "Motor Voter" law which makes it easier for people to register as voters. And the ACORN political action committee has endorsed Obama.

Campaigning in Mosinee, Wisc., on Thursday, McCain responded to shouts of “ACORN!” in the crowd by saying, “There are serious allegations of voter fraud in the battleground states across America…. You’ve seen these are serious allegations, my friends, and they must be investigated, and they must be investigated immediately, and they must be stopped before November the 4th so Americans will not be deprived of a fair process in this election.”

The co-chairman of the McCain advisory team in charge of monitoring alleged voter fraud, former Missouri Sen. John Danforth, hinted this week at potential post-Nov. 4 litigation if Obama wins due to suspect voters who had been registered by ACORN. “The contest could go on for a very long time,” he told reporters.

Danforth also said it would be “a nightmare in America” and “a total horror story” if Obama either wins or loses by a small margin “and the losing side believes it has been cheated.”

Offering a professional election official's view of last-minute “dumps” of new registration applications by groups such as ACORN was Doug Lewis, the executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of Election Officials, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee last month.

'It just screws up the system'
“This unfettered, unbounded, unregulated use of third-party registrations, where they sit on those registrations right until the end and try to turn them all in at the very last minute — it just screws up the system,” Lewis told the committee. “It disenfranchises voters. It's one of those things that just is frustrating to us as elections officials.”

Lewis added that in his years as an election official he has seen both Democrats and Republicans “dumping in” new voter registration cards at the last minute before a state’s voter registration deadline. “The problem is that these groups all think that they're going to surprise the other campaign with how many people they've registered.”

This week the controversy reached as far as the usually non-political offices of the Social Security Administration.

The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) which represents most of the chief election officials in the states, urged Social Security Administration Commissioner Michael Astrue to postpone this weekend’s scheduled shutdown of his agency’s database, which most states use to verify new would-be voters’ names and identities.

State officials use the Social Security database when they cannot verify voters’ identity with drivers’ licenses or other state-issued identification cards.

The database shutdown is an annual event, done for maintenance.

In its letter to Astrue, NASS said that most states have voter registration deadlines “that fall a week before, the week of, or the week after the scheduled Computer Center shutdown. Holding all of these verifications until the system comes back online on October 13, 2008 could result in a tremendous surge of data.”

For his part, Astrue accused his critics of partisan motives: “I regret that people unfamiliar with the facts of this situation have sought to create a partisan issue where there is none.”

State officials have been reporting to NASS this week that there has been a slowdown in the Social Security database, which could create delays in verifying voter registrations.

The issues of registration and voting are sensitive in part due to the history of intimidation of black people seeking to register and vote, especially in the South, which led to the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the senior African-American member of Congress, said, “It’s pretty clear. You’ve got a black candidate for president for the first time. Do you think that the usual attempts to suppress voting among minorities are going to go down and not up? Of course not.”

Furor over fired federal prosecutors
Democrats charge that the Bush administration went to extraordinary and perhaps illegal lengths to pursue voter fraud allegations.

Last month, a report from the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility found that former attorney general Alberto Gonzales fired the United States attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias, in December of 2006 after top Republicans in the state complained that Iglesias hadn’t aggressively pursued voter-fraud cases after the 2004 election.

It was the ACORN issue that partly led to Iglesias being fired.

Patrick Rogers, a New Mexico Republican activist, complained in a March 2006 e-mail to a Justice Department official that Iglesias and his assistant "were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle" in the 2004 election when the group was accused of submitting fraudulent registrations in the state.

That same motive — insufficient zeal in prosecuting alleged vote fraud — may have played a role in the firing of the United States attorney in Seattle, John McKay.

But Republicans say the U.S. attorneys controversy doesn’t undercut their fundamental contention: Voter fraud has occurred and may occur again this year.

While Republicans accuse Democrats of benefiting from voter fraud, Democrats fire back that Republicans are trying to suppress the Democratic vote by too stringent rules on voter identification.

Photo ID requirement 'an abomination'?
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said a Georgia law that required residents to show photo identification when voting in person was “an abomination.”

In Georgia, Schumer’s DSCC is backing Democrat Jim Martin’s challenge to Republican incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss as the Democrats aim for a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority.

“Photo ID laws in other states, which we don’t have, are barriers to senior citizens voting,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat. “There’s no support for that idea among election officials and people in Minnesota…. I think generally it is agreed that photo ID laws are designed to prevent some people from voting whether it’s senior citizens or others.”

But Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican, defended his state’s photo ID requirement. “The law was very narrowly crafted and well tailored,” Rokita said.

The law was upheld in a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last January. “Not only is the risk of voter fraud real,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in the majority opinion, but “it could affect the outcome of a close election.”

Under Indiana law, a person without a photo ID can cast a provisional ballot, and then has up to ten days after Election Day to get a free state-issued photo ID from a local office of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

Caught in the middle of the partisan warfare over voting are the local officials who in just three weeks will have the job of administering elections across the nation.

“We are at the point where we have had so many allegations made about the process, that I'm not sure we're not doing permanent damage to the process,” Lewis testified last month. “We've got to get to the point where we understand the process is more important than partisanship.”

Voter Purges Could Cause Florida-like Presidential Recounts

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2008

With less than four weeks to go before the 2008 presidential vote, new practices in key swing states to update voter rolls are coming under fire for mistakes that could involve rejecting tens of thousands of legitimate voters, suggesting that close vote counts in these states could lead to legal fights echoing Florida's presidential recount in 2000.

According to a New York Times report on Oct. 9, key swing states -- including Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Missouri -- have been using federal Social Security data to verify voter registration information from established and potential voters. The Social Security data, which is used to authenticate voters' identity but is known to be error-prone, has been used to purge "tens of thousands" of voters already on voter rolls, the Times reported, as well as to reject numerous new voter registration applications.

Of 7.7 million inquiries by states to the Social Security Administration to verify voter applications in 2008, nearly 2.4 million resulted in "non matches," according to the agency, which Monday issued a statement urging election officials in six states -- Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio -- to "review their procedures."

This past summer, AlterNet reported that Michigan, Kansas and Louisiana were using drivers' license databases in a similar manner to purge voters. In both instances, whether using Social Security or motor vehicle data, it is difficult to fully know how voter rolls will be affected because different states and counties have differing procedures on purging and removing voters, and because this process is often secretive.

What's clear to leading voting rights attorneys, however, is that this "name-matching" process not only violates the guiding federal law on removing voters, the National Voter Registration Act, and violates the guiding federal law on accepting vote registrations, the National Voting Rights Act, but also creates a new basis to challenge presidential results if the vote count is close on November 4.

Unless there is litigation to force states to follow these federal laws before Election Day and restore purged voters and accept registrations from new voters, a close vote count in swing states could see post-Election Day legal fights over provisional ballots. These are ballots issued to voters whose names are not on voter lists and are later validated before they are counted. Thus, a fight over provisional ballots in 2008 could echo the fight over hanging chads -- or punches in paper ballots -- in Florida in 2000.

"I think it is a real risk," said Brenda Wright, legal director of The National Voting Rights Institute at Demos, a public interest law firm. "If you have a situation where people are showing up who think they are registered to vote, that is where provisional ballots come in. The question is will those ballots be counted. If there are thousands of provisional ballots in a number of states, there's a danger that they may not all be counted."

"There will be an effort by the civil rights community to figure out what to do," said Jon Greenbaum, Voting Rights Program director at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

"There is the potential the perfect storm is developing," said Gerry Hebert, executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, another public-interest law firm. "New voters should be added to the rolls immediately, and then vetted and sent letters if there are problems."

The scenario of post-Election Day litigation is not speculation. Across the country, GOP partisans already have filed lawsuits over voter registration issues or said they planned to pursue polling place challenges of individual voter registrations in states such as Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. In federal court in Ohio, a hearing was held Thursday on a GOP suit seeking to force the state to use the Social Security data to vet new voters.

"It does add a whole other dimension to the potential debates on what is the vote," said Kimball Brace, director of Election Data Services, a Washington consulting firm. "I was Al Gore's expert in Florida on this. ... In 2000, we were concerned with the voting equipment, and what happened with under- and over-votes. Now, if you are a lawyer looking at challenges, you don't only look at that but at the voter side as well."

Roots of the Problem

The name-matching issue has its roots in the federal legislation that was passed after the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida -- the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Under that law, states were instructed to compile statewide voter lists in contrast to lists that previously were maintained at the local level. States also were allowed to use Social Security data to verify registrations, but only as a last resort after other forms of voter ID could not be corroborated.

The problems that have arisen since the law took effect are multiple, but they seem to have one common factor: The practices now at issue evolved with little or no guidance from federal election officials, such as the Election Assistance Commission, or without any comment from the Justice Department, which enforces federal voting rights law.

The Help America Vote Act told states to create statewide voter registration databases, said Tova Wang, vice president for research at Common Cause, but did not tell states how to use them. Similarly, states were not told how to use provisional ballots.

Thus, states began using Social Security and motor vehicle databases to screen voter lists and purge voters instead of following the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to contact a voter over a four-year period before removing them and to conduct no purges closer than 90 days before an election. Indeed, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights' Greenbaum said his organization was filing a lawsuit on Thursday in Georgia over that state's use of motor vehicle databases to purge voters outside of the National Voter Registration Act process.

On the issue of screening new voter registration applications, the states are overlooking the Voting Rights Act, which tells them to accept voter registration forms that might be missing some voter information, a Capitol Hill staff attorney for a committee with election jurisdiction said, citing 42 USC 1971. But this staffer and other voting rights attorneys said the Justice Department's selective enforcement of civil rights laws during George W. Bush's presidency allowed states to maintain voter rolls under their own standards.

Moreover, because the voter purging process and new voter registration vetting process is so secretive -- and states are not required to remove or reject voters due to non matches with these databases, Wang said it was hard to know what lays in store for voters on Election Day.

"HAVA had all the best intentions," said Wang, who, when pressed, said she was tempted to characterize the current situation as "anarchy" because of an absence of clear rules and procedures.

"You do have to ask, where is the Justice Department," Wright said.

The Name Matching Problem

The biggest problem with using Social Security or motor vehicle data to update voter rolls is government agencies often have different data for the same individual.

"It is a problem we are very worried about because this database matching so often produces false non-matches," said Wright. "It could be something as simple as you have a hyphenated name, or an apostrophe is missing for O'Leary. There are so many ways to be a non-match when there is no real world discrepancy."

Kimball Brace, whose firm parses election data, cited himself as an example. "I figured I could be eight different people if I wanted to," he said, saying he could appear as Kim, Kimball and so on.

These distinctions are hardly academic, but instead, are at the heart of current litigation that will affect who gets to vote and which votes will count in November. In Ohio, the Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, and state Republican Party, had a federal court hearing on this very issue on Thursday.

"Ohio Republicans sued the secretary of state to use database matching," Wright said. "Brunner pointed out that she is being accused of violating the law for not taking names off the rolls and the Social Security Administration just sent out a notice that Ohio is overusing Social Security Association matching to take people off."

The best practice, said the Campaign Legal Center's Hebert, who used to be Voting Section Chief at the Justice Department, would be to add people’s names to voter rolls and then subsequently seek to contact them to clear up discrepancies, which is what the NVRA prescribes.

The reason the name matching issue is so politically explosive is the number of potentially affected voters could be many times the size of the president's margin of victory against Democrat John Kerry in 2004. According to the Social Security Administration, the number of "non-matches" for voter registrations, from January through September 2008, was: 265,691 in Georgia; 39,489 in Missouri; 716,252 in Nevada; 74,797 in North Carolina; 289,603 in Ohio; 72,137 in Pennsylvania; and 57,887 in Florida.

In the meantime, as election officials across the country continue to process voter registrations with an eye to election day, the Social Security Administration this weekend is proceeding with a planned three-day shutdown of its computer systems for maintenance purposes -- despite requests by the Senate Rules and Administration Committee to postpone that maintenance until after Election Day.

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and author of Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting (AlterNet Books, 2008).

GOP attacks on American voters turn desperate, ugly and dangerous
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
October 10, 2008

The GOP assault on American voters has hit full stride as the economy and John McCain tank in synch.

With just over three weeks until election day, the Republicans have mounted an all-out attack against newly registered voters and the organizations working to sign them up. As many as 75% of these new voters are expected to vote Democratic, but the attacks have also spread to long-established voters as well. Recent calculations show more than a million more newly registered Democrats in Ohio than Republicans.

The usual drumbeat claiming massive voter fraud has become ceaseless at Fox "News" and other right wing media mouthpieces.

As expected, the assault centers in Ohio, which once again could decide the presidency, but has manifested throughout the nation:

1) A Republican sheriff in Greene County, Ohio, has demanded social security and other records from 302 local voters whose ballots he apparently wants to negate. Sheriff Gene Fischer has requested registration cards and address forms for all Greene County residents who voted in a special session established in Ohio allowing new voters to register and vote on the same day. The process was challenged in court by the GOP. The Ohio Supreme Court turned down that challenge, and allowed the same-day voting to proceed. But now Fischer claims telephone calls complaining about the potential for voter fraud have prompted him to go after the information.

In Franklin County, home of Ohio State University, Columbus State Community College, Capital University, Ohio Dominican University, and Otterbein College, election protection observers are reporting continuing surveillance by Republicans at Veterans Memorial, the site for early voting. The observers have documented Republican operatives taking photographs and writing down license plate numbers of voters. Election activists expect similar criminal charges as in Greene County to be filed in the state's capital.

Greene County is home to Wright State, Central State, Wilberforce and Cedarville Universities, along with Antioch College, which was recently put out of business by a right-wing putsch on its board of directors.

Llyn McCoy, Greene County's deputy elections director, says names, telephone and Social Security numbers will be blacked out of any records handed over to the Sheriff. According to McCoy, the Sheriff says he has no evidence of voter fraud other than phone calls stating fraud was a possibility. It is widely assumed that the same-day registration/voting option was exercised primarily by students who lean heavily Democratic. In 2004, African-American students from Wright State, Central State and Wilberforce were regularly challenged on their registration credentials and forced to endure waiting in lines to vote for hours. Students at Cedarville, a Christian school, made no such reports. Sheriff Fischer's targeting of historically black college students, the core of Obama-mania, is intended to send a chilling effect through the ranks of these Democratic voters.

2) U.S. District Court Judge George C. Smith, a Reagan appointee, has approved a GOP lawsuit demanding that the state give county boards of elections great leeway in attacking new voter registration forms. The decision, framed under the Help America Vote Act, would allow Republican challengers access to data from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security agency to challenge new voters. The Judge noted that Ohio law permits challenges to absentee ballots, thousands of which have been pouring in to elections boards. If allowed to stand, it could give the GOP the right to shred ballots already cast in the Buckeye State, with the precedent possibly being used to further enable a GOP nationwide disenfranchisement campaign. Smith gave Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner a week to respond. Brunner has stated she will appeal.

3) Before the ruling, Brunner announced at the close of registration that the number of registered voters in Ohio had jumped by 665,949, from 7,518,189 active voters on January 1, 2008, to 8,184,138 active voters now. About 5.4 million votes were officially counted in Ohio's 2004 presidential election. Then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell certified a Bush victory of less than 119,000 votes. A massive GOP disenfranchisement campaign could easily exceed that margin.

4) The New York Times has reported that boards of elections in at least nine crucial states, including Ohio, have violated federal law in conducting purges and have been illegally using Social Security data bases as part of those purges. The Times' Ian Urbina quotes Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman as asking the Colorado Attorney-General to review how some 2,500 citizens were removed from the registration lists there. The Times has cited purges in Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan that have apparently been conducted within 90 days of the upcoming November 4 election, violating federal law that allows states to expunge only those who have been convicted of a felony, moved out of state or died.

5) The Times has also reported that boards of elections in Nevada, North Carolina, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio have illegally used federal Social Security databases to flag and possibly eliminate voters whose registration applications were suspected of irregularities. The Times reported some 37,000 Colorado voters removed in the three weeks after July 21; Secretary Coffman said the number was 14,000.

6) Michigan elections director Christopher Thomas said his state had removed about 11,000 voters in August, while the Times estimated the real number to be closer to 33,000. Thomas refused to make the purged files public. Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land is a long-standing Republican partisan whose political activism traces back to the mid-70s when she worked for Gerald Ford's campaign in high school. Critics charge that she functions in the traditional of Florida's Katherine Harris and Ohio's J. Kenneth Blackwell.

7) North Carolina's BOE director Gary Bartlett dismissed concerns raised by the Social Security Administration about possible mis-used of SS files to purge registrations there in conjunction with drivers licenses. The SSI contends Social Security numbers can only be accessed when there is no drivers license or other form of state ID available.

8) A CBS News report has revealed organized caging attempts by the GOP to eliminate registered voters from the rolls in 19 states. The report marks one of the first initiated by a corporate news organization isolating Republican anti-vote campaigning.

9) An electronic voting machine in New Mexico was found to be operating on faulty software which could have eliminated hundreds of votes. The glitch was apparently corrected, but was of a type that could result in thousands of votes being lost on Election Day 2008, as they were in 2000 and 2004.

10) The grassroots organizing group ACORN has come under serious attack in Nevada, Missouri, Ohio and elsewhere from Republicans attempting to negate the thousands of generally low-income citizens ACORN has registered to vote. As a matter of law, ACORN is required to report irregular registrations that come through its process. But GOP operatives have equated these with "fraudulent" filings, and a have ramped up a smear and fear campaign aimed at negating thousands of legitimate ACORN registrants throughout the US.

11) The GOP continues to resist attempts to subpoena Michael Connell, a shady Republican computer operative who programmed the 2000 Bush-Cheney web site. Connell was also hired by former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in 2004 to tabulate the Ohio vote count. Under Connell, Ohio's vote totals were shunted to a computer bank in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that housed the servers of the Republican National Committee. In the early hours of the morning after election day, vote totals mysteriously began shifting from Kerry to Bush, swinging the 2004 election. Connell's cyber-security industry colleague Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican and former McCain supporter, has said that Connell may be able to shed light on vote count rigging in the 2008 vote count as well. Attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit have thus far been unable to secure Connell's sworn testimony.

12) CNN has reported that Obama's surging poll numbers may leave him "in position to steal Virginia from the GOP." Virginia hasn't backed a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but CNN's use of the word "steal" has raised hackles among election protection activists who argue the flow of theft is in the other direction.

As the moment of truth arrives, McCain-Palin attacks based on race, alleged "terrorist" ties and more are sure to increasingly dominate the GOP campaign. But far more insidious will be an all-out assault on voter registration in the name of "voter fraud," and on finding new ways to undermine the national vote, most importantly on electronic voting machines of the kind programmed by Michael Connell.

If those supporting the democratic process are not exceedingly vigilant, the GOP could use these tactics to once again take the White House.

--
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of four books on election protection including HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and AS GOES OHIO, just published by www.freepress.org, where this article originally appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville lawsuit.

Tens of thousands illegally denied voting rights

Agence France-Presse
Published: Thursday October 9, 2008

In Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina, eligible voters were taken off rolls, and new registrations were blocked, illegally.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Tens of thousands of voters in at least six battleground states have been removed from election rolls or have been illegally blocked from registering to vote, according to an investigation by the New York Times published Thursday.

The anomalies, which are violations of US federal law, are largely bureaucratic mistakes in record keeping, and "do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules," said the newspaper.

The states affected -- Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina -- are among the most crucial states that could swing either way in the November 4 presidential election between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

While neither party appears to have been guilty of violations, the Democrats will most likely suffer the most because more Democratic voters have newly registered this year than Republicans.

As such, "the heightened screening of new applications may affect their party's supporters disproportionately," the newspaper reported.

The Times also suggested the problems could keep up until election day, when people who have been removed turn up and expect to vote "only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers."

The newspaper identified the root cause as the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which allows states to remove from the rolls names of voters who should no longer be listed because they are dead, have moved out of the state or have been declared unfit to vote.

"For every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two," the newspaper reported.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an influential association for civil rights, said in a statement Thursday that the Department of Justice should compel states to comply with federal law.

"These purges are in violation of federal law, including the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits such purges of voters 90 days before a federal election," said the ACLU statement.


This video is from CNN's The Situation Room, broadcast October 9, 2008.




Download video via RawReplay.com

Help the squirrel through the fall maze in the shape of an acorn to find its stash of nuts.