LatinaLista — Last week, it was reported on Latina Lista that an inflammatory report was making the rounds accusing non-citizen Latino voters of fraudulently registering to vote, thus posing the threat of impacting the presidential election.
Brooke Rodriguez, 19, of Fontana, California says a voter-registration volunteer at San Bernardino Valley College switched her from Democrat to Republican without her knowledge or permission.
(Source: Stan Lim/The Press-Enterprise)
The report was released on the heels of the Republican Party establishing a Voter Fraud alert campaign as that party is leading the charge of voter fraud among Democrats.
Now, comes a story that voter disenfranchisement is coming courtesy of the Republican Party. In California, voters are approached by clipboard-carrying “signature gatherers” who either outright tell people they are switching their party affiliation or misleading them into signing petitions, that range from supporting tougher laws for child molesters to lower gas prices, but being told their signatures don’t count unless they switch parties.
Of course, the Republican Party denies any sort of wrongdoing. Yet, in light of all of this activity, it begs the question:
I found that I wasn’t alone in asking this question. Come to find out that investigative journalist, Greg Palast, seems to have made his living off the question of voter fraud.
A New York Times bestseller author, whose reporting style is reminiscent of documentarian Michael Moore, but a bit more balanced, has been asking and analyzing that question for at least 8 years now.
Working with the BBC, Palast created a two-part piece on just how rampant the effort is to block votes in this presidential election.
While blocking votes is nothing new, the tolerance level for this kind of unethical practice is wearing thin among voters who are already bombarded with more than their fair share of negative ad campaigns.
It’s clear that if the integrity of the U.S. voting process is to remain intact, it will have to come from the diligence of the people and not the parties or Washington.
But what can voters do?
1. Confirm which party you belong to.
2. Make sure you bring the proper ID when going to vote.
3. Vote!
The following piece is by journalist Greg Palast and makes for a very interesting perspective on how American voters’ votes can be compromised if people are not watching.
Comment(16)
laura
It is pathetic when a party that can’t win legitimately tries to win by blocking voters. Unfortunately that is what the Republican party tends to fall back on when they see the voters are not coming their way. That is politics a la Soviet Union – when you can’t convince ’em, suppress ’em.
This Sunday I went canvassing for Obama in a swing state. It was very interesting to me, because of the range of views among the people on whose doors we knocked. But my (unscientific) impression is: if there is no voter suppression and no fraud, Obama should win this election. Many people said they would vote for him, of whom I would not have necessarily expected it. And the campaign was extremely well organized – much better than the Kerry campaign for which (or should I say, against Bush) I canvassed in the same place 4 years ago. This year, they gave us the maps right along with the addresses, all the names were correct, they processed us quickly in the office – I was very encouraged.
I hope they have enough lawyers under contract to jump on voter suppression, and on attempts to mislead voters, in every case, right away.
Grandma
“It is pathetic when a party that can’t win legitimately tries to win by blocking voters. Unfortunately that is what the Republican party tends to fall back on when they see the voters are not coming their way. That is politics a la Soviet Union – when you can’t convince ’em, suppress ’em.”
And it’s more than pathetic to me, in fact it’s really downright illegal, that ACORN a/k/a Obama supporters, are pulling homeless off the street, bussing people in from rehab centers, and offer people money, cigarettes and crack cocaine to register, vote early and telling them who to vote for.
If someone registered you to vote as a Republican rather then a Democrat, it means nothing. You can vote for either in the general election. Simply change your party after the election when you’re able to do so.
I know plenty of Democrats that will be voting Republican. It’s no big deal.
Buying votes, registering people duplicate times (like 73) and telling them who to vote for is illegal.
EYES OF TEXAS
Lets not forget Obamas organization that have registered everyone from Mickey Mouse to the starting line up of the Dallas Cowboys. Acorn is now under investigation in eight states for their illegal actions and with a rigged Demoncrap registration system hopefully some of these people will be seeing some jail time. One homeless person said he was allowed to register 78 times in one day, but was never informed it was illegal to do so. So if your want to condemn those that are trying to rig the system, lets include Acorn wich is in Obamas hip pocket.
Texano78704
Oh, please. There is absolutely no proof that ACORN intentionally registered ineligible voters. So far, it is nothing more than pure allegation. This is a witch hunt by Republicans. Voter fraud has been historically a non-issue. Elected officials (Republican) have spent millions investigating voter fraud and turned up jack squat.
On the other hand, voter suppression is a real problem and it does not take a rocket scientist to see why it benefits the Republican party.
laura
I have also read that irregularities happened during voter drives organized by ACORN, because they paid people to register voters. So the people who were registering voters not out of civic dedication, but to make money, registered people repeatedly.
Of course this is wrong and I expect illegal.
However, I don’t know of any connection between Obama and ACORN.
Plus, the homeless man who registered 78 times will be able to vote only once.
laura
By the way, my friends: Do you know John McCain was the keynote speaker for an ACORN rally two years ago?
It’s because ACORN does many good things, besides having used a bad system to register voters (paying people for voters registered, thereby providing an incentive for false registrations, instead of using volunteers).
Evelyn
Acorn is now under investigation in eight states for their illegal actions and with a rigged Demoncrap registration system hopefully some of these people will be seeing some jail time
E
Is this what you are refering to?
Ohio Right Wingers Resurrect Failed 2004 RICO Suit Against ACORN
Posted by Steven Rosenfeld at 4:02 PM on October 14, 2008.
In 2004, right wingers in Ohio sued ACORN under racketeering laws and were forced to withdraw their suit.
On Wednesday, history repeated itself.
A right-wing Ohio think tank filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing ACORN, the low-income advocacy group that has conducted massive voter drives in 2008, of violating voting rights law under the state’s anti-racketeering laws.
The group, whose staff includes Ohio’s former Republican Secretary of State and Bush-Cheney ’04 re-election campaign co-chair, J. Kenneth Blackwell, is skating on the thinnest of legal ice.
Why? Because the same tactic was tried in 2004 by some of the same GOP-connected election lawyers — who were forced to withdraw their suit — and because ACORN did not even register voters in the Ohio county where the suit was filed on Wednesday, Warren County, according to ACORN officials.
Warren County is notable because in 2004 county officials lied to the media and public and declared a homeland security emergency on Election Night, causing the county to take all ballots to a warehouse to be counted away from any public observers.
The FBI denied it ever issued such a security alert. Moreover, subsequent reporting by the Cincinnati Enquirer found county officials had been planning to announce the alert days before the election.
But that was 2004. On Wednesday, the Columbus-based Buckeye Institute, filed the state RICO suit. While ACORN spokespeople said they would vigorously fight this suit in court, a more telling response comes from looking at what happened the last time GOP partisans used this same tactic — in 2004.
Here’s what Ohio election lawyer Bob Fitrakis wrote about that litigation for FreePress.org in 2005.
As the Free Press reported in 2005, (American Center for Voting Rights founder Thor) Hearne, with the help of Republican attorney Alex Vogel, concocted a story that the main problem with the 2004 elections in Ohio was that the NAACP was paying people with crack cocaine to register voters.
Based on scant evidence and an incident of a volunteer being linked to crack use, Hearne pushed a version of voter fraud in Ohio that directly attacked not only the NAACP, but ACORN, the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio. By attacking this combination of groups, Rove and Hearne were targeting the leading forces for registering blacks, poor, union workers and young people in Ohio – those most likely to vote Democratic.
Aided by Vogel, then-attorney for Republican Senate Majority leader Bill Frist, and a front group connected to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Free Enterprise Coalition, local Republican operative Mark Rubrick filed an Ohio corrupt practices lawsuit (RICO) against all the voter registration organizations listed above in Wood County.
The civil RICO case, backed by financing from the Free Enterprise Coalition, alleged that the voter registration groups provided “. . . payments made in connections with the violations (in the form of, among other things, ‘bounties,’ payments or other rewards for collecting and/or processing the registrations including but not limited to illegal drugs, paid to individuals actually engaged in the violations), . . .” At the bottom of the document filed by attorneys Jeffrey Creemer and Douglas Haynam of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick of Toledo, the following words appear: “jscFree Enterprise CoalitionAmended Complaint.doc” calling into question who was behind the lawsuit.
The suit was later quietly withdrawn after election rights attorney Cliff Arnebeck discovered that the Free Enterprise Coalition had indemnified Rubrick and had promised to pay any and all expenses related to his RICO suit. “I told Rubrick in no uncertain terms that his accusations that the NAACP was a criminal organization were false and that the indemnification from the Free Enterprise Coalition wasn’t worth the paper it was written on,” Arnebeck said.
In writing about the Free Enterprise Coalition (FEC) on May 28, 2007, the website SourceWatch contains the following quote: “No website, no employees, a disconnected phone and a lapsed corporate registration. Without the 990s, you’d be hard pressed to know the GOP funneled $2.8 million through the Free Enterprise Coalition to fund election-related legal expenses between 2004 and 2005.”
“The GOP pulled this exact same stunt in 2004,” said Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote, which organizes ACORN’s voter registration activities. “This is a frivolous abuse of the legal process. The court should respond and impose sanctions. You can expect an aggressive response from us.”
EYES OF TEXAS
So, you found another leftist loon that thinks the Demoncraps can do no wrong even it it is as plain as the nose on your face. There have been televised interviews with people who stated they were allowed to register as many as 78 times by ACORN. Most of the Obama voters can’t see past all the pretty words, false promises and down-right lies that flow so easily out of Obamas socialist mouth. BTW, why do you think Obama wants a national police force? Is it for his personal protection or something more in line as Hitlers SS or Gestapo to force us to all goose step to his socialist agenda?
Do you think a Republican who said this could be elected president?
By Vincent Gioia
In his speech July 2 in Colorado Springs, Denver, media darling Barack Obama said:
“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.â€
What Obama meant:
“…we need a ‘civilian national security force’ that would be as powerful, strong and well-funded as the half-trillion dollar Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force …â€
But as reported by Joseph Farah of WorldNet Daily Obama’s comments concerning a national police force are not included in published transcripts of his prepared remarks. Moreover, transcripts posted at both the Wall Street Journal and Denver Post do not have the critical passage and none of the major news media even mentioned Obama’s call for a national police force.
The transcripts have all had the above paragraph censored. But on the YouTube video you can hear the above comment.
The budget of the Defense Department is about $585 billion, over $200,000 per employee. The Heritage Foundation reports that spending on military personnel averages $70,000 per member, though it is not clear what that entails. If Obama is talking about funding his civilian national security corps at the same level as the military, he would need at least an additional $500 billion. That can buy a lot of clicking boots and Lugers and other wafen for his national Gestapo.
Joseph Farah on WorldNet Daily wrote:
“If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal. I thought Democrats generally believed the U.S. spent too much on the military. How is it possible their candidate is seeking to create some kind of massive but secret national police force that will be even bigger than the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force put together? Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?â€
I think Obama said exactly what he meant although as a slip of the tongue because this part of his agenda is not something to be expressed prior to the election. Obama has a socialist, near communist agenda, of government control and redistribution of wealth. A national police force would be important in achieving Obama’s goals and could be used to stifle opposition. If you think this is just conspiratorial thinking, reflect back on the days before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.
I thought we already had the FBI, DEA, BATF, U.S. Marshals, TSA, postal inspectors, park rangers, Secret Service, state bureaus of investigation, state police, local police, sheriffs and constables, among others, to already handle domestic law enforcement; why do we need an additional national police force? The only reason would be to exercise authority the existing agencies do not have.
In all his life Obama has never managed an organization larger than a Senate staff, or that of a law school publication. And, he’s never operated a for-profit business or been responsible for any profit center within one. Yet now too many Americans seem willing to entrust him with management of the largest business in the world; and with a national police force as well.
All Obama’s experience prior to his 123 days in the U.S. Senate has been in community organizing. Among other things he worked with ACORN, the extremist community organization whose rap sheet include perpetration of numerous acts of violence, such as the destructive actions in Philadelphia where numerous buildings were burned to the ground. His other experience includes assisting in the Meals-on-Wheels programs in Illinois, training programs for Vietnamese Refugees, assembling congregations and a synagogue in a mid-sized Texas town to provide emergency assistance to low-income citizens, and being an expert witness at a Texas Senate hearing when legislation forming the state’s Commission on Human Rights was being drafted. Although some of these community action deeds may be commendable, on one level, they hardly constitute any sort of experience to justify his election to the country’s highest office, and any comparison to Senator John McCain’s experience and background is laughable.
Putting Obama in charge of a national police force is akin to giving a paper hanger (Hitler’s previous profession) an armed force funded with billions of dollars (to be commensurate with the existing military) and the power to enforce an agenda that will change every fabric of American freedom.
I do not trust Barack Obama in the least and this only adds to my mistrust. If it had been John McCain who had made this proposal, the press would have been all over it. Why does Obama get a pass from the media; because they want Obama elected president!
Do you Obama supporters still want him to be president after knowing about this part of his agenda? If you buy into Obama’s call for “changeâ€, is this the kind of change you want?
Vincent Gioia is a retired patent attorney living in Palm Desert, California. His articles may be read at http://www.vincentgioia.com and he may be contacted at gioia@gte.net.
This will be stopped at all cost by Americans that will not let Obama turn our nation into the likes of Cuba. Not in my America, no way, no how.
Irma
Yes, voter disenfranchisement is a bad thing and is wrong. It was wrong when the Republicans did in in 2000 and it was wrong when the Democrats did it in 2008 to supporters of Hilary Clinton many of who live in Florida and Michigan. Not to mention Dallas, Texas where my brother was barred by Obama supporters from
participating in a caucus. They LOCKED
the doors because they said there was
no room.
Voter disenfranchisement is BAD and wrong when it happens to ANYONE.
Evelyn
EYES OF TEXAS said:
So, you found another leftist loon that thinks the Demoncraps can do no wrong even it it is as plain as the nose on your face. There have been televised interviews with people who stated they were allowed to register as many as 78 times by ACORN. Most of the Obama voters can’t see past all the pretty words, false promises and down-right lies that flow so easily out of Obamas socialist mouth. BTW, why do you think Obama wants a national police force? Is it for his personal protection or something more in line as Hitlers SS or Gestapo to force us to all goose step to his socialist agenda?
E
No Eyes, I found the truth. Here is more!
Republicans Abuse Prosecutorial Powers to Intimidate Voters
By Steven Rosenfeld, Posted October 17, 2008.
From the FBI to Ohio county prosecutors, GOP-connected lawmen are seeking to scare new voters.
As the presidential election comes to a close, the Republican Party — and its allies in law enforcement at the FBI and at county levels in Ohio — are announcing voting-related prosecutions that civil rights advocates say are intended to intimidate voters, despite prosecutorial rules that bar these disclosures before an election.
The foremost example was Thursday’s leak to the media by top FBI officials of a new investigation of ACORN, a low-income advocacy group which registered 1.3 million new voters in swing states in 2008.
The Associated Press reported “senior officials” confirmed the FBI investigation, saying they “spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election.”
“The reports by unnamed sources within the FBI that they have begun an investigation of ACORN is patently inconsistent with the DOJ prosecution manual,” said Gerry Hebert, a former Justice Department Voting Section Chief who now runs the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.
“Whether they are prosecuting or not, it is clearly intimidation,” said Jeff Gamso, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio. “That is what press reports do. You intimidate people into not going to the polls and not voting.”
The FBI leak has counterparts at the county level in Ohio, raising the same voter intimidation concerns.
In Columbus, Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney Ron O’Brien, a Republican, confirmed in numerous state media reports on Wednesday that he was investigating a group called Vote From Home that registered more than 11,000 new voters from inner-city neighborhoods.
A Franklin County Board of Elections spokesman said it learned about the group from a college website and found some of its members had registered and already voted in Ohio.
Vote From Home’s great crime is they helped 11,000 people register to vote and helped people get absentee ballots,” said Robert Fitrakis, a Columbus election lawyer.
“All this was leaked to the press, to FOX news, to TV-6, which is Sinclair Broadcasting, which is more conservative than Fox News … They are trying to put a chilling effect on voting. They are trying to scare people into not voting by using criminal prosecutions.”
The FBI leak and Franklin County investigation are not the only examples of publicized legal tactics in Ohio that civil rights lawyers say are intended to scare new voters.
The Ohio Republican party ought to stop harassing innocent voters,” Carrie Davis, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Ohio said in a statement Thursday, looking at the party’s tactics. “The party is continuing to imply wrongdoing by undertaking a sweeping investigation of legitimate voters for simply having the nerve to lawfully cast a ballot.”
What this is all about is keeping people from going to the polls at all,” he said. “It is designed to keep people from voting. It is too late to keep people from registering. Voter registration is closed. But what you can do is set up a system where if they try to go to the polls they will be harassed, or create an expectation that will happen.
That is the point.”
Steven Rosenfeld is a Senior Fellow at AlterNet.org, where he reports on elections from a voting rights perspective. His books include Count My Vote: A Citizen’s Guide to Voting (AlterNet Books, 2008), What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (The New Press, 2006), and Making History in Vermont: The Election of a Socialist to Congress (Hollowbrook Publishing, 1992). An award-winning journalist, he has been a staff reporter at National Public Radio, Monitor Radio, TomPaine.com, and at daily and weekly newspapers in Vermont.
http://www.alternet.org/election08/103398/?page=entire
~~~~~~~~~
Simply a Disgrace
10.17.08 — 12:36AM By Josh Marshall
“I’m astounded that this issue is being trotted out again. Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it’s a scare tactic.”
Who’s that speaking? And What’s he talking about?
That’s fired US Attorney David Iglesias talking about the news leaked today that the DOJ and FBI are opening a nationwide investigation into allegations that the community organization ACORN is somehow working to undermine the November election through fraud. For more from Iglesias and his fellow fired US Attorney Bud Cummins, don’t miss TPMMuckraker’s Zack Roth’s interview post from earlier this evening.
Iglesias got fired not long after the 2006 midterm election because he wouldn’t get off the dime and bring bogus vote fraud indictments against Democrats or time other indictments of Democrats to sway the 2006 election.
In other words, he got canned for not doing what a number of his former colleagues at the DOJ are happily doing this very day.
Nor was Iglesias simpy a respected attorney with solid enough connections to swing a US Attorney appointment. He was a rising star in the New Mexico Republican party.
Iglesias was the Republican nominee for Attorney General in 1998. (Not that it’s immediately relevant to this question, but Iglesias was the Navy JAG lawyer on whom Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men was based.)
This was that reassuring case where a political person’s partisan attachments butted up against his integrity and the latter won the day hands down. This is someone who knows this scam from the inside and whose testimony — literal and figurative — comes not in line with partisan attachments but in spite of them. Everyone should listen.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/237825.php
Grandma
Texano said on Oct 14:
Oh, please. There is absolutely no proof that ACORN intentionally registered ineligible voters. So far, it is nothing more than pure allegation. This is a witch hunt by Republicans. Voter fraud has been historically a non-issue. Elected officials (Republican) have spent millions investigating voter fraud and turned up jack squat.
Now that ACORN fraud is all over the news, FBI raiding Nevada office, FBI investigating in numerous states and several ACORN employees coming forward with their confessions, would you like to retract your statement?
Alex
I have very good news for everybody!! Today, me, and many of my collage friends went to vote. All of us for Obama and Democrat candidates. We are all hopeful that we will get rid of the Republiklan racist scums.
Sandra
I think that perhaps this has been the dirtiest year in politics for those who call themselves Democrats that I have ever seen. They have stooped to a new low calling the Republican party and its constituents, racists. It saddens me to see our country going back down that road again when we come such a long ways.
Alex
If you think like, talk like, act like, you cannnot expect anything else. Look who supports the Republiklan party: Minute Men, FAIR, etc. If you go to the neo-nazies, skinhead sites, they encourage their supporters to vote Republiklan. If you remembered mathematical logic, or simple logic reasoning, After all premises indicating xenophobia by the Republiklan Party, the expected conclusion is that they are racists.
Sandra
So because of a few bad apples who “call” themselves Republicans, that makes the party itself and everyone who is a registered Republican, a racist?
Republicans are not xenophobic. They have no fear of strangers and that is the meaning of xenophobia. They do however expect these foreigners/strangers to come to our country legally and so do many Democrats. You have a problem with that?
Alessandra
As far as I can tell, the far right despises McCain and are not voting for him; they are voting mostly for Chuck Baldwin running on the Constitutionalist ticket.
The vast majority of Republicans are no more racists than the vast majority of Democrats are Communists. Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are racists as listed by the SPLC. They are voting for Obama. Does that make most Democrats who support Obama racists? That logic is not sound.
Most people in either party are not racist. They merely have different political views and differ on their ideas of the policies which are better for the country.
There is also hatred on the far left; it’s just that their targets are different. But the hatred is there. The demonization of an entire group of people because of their differing political views is an example of that hatred. It is a tactic used most frequently by those on the far right and far left. Intimidation of those with opposing views is also a hallmark of those on both extremes of the political spectrum.
Comments are closed.