When an election is ACTUALLY stolen (not the ridiculous claims made by teabaggers that the all-powerful ACORN (which was all too easily toppled by a 25-year-old punk) somehow managed to get enough poor people to vote to give Barack Obama 56% of the vote in 2008), you don't just move on. Because the same people who stole the 2004 election will do it again if they have to in order to regain power.
Brad Jacobson has a devastating series (Parts one and two) about how a FEC commissioner helped the Republican Party hide its role in vote suppression in the 2004 election.
A little taste before you go read it:
Caroline Hunter, a Bush-appointed Federal Election Commissioner who remains in office, provided misleading statements under oath in an effort to conceal Republican National Committee involvement in vote suppression activities during the 2004 presidential election, a Raw Story investigation has found.
Legal experts say Hunter's submission of such statements under oath is a serious ethical and professional breach which could warrant a bar review and potential disbarment. At the time, Hunter was serving as deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee.
In the final days of the 2004 presidential election, the Democratic National Committee files an injunction against the Republican National Committee in New Jersey federal court, alleging its involvement in using lists of returned mail to challenge 35,000 newly registered Ohio voters. This tactic, also known as voter caging, is historically employed to suppress votes from minority and low-income citizens who tend to vote Democratic.
Now you know why the Republicans had to destroy ACORN. Yes, a couple of low-level employees at ONE office fucked up and got caught doing it. But the main reason ACORN became such a threat to conservatives was because the organization was trying to overcome the Republican Party tactic, established in the 2000 elections in Florida and used ever since, to drive minority voters away from the polls. Greg Palast has been documenting Republican vote suppression since 2000.. Funny, isn't it, how the media just went ahead and adopted the Republican line on ACORN (including the New York Times -- a travesty to which Brad Friedman has been trying to get the paper to own up), convincing people that a few people who might have gotten through the voting cracks are more of a threat to democracy than the hundreds of thousands of American citizens registered to vote who have not been allowed to because of Republican thuggery over the last decade.
It didn't work in 2008, or perhaps it did and Barack Obama was allowed to win because the Republicans didn't want to clean up the mess they had made. But if you think that just because we have a Democratic president right now, they aren't gearing up to do it again, guess again. And without one of the largest organizations dedicated to ensuring that all American citizens who are registered to vote can do so, their path to a revival of election theft is wide open.
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