Why are we even bothering to have an election next year?

Why not just crown Mitt Romney or Rick Perry or whichever of the lunatics the Republican Party will choose next year king-for-life? If there are up to five million Americans who should be eligible to vote, but will not be allowed to next year lest they vote for Democrats, why are we even bothering to go through this charade (NYT link):

There is almost no voting fraud in America. And none of the lawmakers who claim there is have ever been able to document any but the most isolated cases. The only reason Republicans are passing these laws is to give themselves a political edge by suppressing Democratic votes.

The most widespread hurdle has been the demand for photo identification at the polls, a departure from the longstanding practice of using voters’ signatures or household identification like a utility bill. Seven states this year have passed laws requiring strict photo ID to vote, and similar measures were introduced in 27 other states. More than 21 million citizens — 11 percent of the population — do not have government ID cards. Many of them are poor, or elderly, or black and Hispanic and could have a hard time navigating the bureaucracy to get a card.

In Kansas, the secretary of state, Kris Kobach (who also wrote Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law), pushed for an ID law on the basis of a list of 221 reported instances of voter fraud in Kansas since 1997. Even if that were true, it would be an infinitesimal percentage of the votes cast during that period, but it is not true.

When The Wichita Eagle looked into the local cases on the list, the newspaper found that almost all were honest mistakes: a parent trying to vote for a student away at college, or signatures on mail-in ballots that didn’t precisely match those on file. In one case of supposed “fraud,” a confused non-citizen was asked at the motor vehicles bureau whether she wanted to fill out a voter registration form, and did so not realizing she was ineligible to vote.

Some of the desperate Republican attempts to keep college students from voting are almost comical in their transparent partisanship. No college ID card in Wisconsin meets the state’s new stringent requirements (as lawmakers knew full well), so the elections board proposed that colleges add stickers to the cards with expiration dates and signatures. Republican lawmakers protested that the stickers would lead to — yes, voter fraud.

Other states are beginning to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, or are finding other ways to make it harder to register. Some are cutting back on programs allowing early voting, or imposing new restrictions on absentee ballots, alarmed that early voting was popular among black voters supporting Barack Obama in 2008. In all cases, they are abusing the trust placed in them by twisting democracy’s machinery to partisan ends.

Republicans relied in the Supreme Court to deliver the White House to George W. Bush in 2000. They relied in a corrupt Ohio Secretary of State in Kenneth Blackwell to rig the system there to make sure George W. Bush remained in office. The 2008 election was so decisive that even efforts to disenfranchise didn't work. But the Republicans won't take that chance again, especially with what will surely be a weak candidate at the top of the ticket next year.

With the head of the Tea Party Nation saying that it would make sense to limit the right to vote to only property owners, it's clear that Republicans simply do not want Americans to vote unless they are white and virtually assured to vote Republican. That being the case, and with Republican governors having so much success in getting restrictive voter laws on the books, why are we even bothering with this charade of "elections" next year?

Arizona 2010 = Florida 2000?

Greg Palast seems to think so, as he makes the case for the new anti-immigrant law in Arizona being more about keeping LEGAL LATINO AMERICAN CITIZENS, who tend to vote Democratic by a two-to-one ratio, away from the polls:

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote -- and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias' jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

More...

It should be no surprise at this point; this is how Republicans operate. Whether it's voter roll purges in Florida, inadequate voting machines in black precincts in Ohio in 2004, or calls for literacy tests, it is now a FACT that Republican election tactics include, and rely heavily on, the disenfranchisement of Americans who don't vote Republican. For all the talk about ACORN, there has been NOT ONE INSTANCE of EVEN ONE PERSON who voted fraudulently as a result of anything ACORN did. And yet, we have two tainted presidential elections in 2000 and 2004 behind us, and now Virginia and Arizona essentially advocating Jim Crow-type tactics.

This is what Republicans are. It has always been thus.

They're Going to Steal It Again, Part III: Republican Voter Registration Fraud in California

Brad Friedman was on Faux Noise yesterday breaking the news that the head of the Republican voter registration group, Young Political Majors that was coercing people into registering as Republicans in order to sign a petition, has himself been arrested for voter registration fraud.

From the California Secretary of State's press release (posted at Bradblog):

Mark Anthony Jacoby, who owns the firm known as Young Political Majors (YPM), was arrested after allegedly registering himself to vote, once in 2006 and again in 2007, at an address where did not live. An investigation by the Secretary of State’s Election Fraud Investigation Unit revealed that Jacoby twice registered to vote at the address of a childhood home in Los Angeles although he no longer lived there.

The Secretary of State’s fraud unit and the Ontario Police Department arrested Jacoby near an Ontario hotel just before midnight Saturday. An arraignment date has not been scheduled yet.

“Voter registration fraud is a serious issue, which is why I vigorously investigate all allegations of elections fraud,” said Secretary Bowen, California’s chief elections officer. “Where there’s a case to be made, I will forward it to law enforcement for criminal prosecution.”

For his business, Jacoby traveled California and a number of other states collecting petition signatures and registering voters. Under state law, signature-gatherers must sign a declaration stating that they are either registered to vote in California or that they are eligible to do so. Jacoby allegedly registered to vote at his childhood address to meet this legal requirement.

Under California law, it is a felony punishable by up to three years in prison to register yourself when you are not entitled to vote and it is perjury to provide false information on a voter registration card.

On October 3, the Public Integrity Unit of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office charged Jacoby with four felonies: two counts of voter registration fraud and two counts of perjury. A warrant was issued for his arrest and bail was set at $50,000.

It's important to note that the Republicans are clearly embarking on a two-prong approach of stealing the election if they can through massive voter caging lists, voter intimidation at the polls, and rigged voting machines; and attempting to delegitimize Barack Obama if he is elected by blaming ACORN, which has done nothing other than hire unreliable people and then flag registrations gathered by these people that are likely to be fraudulent before passing them on AS REQUIRED BY LAW. On the other hand, we have Republican front groups doing the electoral equivalent of long-distance slamming, combined with deliberate registration fraud.

ACORN is required to submit all voter registration forms it receives to eliminate the possibility that voters might think they are registered when they are not. It is not unheard of for the trashing of voter registration forms to be used as a disenfranchisement tactic. In 2004, Voter Outreach of America was alleged to have thrown out registration forms decleared as Democratic because it was paid by the RNC to only sign up Democratic voters. Registration scams run by Christian Coalition goon Nathan Sproul were rampant during the last presidential election cycle. Funny how there was no Republican outrage over voter registration fraud when it's actually done by Republicans, instead of being done by employed individuals whose fraudulent activity is flagged by the organization that hires them as part of that organization's compliance with the law.

It's time to face the fact that Republicans do not want Democrats to vote. Period. I'm somewhat encouraged by the fact that the Obama campaign seems to at least have a clue about what's going on, and is putting together an apparatus to try to deal with it. The problem is that once voters are denied the opportunity to vote on November 4, it's too late to re-enfranchisement them. And they only have to disenfranchise enough people to gain enough electoral votes to win.

They're going to steal it AGAIN

They've all but flat-out admitted it.

They're going to steal the election again.

They're going to do it through disenfranchisement, through rigged voting machines, through plants at Fox News calling states before the votes are in.

What else do you think the "narrow victory scenario" means? It means winning by just a hair, just enough to take the White House, leaving stunned Democrats once again wondering how it all went wrong.

Here's how they're doing it:

1) They're duping voters into changing their registrations to Republican by telling them they're not allowed to sign a petition against child molesters unless they are registered Republicans. (Where's the Justice Department on this one, eh?)

2) They're inciting the same thugs that have been screaming at McCain/Palin rallies advocating the murder of Barack Obama to vandalize ACORN offices and threaten the lives of activists trying to register voters.

3) They're embarking on a nationwide quest to systematically disenfranchise Democrats -- and ONLY Democrats.

4) They're going to rely on people's trust in the voting apparatus when, four years after Wally O'Dell of Diebold said he would do whatever is necessary to deliver Ohio's electoral voters to George W. Bush, people in 34 states, including New Jersey, are going to vote on machines that are easily rigged. Let's not say "hacked", because "hacked" conjures up images of bored smart teenagers. Let's call it what it is -- vote-rigging and often vote-switching.

5) The lapdogs of the corporate media are still talking in one way or another about the so-called "Bradley Effect", in which white voters lie to pollsters, thus overstating support for the black candidate. And just to cover all the bases, Faux Noise has decided that there is a REVERSE "Bradley Effect" to try to rile up the Republican base.

"The Bradley effect." "The narrow victory scenario." It's all falling into place.
Oh, and by the way? They also have the apparatus in place to clamp down on anyone who dares to protest the results.

Yes, the Supreme Court put a roadblock in the path of Republicans to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of new voters in Ohio yesterday. But that's just a flesh wound. There are 49 other states to play with.

So there is not going to be a single minute to exhale. Not now, not on November 5 if their efforts fail, and not for the next eight fucking years. Because every damn last one of us has to get out there on November 4 and vote. No excuses. No "he doesn't need my vote." No "My state is blue anyway and I really need to cut up vegetables for stir-fry." No "I've been sitting in a 10-mile backup on the Parkway because there's an accident on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD and everyone wants a show." I don't care if you've been mauled by a pack of wild dogs. Barack Obama is going to need every vote he can get. He needs every vote because he has to have enough votes that not even the Republicans can steal this election. He needs every vote because Bush Republicanism must be shown, even to Chris Matthews, to be completely discredited. He needs every vote because part of this attempt to steal the election is the contingency plan to try to delegitimize a President Obama. Because if you think for one minute that they won't try to turn Tony Rezko into Jim McDougal, that they won't go on wild goosechases finding phony birth certificates to try to "prove" that Obama is "not American" and is therefore not eligible for the presidency, that they won't try to take a shot at him if they have to, guess again.

If ever a presidential candidate needed us to have his back, it's this one. He is up against the foul forces of racism, of fear, of loathing, of white privilege, of mean-spirited little people who wish it was still 1954. We can be satisfied with nothing less than a landslide.

ACORN is the new illegal immigrants

Just the way illegal immigrants were the new Muslim terrorists and Muslim terrorists were the new Scary Negroes™. ACORN's voter registration drive plays right into the Republican "voter fraud" meme that Republicans are already using to try to justify their mass vote caging schemes in as many states as they can get away with it and the fact that the voting machines in many states are still not counting votes, and in some cases, switching votes from that which the voter intended. Funny, too, how the states with the biggest potential problems are also potential toss-up states.

But in a move that smacks of the continuing partisanship of the Bush Justice Department, the FBI has been sent to investigate ACORN's voter registration drives, even though not one registrant named "Mickey Mouse" has dared show up at the polls. Of course it's not about preventing "Mickey Mouse" from showing up at the polls, it's about preventing "Tyrone Jackson" and "Goldie Berkowitz" and "Juan Hernandez" and others who might commit the crime of voting for a Black Democrat for president from exercising their right to vote.

David Iglesias, one of the U.S. Attorneys fired by this very same Bush Justice Department for refusing to falsely prosecute Democrats for voter fraud, has seen this before, and calls it "a disgrace":

"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 start 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.

This is not for one minute about sustaining the integrity of the voting system. These people who are registering under phony names are not going to show up at the polls. This is about selective prosecution of an organization that was once supported by John McCain when it was convenient and advantageous for him, because it is encouraging people to exercise their right to vote.

If the Republican Party does not feel Americans have the right to vote, then perhaps it ought to just say so -- and let the voters decide.

Actually fear isn't quite the only arrow left in the Republican quiver

There's also disenfranchisement via lies and thuggery:

An anonymous flier circulating in African-American neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia states that voters who are facing outstanding arrest warrants or who have unpaid traffic tickets may be arrested at the polls on Election Day.

Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison, who learned of the flier last week, said that the message is completely false.

"The only thing that police officers are going to do that we'll be encouraging that day is that they'll be exercising their own individual right to vote," Gillison said.

He plans to put up statements on the city and police Web sites to let citizens know that the handouts are false. He said that he also will record a public-service announcement for broadcast.

Gillison referred the matter to the U.S. Attorney's Office and the district attorney.

"We are not going to stand for any intimidation of voters," Gillison said. "Not in this city."

He said that he did not know who was behind the fliers, which appear to be targeted at supporters of Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

But telling people to beware of voting if they have outstanding warrants is an old trick. In Maryland's 2002 gubernatorial election, anonymous fliers in African-American communities warned people to pay parking tickets and resolve outstanding warrants before heading to the polls.

"It seems to be clearly aimed at lower-income voters that might have had some problems in the past and clearly aimed at discouraging people from voting," said Zack Stalberg, who heads the political-watchdog group Committee of Seventy.

Stalberg said that he feared that there could be more fliers to come.

"I'm a little surprised it appeared this far before Election Day," he said. "It's another indication of how dirty this election might become."

"Might" become? How about "has already become"? Already there are reports of massive voter roll purges of college students, Black and Hispanic voters, and those on foreclosure lists. Crimes against the right to vote are being documented here.

With Sarah Palin playing the "patriotism" card by hammering Barack Obama's passing acquaintance with William Ayers at the same time as she and her husband have been supporters of an Alaska secessionist movement, someone (and it isn't going to be Tom Brokaw, you may be assured of that) needs to ask John McCain and his trophy running mate just why they are so afraid of the voters.

(h/t)

Joe Biden talks about the Republicans' dirty little secret

About 21 minutes in:

I heard that a Republican County Chairman right here in Michigan said that they're keeping a list of foreclosed homes, suggesting that if you've lost your home, you should also lose your vote. I have a different idea. I think that if you're worried about losing your home, you should vote for the guys who are going to help you keep it!

The story:

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township.”

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

Except that a foreclosure notice doesn't necessarily mean that the person isn't a resident. But go prove that when you show up to vote.

That's just one way the Republicans are trying to disenfranchise Democratic voters all over the country. Brad Friedman has been all over this for years, and if you want to know how they're trying to rig yet another election, make BradBlog a daily stop. Because if you think that elections should reflect the will of the people, and Republicans are doing what they can to make sure that only THEIR people can vote, the time to act is NOW.

How John McCain and Sarah Palin will win the election

...in true Republican fashion, by mass disenfranchisement:

Ohio election officials are sending out a mass mailer stamped “do not forward” to all registered voters today (Sept. 5) with an absentee ballot application and other important notices for Nov. 4.

What’s important here is not so much what’s going out as what’s being returned to sender.

Unbeknownst to the would-be recipients, the same mailer — just 60 days before the election — has the potential to determine their eligibility to vote, challenged not by election officials but by partisan opposition.

A similar mailer in March netted nondeliverable mail from almost 600,000 registered voters in just five Ohio counties who could now have their ballots thrown out for voting under the wrong address.

The National Voter Registration Act prohibits any state from purging names from the voting rolls within 90 days of an election.

The law doesn’t, however, preclude mass partisan challenges on or shortly before Election Day — known as voter caging — based on the same returned envelopes from state-sponsored mailers like the ones in Ohio and others going out across the country.

In 2004, the year the national election hinged on results from Ohio, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters based on returned mail from the GOP's own friendly reminder notices. From 2004 to 2006, Republicans challenged 77,000 voters this way nationwide. A consent decree issued in 1982 and amended in 1987 enjoins the GOP from instituting “ballot security programs” that focus on minority voters.

No evidence so far suggests Republicans — vote caging is essentially a GOP sport — have mounted a caging campaign this year. Yet, in July, Franklin County Election Director and County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse told reporters he didn’t rule out challenges before November, particularly because of increased home foreclosures, which would make failures to change address on voter registration records more common.

A challenged voter will likely cast a provisional ballot, which often requires voters to return to election divisions to prove their identity and address. Nearly a third of all 1.6 million provisional ballots cast in 2004 were thrown out.

It all becomes clear now, doesn't it? It's almost enough to make you think that the easy credit "liar loans" and interest-only mortgages were specifically designed to result in massive foreclosures and the accompanying mass dislocation of lower-income (read: Democratic) voters all across the country. Send them non-forwardable mailings at the address from which they were foreclosed, and bingo! An invalid voter.

You've got to hand it to the Republicans -- they sure know how to cover all the bases. It will be interesting to see how these voters respond when they show up and aren't allowed to vote -- and how Americans will respond when they find out that in addition to being homeless, John McCain's health plan consists of yanking the rug out from under them and giving them a tax credit of only $2500 to $5000 with which to buy a $12,000/year family health insurance policy. But of course John McCain would think that $5000 is enough; after all, HE has the best health insurance in the country, and who else matters? And by the way, did you know that he was a POW?

MONDAY UPDATE: Kansas, Michigan, and Louisiana are also illegally purging their voter rolls.

Winning by cheating

I'm not convinced that the Republicans don't have an alternative way to steal the 2008 election even now that their mass voter disenfranchisement efforts through the U.S. Justice Department has been exposed.

What IS extremely disconcerting, however, is the relative lack of public outcry at the Justice Department being used not to fight crime or even terrorism, but to try to ensure that people who don't vote Republican are not allowed to vote:

A New Mexico lawyer who pushed to oust U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was an officer of a nonprofit group that aided Republican candidates in 2006 by pressing for tougher voter identification laws.

Iglesias, who was one of nine U.S. attorneys the administration fired last year, said that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him several times to bring voter fraud prosecutions where little evidence existed.

Iglesias believes that he was fired in part because he failed to pursue such cases.

He described Rogers, who declined to discuss the exchanges, as ``obsessed . . . convinced there was massive voter fraud going on in this state, and I needed to do something to stop it.''

Iglesias said he only recently learned of Rogers' involvement as secretary of the nonprofit American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund -- an activist group that defended tighter voter identification requirements in court against charges that they were designed to hamper voting by poor minorities.

Rogers, a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party and a candidate to replace Iglesias, is among a number of well-connected GOP partisans whose work with the legislative fund and a sister group played a significant role in the party's effort to retain control of Congress in the 2006 election.

That strategy, which presidential advisor Karl Rove alluded to in an April 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, sought to scrutinize voter registration records, win passage of tougher ID laws and challenge the legitimacy of voters considered likely to vote Democratic.

THREE FRONTS

McClatchy has found that this election strategy was active on at least three fronts:

• Tax-exempt groups such as the American Center and the Lawyers Association were deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.

• The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division turned traditional voting rights enforcement upside down with legal policies that narrowed rather than protected the rights of minorities.

• The White House and the Justice Department encouraged selected U.S. attorneys to bring voter fraud prosecutions, despite studies showing that election fraud isn't a widespread problem.

Nowhere was the breadth of these actions more obvious than at the American Center for Voting Rights and its legislative fund.

More here.