Rachel Maddow, Bobby Kennedy on Republican voter fraud

The overblown histrionics about ACORN do not surprise those of us who have been watching the RNC's election manipulation antics. For eight years White House operatives have been trying to gin up press stories about voter fraud. David Iglesias of New Mexico was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the White House for their refusal to bring voter fraud prosecutions. "We took over 100 complaints," from the GOP, he told us, "We investigated for almost 2 years, I didn't find one prosecutable voter fraud case in the entire state of New Mexico." Iglesias, a McCain supporter, has, for the first time, leveled a new and serious charge: Despite finding none of the 200 voters guilty, he says the White House nevertheless ordered him to illegally prosecute baseless cases against innocent citizens, just to gin up voter fraud publicity. His refusal, he says, cost him his job. "They were looking for politicized -- for improperly politicized US attorneys to file bogus voter fraud cases."

Finally, the removal by GOP officials of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from voting rolls over the past year provides ACORN with a sound rationale for obtaining new registrations, even from voters who believe they are already registered...The GOP is ginning up hysteria about non-existent vote fraud by Democrats in order to distract the press from its own campaign to disenfranchise millions of American voters.

The Republicans have created an obstacle course of barriers designed to suppress the vote, purge tens of thousands of Democratic voters from voting rolls, create mayhem and delay at voting venues on Election Day, and stop millions of votes from being counted this election cycle.

Jailed GOP activist Jack Abramoff and his fellow convict, Congressman Bob Ney, wrote the most sinister provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which Congress passed in 2002 creating a series of diabolically cunning new voting impediments. HAVA, for example, allows state voting officials to purge tens of thousands of voters from the polls using algorithms and voter ID requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise black, Hispanic and minority voters, and other Democratic demographics including senior citizens and young people.

In 2004, highly organized GOP tacticians helped disenfranchise no less than 2.7 million American voters. Almost a million of them were African Americans. The The Federal Elections Commission has found black voters were nine times more likely to have their votes discarded than white voters and that over one-third of the million provisional ballots cast in 2004 -- ballots handed disproportionately to African Americans -- were never counted but simply thrown into dumpsters.

In a technique known as "caging" RNC operatives send millions of first class letters to black voters across the country marked 'do not forward.' Republican operatives armed with lists then invade black precincts on Election Day to challenge those voters whose letters were returned to the RNC because the voter was not home when the mail arrived. That tactic deliberately targeted black students on vacation in August, homeless men and soldiers posted overseas. "Caging" is resurrecting Old Dixie's Jim Crow procedures designed to rid the lists of black voters and create long lines in black precincts.

In this election, new HAVA mandates permit voting officials to precisely match registration form information with the voter's driver's license and other government records. While it may sound reasonable, in practice, any change, even a dropped hyphen, is cause for eliminating the voter from the rolls. Since 2004, Colorado's Republican Secretaries of State have purged one out of every five voters from the rolls. The current Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, a Republican also running for office, recently purged...new voter registrations -- overwhelmingly Democratic -- based upon an obscure technical mistake that Coffman's office encouraged voters to make in the first place.

The GOP "anti-fraud" campaign resulted in one in nine New Mexico Democratic voters finding their names had disappeared from voter roles during this year's caucus.

Despite a recent Supreme Court decision upholding Ohio's refusal to disenfranchise 200,000 legitimate voters based on this absurd demand to "match" voter names to databases, White House operatives are still fighting to purge these names from the rolls. President George Bush last week personally asked his Attorney General Mike Mukasey to renew Republican efforts to disenfranchise these voters.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-greg-palast/drinking-th...

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Tags:

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[johnher1982]

why you making fun of his disorder? that is just wrong!

[PeWh55]

And P.S. voting on a Tuesday??? WTF's with that. Aren't most people at work/school. Where I live it's always on a Saturday from 10 am to 10 pm. Now that democracy in action as opposed to inaction!

[swimmer7189]

rfk jr is so hot for his age!

[dale1966gto]

isn't it ironic that it's the dem's that stole this election. in fact, the strongarm - acorn, which the repub's never used such a criminal organization -

[playsetman]

felons,dead people cant vote-democrats letting accorn commit fraud-its fraud to let one register 74 times and illegal aliens are voting in NC where elaine marshall is blocking checking of duplicate ballots-obama campaign memo to NC-power bill and job application gets you registered -dems got 40% of military ballots thrown out in 2004-yes robert people should have social security and correct address-dont be a dumbass-if you are too dumb to write your full name then you should not be voting

[52381a]

I just love this time of year. I just received my Republican Guide to Voter Suppression. It's autographed by Karl Rove himself. It comes with a decoder ring for secret messages and a preprogrammed disk to log on to Diebold voter machines. This year they have camera technology built in so you can watch their expressions in real time when you change their votes to McCain. Should be a blast. Maybe I'll get to watch some of the moonbats here.

Way more fun than Butterfly ballots.

[rdang111]

Madcow,ayers dedicated his terrorist book to the killer of kennedy. Glad to see you support that.

Seig Heil obamy!!!!

[drlarrymitchell]

I'm sorry, you're right.

It's this damn campaign.

It's made me wary of doddering,

senile old fucks of any political stripe.

[dbmcvey]

It doesn't matter whether you knew or not--you just wanted to be nasty.

[drlarrymitchell]

Didn't know that he actually had a disorder.

Honestly.

Dude used to be a junkie, and what I knew about him seemed to lead to a conclusion of him having blown out his pipes with dope.

[GoofyVal]

Trust me, over 60 percent of us here in the USA are just as appalled as you onlookers from other countries.

OBAMA/BIDEN 08!