The GOP war on voting

[Teatownclown]

More good news!

BREAKING: Federal Court Strikes Down Ohio Law Restricting Early Voting
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/31/784981/breaking-federal-court-strikes-down-ohio-law-restricting-early-voting/

Amusingly, the court's opinion relies on the Supreme Court's infamous decision in Bush v. Gore to reach this holding, citing Bush's statement that "[h]aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another." Judge Economus' decision will be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a Republican-leaning court with a history of legally-challenged partisan decisions benefiting the Republican Party. So it remains to be seen whether Economus' decision will have staying power.

Ironically....NOT amusingly....

[Teatownclown]

Greg Palast on How the GOP Is Planning to Steal the 2012 Election
Wednesday, 12 September 2012 14:32
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/11500-greg-palast-on-how-the-gop-is-planning-to-steal-the-2012-election
Greg Palast is back with a timely new book, "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps." In the book, which is illustrated by Ted Rall and with an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Palast warns of more than a decade of Republican elections theft - and explains how they do it. Make a minimum donation to support Truthout and receive a copy of the book - and you'll also get Palast's "Why We Occupy" DVD free, which includes a Palast talk, a rant by Lee Camp, and a variety of other video segments.
Mark Karlin: The Republicans don't just aim to steal elections in one way. They have a variety of methods to mug democracy. Can you explain a few of them?
Greg Palast: Karl Rove - "Turdblossom" as Bush called him - has a computer-data-mining system called DataTrust, which he's joining up with a data-mining computer system set up the Koch brothers called Themis. These are voter-eating machines, designed to juice the attack on voter rolls by GOP secretaries of state. Ready for this? Over 22 million names were purged from voter rolls in the last two years. Those figures are from the US Election Assistance Commission - hidden in plain sight. And who gets purged?
Black voters, Latinos, Native Americans. In Colorado, the Republican secretary of state purged 19.4 percent of voters - that's one in five! In the book, she's the Purge'n General. Obama took Colorado in '08. He can kiss it goodbye.
My co-investigator and I, Bobby Kennedy, called the secretary of state of California, a Dem, who told us her GOP predecessor blocked 42 percent of new voter registrations because they had "suspicious" names - like Mohammed. For this reason, despite massive voter drives and the increase in Latino citizenship, Hispanic registration has dropped by 1 million since 2008. Caramba!
In all, 5,901,814 legitimate votes and voters were tossed out of the count in 2008. In '12 it will be worse. Way worse.
Mark Karlin: Why do you think there isn't more public outrage about the GOP attempting to crush democracy?
Greg Palast: Because Democrats are in on it, too, and that's the sick, sad truth. In New Mexico, a solid Democratic state where Latinos are half the citizenry, Bush carried the state and the GOP has the governor's mansion. Why?
Because the Hispanic Democratic elite of that state don't want no poor folk voting - or jackasses like Bill Richardson would never win a primary. When I called the secretary of state, Becky Vigil-Giron, to ask why, in one poor Hispanic precinct, there was not a single vote for president recorded, she told me that, "Those people can't make up their minds."
"Those people." I'm glad to say she's on her way to prison. But she's a Democrat.
So, Republicans and Democrats steal votes from the same people: the poor and voters of color.
But on a strict numerical scale, 90 percent of the victims are Democrats, though they are victimized by both parties.
Get "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits" and the Greg Palast DVD with a minimum contribution to Truthout. 
Mark Karlin: I've known you since you single-handedly exposed the caging strategy of Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and a company then called ChoicePoint. Without that voter suppression in 2000, Gore would have won the popular vote in Florida as he did nationally. Yet, the mass media ignored your findings of a stolen election. Has anything changed? The mass corporate media still seems uninterested, or clueless - or both - when it comes to ratcheting down voting rights.
Greg Palast: Yeah, it's changed. For the worse.
In the book, I've got a chapter, "De-Pressed," on how the US mainstream media simply refuses to cover the story or does so in a dumbass "he-said/she-said" way.
Example: NPR, what I call National Petroleum Radio, said of the Florida purge of over a quarter million citizens from voter rolls: "State elections officials began an investigation that appears to give that argument some credence." So NPR has concluded there's "credence" in the purge. That would mean that NPR found some illegal voters. After all, there's a list of a quarter million. They didn't find any - but they effectively endorse the idea because the Republicans said so. That's not reporting; that's repeating.
My team actually went through the lists. We found, for example, that a "Bobbi Moore" (black female) was removed as a felon because of a conviction of a "Robert Moore" (white male). It wasn't a random mistake - every name was a phony.
And NPR is the best in America. At least they put the story on air - even if they didn't get one fact right.
I report these stories on the top of the nightly news on BBC TV, so it goes out worldwide - except in the USA. Here I report on Truthout (bless you), which has the no-poop facts.
There's also this: No one inside the Great American Circus Tent likes to believe they're being fooled. America likes to think of itself as a democracy. No one really wants to know their ballot has gotten hijacked, boosted, deep-sixed, caged, purged, stuck inside a robot's pocket, fiddled, filched, flimmed or flammed.
Mark Karlin: Of course, this is the first presidential election since the infamous Citizens United decision. That's like a fat cat license to buy the election, isn't it? They won't need to steal the vote if they can create an alternative reality with all that money going toward ads and other propaganda. They can just brainwash the vote.
Greg Palast: Yes, they're buying your brain, not just your ballot. But who are these guys, and why do they need a president? The point of the book is to tell you about the billion-dollar donor babies: Ice Man Simmons, Singer the Vulture, Snake Paulson - I didn't give them these nicknames, their bankers did. You should know what they have in mind for you. And I've got stuff on the Kochs you've never heard - from my files from years back when, alongside the FBI, I was investigating "Target 67C" - Charles Koch, for felony theft. No kidding. The indictment's in the book - and why Koch was never cuffed and jailed.
Mark Karlin: Isn't it amazing that since 2000, Karl Rove has played a key role in GOP election theft strategies - and is still going strong in 2012?
Greg Palast: Turdblossom has over a quarter billion dollars in his "social service charity," Crossroads. Over $20 million from Ice Man. Unlike McCain, who wouldn't touch Rove because of Turdblossom's racist operations, the Republican National Committee has actually contracted with Rove to use his Jim Crow machine, DataTrust. Rove is straight-up, at least: I quote his line that the GOP can win swing states like North Carolina by "reducing black turnout by one-quarter of one." He knows how to do it: he invented voter caging. RFK says for that, he "should be in jail." But Bobby gets all upset about people committing felony violations of the Voting Rights Act. Runs in his family.
Mark Karlin: You state that in the 2008 presidential election, 2,706,275 votes were cast and never counted. How did that happen?
Greg Palast: Here's the facts, my friend, calculated from the raw data of the US Election Assistance Commission:
No less than
767,023 provisional ballots were cast and not counted;
1,451,116 ballots were "spoiled," not counted;
488,136 absentee ballots were mailed in, but not counted.
How? Well, I could write a book. And I did: "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits."
Mark Karlin: In the chapter "The Hysteria Factor," you quote the former chairperson of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Mary Frances Berry, as telling you: "Elections aren't stolen in the vote count - they're stolen in the no count." Isn't that the essence of what the Republican Party is trying to do?
Greg Palast: Yep, that's the Rove-arian cancer on our body politic. There are no swing voters left. If you can't tell the difference between the candidates, you probably can't work a doorknob to get out to vote anyway.
The trick is this: Take 1.45 million ballots "spoiled" (cast and not counted for technical reasons, mostly errors in machine readers). The chance your vote will spoil if you're black is seven times the likelihood your ballot will be ruined by a machine if you're white. Whose vote is that? Who gave black people the crap voting machines? The same ones that gave them the crap schools. And Rove knows how to keep it that way.
Mark Karlin: Yet, watchdogs such as Mark Crispin Miller, Brad Friedman and many others do contend that the electronic voting machines do allow for the theft of elections through electronic manipulation of election outcomes.
Greg Palast: That's why I'm including Friedman's analysis on my associated web site, BallotBandits.org. I, though, don't want folks to forget the easiest way to steal votes by computer: unplug the computer. That's right. One of the key ways black votes are gone is the miraculous way that computers have glitches in Hispanic precincts, which suffer a loss of votes five times the loss in white precincts. So the votes aren't changed, they simply disappear. Oops! A "glitch" - no nasty software tricks to explain. Details? You'll have to read the book.
Mark Karlin: You point out that Bill Clinton was beholden to big money, as is Barack Obama. Yet, the efforts at voter suppression tend to be almost all Republican - and as your book points out, they are pretty unrelenting. Why does big money play a role in both parties, but restricting voting rights tends to be confined to just one of them?
Greg Palast: Democrats used to be the vote suppression champs: Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats. Democrats wore white sheets; Republicans use spreadsheets. I was in Chicago when Boss Daley would fire city workers who didn't pull the A Lever (you could vote party line with a single pull).
Vote theft has always targeted the poor and minorities. Today, that benefits (mostly) the GOP, so they've got the incentive to bleach the voter rolls white.
Mark Karlin: I've asked you this before, but let me take your temperature on this again. In the United States, you continue to be shunned by the mainstream corporate media, which means the audience for your intrepid investigations is limited. Does this discourage you? Does the fact that election theft appears to be getting more brazen instead of more transparent cause you to be cynical?
Greg Palast: Yes, it does. I have a Pulitzer Prize in Despair. But with the love of a wonderful woman, my children and Felipe II in liter size, I can make it. And as long as I have Truthout, I know I can lob my investigations for the Guardian and BBC over the electronic Berlin Wall to be read in my home country.
Get "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits" and the Greg Palast DVD with a minimum contribution to Truthout.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

THE GOP IS NOW THE PARTY OF LIARS, CHEATERS, AND THEIVES! Is it no wonder they are running a hedge fund guy for President?

[guido911]

No matter how bad the repubs are in this country, at the end of the day, the left has this ^^^^^^ turd floating in its bowl.

[Townsend]

CBS news tweet:  Pennsylvania state supreme court vacates voter photo ID case. Sends it back to lower court for review

[Hoss]

CBS news tweet:  Pennsylvania state supreme court vacates voter photo ID case. Sends it back to lower court for review

Here's some more detail...

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20120918_Pa_Supreme_Court_orders_more_hearings_on_Voter_ID_law.html

The PA court essentially has said to send it back to the lower courts.  To determine whether or not it's feasible to issue State IDs to those who currently don't have them in time for the November election.  If it is deemed that PennDOT can't do this (estimates are wide, from 100,000 to 1.6 million who could be disenfranchised), then the law will be blocked.

If the indication from PennDOT is the same as when I had to deal with them in my previous job....the law will be blocked.

[Teatownclown]

[erfalf]

Ok, while I think there are some reasonable things that can be done in regards to voter ID. Let's just put that to the side for a moment. I just listened to an interview with John Fund (former WSJ, now with American Spectator) who wrote a book called stealing elections. He was just discussing what the real threats to our votiong system were and how just the slightest cases of fraud could have huge impacts on our political system. In particular, the example he used was the most recent Minnesota Senate race where Frankin was finally seated just in time to vote for the Affordable Care Act. And how there were many "irregularities" found that literally could have changed the face of the health care reform discussion in Washington.

I also recall nathan (I think) saying things about how ID wasn't the problem, it was the counting of the votes and such that was a bigger problem. Fund would agree with you. So here is my "common sense" (to me) solution. Please correct me if any of my assumptions are wrong.

Currently the actual vote counting and polling stations are operated by the county. I think the stations are manned with volunteers as well. It is supposed to be non-partisan or whatever. Well, I say let's make it partisan. Instead of volunteers from the county, let's have volunteers selected by each political party. So it would be more like keeping score in golf. You keep your score and the score of your opponent and then when it's all said and done, you attest for each other's scores.

Is this a good start, or complete rubbish?

[Red Arrow]

Currently the actual vote counting and polling stations are operated by the county. I think the stations are manned with volunteers as well. It is supposed to be non-partisan or whatever.

My parents used to work at the elections.  There was a requirement that at least one of the three workers was of the opposite party of the other two.

[nathanm]

Currently the actual vote counting and polling stations are operated by the county. I think the stations are manned with volunteers as well. It is supposed to be non-partisan or whatever. Well, I say let's make it partisan. Instead of volunteers from the county, let's have volunteers selected by each political party. So it would be more like keeping score in golf. You keep your score and the score of your opponent and then when it's all said and done, you attest for each other's scores.

a) We already have that. Almost every state allows each political party (or candidate in the case of non-party-affiliated candidates) to post at least one observer in each precinct.
b) That further entrenches the two party system, which is a bigger problem, IMO.

On voter ID, I find it just as problematic when eligible voters are not allowed to vote as when ineligible people vote illegally.

[Red Arrow]

On voter ID, I find it just as problematic when eligible voters are not allowed to vote as when ineligible people vote illegally.

I find the Oklahoma voter ID acceptable and that it does not stop or even inhibit eligible voters from voting.  I can see that PA, for example, needs some better options.

[Townsend]

Republicans look for voter fraud, find little

http://news.yahoo.com/republicans-look-voter-fraud-little-172327169--election.html

DENVER (AP) — Republican election officials who promised to root out voter fraud so far are finding little evidence of a widespread problem.

State officials in key presidential battleground states have found only a tiny fraction of the illegal voters they initially suspected existed. Searches in Colorado and Florida have yielded numbers that amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all registered voters in either state.

Democrats say the searches waste time and, worse, could disenfranchise eligible voters who are swept up in the checks.

"I find it offensive that I'm being required to do more than any other citizen to prove that I can vote," said Samantha Meiring, 37, a Colorado voter and South African immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 2010. Meiring was among 3,903 registered voters who received letters last month from the Colorado Secretary of State's office questioning their right to vote.

Especially telling, critics of the searches say, is that the efforts are focused on crucial swing states from Colorado to Florida, where both political parties and the presidential campaigns are watching every vote. And in Colorado, most of those who received letters are either Democrats or unaffiliated with a party. It's a similar story in Florida, too.

Republicans argue that voting fraud is no small affair, even if the cases are few, when some elections are decided by hundreds of votes.

"We have real vulnerabilities in the system," said Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican elected in 2010 who is making a name for himself at home by pursuing the issue. "I don't think one should be saying the sky is falling, but at the same time, we have to recognize we have a serious vulnerability."

The different viewpoints underscore a divide between the parties: Are the small numbers of voting fraud evidence that a problem exists? Or do they show that the voter registration system works?

COLORADO

Last year, Gessler estimated that 11,805 noncitizens were on the rolls.

But the number kept getting smaller.

After his office sent letters to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status, the number of noncitizens now stands at 141, based on checks using a federal immigration database. Of those 141, Gessler said 35 have voted in the past. The 141 are .004 percent of the state's nearly 3.5 million voters.

Even those numbers could be fewer.

The Denver clerk and recorder's office, which had records on eight of the 35 voters who cast ballots in the past, did its own verification and found that those eight people appear to be citizens.

Kevin Biln, an Adams County resident on the list, said he didn't know he was registered and maintains that he's never voted. Another voter on the list, Erica Zelfand, a Canadian immigrant, said she's a U.S. citizen no longer living in Colorado. Robert Giron said he was furious that the 20-year-old daughter he adopted from Mexico was listed as having illegally voted. He said she went to the Denver clerk's office with her U.S. passport and other documents to prove her eligibility to vote.

To Pam Anderson, the clerk and recorder in Jefferson County in suburban Denver, the investigation proves what's already been her experience: Cases of noncitizens on the rolls are extremely rare.

Anderson said the fighting between the political parties over the perception of voter fraud also has less tangible consequences.

"It impacts people's confidence in elections, which is extraordinarily important," she said.

FLORIDA

Florida's search began after the state's Division of Elections said that as many as 180,000 registered voters weren't citizens. Like Colorado and other states, Florida relied on driver's license data showing that people on the rolls at one point showed proof of non-citizenship, such as a green card.

Florida eventually narrowed its list of suspected noncitizens to 2,600 and found that 207 of them weren't citizens, based on its use of the federal database called SAVE, or the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. The system tracks who is a legal resident eligible to receive government benefits.

Of the 2,600 initially marked as possible noncitizens, about 38 percent were unaffiliated voters and 40 percent were Democrats, according to an analysis by The Miami Herald.

The state has more than 11.4 million registered voters, so the 207 amounts to .001 percent of the voter roll.

Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, a Republican, said in a statement that the initiative "is already proving to be a successful process to identify illegally registered voters," which he noted is crucial in a state where the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes.

NORTH CAROLINA

In North Carolina, the nonpartisan state elections board last year sent letters to 637 suspected noncitizens after checking driver's license data. Of those, 223 responded showing proof they were citizens, and 79 acknowledged they weren't citizens and were removed from the rolls along with another 331 who didn't respond to repeated letters, said Veronica Degraffenreid, an elections liaison for the board.

She said the board did not find evidence of widespread fraud, noting there were only 12 instances in which a noncitizen had voted. North Carolina has 6.4 million voters.

"What we're finding is there is strong indication that the voter rolls in North Carolina are sound," Degraffenreid said.

MICHIGAN

Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, a Republican, last week estimated that as many as 4,000 noncitizens are on the state's voter roll.

The department said it verified 1,000 registered voters who are noncitizens, based on an analysis of about 20 percent of complete citizenship data. She extrapolated the 4,000 number from the most recent U.S. Census' five-year American Community Survey, which showed Michigan has a noncitizen population of about 304,000.

That's as far as the investigation has gone. The figures have not been verified.

OTHER STATES

Ohio and Iowa, both with recently elected Republican secretaries of state, also are negotiating with the federal government to also use the SAVE database to verify citizenship, although it's unlikely they'll have enough time to do anything before the Nov. 6 election. While Ohio doesn't have a list of names it wants to check, Iowa is looking at verifying the status of 3,500 registered voters.

Last week, Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation filed election misconduct charges against three noncitizens who voted in gubernatorial and city elections in 2010 and 2011. Among the three are Canadians who told investigators they thought they were only barred from voting in presidential elections.

The three were on a list of about 1,000 names of potential noncitizens who had voted since 2010, which Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz forwarded to the Division of Criminal Investigation.

Early voting in Iowa begins Thursday and Schultz recently told legislators that his office wants to use the information from the federal database "in a responsible manner."

"When somebody casts a ballot you can't un-ring that bell," he said. "If somebody is ineligible to vote and they cast a ballot that's been counted we can't take that back. This is an important election coming up."

[nathanm]

From what I've read, the false positive rate is so ridiculously high because the databases don't get updated when an immigrant applies for and receives citizenship. I guess that's why there are more false positives than there are instances of illegally registered voters, much less illegally registered voters who have actually voted.

What really makes me mad is that rather than doing this earlier in the year or even last year, they're rushing to get it done right before the election, leaving people little time to correct any errors.

[Townsend]

What really makes me mad is that rather than doing this earlier in the year or even last year, they're rushing to get it done right before the election, leaving people little time to correct any errors.

Seems to be the plan.

[Gaspar]

New booths to streamline the process.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/florida-to-experiment-with-new-600lever-voting-mac,29699/

[Teatownclown]