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Election Theft Round-Up

AlterNet. Posted November 7, 2006.


The Latest: Robo-calls in Nebraska ... Colorado Latino voters threatened with arrest ... Maryland GOP hands out false ballots ... MoveOn offers $250,000 for voter fraud evidence ... Did FoxNews canvass for Lieberman?
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Election Theft Round-Up
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The Raw Story reports widespread problems with the vote, "especially in states where close or 'bellwether' elections are taking place." In Colorado, "Latino voters report receiving racially charged, intimidating phone calls warning them that, based on ethnicity, they are inelligible to vote." In Pennsylvania, more complaints were phoned into a voter hotline than in any other state. And in Virginia, calls from a fictitious "Virginia Elections Commision" threatened voters with arrest if they appear at polling places to vote. Raw Story adds: "Voters are advised that, because of their out of state registrations, voting in Virginia is illegal. However, many of the voters who've been harassed have been registered instate for years."

****

More violence, this time in Idaho. According to the Associated Press (via TPMmuckraker), an Idaho man was charged with aggravated assault after he pulled a knife and threatened to stab a co-worker while the two were arguing over politics. The assailant, a Republican, pulled the knife after telling his colleague that "Democrats cheat and lie." Apparently he wasn't pleased with the response: "All politicians lie and cheat."

****

More robo-calls, this time in Nebraska: TPMmuckraker reports voters in Nebraska's 3rd District are getting robo-calls that purport to be from Democratic candidate Scott Kleeb. Kleeb's campaign manager told the local paper that the recordings are of extremely low quality, leading them to believe that they're recordings of earlier, legitimate Kleeb campaign calls. Who's behind the robo-calling? Writes Paul Kiel, "Last week, the NRCC paid GOP political firm Direct Strategies for approximately $3,500 for phone banking in Kleeb's district, according to FEC filings."

****

Latino voters in Colorado threatened with arrest: Colorado Latinos are receiving both automated and live calls warning them that they are ineligble to vote and will be arrested if they try to do so. Voters who receive the calls were first asked to identify their party affiliation, and those who said they were Democrats or independents were told they risked arrest if they tried to vote. One of the callers told 24-year-old Oralia Ramirez, "'You're Hispanic, so you can't vote. You aren’t even registered to vote, so don't waste your time. Just by looking in my records you can't vote.'"

****

GOP distributes false ballots in Maryland: The Washington Post reports Maryland Republicans are bussing in homeless people, recruited at shelters in nearby states, to hand out inaccurate sample ballots in Prince Georges County. Handed out at four polling sites, the fake ballots identified the Republican candidates as Democrats.

****

MoveOn offers reward for voter fraud whistleblowers: The progresive group is offering $250,000 for material evidence leading to a felony conviction of an "organized effort of partisan voter suppression or electronic voting fraud." Send evidence to votingfraud@moveon.org.

****

Ohio voting sites will stay open later: A Cuyahoga County judge has ruled that 16 voting sites will remain open until 10 p.m. because of long lines that have prevented people from casting ballots. A judge in Denver, however, denied a similar request there.

****

Conservative radio host asks listeners to jam voter protection hotline: ThinkProgress and Firedoglake report that right-wing talk radio host Laura Ingraham is enouraging her listeners to dial into a voter protection hotline en masse in an attempt to jam the line. She reportedly said on the air, "Tell me if you think I’m crazy. This is what I’m thinking. I think we all need to call 1 888 DEM VOTE all at the same time."


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Amazing
Posted by: YogiBear on Nov 7, 2006 12:51 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Dont people realize that tampering with a federal election is a federal offense?

I remember these kinds of things happened in 2000 and 2004 as well (registration fraud, voter intimidation, etc.). Virtually none or actually none of the offenses were committed by Dems or the left.

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» RE: Amazing Posted by: aonghus36
» Agreed! Posted by: grumble-bum
» Hey, speaking of Bolton! Posted by: WhuThe?!?
All things "hi-tech"
Posted by: MAD on Nov 7, 2006 1:28 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Welcome to the information age everybody! Aint technology just swell?! A Colorado judge stated that he had reservations regarding the efficacy and accuracy of the electronic voting machines but ultimately determined that it was too late to go with an alternative!! Too fucking late to print ballots and buy some pens? Are you kidding? Must have been a paper shortage in America the last two years . . .

This is just another example of politicians dictating the terms to the people instead of the other way around. Had the people vigorously insisted on low-tech rather than cowing to the demands of some corrupt old men and their corporate pals then none of this would be happening. We the people . . . remember?

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Greg Palast:
Posted by: rwa on Nov 7, 2006 1:39 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While we panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections.Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind.

On January 1, 2006 a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act -- strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. Under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

It's not the number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example, California's Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every single one back on the rolls.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game

A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic(i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration data.

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

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Greg Palast #2
Posted by: rwa on Nov 7, 2006 1:42 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let's Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you … steal back your vote.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can't get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win back America.

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» If you know this... Posted by: jakrabit
AP posts first corporate exit poll data:
Posted by: thoughtcriminal on Nov 7, 2006 4:03 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Democrats Look to End GOP Rule of House

Keep in mind these polls are somewhat suspect; they are the coordinated product of the "National Election Pool", a consortium of ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CNN and AP.

Election tampering should be as serious a crime as counterfeiting money is - who produced those fliers in California, for example? Chevron, Occidental, and the tobacco companies.

They seem to use the same public relations firms, don't they? They've also hired the old tobacco company scientists to work for their "global warming is good for you" campaign.

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Roveian
Posted by: rsaxto on Nov 8, 2006 1:28 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The Roveian nightmare tried its best to steal the election but when push came to shove they failed to stop the people's steamroller from achieving our most important victory: the House of Representatives. Bushies had better quiver in fright because decent people will track you down and rat on you even if you flee to your South American hidey properties. Shake in fear you criminal mass murderers!

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» RE: oveian Posted by: rwa
A New Direction
Posted by: thinkverybig on Nov 8, 2006 1:39 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The American people have spoken loudly, very loud for change in the direction of this country. I hope our congressional leaders and especially the President heard the public’s cry for a change of course. No more corruption, no more misleading the public with lies, no more policies of arrogance, no more tax cuts for the rich, no more divisive politics, no more outsourcing of American jobs, no more illegal immigration, no more NAFTA, no more private campaign financing and the list goes on. We need leaders in place who represent all citizens and no just a selected few. We need leaders who seek to unify and not divide, leaders who understand the present systems in place need repairing or simply replacing. This election was more than about the economy, Iraq or corruption. President Bush has failed not only the Republicans but all Americans in guiding this country down a road of debt and destruction that will take many years to get back on course.

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It May Not be Illegal, but it Ought to Be
Posted by: KeepsonTickn on Nov 8, 2006 6:30 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I was listening to St. Louis' Fox Radio station 97.1 morning show "Almann and Smash in the Morning" on election day when one of the DJs repeatedly advised listeners, "If an exit poll taker asks you who you voted for, lie to them."

Why should Fox be trying to defeat exit polling, which can only be used to verify or question the validity of election results?

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Time to get busy, brothers and sisters
Posted by: LeftWright on Nov 8, 2006 8:58 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Some non-violent things we can do, starting today:

VIGILS

Start vigils tonight outside politician’s offices, especially key House and Senate leaders. Demand that your state return to a paper verifiable election process. Optical scan has worked great in my precinct for years.

PROTESTS

Combine larger scale protests with the vigils. We should start with large monthly protests on the 11th of each month (and/or the second Sunday of each month). These protests can graduate to a continuous state by creating a pool of protesters who protest in shifts with a support system bringing food, etc. The eastern Europeans have shown the way here.

Use postcards to flood your elected officials with clear, concise statements of your dissatisfaction with their performance on the critical issues.

BOYCOTTS

Start with targeted boycotts of key institutions/industries, beginning with the MSM who ignore the key issues facing us. Demand that they cover these issues, give them two weeks to show that they are covering the stories we need to have covered, then if they don't cancel your subscriptions. Flood them with postcards, too. Then just shut them down by not buying what they're selling.

STRIKES

The last phase is to begin with targeted strikes, beginning with "Stay Home Sundays" in support of the Sunday protests. Then add rolling strikes in specific regions and against specific industries. Increase the frequency, size and duration of these strikes until we peacefully force the changes we have to have. Once again, flood the strike targets with postcards.

It's especially important that progressives reach out to all segments of our society, especially recent immigrants (particularly native Spanish speakers) and disaffected conservatives who are horrified by the neocons.

Let's keep it non-violent, brothers and sisters. Let others be violent and show their true colors and desperation.

Stay in the light and fight for what's right.

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

Be well.

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1st Post Card Snow Storm: Ban Depleted Uranium Weapons NOW
Posted by: LeftWright on Nov 8, 2006 9:00 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Call on the Senate and House to ban depleted Uranium weapons immediately

Coalition forces have used more than 120,000 kg of dU weapons in Iraq since 2003.

This is in addition to the 2700 tonnes of dU used in the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

Depleted Uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

U.S. forces continue to use these WMD's in Iraq.

We must end this insanity ASAP.

Please contact your local House and Senate members, Speaker Pelosi and Rep. Murtha today and once a week on this issue until they ban dU weapons.

Speaker Pelosi
2371 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515

Rep. Murtha
2423 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515

Only mail POST CARDS, as letters get screened for bio-weapons.

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

Be well.

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Change In Congress? Only In Your Dreams!
Posted by: mite on Nov 8, 2006 10:33 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Your Press is controlled by CFR, Tri-Lateral Commissions, Bank Cartels, and International Intellegence Agency's. So is the Congress. Is the House membership suppose to vote on the leadership? Who says that woman from San Fransico is leader of the house- it is not January 2007 yet.
You citizens of the U.S. are fooling your self, you have no control of the Congress.

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Beneath contempt
Posted by: bettyn on Nov 10, 2006 5:24 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What I want to know NOW is:

WHEN DOES THE IMPEACHMENT OF BUSH AND CHENEY START?

These rats belong in PRISON for LIFE!

BRING IT ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Let's "do" Scalia and ThOMas, too!)

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