STEALING THE VOTES!

[FOTD]

The devil wants you to know your democracy got bushwhacked and your capitalist free enterprise ideals have been ransacked.
Just an FYI....

           

RFK Jr: Votes Are Being Stolen, Now, By Hundred Thousands - And Dems Aren't Doing Anything About It

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=4071366

"There are about 30 scams the Republicans are deliberately using, particularly in the swing states to get Democratic voters off the rolls.

Let me tell you about one of other scams people should know about. If you're a newly registered voter--and of course the Democrats have done these gigantic registration drives--12 million people on registration--if you're a new voter, you MUST include your license or some other state I.D. when you come to vote. What that means is that if you're a college kid--and college kids now, they're sending in absentee ballots, they're not going to the voting place, they do everything online or they do everything remotely. They don't dream of going to the precinct house voting on election day and waiting in a long line. So if they send in the absentee ballot, and they don't include a color copy of their license, their vote is going to be thrown into a trash can. And none of these people know this, because you had to have to read the law in order to know it. There is no notification when you fill out your registration form, so all of those 12 million people that the Democrats have registered--those ballots are going to be just thrown out."

The repiglican shenanigans got us here. This is the season of "what now?"

[Conan71]

Kennedy should know, his family mastered voter fraud and intimidation.

"Hello Mr. Giancanna?"

[FOTD]

After 2000 and 2004, we still don't hear any calls to secure the election and voting system.

More Republican Attempts to Suppress Youth Vote in Colorado and New Mexico ...

http://futuremajority.com/node/2964

Word is leaking out about more attempts to suppress the student vote, this time in Colorado and New Mexico, two battleground states that went for Bush in 2004 and look to be swinging blue this year:

Washington - Colorado Democrats accused a Republican county clerk Wednesday of falsely informing Colorado College that students from outside the state could not register to vote if their parents claimed them as a dependent on their tax returns.

At a news conference in Colorado Springs, Democrats also criticized Robert Balink, the El Paso County clerk and recorder, who was a delegate to the Republican National Convention, for taking other steps they said would dampen voting by college students, who are expected to heavily favor Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"When election officials spread false information about who is eligible to vote and remove, not add, polling places, we need to be concerned that eligible voters will be denied their right to vote," said Pat Waak, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party.

Sujatha from the Student PIRGs did a little ninja work on this. Check out what she found:

Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group's New Voters Project in Washington, said she encountered similar problems when she posed as a college freshman last week and called registrar's offices in Greenville County, S.C., home to Furman University, and York County, S.C., where Winthrop University is located.

Jahagirdar said a Greenville official asked if her parents listed her as a dependent, and when she replied in the affirmative, told her: "You should vote where your parents live." She said a York County representative asked if she was in town for school, and when she said yes, stated flatly: "You can't vote here."

This election is going to be won on the ground, and it's really a matter of whether or not the voter registration advantage Obama is building - particularly among young and first time voters - can hold up attempts to suppress the vote by Republicans, either through outright disenfranchisement, or by subtle discouragements such as long lines caused by a lack of polling places. If you encounter this in your neighborhood, remember to get in touch with the people at Student Voting Rights."

[FOTD]

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/306692

Joel McNally: Don't give in to GOP vote shenanigansJoel McNally  —  9/27/2008 6:48 am
From the history of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, we know vote fraud has been a very successful issue for the Republican Party. The more vote fraud they commit, the more successful they are.

That's why it was no surprise when Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, co-chairman of the John McCain campaign in Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit to try to prevent thousands of state voters from casting their ballots.

Republicans used similar tactics in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004 to remove thousands of voters from the rolls based on confusion over names, addresses and clerical records.
The cover story this time is that Van Hollen claims to be concerned because the names or addresses of many new voters who have registered since 2006 don't match state driver license records or other bureaucratic sources.

There are many innocent explanations for such discrepancies. Sometimes numbers are transposed by clerical error or names are recorded differently because of nicknames or middle initials.

Differences in addresses are particularly common among low-income voters who move frequently.

Republicans have made exaggerated claims in recent years about vote fraud to try to justify requiring photo IDs for voting, a roadblock that disproportionately affects low-income, minority and elderly voters, who are less likely to have a driver's license and more likely to vote Democratic.

The good news for anyone truly concerned about vote fraud as a result of the Republicans' repeated claims is that every time legitimate law enforcement investigates, it finds almost no vote fraud.

In Milwaukee, that was confirmed by a joint investigation by the Milwaukee County district attorney, a Democrat, and the U.S. attorney, a Republican.

Common sense tells you why. Anyone convicted of vote fraud goes to federal prison. Risking incarceration to cast an illegal vote that would make an infinitesimal difference in the outcome of an election is senseless.

In the 2004 election, I waited in line for more than three hours in Milwaukee to cast my vote. Fiendish illegal voters would have to be out of their minds to get back in line to wait three more hours to vote again.

Republican claims of vote fraud were recently revived after reports that employees hired to register voters for community groups in Milwaukee had submitted fraudulent registrations.

The community groups themselves discovered the fraudulent registrations and reported them to the Milwaukee Election Commission. The commission referred them to the district attorney for possible prosecution.

The results of the district attorney's investigation should be very interesting. To prevent the submission of fraudulent registrations, vote drives no longer pay employees by the number of registrations they turn in. Employees are paid an hourly rate, regardless of how many voters they register. There is absolutely no incentive for employees to turn in fraudulent registrations.

In fact, one of the few groups with any incentive to put phony voters on the rolls is the Republican Party. That could then be used to justify all of the obstacles they are eager to put in the way of likely Democratic voters.

Investigate away, Mr. District Attorney. It would be wrong to prejudge the investigation, but if the Republican Party turns out to be involved in any way, hang 'em high.

One of the false claims Van Hollen makes is that his lawsuit is not intended to prevent anyone from voting. Anyone with a clerical discrepancy on voter registration records would be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, he said.

Casting a provisional ballot is not the same as being allowed to vote.

Provisional ballots are set aside. Provisional voters are required to return the same day or the next day with additional paperwork. Then, if the ballots are necessary to determine who wins an election, someone might actually count them.

Those who cast provisional ballots essentially have to show up twice to have their votes counted -- maybe. Other voters only have to show up once on Election Day.

Republicans want to make voters jump through more and more hoops so many of them will become discouraged and fall away. That is especially true of low-income voters who lack transportation and have other difficulties in their lives to distract them from voting.

By attempting to remove thousands of registered voters from the voting rolls, Republicans are making Election Day more difficult for all of us, especially those of us who live in urban areas.

By forcing thousands of legitimate voters to re-register at their polling places or to go through additional paperwork to cast provisional ballots, Republicans hope to create even more delays at urban polling places.

Those of us who waited three hours to vote in 2004 may have to wait four hours or more this time. Stay mad the entire time and more determined than ever to triumph over Republican vote fraud.

Joel McNally of Milwaukee writes a regular column for The Capital Times