'The Republican War On Voting' (Brad Blog)

[babsbunny]

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5871

The American Prospect's Investigation Into The GOP 'Myth Of Voter Fraud To Purge The Rolls Of Non-Republicans'
ALSO: The DoJ's John 'Minorities Die First' Tanner Has Found a New Job...
Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Art Levine at The American Prospect has a new must read piece titled, “The Republican War on Voting: Using the Department of Justice, friendly governors, and its usual propaganda outlets, the GOP has propagated the myth of voter fraud to purge the rolls of non-Republicans”. Here's a small taste of it...

"Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics --- including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws and policies, and flimsy prosecutions --- Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as ACORN..."

"Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a more systemic threat: the Republican campaign to suppress the votes of low-income, young, and minority voters through restrictive legislation and rulings, all based on the mythic specter of voter fraud..."

[Peace Patriot]

1. Nope, I don't agree. Their suppression tactics would not be possible without

the 5% to 10% advantage they are giving themselves with "trade secret" vote counting in machines that are highly riggable--and highly insider riggable--with the code owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations.

I think it's the other way around. WITH "trade secret" vote counting, they have been able to grab the power to overturn the Voting Rights Act, to politicize the DoJ, to conduct outrageously illegal, highly VISIBLE vote suppression in Ohio, and to set up electronic systems for purging black and other minority and low-income voters from the voting rolls.

I think the suppression of black and other minority and low-income voters could almost be seen as a distraction. I was flabbergasted, for instance, to see the heavy emphasis on the Ohio crimes against black voters--which we ALREADY HAD LAWS TO PREVENT--laws that were not enforced--and the distinct, and amazing to me, de-emphasis on the biggest fraud and scam of all--electronic voting--in Barbara Boxer's speech to the Senate in January 2005, and in John Conyers' report on the 2004 election. YES, it's an important issue. Of course it is! And if Greg Palast is correct, that one million black voters were unfairly purged from the voting rolls, prior to the 2004 election, it is a major crime, and one that touches me personally, since I was a civil rights worker in 1965, in Alabama, working on MLK's voting rights campaign. The long lines in black precincts in Ohio in 2004 enraged me, and made me cry. But that is not where the election was stolen. There was a 4 million vote flip. The election was stolen all across the country. THEN Ohio happened.

"Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a more systemic threat...".

Nope, I don't agree with this either. I have seen one progressive and leftist article after another criticizing the American people for being brainwashed, uninformed, lazy, good-for-nothing, redneck, couch potato 'sheeple'--and they NEVER mention the deliberate, premeditated destruction of our vote counting system, under the radar of the American people, during the 2002 to 2004 period, with the complicity of our Democratic Party leadership. They also fail to mention that 56% of the American opposed the Iraq War, from the beginning--Feb. '03 (NYT poll; other polls 54-55%). They WANT to believe that the American people are stupid, and they want to pontificate about it. Their analysis is based on wrong premises, and leads to wrong or distracting solutions.

How do you REMEDY the persecution of poor peoples' voter registration groups, and the purges of black voters, and the lies and bullshit about "voter fraud," when Bushites and Bushite protectors (Vichy Democrats) keep stealing elections, with the system that they created for that purpose--egregiously undemocratic, egregiously non-transparent, egregiously wrong, egregiously upside down and backwards vote counting with 'TRADE SECRET CODE?

The remedy for suppression of black and other minority and low income votes is enforcement of the VOTING RIGHTS ACT of 1965. To get there--to get that law enforced--we have to get rid of the rigged voting machines, and remove these fascists and war criminals from power. No amount of lobbying and letter writing and pleading with our hapless and collusive Democratic leaders* is going to do it. It is an issue of POWER. We don't have the POWER to stop it, because they are 'counting' all our votes with secret code and deleting 5% to 10% of them!

It's not the only thing wrong with our election system, by any means--but it is the democracy-killer. It is the 'coup de grace'--the final blow--that utterly frustrates efforts of reform. The wrong people keep being put into power. Now we have an epochal anti-war majority of 70%, and STILL we can't stop the war. We vote, and we produce a Congress that is the OPPOSITE of the American people--60% to 70% FOR the war--and that funds it with more billions of our tax dollars and ESCALATES it.

This is NOT because black voters are being suppressed, purged and persecuted. It's because we are ALL being suppressed, purged and persecuted. And they are accomplishing that through rigged voting machines.

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*(In case anybody misconstrues me, I'm not saying that Conyers and Boxer are collusive with the Bushites or with electronic election fraud. But I think their de-emphasis on this outrageously non-transparent and NEW vote counting system, fast-tracked all over the country, from 2002 to 2004--FOR the 2004 election--is peculiar. I think it has to do with real fear of these corporations and the rightwing Bushite whackos behind them, and also perhaps to intense pressure from the Bushite wing of the Democratic Party (the DLCers) who were the actual treasonous leaders on e-voting.)

[lonestarnot]

2. rigged voting machines and rigged counting machines.

[L. Coyote]

3. COMPILATION: Ohio, the DOJ scandal and "Thor" - the god of voter suppression

FROM: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1159656

While I certainly do not ascribe to the notion that voting-related issues are the sole reason for the USA firings, they are important and have become a central fcus of the investigations because the evidence of this particular reason has come to light. Bob Fitrakis has assembled considerable information about a central player in the Republican election irregularities pantheon.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Ohio, the DOJ scandal and "Thor" - the god of voter suppression
Bob Fitrakis - June 18, 2007 - http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2007/1555

The current scandal involving the firing of U.S. attorneys cannot be separated from the Bush administration's scheme to suppress black, poor and working class voters. In order to divert attention from its voter suppression tactics that won Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004, the Bush administration created the myth of "voter fraud." Using fake "voting rights" organizations, obscure groups to finance civil suits and pressure on the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against voter registration organizations, Karl Rove and his political operatives like Mark F. "Thor" Hearne have succeeded in undermining the United States' democracy.

"Hearne was one of the most important Bush operatives that almost nobody in America has ever heard of. ....." Brad Friedman, Editor of Bradblog, told the Free Press. Bradblog was the first to reveal Hearne's masquerade as a voting rights advocate.

-----------------------------------------------
Mark F. "Thor" Hearne & election fraud timeline

1976 - Hearne ... a page at both the national and Missouri GOP convention
1980 and 1984 - Hearne was an alternate at the Missouri GOP Party convention
1986 and 1987 - Hearne worked for the Reagan administration... a law clerk and attorney
2000 - Counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign ... an operative in the so-called "Brooks Brothers" riot that stopped the Florida recount ... a Republican election observer in Broward County
2002 - ... Republican lawyer who led the Missouri legislative redistricting fight
2004 – Counsel to Bush-Cheney re-election campaign
3/21/05 – Hearne shows up masquerading as a "non-partisan voting rights activist" ...newly created American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR)
...
5/2/07 – Hearne admits that he hired powerful GOP connected attorney William Mateja to intervene in the DOJ investigation of Missouri Governor Matt Blunt
2007 – All traces of Hearne's connection to the ACVR and Free Enterprise Coalition vanish from the internet ....

...............

[Kip Humphrey]

4. WRONG! Its the tabulators, stupid! And here's why...

Rove planned to flip the vote by 4% in 2004. He needed two diversions to affect success and ensure deflection of any revelations of what actually would happen:
1. A massive country-wide Republican effort to disenfranchise 1 million likely Democratic voters to generate an excuse why the polls were so wrong
2. A campaign to conflate and confuse the language and the issue: for every statement of "election fraud", counter with "voter fraud"

Meanwhile...
On election night, Rove arrived at the White House at 9:38PM. The White House had been transformed into a self-described "Election War Room". In the Executive Dining Room, RNC staffers sat at folding conference tables, their faces buried in computer screens filled with voting results pouring in from key counties in the so-called battleground states. In the privacy of the Oval office, similar tables were arranged: 6 in all with 2 PCs on each, arranged in rows with a center aisle dividing them into 2 groups of 3 tables. At the head of that center aisle an oak podium set facing the group of tables. Behind and to the right of the podium the president's desk had been relocated off center to its usual location. In this setting, Rove and Bush oversaw a small cadre of highly loyal RNC employees as they accessed key vote tabulators via modem and Internet to execute algorithms that flipped the vote from Kerry to Bush. In the White House dining room, a RNC regulars sat monitoring vote totals, unknowingly providing the Oval Office Loyals with lists of locations used to target tabulator vote flipping. (to find videos of the above scenario, they reside in the bowels of the MSNBC and CNN archives, November 3rd, 2004)

That's how it was done. It didn't matter that 1 million voters were disenfranchised when 3.8 million votes were flipped electronically from that oval room by fewer than a dozen people. It didn't matter on which machines voters voted: touchscreen, optical scan, or mechanical levers. What mattered was: no one can know.

What followed was an organized campaign of misdirection and extortion engineered to ensure there would be no evidence or initiative that might uncover evidence of the greatest theft ever. Kerry was persuaded not to contest the election. He conceded the next day. But he knows. His wife knows. The election was stolen. Edwards objected to the concession but could do nothing beyond get Kerry to issue his infamous statement that "every vote would be counted". The MSM operated under a virtually total wall of silence until the inauguration on January 19th. Producers were threatened with firing should they run stories questioning the election results or should they reveal they were threatened with firing. Only Keith Obermann dared run stories questioning the result of the election in the early days after election day. But that lone voice was isolated and alone (and had a small audience too). At that time, Keith had an ironclad contract giving him full editorial control of Countdown's content so he could not be threatened.

That spring and summer, the Carter-Baker commission was made ineffectual and suffered from the same media silence surrounding election fraud. Their report was compromised by equal time given to "voter" fraud and a focus on voter ID in the name of bi-partisanship (that would be the James Baker contribution). They were infiltrated by RNC operatives consulting or testifying as election experts. We did manage to provide the commission with a little discomfort by holding the Election Assessment Hearing on the day prior to the Carter-Baker commission's second hearing in Houston Texas and did provide their staff with our testimony and findings. However, the fix was in and our evidence was effectively buried.

Our fledgling ER movement was stalked, watched, and infiltrated. My home telephone was tapped from December 13th to January 19th - Inauguration Day. My 12/12/04 Election Fraud protest effort was approached by a person operating off of a server in Atlanta named FED1 (we traced him). He started asking all sorts of personal questions when attempting to volunteer. Even here on DU, it quickly became politically incorrect to discuss "who" stole the election. The ER movement quickly fell to internal bickering (HCPB vs. fix the machines; exit poll analysis vs RBr; litigation vs. legislation, etc.). This was shades of the demise of the SDS during the Vietnam era (thanks then to the FBI and CIA) and had infiltration written all over it.

The exit polls were effectively (if arbitrarily) discredited. The fictitious RBr (Reluctant Bush responder) was invented, explaining that Bush voters refused to tell exit pollsters how they voted. The pre-election tracking polls were dismissed: After all, 1 million+ voters were disenfranchised and didn't vote; pre-election polls aren't that accurate anyway; the religious right came out to vote against gays.

This all had the mark of a Rove operation: complex, comprehensive, deceptive, and effective - Karl Rove, the "Architect" of Bush's re-election.

One final comment: If you want your country back, Hand-Counted Paper Ballots.

Kip Humphrey

[L. Coyote]

5. if minorities voted at the same rate as whites, there would be 7.5 million more voters

"if minorities voted at the same rate as whites, there would be 7.5 million more voters on Election Day"

The original article is a good read.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_republican_war_on_voting