A Voter Fraud Thread For Ruthie

[ruthie]

Hmmm..looks like there are even more problems (if possible) afoot. Check this out.

Voting Rights Machinery Doubted
GAO Says Justice Is Unprepared for a Flood of Complaints
By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A07


The Justice Department is ill prepared to handle a large influx of complaints about voting rights violations in the Nov. 2 presidential election, according to a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office.

Campaign experts predict that the department's voting rights section will be flooded with calls and complaints about poll access and other irregularities in the face of a close race between President Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry and uncertainty over the effects of changes in election law and procedures. Some fear a repeat of the 2000 deadlock over the presidential election results in Florida.

The Justice Department "lacks a clear plan" to reliably document and track allegations in a manner that could allow monitors to swiftly pick up patterns of abuse and take corrective steps, according to the GAO, Congress's nonpartisan investigative arm.

"The reason it's so important to collect this information is to look for patterns in a particular county or in a particular polling place," said William O. Jenkins Jr., who prepared the report at the request of three Democratic lawmakers. "For instance, is it only Democrats or Republicans that seem to be having this problem? Were different voters told different things?"

The Justice Department said it has put in place better reporting and tracking mechanisms since the GAO report draft was completed in August and has devoted significant resources to ensuring that election reform laws passed since 2000 are followed.

"Additionally, as the GAO report points out, the Civil Rights Division, at the direction of the Assistant Attorney General, has worked with civil rights leaders, state and local election officials, and U.S. Attorneys' Offices prior to election day to help ensure that citizens' voting rights are protected," spokesman Eric Holland said in a prepared statement.

The report comes amid criticism by Democrats that the Justice Department is too focused on pursuing allegations of voter fraud and trumpeting terrorism concerns that could scare people away from the polls, at the expense of its mission to safeguard the right to vote.

The Justice Department said it plans to deploy 1,700 civil rights monitors to key states on Election Day. But with more than 200,000 polling places nationwide, the department will be able to cover only a fraction of the facilities.

In 2000, the report found, the department relied on contractors to handle a record number of call-in complaints. The contractors' logs were imprecise, the report found, and did not track complaints at all in four states: Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and North Dakota.

Democrats who requested the report blasted the department.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said it was "inexcusable" that the "Justice Department does not have the systems in place that are necessary to respond to reports of voters being turned away from the polls on Election Day."

New voting rules cited in the report as potentially problematic vary from state to state and continue to change.

In Ohio, for instance, a federal court yesterday reversed a ruling by the secretary of state and said that "provisional ballots" must be counted regardless of whether they were cast in the correct precinct.

Provisional ballots must for the first time be given to people nationwide who show up at the polls and do not find their names on the rolls of registered voters. They will be counted if it can be determined after Election Day that the voter was in fact eligible. Other federal courts have ruled differently, and legal battles are ongoing in battleground states including Florida.

Meanwhile, new problems crop up daily. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a co-chair of Kerry's state campaign, and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a co-chair of Bush's state campaign, are wrangling over the number of ballots that election officials should make available in the city. Barrett wants more, saying the city could run out; Walker has said the request is excessive and poses potential problems of ballot security.

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.

from The Washington Post

[ruthie]

Here is another one. Gee, Hank, thanks for starting this thread. There is just so damned much to expose.

Block the Vote
By PAUL KRUGMAN

arlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.

The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.

Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.

Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.

But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.

That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.

And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.

Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form. Many counties are, sensibly, ignoring this ruling, but it's apparent that some officials have both used this rule and other technicalities to reject applications as incomplete, and delayed notifying would-be voters of problems with their applications until it was too late.

Whose applications get rejected? A Washington Post examination of rejected applications in Duval County found three times as many were from Democrats, compared with Republicans. It also found a strong tilt toward rejection of blacks' registrations.

The case of Florida's felon list - used by state officials, as in 2000, to try to wrongly disenfranchise thousands of blacks - has been widely reported. Less widely reported has been overwhelming evidence that the errors were deliberate.

In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.

And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.

Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast by blacks. And there's strong evidence that this spoilage didn't reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by defective voting machines and may also reflect deliberate vote-tampering.

The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters - whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough - hold that party accountable.

from The New York Times

[Busyman]

ruthie that's all bullshit and I point you to The Drudge Report that Hank cited below. It clearly shows that DNC is making all these stories to....uh...get more votes?

Just for you and RF

[ruthie]

Great minds think alike. ROFL

[BigBank_Hank]

Next time could you possibly post article from newspapers that are a little more liberal? And you got the never to get upset when I posted something from Drudge

This whole thing about provisional ballots and disenfranchised voters is crap. Look if you don’t know where to vote and you show up at the wrong place and your vote isn’t counted that’s your own damn fault. If you are to stupid to figure out where you have to go to cast your vote then you are to stupid to vote for the President.

[ruthie]

Hank...you are totally full of shit.

[Rat Faced]

Next time could you possibly post article from newspapers that are a little more liberal? And you got the never to get upset when I posted something from Drudge

This whole thing about provisional ballots and disenfranchised voters is crap. Look if you don’t know where to vote and you show up at the wrong place and your vote isn’t counted that’s your own damn fault. If you are to stupid to figure out where you have to go to cast your vote then you are to stupid to vote for the President.

Hey, I posted from somewhere as biased as yours Hank...dont i get any credit?

[ruthie]

You miss the point entirely, hank, or you choose to ignore the illegal activity of purposely disenfranchising voters, tearing up registration forms, refusing to have enough ballots on hand. What is it you don't get, or is the box you think in so deeply ingrained that you can't see the reality of what is going on

[BigBank_Hank]

Hey, I posted from somewhere as biased as yours Hank...dont i get any credit?

Sorry bout that RF. Credit given where credit is due.

[BigBank_Hank]

You miss the point entirely, hank, or you choose to ignore the illegal activity of purposely disenfranchising voters, tearing up registration forms, refusing to have enough ballots on hand. What is it you don't get, or is the box you think in so deeply ingrained that you can't see the reality of what is going on

And what is it with you crazy democrats who want convicted felons and the deceased to cast votes?