🚀 go-pugleaf

On Oct 15, 10:44�am, John Black <jbl...@texas.net> wrote:
> In article <dfmanno-A5EDB6.20372414102...@reader.motzarella.org>,
> dfma...@mail.com says...
>
> > There's really little risk that fraudulent registrations will lead to
> > voter fraud. I doubt the officials at the polling place are going to let
> > someone signing in as "Mickey Mouse" vote.
>
> Mickey Mouse is probably the one example that would not be allowed. �Now
> that democrats have successfully gotten rid of the picture id requirements
> in most states, they have enabled the kind of voter fraud that they wanted
> all along (with ACORN providing the setup). �If they register Terrell Owens
> in one precinct, and a guy shows up and says he's Owens, he votes without
> needing to show an id. �Then if he goes to the next precinct and votes as
> Dion Saunders, he's Dion Saunders. �They register fake people after removing
> the one check that could prevent from actually voting. �If anyone wondered
> why democrats were against picture ids for voting, they can't be wondering
> anymore...
>
> John Black

"The Truth About Voter Fraud

As the 2008 election process draws near -- and with early voting in
many states having already begun -- conservatives are raising a great
hue and cry about the threat of voter fraud. Attacks have centered on
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the
"nation's largest grassroots community organization of low- and
moderate-income people," whose workers have registered 1.3 million new
voters this year. Conservatives like Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) and former
Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell have seized on reports of
improperly filled-out forms as evidence of "lawlessness" and "voting
fraud," which will lead to "the kind of chaos you expect from a
category-five hurricane." But mass voter fraud is just a conservative
myth used to justify increasing the difficulty of the voting process.
In an interview with Salon, Lori Minnite, a professor of political
science at Barnard College who investigated allegations of widespread
voter fraud, explained, "From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found
guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of
voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting
more than once. That's 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice,
impersonate other people, vote without being a resident ... Meanwhile
thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls."

COMPLEX AND ONEROUS RULES: Although the United States has a long and
dark history of voter disenfranchisement and voter suppression, recent
laws passed at the state and federal level have focused instead on the
vaporous threat of voter fraud. These laws particularly discourage the
poor and the young. Because voting, even for federal elections, is
regulated by state law and administered at the local level, there is
no consistent standard for voting machines, ballot design, the
counting of provisional ballots, or voter identification. The 2002
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that "any voter who has not
previously voted in a federal election" must provide a form of ID.
But "twenty-four states have broader voter identification requirements
than what HAVA mandates" -- seven require photo ID for all voters, and
17 more require some form of ID. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld Indiana's draconian photo ID law that could disenfranchise as
many as 400,000 voters, although Indiana Secretary of State Todd
Rokita "conceded the state has never presented a case of 'voter
impersonation.'" In his dissent, Justice David Souter compared
Indiana's unjustified regulations to a poll tax, "because it
correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object
of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise."

MASS DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND INTIMIDATION: Last week, the New York
Times reported that "[t]ens of thousands of eligible voters in at
least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been
blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law."
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing
order Wednesday "lambasting the Montana Republican Party for
challenging the registrations of thousands of Montana voters,"
writing, "The timing of these challenges is so transparent that it
defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political
chicanery." On Sunday, the Ohio Republican Party "requested
information on voters who registered to vote and cast an early ballot
on the same day," not long after Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer
requested registration information -- including driver's license and
Social Security numbers -- "for the 302 voters who took advantage of
the window in that county, which has five colleges and universities,
including two historically black colleges." In Indiana, state NAACP
president Barbara Bolling said voters in three northern cities "are
being disenfranchised each day they can't cast ballots at their local
clerk's offices," after "two Republicans on the Lake County Election
Board voted against the sites last month, contending in-person
absentee voting makes vote fraud easier." In Colorado, the El Paso
county clerk Bob Balink has engaged in an "emerging and consistent
pattern" of purging voter rolls and challenging inaccurate
registration information as "election fraud."

ROVE'S FINGERPRINTS: The Department of Justice, whose responsibilities
include ensuring the right to fair elections, was subverted by the
Bush administration to pursue the false threat of voter fraud. In
2002, former attorney general John Ashcroft announced an initiative
that required "all components of the Department" to "place a high
priority on the investigation and prosecution of election fraud." The
2006 purge of eight U.S. attorneys -- all lifelong Republicans -- at
the behest of the Bush White House exposed the depths of this
politicization. The White House justified the dismissals by telling
reporters, "President Bush mentioned to Attorney General Alberto R.
Gonzales in October that he had heard complaints from Congress that
some federal prosecutors were lax in pursuing voter fraud." As the
Washington Post reported last year, "Nearly half the U.S. attorneys
slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of
Republican complaints that they were lax on voter fraud, including
efforts by presidential adviser Karl Rove to encourage more
prosecutions of election-law violations," Rove has made it his
specialty to raise the specter of vote fraud throughout his political
career, from his days working on state races in Alabama."