Defrauding the voters

Thousands Face Mix-Ups In Voter Registrations

The scramble to verify voter registrations is happening as states switch from locally managed lists of voters to statewide databases, a change required by federal law and hailed by many as a more efficient and accurate way to keep lists up to date.

But in the transition, the systems are questioning the registrations of many voters when discrepancies surface between their registration information and other official records, often because of errors outside voters' control.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who co-chairs John McCain's campaign in that state, is demanding that election officials use the database to re-verify the identities of voters who registered going back to 2006.

The elections board has refused, citing the database's error rate. The issue has gone to court, and a ruling is expected next week.

Among the errors with Wisconsin's database, which has been fully in place just since August, are incorrect ages for 95,000 voters, all of whom are listed as 108 years old. If no birth date was available when names were moved into the electronic system, it automatically assigned Jan. 1, 1900.

In court filings, Van Hollen said "tens of thousands" of ineligible voters could cast ballots, noting that Wisconsin "will be a swing state" whose 10 electoral votes "may be won by a very narrow margin."

...


In Alabama, the centralized system triggered a new controversy over a constitutional ban on voting by people convicted of a felony crime of "moral turpitude." The governor's office in the past year issued a list of 480 crimes that meet the definition, including disrupting a funeral and conspiring to set an illegal brush fire.

Alabama's court administrator and attorney general issued a shorter list of 70 more violent and serious crimes. But Secretary of State Beth Chapman said the longer list was used to identify ineligible voters until three weeks ago.

Among those wrongly flagged by the database was former Republican governor Guy Hunt, who was driven out of office in 1993 after being convicted of a felony ethics violation for misusing inaugural funds. But Hunt, 75, received a pardon that declared him innocent a decade ago.


...

The former governor, who has run for office since he was pardoned, was included on a "monthly felons check" sent to a county registrar this year. The document, obtained by The Washington Post, contains 107 names of purported felons, but 41 of them committed only misdemeanors, according to the handwritten notations of a county staffer.

Media Matters points out how complicit the mainstream media is in promoting the voter fraud lies

Media Matters has extensively documented flawed reporting about voter fraud over the past week:

• Ignoring its own reporting, NY Times omitted key facts on ACORN voter registration allegations

• CNN reports leave out relevant facts on ACORN voter registration allegations

• Media revive pattern of reporting on alleged "voter fraud" concerns, despite lack of evidence

• ABC World News reported on ACORN but ignored voter suppression, including indictment of GOP official in NH case

• Dick Morris baselessly accused ACORN of "committing voter fraud"

• AP, CNN report that Obama represented ACORN, but not that DOJ was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit

• WSJ editorial leaves out relevant information in smear of ACORN

• Fox News' Kelly mocked ACORN for accurate statement about Florida registration law

So much for a press that is supposed to inform the people.

Helping the poor. How absolutely... awful.

From Little ACORNS...

Well, one of the factors is that ACORN is just the kind of group Republicans love to target. The WSJ article linked above makes that plain in its third paragraph.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform.

Obviously in league with Satanic Forces, then.

Have you noticed how the problems of poor people have been rather assiduously avoided in this campaign? Obama mentions the middle class at every opportunity but poor people? Completely off his radar. Why is that, I wonder? What, poor people don't work and try to feed their families? Poor people aren't deserving of gov't attention? Poor people aren't worth a stump speech? McCain? Well since he's now saying that the Obama's middle-class tax cuts are freaking WELFARE, for god's sake! it is rather clear that if middle class ppl are lazy welfare bums, poor people are completely undeserving of anything. And as for teh Wall Street Journal. "Tax justice". "Affordable housing". "Living Wage". Wow. How quaint. How "liberal". Obviously, these issues is just completely nonsensical. Not common sense at all, to make sure that people can have housing they can afford and a wage that ensures that enough to eat and sleep and heat their homes in the winter. One hell of a mindset, that.

Books I want

From: Pambazuka News: Books and culture

Via: delux_vivens

Black Inventors: Crafting Over 200 Years of Success

World City Syndrome

Afro-Mexicans: Discourse of race and identity in the African Diaspora

Rethinking Venezuelan politics

The wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS

Gender & Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region

Book review: Missionaries, mercenaries and misfits

Biopiracy of Biodiversity

Southern Virginia is REAL since they will vote for Mccain. Northern Democratic-leaning Virginia?

Not real

Ladies and gentlemen, you are NOT REAL, if you are a Democrat from Northern Virginia.Only Southern Republican Virginians are real. Q.E.D.

On the other hand?

the netroots ROCK. Kossacks, Thank You and Michele Bachmann, $438,346.57 raised! for her opponent!

Um. oops!

You see the theme...

McCain's Brother: VA Suburbs "Communist Country"

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidate John McCain's brother made an apparent joke at a campaign rally this weekend that might not play well in parts of newly competitive Virginia.

Joe McCain, speaking at an event in support of his brother, called two Democratic-leaning areas in Northern Virginia "communist country," according to a report on The Washington Post's Web site.

"I've lived here for at least 10 years and before that about every third duty I was in either Arlington or Alexandria, up in communist country," Joe McCain, a Navy veteran, said at an event in Loudoun County, Va.

Joe McCain then apologized, but the remark drew laughter at the event, according to the report.

100, 000 "Fake Americans" turn out in Missouri for Obama rally

Pic from daily kos

Crowd of 100,000 turns out to see Obama in Missouri; McCain in N.C., Va.

ST. LOUIS -- Democrat Barack Obama drew his largest U.S. crowd to date on Saturday - an estimated 100,000 people who came to hear him speak at the Gateway Arch - as he campaigned in battleground Missouri just 17 days ahead of the election.

Funny how the far right is beginning to sound like the Germans after their 1918 defeat in World War 1.

I've been following politics for going on 35 years now, and I don't think I've ever heard a Republican candidate publicly refer to his Democratic opponent as a "socialist" -- not even while hiding behind a cardboard cutout like "Joe the Plumber". This from a man who told the entire nation on Wednesday night that believes an obscure nonprofit group is "perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

Likewise, I don't think there's ever been an American vice presidential candidate who explicitly referred to entire regions of the United States as "pro-American" -- with the clear implication that other regions are something less than "pro-American." Not since the Civil War, anyway.

We've crossed some more lines, in other words -- in a long series of lines that have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party and an explicitly fascist political movement. And John McCain and his political handlers appear to have no moral compunctions whatsoever about whipping this movement into a frenzy and providing it with scapegoats for all that hatred, simply to try to shave a few points off Barack Obama's lead in the polls.

To call this "country first" only works if you assume your opponents (and scapegoats) are not really part of that same country. And we all know where that leads.

HELL to PAY ppl! DONATE to NO. on Prop 8!

Daily Kos is running a HUGE fundraising event called HELL TO PAY, tonight to raise money for No on Proposition 8.

DONATE TO NO. on 8

keep them out of our pants!

Funny that.

Balloon Juice

Cause:

John McCain, third debate: We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy. The same front outfit organization that your campaign gave $832,000 for “lighting and site selection.” So all of these things need to be examined, of course.

Effect:

An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group’s Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month.

John McCain is so concerned about domestic terrorism, he and his campaign are trying to create a bunch of them.

What he said.

The trouble with Touchscreens

keep a weather eye on this, folks.


Some early W.Va. voters angry over switched votes Jackson County touch-screens switched votes, 3 residents say

At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.

Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.

When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."

Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.

On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.

Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.

"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.

"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.

"Why didn't she [the polling clerk] tell me before I even used the machine that might happen? And how many people, especially my age, didn't notice that? MORE

Keep a sharp eye out, folks! From BRAD BLOG Remember this 2007 documentary: The Trouble with Touchscreens

Part 1 (30:09): Concentrates on voting machine vendor ES&S and their previously undisclosed touch-screen sweatshop factories in Manila...

( Watch more )

(no subject)

HIM feat. The Rasmus - Apocalyptica bittersweet

Apocalyptica - Enter Sand Man

(no subject)

H.I.M. - In Joy And Sorrow

H.I.M - Gone With The Sin

H.I.M. - The Funeral Of Hearts