Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today

Don't worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

(Palast is the researcher that did much of the investigation into the Florida vote theft in 2000. An American reporter, his news stories were primarily printed in England and Europe, not in the US. He used to be a utility investigator for the NYS Assembly.)

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging" ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There's more:

- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.

The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.

"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."

The investigators level a deadly serious charge:

"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."

Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org

For updates and video reports, go to RollingStone.com, www.GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org.

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Mounting Evidence of Voter Suppression for Election Day 2008
10/28/2008 6:03:22 PM
by Bennett Gordon

As election day nears, new stories of voter suppression and improper voter purges continue to come to light. The polls that pundits tend to focus on may not mean much, as huge numbers of voters will likely be unable to vote on November 4.

States have purged some 13 million voters from the voter rolls since 2004, Joe Rothstein reports for U.S. Politics Today. According to Rothstein, 17 percent of registered voters in the vital swing state of Colorado have been dropped from the rolls, and 10 percent of voters have been dropped in Missouri. CNN reports that 50,000 people have had their voter registrations “flagged,” calling the viability of their votes into question, and “4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.”

Even if people manage to get on the voter rolls, some states may not be ready for the massive influx of voters on election day. The Virginia NAACP recently sued Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat, claiming that the state has failed to prepare for all the voters, the Associated Press reports. The complaint points out that many polling stations were overwhelmed in the February primaries, with some precincts resorting to makeshift ballots that were later thrown out. The NAACP believes November 4th could be even worse, warning that current preparation could “result in a meltdown on Election Day.”

North Carolina residents who don’t have their votes counted likely will be in good company. More than 1.6 million votes weren’t counted in 2004, according to Robert F. Kenney and Greg Palast writing for Rolling Stone, and the tactics used to suppress those votes could get worse this year. Kennedy and Palast outline six ways that people are going to try and steal votes, including obstructing of voter registration drives, illegitimate voter purges, and challenging and rejecting provisional and “spoiled” ballots.

The groundwork for this voter suppression has been laid by GOP operatives over the past few election cycles, Andrew Gumble writes for the Nation. Barack Obama’s commanding lead in the polls won’t make the illegal and undemocratic efforts to steal people’s votes go away, it just makes them more desperate.

The best way to stop the election from being stolen is to make the election into a blowout, Robert Lovato writes for New America Media. That way, manipulated and stolen votes won’t matter as much. If that doesn’t work, Lovato floats the idea of a general strike, protests, office-takeovers, and other non-violent protest demonstrations.

One of the organizations trying to make sure the vote goes as smoothly as possible is the Video the Vote project, an organization profiled by the New York Times that is supplying volunteers with video cameras to document any election misconduct. The Times also points to the Voter Suppression Wiki and the Election Protection Wiki as user-generated efforts to protect people’s votes on election day.

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After a lengthy campaign, John Kerry led “W.” in the polls, but the official results reported another “upset” election anointing America’s rogue president for an undeserved second term. Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. and other experts performed a forensic autopsy on the 2004 election and pronounced their collective diagnosis -- the American electoral process was deeply traumatized, chronically dysfunctional and susceptible to covert abuse by computerized criminals. After his tearful concession the morning after the traumatic night, John Kerry told investigators that the election had been stolen.

Last week, Amy Goodman interviewed Mark Crispin Miller who addressed the issue of the troubling vote in the state of Ohio in 2004. Miller identified an evangelical anti-abortion activist named Mike Connell as the operative who infiltrated the computerized results in Ohio and re-calibrated them in order to deliver the presidency unto George W. Bush. Miller described Connell as, “Karl Rove’s computer guru.” According to Miller, Connell had been involved in cyber-hacking more than one major US election.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, the world’s leading watchdog over global democratic procedures, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) examined the US elections. In their official report , the OSCE stated that the colloquial voting procedures in America failed to achieve the desired standard for democratic elections as defined by the 1990 Copenhagen Document. Citing recurrent problems with voter registration, partisan election officials, gerrymandering, inconsistencies with provisional ballots and the flagrant circumvention of spending limits by independent “527” organizations, the OSCE published a lacerating report on the US presidential election of 2004.

Following 2004, the USA quickly dropped to 17th on the Economist’s Democracy Index falling far behind more advanced democracies that include: Sweden, Iceland, Canada and Malta whose elections are held to higher standards. It is a sad fact that no major presidential candidate has called for meaningful voting and electoral reform.

After the troubling election of 2000, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford led a commission to reform America’s creaking electoral infrastructure. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA ) became law, but its provisions were not fully implemented by 2004, thus permitting another electoral debacle to mar the face of American history.

After the second soiled election, former president Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker led a commission to re-enforce America’s voting and electoral infrastructure. In 2006, the election results appeared to be less controversial than in 2000 and 2004, and there were hopes that this year’s presidential election would be less compromised than those of 2000 and 2004.

Today, Barack Obama is leading John McCain by a larger margin than John Kerry led George W. Bush, so it is only prudent to pose the question: “Will the vote in the 2008 American presidential election restore credibility to our status as a ‘democracy?’” However, the answer is already clear -- “No.”

Unfortunately, the initial reports for the early voting period are discouraging. Although Barack Obama and the Democrats are doing very well in the early voting, the internet is inundated with reports of serious flaws marring this year’s vote. In Colorado, election officials removed a Diebold voting machine that was flipping votes from one candidate to another in what may have been a first step in the right direction. While this development is welcome, other more serious flaws in the US electoral system are now endemic and will require new legislation.

Anticipating that the preponderant majority of America’s voters would reject their party this year, Republican officials ordered vast purges of voting rolls deleting 19% of the registered voters in battleground states. RFK, Jr. and Greg Palast have drawn attention to the troubling record of Donetta Davidson the former Colorado Secretary of State who purged 19.4% of the registered voters. After that aggressive purge of low-income and minority voters who were overwhelmingly registered as Democrats, George W. Bush elevated Donetta Davidson to head the federal agency ominously titled, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Following Donetta Davidson’s arrival at EAC, her staff noticed a partisan slant to her policies that tarnished America’s reputation as a democracy that resulted in critical international publicity on the BBC , (see below).

Realizing that their moves to truncate the bloc of eligible voters would not go un-noticed, shrewd supporters of John McCain and Sarah Palin have repeatedly called attention to the case of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN is a charity that registers America’s poorest citizens to vote that has benefited from financial contributions provided by the Obama-Biden campaign. After registering over one million new voters who are largely poor, minorities, women and young, ACORN’s officials revealed that a minute proportion of the new registration forms were deeply flawed. However, US law requires that all voter registration forms including incomplete or questionable applications must to be turned in to local officials.

This bureaucratic procedure, the verification of voter registration forms by local election officials, is now the subject of an investigation by the FBI, an agency already over-stretched by the massive number of financial cases boiling out of the meltdown on Wall Street. The background is illuminating for it has been reported that fewer than 100 instances of vote fraud are committed in any given year, but the MSM have been transfixed by the case of ACORN even though it does not represent one single solitary case of vote fraud. Why the FBI is concentrating on this case at this time remains obscure other than theories of partisan political influence.

With their audiences transfixed by the case of ACORN, Americans learned that Republican operatives supporting McCain-Palin had organized lists of foreclosures to challenge thousands of voters on Election Day as ineligible due to their lack of a current physical address on their registration forms. This dubious procedure is termed, “voter caging.” In Ohio, Republicans filed a lawsuit to require the Democratic Secretary of State to purge thousands of newly registered voters from the lists if there were slight inconsistencies in their registration documentation. Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. focused on this desperate voter-suppression operation during his recent interview with Rachel Maddow.

To counter this legal but elitist ploy, supporters of Obama-Biden filed a lawsuit that was swiftly elevated to the US Supreme Court that ruled against the caging of voters in what is deemed to be a serious setback to the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to expunge the poor from the voter rolls. While this is a positive development, an aura of suspicion is beginning to descend over the election.

Another positive development for the Obama-Biden ticket is unfolding in Florida. Due to the overwhelming success of early voting, Governor Crist and his Secretary of State have extended the polling times four hours per day in order to assure working people, the young and the poor the opportunity to vote. Governor Charles Crist had been a favorite for the Republican Vice-Presidential nomination, but John McCain passed him over in favor of the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin.

In Florida, massive teams of lawyers are assembling under the leadership of Charles Lichtman who is in command of the Democratic squad, while his old friend, Ed Pozzuoli is heading the Republican legal eagles. Both parties are braced for post-election litigation as the polls remain close and within the margin of error.

It must be observed that the MSM have refrained from providing adequate coverage of America’s crumbling reputation as a viable democracy. However, America’s declining status as a democracy is routinely reported in the international press and media. The BBC is regarded as the most authoritative news agency in the world. Earlier this month, the BBC broadcast a lengthy report on its premier program, Newsnight, analyzing the egregious flaws in America’s voting system that could have an impact on the outcome of the presidential election. The world is enthralled as Barack Obama and Joe Biden confront the two-headed dragon of John McCain and Sarah Palin who are blatantly directing a campaign to restrict voting in the presidential election at the expense of the democratic ideals enshrined in the Constitution.

The international audience is keenly aware that McCain and Palin will not merely continue the horrible roller-coaster ride -- they will accelerate it. McCain’s promise to bomb Iran and Palin’s strident threats of doom to America’s enemies have not gone un-noticed by the global audience who now fear the continuation of the rabidly neoconservative theocracy in America.

An arc of darkness is sweeping across the face of America, and the only ray of hope that will overwhelm flagrant attempts to render democracy cold, dead and inert forever in the USA is for a pro-democratic revolution at the polls in a massive turnout of Americans demanding their right to vote.


Global Research Articles by Michael Carmichael