October 20, 2008
By ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST
“I don’t think the Democrats get it. All these new rules and games … could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”
Rolling Stone Magazine is making this important investigative story available on the net in its entirety, free of charge.
Read this excerpt, then read it all on-line at RollingStone.com. Or download it all, with the Kennedy-Palast voter guide, Steal Back Your Vote, at StealBackYourVote.org.
“The new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.
“Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not,” says Donna Brazile. “We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise.” Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.
– From the current Rolling Stone
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast “provisional” ballots, (Show me more…)
Source URL: http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/
RELATED:
ROLLING STONE: It’s Already Stolen
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.
– 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.”
Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.
[Media enquiries – Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]
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.
Source URL: http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/
See also, email from Robert Wexler, 10-21-08:
Dear ________,
I saw it with my own eyes: The Bush and GOP machine stole the 2000 election and the presidency in Florida (not to mention Ohio in 2004) and the results have been catastrophic for our nation and the world.
Don’t take my word for it – read the dissent of Supreme Court Justices Stevens, Breyer and Ginsberg in the absurd legal decision of Bush v. Gore: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
Back in 2000, in Florida, I witnessed the votes of World War II veterans thrown away and GOP thugs bully the Miami Dade elections office into stopping a recount. I swore to myself that never again would the votes of Americans be thrown away and replaced by the votes of appointed judges. Following the 2000 election, I spent 7 years fighting to remove the DIEBOLD electronic machines from Florida and to install a voter verified paper trail which we accomplished last year.
I have bad news: They are trying again to silence our votes.
Most people associate the 2000 election with paper “chads” and the Supreme Court’s tragic decision. Yet the voter suppression in 2000 went way beyond not counting votes – from illegal roadblocks near minority precincts to the complete purging of legitimate voters from the rolls through what is called “voter caging “– the practice of using databases to improperly delete voters.
Now, we are seeing signs of voter caging again in both Michigan and Florida.
In Michigan, the state is using a list of foreclosures to purge voters (many of which are still legitimate voters in their districts).
In Florida, my home state, the Republican led Supervisor of Elections is aggressively applying a new law designed to limit voter fraud by summarily deleting voters who might have – as part of a clerical error – a different driver’s license or social security number than was put in the database.
If legitimate, legal voters are denied access to the voting booth – we risk a repeat of 2000, in multiple states.
We must remain vigilant, not just in defense of our economy, but in defense of our rights as Americans.
I am working with my colleagues in Congress to call attention to this matter, but I encourage you to contact your state elections supervisor and demand that they allow every person who claims to be a legitimate voter to submit a provisional ballot.
There is a system in every state to deal with provisional ballots – to verify their legitimacy after the fact.
Voter caging is a threat to our (already challenged) democratic principals. Please join me and pass this email along to spread the word.
If you have not already signed up at www.wexlerforcongress.com, and would like to be on this list, please sign up today.
Sincerely,
Congressman Robert Wexler
