Ghosts of Joe Slovo

Enjoy!




Kick ass and take names.

This one has a link to the ACORN Action Center at the end so people can take action to stop the smears and make sure that everyone who is eligible can get to the polls on Election day.



The other one is over 60,000 views and was the 71st most viewed video on all of YouTube on Wednesday October 21 and the 3rd most favorited in the News and Politics section.

Take a minute and change your link to this one instead so people can fight back as well as learn the truth.

Kick ass and take so very many names.

Who is that handsome devil?

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PASS THIS AROUND TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW! HELP SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE TRUTH.
</shouting>




Kick ass and take names

Nice to have a big gun on your side...

I didn't know that getting poor people to vote was a Federal case, but apparently I live in something called the 21st century and the Bush Justice Department lives in the 1880's...

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/V/VOTER_FRAUD_FBI?SITE=ORROS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT


Officials: FBI investigates ACORN for voter fraud

By LARA JAKES JORDAN




WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is investigating whether the community
activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the
nation before the presidential election.

A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation to The
Associated Press on Thursday. A second senior law enforcement official
says the FBI was looking at results of recent raids on ACORN offices
in several states for any evidence of a coordinated national scam.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice
Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations
particularly so close to an election.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, says
it has registered 1.3 million young people, minorities and poor and
working-class voters - most of whom tend to be Democrats.

Republican accusations about the group were raised during Wednesday's
presidential debate between Democrat Barack Obama and GOP candidate
John McCain.

Some ACORN employees have been accused of submitting false voter
registration forms - including some signed `Mickey Mouse' or other
fictitious characters.

Those voter registration cards have become the focus of fraud
investigations in Nevada, Connecticut, Missouri and at least five
other states. Election officials in Ohio and North Carolina also
recently questioned the group's voter forms.

ACORN has said the "vast majority" of its workers are conscientious,
but some might have turned in duplicate applications or provided fake
information to pad their pay. Workers caught submitting false
information have been fired, ACORN officials say.

ACORN says laws in a number of states require it to submit all
registration cards it collects even dubious ones, so its workers
segregate applications with missing, suspicious or false information
and flag them so state election officials can quickly check them
further.

Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow get it right on ACORN.

You can find out the real truth here: The Real ACORN.


Here's Keith.



Here's Rachel.



Kick so much ass and take so many names.

Project Vote blog on how the myth of voter fraud is driving systematic attempts to suppress the vote.

Here's how it starts:

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

"I think the days of ballot box stuffing are more or less gone." - Allen Raymond, former GOP operative

Voter fraud by individuals has been a major partisan debate in recent elections, inspiring multiple states to consider or pass laws that purport to stop it, including "no-match, no-vote" list maintenance procedures and strict voter ID  requirements. Despite federal findings that the act of casting an illegal ballot is exceedingly rare, partisans often cite large scale voter registration drives as voter fraud culprits, and perpetuate the myth of voter fraud by spreading the fear that such votes cancel out legitimate ones. With rising registration rates - particularly among historically underrepresented Americans - it is no surprise that partisans are spreading this myth, and the media often perpetuates the hysteria by printing stories on the small numbers of bad registration cards submitted by large scale voter registration drives (including the 1.2 million submitted by Project Vote voter registration partner, ACORN).

Check out the rest in any of the following diaries. Feel free to leave comments and forward as appropriate, especially to folks you know in battleground states.

Updates at the bottom of the entry...

I've excerpted parts of a fresh post on the Project Vote blog and is an analysis of recent stories from Michigan and Ohio about Republicans using lists of houses in foreclosure to challenge voters' right to vote in November. People are calling this heartless, which I think is a bit tepid. I think "reprehensible", "unconscionable", "Jim Crow-esque", and "sleezy" might start to do it justice, but I think I'm just lacking creativity. There is a particular irony in the GOP's announcement of these attempts to keep folks away from the polls during the week of September 11, when, supposedly, we all come together to celebrate what unifies us as Americans. But then, that comes as no surprise really, given the right's attempt to trademark Sept. 11 and use it against progressives during policy debates and elections.

Here are some of the key parts of the post.

Partisan political operatives in Michigan are taking voter caging operations to depths that would surprise even the most cynical observers of American elections. If their plans are put into action, thousands of Michigan foreclosure victims may find that they will not only have lost their homes this year, but also their vote.

Operatives in the closely contested state, which is home to thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure, are “gearing up for a comprehensive voter challenge campaign,” according to Eartha Jane Melzer of the Michigan Messenger Wednesday. The state allows parties to send election challengers to polls to challenge the eligibility of voters if they “have good reason to believe” a voter is ineligible. In this case, the GOP of Macomb County—a “key swing county” with a foreclosure rate in the top three percent in the nation—has announced plans to challenge the voting eligibility of foreclosure victims based on residency.

“We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” Macomb County GOP chairman James Carabelli told the Messenger.

And then this.

“The Macomb County party's plans to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters,” Melzer writes. “More than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans – the most likely kind of loan to go into default – were made to African Americans in Michigan...”

Melzer points out that Republican presidential candidate John McCain's regional headquarters is in the office of the state's largest foreclosure law firm, Trott & Trott, whose founder has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the campaign. McCain “stands to benefit from the burgeoning number of foreclosures in the state,” Melzer writes.

Advocates respond.

“At a minimum, what you are seeing is a fairly comprehensive effort by the Republican Party, a systemic broad-based effort to put up obstacles for people to vote,” says [J. Gerald] Herbert [former voting rights litigator for the US Department of Justice]. “When you are comprehensively challenging people to vote, your goals are two-fold: One is you are trying to knock people out from casting ballots; the other is to create a slowdown that will discourage others.” This type of disruption would be expected in areas with high foreclosure rates, particularly the Detroit metropolitan, where one in every 176 households received foreclosure filings during the month of July, according to Melzer.

“You would think [the Macomb GOP] would think, 'This is going to look too heartless,'” says David Lagstein, head organizer for Michigan ACORN, which has registered 200,000 new voters statewide and provides foreclosure-avoidance assistance.

“The Republican-led state Senate has not moved on the anti-predatory lending bill for over a year and yet have time to prey on those who have fallen victim to foreclosure to suppress the vote,” Lagstein says.

If you want to learn more:

“Voter Caging.” Project Vote.

James, Teresa. “Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters.” Project Vote. September 2007.

Kick ass and protect voting rights.

UPDATE: Also available at DailyKos, MyDD, and OpenLeft.

UPDATE II: In this story in the Michigan Messenger today, the Macomb County GOP is now stating that it has no voter caging plans for the foreclosure list, but that it does expect, "party volunteers to challenge voters in other ways."

When asked whether Michigan Republicans plan to create a challenge list based on returned direct mail, a practice known as “vote caging,” Doster replied, “I think so. I know this has been done in years past … both parties may be doing this.”

Reports of the plan for foreclosure-based challenges have spurredoutrage and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), planned a demonstration today at the Macomb County Republican headquarters.

This was originally posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters and at Project Vote's diary on DailyKos.

Steve Rosenfeld, writing in the journal Social Policy, has authored a comprehensive look at the recent history of partisan attacks on the voting process itself and the unfolding attempts to roll back all of the voting rights gains of the past 50 years that have gained speed and urgency under the Bush Administration.

Pointing out that modern voter suppression attempts and larger projects to reshape the entire electorate to favor conservatives no longer rely on the open fear and intimidation that characterized past practices from American history, Rosenfeld opens his in-depth survey with this observation,

“Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the 21st century he is apt to be a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers, proposed legislation and talking points about “voter fraud” and protecting the sanctity of the vote.”

The entire article, which Social Policy has placed outside their subscriber wall (pdf), is worth reading in its entirety.

From the article, here’s the overall thesis:

The newest barriers include state laws that target various phases of the voting process. Registration by individuals has been made more rigorous. Mass registration drives face new deadlines and increased potential fines. Citizens must present new identification to register and to vote, and in some states newly registered voters face increased prospects that partisan challengers will question their credentials before voting. Civil rights groups have noted that all of these new laws and procedures disproportionately fall on people of color, poor people, senior citizens and the disabled.

The Department of Justice, which for decades fought to ensure all eligible citizens could vote, has encouraged states to take these steps in the opposite direction. Political appointees who advocate for stringent requirements before ballots are cast and votes are counted now drive much of the Voting Section’s actions. As a result, the Justice Department has been pushing states to purge voter lists, and to adopt newly restrictive voter ID and provisional ballot laws – actions all that are known to cause delays if not confusion at the polls. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Voting Section has not enforced other federal laws, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients a chance to register to vote. Similarly, the Bush Justice Department has filed few cases on behalf of minority voters.

The Department’s political appointees have also pressured federal prosecutors to pursue “voter fraud” cases against the Bush administration’s perceived opponents, such as groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which conducts mass registration drives among populations that tend to vote Democratic. Two former federal prosecutors have said they believe that they lost their U.S. attorney posts for failing to pursue those cases. The proponents of this renewed impetus to police voters are almost all from a powerful and well-connected wing of the Republican Party that believes steps are needed to protect elections from what they call “voter fraud,” or allegations that Democrats – or their allies - are fabricating voter registrations en masse, and voting more than once to win. It is “an article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas said in a May 17, 2007 Houston Chronicle report. The report continued, “He [Masset] doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3% to the Republican vote.”

Rosenfeld’s piece adds deeper context to the Art Levine piece we highlighted yesterday. Taken together, these two articles show the depth and breadth of recent partisan attempts to shape the electorate and the resulting corruption of independent non-partisan agencies and departments including the Department of Justice itself. They further show the mechanics of those attempts and how they centered largely on ACORN, a national organization fighting for the rights of low- and moderate-income families. (ACORN is also one of Project Vote’s field partners in our Voter Participation Program.)

I'm going to reporduce here some recent blog posts that I've helped shepherd as part of my day job.

I'm putting these up (1) because most of my two readers are progressives and they need to know about this stuff, especially in an election year and (2) they directly relate to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movemement.

The are a comprehensive look at the recent war on voting rights carried out by conservatives, often using partisan organizations, and which culminated in the the complete subversion of the national voting rights enforcement infrastructure for partisan political gain at the Department of Justice. You may remember something about a scandal involving US Attorneys. Well, that was about this stuff.

Here's the first one, on GOP voter suppression dirty tricks in a Dallas Congressional race in 2006, originally posted on the Project Vote blog, Voting Matters:

Art Levine, writing at the Huffington Post, has an article up that sheds fresh light on a stunning example of voter suppression in a Texas Congressional race from 2006 and the complicity of the Department of Justice in letting it stand. He starts this way,

Since the resignations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and others involved in the U.S. Attorneys and Civil Rights Division scandals, you might expect that the Justice Department would come clean and show a new commitment to voting rights.

Think again. At recent hearings before a House Judiciary subcommittee, new revelations emerged about how the Justice Department failed to investigate illegal mailers sent to African-Americans in Dallas threatening criminal punishment if they registered to vote through a community reform group called ACORN."

There are two striking aspects to the story. First, Levine does a great job connecting the dots between partisan attempts to shape the electorate and the politicization that took hold like a cancer in the belly of the Department of Justice.

Moreover, the Justice Department's response was part of a striking pattern of indifference to alleged intimidation violations. In fact, The Huffington Post has learned, President Bush's Justice Department hasn't brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges -- despite receiving, by some estimates, roughly 12,000 criminal civil rights complaints of all kinds annually.

'The Justice Department hasn't handled these cases because they've had an unreasonable focus on voter fraud. They're more interested in disenfranchising voters," observes Tanya Clay House, the Public Policy Director of People for the American Way. (The Justice Department, and the local and national FBI, declined to answer questions about the Dallas incident and the broader lack of prosecutions aimed at voter intimidation.)'

The partisan interest in disenfranchising voters, which the Department of Justice had rushed to support under the stewardship of Alberto Gonzales and which does not seem to be abating under the new Attorney General Michael Mukasey, can be seen in the swarm of attacks leveled against the community organization ACORN, an advocate for low-income families.

"Indeed, part of what amounts to a wide-ranging GOP disenfranchisement strategy is attacking the non-partisan low-income advocacy group ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The organization has been a favorite target of Republicans promoting the myth of widespread voter fraud because of its success in registering Democratic-leaning minority voters since 2004, according to reports by McClatchy Newspapers, The American Prospect, and other outlets. The drumbeat of voter-fraud hype is then used to justify a host of GOP-backed laws and policies, from restrictive photo ID voting laws to the Justice Department' promotion of mass purges of registered voters. Yet voter fraud, in fact, is so rare that even an intensive, four-year anti-fraud initiative by the Justice Department couldn't even find one person in the country to charge with impersonating another voter -- out of nearly 215 million votes cast in federal elections."

The other striking aspect is Levine's clear outlining of the method by which operatives bent on keeping certain voters away from the polls run voter suppression operations. Levine goes step-by-step through the voter suppression scheme implemented in the 2006 Dallas-area Congressional race, from using inflammatory and misleading press released to generate bogus stories of voter fraud in the local media, to creating attack ads based on those media stories, to circulating fliers linking the group named in the press release to suspicions of voter fraud, to a letter to the local District Attorney claiming the Democratic candidate's 2004 campaign had engaged in voter fraud. The entire scheme, Levine notes,

perfectly symbolizes the no-holds-barred Republican politics of voter fraud. The intimidating flier was part of a brazen vote-suppression and smear campaign designed to undermine a Democratic candidate, Harriet Miller, in a tight local race in 2006 to challenge Texas House Rep. Tony Goolsby in a racially mixed North Dallas district.

The entire article should be read by everyone concerned with defending voting rights and by those interested in being able to clearly identify voter suppression attempts in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential Election.

I've been thinking a lot about stuff lately, he said, displaying a keen sense for the vauge and ambiguous. Here's the guide: politics, futbol, and con artists.

First, politics: Here's you superstat of the moment. If, in the 2006 election cycle, non-whites had been registered and voted at the same rates as whites, there would have been 7.5 million more voters in the electorate. The context for this is that people think bringing in 2 million or so new voters in an election cycle (above who you would expect to enter under the current rates of entry and exit) is a Really Big Deal. Bringing in 7.5 million would be mind-blowing.

Why does this matter? These voters generally favor one party over another. You can guess which. This is why the whole freak-out by the Department of Justice in 04 and 06, (illegally) using the machinery of the US Govt. to suppress voters from just these demographics, push for voter ID laws, and generally attack groups like ACORN as engaging in "voter fraud" is so important. The whole Attorneygate deal hinged on people not being zealous enough in attacking so-called fraud. Turns out there was no fraud. Turns out it was an effort to keep certain people from voting. And those numbers, while large, are nowhere near 7.5 million. More like 500K-1 Million, spread strategically over the country.

So what would happen if you DID bring in 7.5 million of these voters. I can tell you the GOP has no interest in finding out.


Next, futbol: The LA Galaxy are on a 4-game win streak after having their worst season ever to date. Ugly wins, achieved thorugh grit, will, and teamwork. Not so very much fun to watch, except that, as a fan, knowing they have to win 7 in a row to make the playoffs, every minute has tension and excitement. I'll miss the season when its over.


After that, con artists: How many of you have been conned? And how many times? I was thinking about this earlier in the week, when a guy in a not-so-new-but-not-so-old Mercedes motioned me over from the crosswalk at 37th and Flower and gave me a sob story about being from the Valley (Encino) and forgetting his wallet and needing cash to fill the tank to get to the next place on his itinerary. Maybe. Maybe not.

This situation is a dilemma that in my case relies more on my own self-image than the actual circumstances in front of my eyes. Does the guy need gas? I can't verify it. Is he just messing with me to get cash to do something he thinks he can't get cash for if he's honest? (AKA "Is this guy a crack fiend preying on my charity to get high and support the terrorist economy?") Maybe. Do I care? Not really. I want to live in a world where someone in need can walk up to someone else and say, "Yo, I need cash to fix an immediate need." and the other person will say, "Here's something to help you out." I want to be that guy. But I'm not interested in separating out the "worthy" from the "unworthy".

So I've decided to categorize each of these encounters not as a charity transaction, but an an entertainment event. I generally ask myself, "What is this story worth?" Based entirely on subjective and ever-changing criteria, of course. How well rehearsed is the story? How smooth is the delivery? How much does the dude smell? How much pathos is involved? Are their kids? What kind of tragedy is being invoked? Is there self-deprication invovled? What is the level of obsequiosness? How much am I being assumed to be a clueless white man devoid of the street smarts given to your average 8th grade survivor of middle school?

Based on my own interpretation of the answers to these questions and the level of the "ask", I generally come up with a dollar figure that satisfies us both. And I don't have to worry about where or how the money will be spent or whether or not I'm being taken by a con artist or a street hustler. It was an equal tranaction. I got a show and the dude got some cash. End of story.

This also got me thinking about all the times I really did get conned out of what I would consider to be "real" money, most of which also played on my own self-image. But I was less experienced and more naive, so I got hooked and reeled in nice and easy like. But those are stories for another posting.

Kick ass and take names.

Down in Texas, what Molly Ivins called "the lege" has been up to its neck in hijinx. While I'm sure there are many pieces of legislation that could be singled out for either disgust or parody or both, one fight has been remarkable for the actions of one State Senator. I do not use the following word lightly and I do not know if it applies to any other aspects of his life, but State Senator Mario Gallegos from Houston acted herocially to stop a voter disenfranchisement (oh sorry, the conservatives call it "voter id") bill from being passed.

Back in January the Senator had a liver transplant, which is always tricky, but lately he's been showing symptoms of rejecting the organ. Doctors have ordered him home. But it also turns out that conservatives in The Lege have been pushing this voter disenfranchisement bill as a top priority. The GOP-dominated State House passed the bill and a majority of Senators supported it as well, but under Senate rules 11 votes can block a measure from coming up. Gallegos was the 11th vote opposing the bill.

But he was seriously ill, with doctors begging him to go home under medical supervision. Gallegos couldn't do that. Whether it was deep personal conviction, a sense of history regarding the movements that won the right to vote, often paying in blood (pdf) for the right, or the sense that core constituents would be blocked from the next election - or even a bit of all of them - Gallegos made the decision to stay in Austin and had a mini-infirmary set-up off the Senate Chamber floor. All so he could be the 11th vote against the bill. 

Project Vote has a massive amount of information this issue and practically every other voter engagement and voter id issue, which you can find on their website, if you want more info on what I'm talking about.

These kinds of stories are full of arcana and hinge on technical aspects of how rules and regulations are designed and implements, but understanding them has a direct bearing on who can and cannot participate in our democratic system. Indeed, it has an impact upon who's right to vote is facilitated and who's is hindered.

In Texas, Sen. Gallegos is to be commended for placing his own life in jeopardy in an echo of the way that thousands of ordinary citizens did a generation ago during the Civil Rights Movement, in pursuit of the same goal: the right to vote.

Kick ass and secure the right to vote.

Normally when I'm talking about rights and politics and things I just rant at you good people.

Today I'm linking to a story from the McClatchy Papers Washignton Bureau (they own the Sac Bee, the Fresno Bee, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Charlotte Observer and a host of other mid-sized papers) about the complete and utter politicization of the Department of Justice under Bush and how it has become nothing more than an adjunct of the Republican party in its quest to suppress progressive voting blocs and institutionalize a GOP majority.

Here's a couple of fun quotes:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort torestrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year asPresident Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives byDemocratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespreadelection fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federalvoter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

I mean, it doesn't get any clearer than that. It should be noted for the record that Project Vote and ACORN were both thoroughly investigated as part of this effort and the failure of US Attorneys in NM and WA to find any actual systematic violations of the law or conspiracies to illegally subvert the elections led to their dismissal. Rove and Gonzalez felt like their folks were being insufficiently aggressive. But since neither Project Vote nor ACORN commits voter fraud, there wasn't anything to find.

The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations ofwidespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and othersteps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.

Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, aformer Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access andVoter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases,and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.

On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan,Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.

Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.

"As more information becomes available about theadministration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said.

B-I-N-G-O!

The article goes on to actually list all the instances of improper behavior, but you get the picture. Read the article, by Greg Gordon, for whom my team compiled an ass-load of information for him to puruse, and you'll get a sense of what this whole scandal is really about.

Kick ass and take names.

WORK, VOTER FRAUD, VOTER SUPPRESSION AND THE GOP'S ACORN JONES
Man, work has been kicking my ass while I'm there, but luckily I've been able to escape bringing it home for a while.

My group, the Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD) has been doing a lot of support work for ACORN and Project Vote's Elections Adminstration program, chiefly around the information coming out about the firing of the 8 US Attorneys. Turns out that at least two were fired for not pursuing "voter fraud" vigorously enough. In other words, they didn't bring indictments against groups engaged in massive ballot stuffing and voter registration drive irregularities.

You know why? Because it doesn't it exist, that's why. Interestingly enough, though, the Department of Justice had their eyes out for both Project Vote and ACORN and even Karl Rove was pushing the NM Attorney to root out "fraud" at the insistence of the local GOP leadership that wanted the US Attorney there to investigate .... wait for it ... ACORN!

See, in 2004, ACORN submitted over 35,000 voter registration applications in New Mexico, well above the margin of victory in the state. Some of those applications were forged by people trying to defraud the organization and get paid for work they didn't do, so all of a sudden the GOP is all "oh my god they are trying to subvert the system and they must be stopped!", which is really an attempt to intimidate voters from ACORN's constituency of low-income folks and folks of color. But they claim "voter fraud".

Well, back in March, Project Vote released a study by Professor Lorraine Minnite from Barnard who concluded that there simply isn't any organized voter fraud occuring in the US and that the bulk of cases of people voting illegally comes from absentee ballots (which are more likely to be cast by older, whiter, wealthier people - people who are more likely to be Republicans). The number of people who have been convicted in the past 5 years for some kind of voting irregularity? 86. The number of votes cast since 2002 in Federal elections? Over 250 million. So there were 86 cases out of a possible 250 million. Which, I guess if you are the GOP, is a clear indication of rampant voter fraud.

Or maybe you are just using that hysteria to pass a series of laws that suppress the turnout from constituencies that you don't want to show up at the polls. Like, say, voter ID requirements, which the Eagleton Center for Politics at Rutgers has just shown depresses turnout among African-Americans by 6% and Asian-Americans by 9%. But we need to protect the system's integrity! From what? So fucking transparent.

Anyway, we've been helping PV and ACORN to make this case for the past 2 months through a series of press releasese, op-eds, and blog posting on the major liberal blogs.

WEIRD PHONE SURVEYS
Two days ago as I was winding down work, I took a call from a phone suveyer and decided to go with it, not knowing it was going to be a 20 minute call! It was all about sports. Professional sports leagues. What was my favorite (MLS), which did I think was the "most professional", whose athletes did I "most respect"? Who were the most overpaid (MLB)? (As much as possible I tried to pick Major League Soccer, but it just wasn't one of my choices. And neither was Major League Lacrosse or the W-League (womens' soccer) or even the Arena Football League - if I was them I'd be pissed.)

Anyway, at a couple of points the questions got really funny: "What percent of your head hair would you say is gray?" Umm, what? (I said 10%.) And then they started asking me about hair care products and which I was most likely to use. They also asked my how much alcohol I drink in a typical week and what my favorite beer is. Favorite beer? I LOVE beer. I'm supposed to choose? But I did. I picked Newcastle because you just can't go wrong with Newcastle. It is never the wrong choice.

They also asked my how much sports I watch on TV per week, but not which sports they are. They did NOT ask me how much sports I watch on the internet, which is where I actually do most of my sports watching since you have to have cable to watch soccer in America.

I couldn't beleive how long this damn survey took and I was particularly amused by their decision to try to find out which league's players are the most respected (or not). At a certain point I just don't give a shit about millionaire athletes and their petty battles and I don't know how to differentiate between the "respect" I have for a millionaire baskeball player vs a millionaire baseball player. Now, the young kids on the Development Contracts with Major League Soccer, who make $12,000-$18,000 a year and live 5 people to a house, like they do over at DC United, all so they can pursue their dream of making it in Major League Soccer - a league no one in this country actually cares about - THOSE kids have my respect. Hell, even a journeyman D-League player in Bakersfield or Grand Rapids or someplace like that gets some respect from me. But A-Rod? Or Barry Zito? Umm, no.

THE BECKHAM EFFECT
One last thing about sports. I recently acquired season tickets to the LA Galaxy, which plays in the league no one cares about (see above) on the theory that if I have a chance to see one of the best players in the world and the best-know player in the world, and soccer is my favorite sport, and I have the means to make it happen, then I should go ahead and do it. Even though I think the other LA team, Chivas USA, is a lot more fun to watch and has better fans.

Now the thing is about MLS - you have to really like this league and this game to follow it and you have to go way out of your way to do it. You can't just turn on ABC and see the Game of the Week. YOu must dig and scramble and dig some more and then you have to deal with other soccer fans who won't give MLS the time of day because they like only "the best" soccer - so they watch English or Spanish or German futbol exclusively. I call them Eurosnobs. Anyway, that gives you an idea of the typical MLS fan.

Until now, I guess. And you can thank David Beckham for this. World-class talent and celebrity brought to a minor league league. As if Shaquille O'Neal decided to finish his career in Italy or something. Anyway, you get a lot of new MLS fans buying season tickets and attending games, but not having a lot of knowledge.

So the guy next to me at the Galaxy season opener is one of these guys (oh lucky me for an entire season). His favorite team in Chelski (Chelsea in the EPL - owned by a Russian billionaire and the winner of the past two league championships, but sitting second this year) and his soccer intelligence is pretty good. He understands what's going on on the field.

But. But he leans over to me at one point and asks me how many substitutions they have in an MLS game. Umm. That's like asking how many strikes you get in baseball. It's the same everywhere the game is played professionally or in a FIFA-sanctioned league. It's 3. It's one of the 17 rules of the game.

Then later he expresses admiration for this tall powerful forward for FC Dallas who scores a goal against the Gals. "Is he a rookie?"

Umm, no. It's Kenny Cooper and he's been in the league for 2 years and before that he was in the Manchester United youth program AND HE JUST MADE HIS INTERNATIONAL DEBUT FOR THE US MENS NATIONAL TEAM 3 MONTHS AGO, SCORING A GOAL, EVEN! What kind of US soccer fan who knows enough about soccer to follow Chelsea DOESN'T KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT HIS OWN NATIONAL TEAM?

Aaargh! Fuck you David Beckham for surrounding me with imbeciles while I watch live professional soccer, one of my very favorite things to do.

That is all.

Kick balls and learn about the damn sport in your own country, already!

Folks,

This is a cross-posting from my diaries at MyDD and DailyKos, so it talks about ACORN in way I rarely do on this journal. I apologize for the length, but I think it very clearly illustrates how voter suppression works in US elections.


With the election in Missouri proving to play a pivotal roll in which party controlls Congress and polling indicating a very tight race between GOP Talent and Dem McCaskill, the GOP has resorted to well-known dirty tricks to suppress the vote of groups they see as supporting their opponents.

The biggest target of their dirty tricks machine has been ACORN, a group that organizes and fights for the rights of poor people in the Show-Me State as well as in 110 cities across the United States. The GOP is scared because ACORN, which placed the initiative on the ballot that would raise MO's minimum wage and index it to inflation, is targeting 600,000 voters in metro St. Louis and Kansas City for GOTV in support of the minimum wage. Republicans are worried that these voters will voter in larger numbers than normal because of the chance to vote themselves a raise and subsequently cast ballots for other candidates that support their economic justice agenda. Notably there are very few of these candidates on the GOP side of the line.

The GOP has engaged in a systemic and coordinated attack on ACORN's efforts and reputation using false allegations of voter fraud to justify serious voter suppression measures. These actions could have the effect of reducing core progressive turnout in key regions of the state. But ACORN is fighting back.

In 2006, ACORN submitted more than 70,000 voter registration applications collected from Missouri citizens in under-represented, mainly African-American neighborhoods; the organization is campaigning for a statewide ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage.  The disenfranchisement campaign began with a series of attacks in the media by Republican Board of Elections officials claiming that ACORN had submitted "potentially fraudulent cards." ACORN has not been allowed to see the evidence behind these attacks in St. Louis, despite promises and repeated requests.

Late last week, the political motives of the press attacks against ACORN became evident as a series of possible voting rights violations came to light in St. Louis:

( Read more about the details and the mechanics, as well as past attempts to destroy ACORN's reputation, all of which were baseless and defamatory. )

Kick ass and take names.

I've been perusing internal focus group data done for an investor with an interest in protecting voting rights and ensuring elections are administered fairly. The focus groups were run by a repuatble reserach firm that polling junkies will recognize were I to name them, but this is confidential data.

There are a lot of takeaways from this information, the biggest being that most people are more concerned with "voter fraud" than they are will ensuring that as many eligible people as possible participate in elections. For most Americans the spectre of a compromised electoral system is embodied in visions of non-citizens and felons casting ballots willy-nilly and making a mockery of American democracy.

This is a powerful narrative, one which politicians bent on reducing the size of the electorate have used to pass a series of onerous restrictions on accessing the polls. These include voter ID requirements, restrictions on the use of non-goernmental agenices registering voters, very strict interpretations of database matching criteria (to verify identity), and very strict purge requirements. Project Vote has a whole set of documents related to all of these issues on their Publications page.

It is powerful despite that fact that since 2002 there have only been 52 documented cases of voter fraud in the entire United States covering over 200 million votes cast. That works out to 0.00000026% of the votes cast. For those of you for whom identifying that number stretches your math skills, that is 26 one hundred thousandsths of one percent. That's the kind of number people mean when they say things like "vanishingly small" and "infintesimal".

To me this means that the measures I listed above exist for one reason and one reason only: to keep under-represented people from accessing the electoral system.

But people clearly care more about what they perceive as attacks on the integrity of the system than the reality of the integrity of the system. We can talk a lot about why that is, but the most important thing, for me, is that any conversations about why these measures must be stopped can't be argued on the facts. People simply aren't persuaded that the trade-off of letting thousands of otherwise eligible people become disenfranchised in return for a squeaky-clean system is a bad thing.

The only thing that seems to persuade people to recondsider their natural hard-line positions on these issues is being confronted with personal stories of real people forced off the rolls due to these measures.

The much larger point here for progressives is that we need to stop arguing about policy details and put human faces on the consequences of convservative actions.

As I get them I will be posting real stories of real people affected by these laws and by other right-wing initiatives. My minimum wage series and my Katrina series are exmples of this approach.

Any stories that you guys here would be greatly appreciated as well. As would any thoughts on what I've posted on this topic.

Kick ass and take names.