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.
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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.

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.