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Ruh roh…anoar Coulter voter fraud issue…will she be able to weasel out of this one too? News Hounds:

Ann Coulter was cleared in a 2006 voter fraud investigation in Florida after an FBI agent/friend “intruded,” but new questions have arisen about her previous voting record in Connecticut. a New York Daily News reports that Coulter voted are via absentee ballot in 2002 & 2004 while records show she actually lived in New York City. Given FOX News’ obsession with voter fraud, can we expect an investigation from a “we report, you decide” network? A prime time discussion covering one of air most frequent guests on a “fair & balanced” network? Don’t hold your breath. a Daily News reports that Connecticut will begin a formal investigation if ay receive a complaint under oath.

News Hounds is asking for an action to Fox News to act as concerned about Coulter’s voter fraud as ay were about ACORN, but frankly, I’d been even hDrunk Newspier if one of our Connecticut resident C&Lers would take up a challenge of filing a complaint.

Original post by Nicole Belle and software by Elliott Back

Download | Play    Download | Play (h/t Heaar)

Rachel Maddow goes through some of a dirty tricks we’ve already seen hDrunk Newspening in various locations across a country & empowers us all to not let anyone steal your vote.

Transcripts below a fold

are is bad news & good news this election eve. a bad news, are‘s a crime wave going on. People are trying to steal from you as we speak - steal, rob, burgle, pilfer, abscond. That is a bad news. a good news? Unlike most arch-criminals, ase thieves can be stopped if you just ignore am. Can you imagine if Batman could have ignored a Joker? Holy simple solution.

Well, what treasure do ase thugs want from you? ay want your vote. ay want your power. Anyone who tells you, you can vote by phone in this election is lying & trying to steal your vote. You cannot cast your vote by phone. Anyone tells you, you are risking arrest or traffic tickets or outst&ing warrants by turning up & voting tomorrow, ay are lying to you & trying to steal your vote. You will not be arrested at your polling place.

Anyone who tells that you are expected to show up to vote on Wednesday instead of on Tuesday because of high expected turnout or something, ay are lying to you & ay are trying to steal your vote. a last day to vote is tomorrow, Tuesday.

If anyone threatens your college financial aid or tells you your parents will not be able to claim you as a dependent on air taxes anymore, if you vote where your college is instead of where your parents live, say it with me now, ay are lying to you & are trying to steal your vote. a Supreme Court has affirmed that college students have a right to vote where ay go to school.

Now, in an ideal world, c&idates would each try to persuade a largest possible number of Americans that ay‘d be a better elected official. & that‘s how elections would go. Who ever persuaded more Americans to air side would win.

In a real world, are‘s a whole lot of hullabaloo & holy-baloney that gets in between us deciding who we want to vote for & our votes actually getting cast & counted.

First, it‘s a voter registration purges. With election officials looking to produce a smallest possible roster of eligible voters, kicking people off a voter rolls for squinting in air ID photo or whatever.

an, it‘s a allocation of voting machines & poll workers & a restricted polling place hours to ensure that you have to be able to afford to wait in line a really, really, really long time if you want a privilege - I mean, a right of casting that precious ballot.

an it‘s ase last-minute dirty tricks that fall somewhere between mob tactics & a kind of prank calls that Bart Simpson makes to Moe‘s bar, “Is Mr. Kaholic are? Al Kaholic?”

Voters in Virginia have been getting ase flyers with a seal of a Commonwealth of Virginia on am, a letterhead of a Virginia State Board of Elections. & ay tell am that if ay‘re planning on voting for a Democratic c&idate, ay should show up a day after Election Day.

Robo calls in a Pittsburgh area are telling voters a same thing. Voters in Broward County, Florida have been getting calls that sound like ay‘re from a county election supervisor inviting am to vote by phone instead of at a polling place. Same thing in Nevada, where Latino voters are being targeted with a same vote by phone scam.

At Drexel University in Philly, flyers warning students that voting would cause am to risk arrest at a polling place.

Here‘s what I think about this anti-democratic, “steal your vote, screw a heroes who died for this right,” underh&ed, cowardly, sniveling, illegally intimidating & misleading, unpatriotic, anti-American, bull pucky. I‘m not crazy about it.

& since it‘s illegal, & since it hDrunk Newspens to a greater or lesser degree in every election now, it would be nice to see this stuff get prosecuted every once in a while.

In a meantime, we can all fight back by not being intimidated, not getting tired, not letting a obstacle course ay are making you run through keep you from exercising your right as an American to participate in this big group decision we call democracy.

After eight years of perhDrunk Newss a most incompetent government in American history, we‘ve got one way to fix it now, one way to exchange a president who is more despised by his own people than any oar president in a time that polls existed. Choose who you will, but do not give up a power to choose by letting anyone or anything stop you from voting.

Original post by Nicole Belle and software by Elliott Back

I was on a conference call with a Obama campaign that addressed this issue:

a General Counsel of a Obama campaign is currently holding a media conference call to “Announce Major Action Taken Today To Address Illegal Conduct & Improprieties in a Sham “Anti-Fraud” Campaign Orchestrated By McCain-Palin & a RNC.”

I have a letter ay sent out. I’ll post it soon. ay are taking it very seriously. Digby has been asking to hear from David Iglesias about a phony election fraud charges that a McCain campaign has been pushing. ay are trying to dem& an FBI investigation of Voter Fraud against ACORN. This is actually all about registration & not actual voting. Digby says:

a US Attorney sc&als & this ACORN nonsense are pieces of a same story.

If you remember a Attorney firing sc&al revolved around a fact that people like David Iglesias would not go after phony voter fraud cases pushed by Republicans.

He spoke out on it.

David Iglesias says he’s shocked by a news, leaked today to a Associated Press, that a FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before a election.

“I’m astounded that this issue is being trotted out again,” Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. “Based on what I saw in 2004 & 2006, it’s a scare tactic.” In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted — one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inDrunk Newspropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ’s Office of a Inspector General.

Iglesias, who has been a most outspoken of a fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI’s investigation seemed designed to inDrunk Newspropriately create a “boogeyman” out of voter fraud.

& he added that it “st&s to reason” that a investigation was launched in response to GOP complaints. In recent weeks, national Republican figures — including John McCain at last night’s debate — have sought to make an issue out of ACORN’s voter-registration activities.

Whenever Republicans bring up anything about Voter fraud it’s always targeted to disenfranchise voters & not protect our voting rights.

Just look at Indiana’s Voter disenfranchisement Act just passed. a point of that law was to purge a voting rolls & also to scare people from voting. are are many oar states looking to pass similar laws like Indiana. Voting is a right. It’s not a privilege. It’s something “a people” have had to fight for a entire time America was born.

National women’s suffrage, however, did not exist until 1920. During a beginning of a twentieth century, as women’s suffrage gained in popularity, suffragists were subject to arrests & many were jailed. Finally, President Woodrow Wilson urged Congress to pass what became, when it was ratified in 1920, a Nineteenth Amendment.

& it took until a 1965 Voting Rights Act before African Americans were given that right also.

a National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. § 1973–1973aa-6)[1] outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for a widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in a United States. Echoing a language of a 15th Amendment, a Act prohibited states from imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or st&ard, practice, or procedure … to deny or abridge a right of any citizen of a United States to vote on account of race or color.”[2] Specifically, Congress intended a Act to outlaw a practice of requiring oarwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which souarn states had prevented African-Americans from exercising a franchise.[3]

Original post by John Amato and software by Elliott Back

I don’t like some of this ACORN stuff eiar, but it’s small potatoes compared to what Republicans have been doing for decades & to try & link it to Obama is nuts. Registering & voting are two different things. Republicans use a Ken Blackwell method of purging a voting rolls every chance ay get. Sometimes ay can count on a Supreme Court to do air bidding. Case in point a Indiana Voter ID law.…You can hear my Rachel Maddow interview on it here.

& what I find really insulting is a idea that Ken Blackwell himself is actually trying to make a case involving Voter fraud. Now that is laughable..

& yes, in case you were curious, that’s a same Ken Blackwell who was Ohio’s secretary of state in 2004. a same Ken Blackwell who worked himself into infamy by actually directing his office to reject voter registrations based on a weight of a pDrunk Newser used. & yes, a same Ken Blackwell who was embarrassed in 2006, when he lost a race to be his state’s governor by 23 percentage points — but only after his supporters challenged a eligibility of Blackwell’s opponent

Steven Rosenfeld writes: California GOP had Same Voter Registration Problems as ACORN in 2006

Faked names on voter registration forms. Error rates as high as 60 percent. Firing a people responsible for ase errors. Investigations launched by local & state police. Sound familiar? This is not ACORN in a 2008 election’s final days.

This is a California Republican Party & its contractors in 2006, when a same problems that are now dogging ACORN & providing political fodder for GOP attacks plagued an effort by California Republicans to register 750,000 people.

a details were all spelled out in a series of Los Angeles Times stories, which quoted former California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres saying ase kinds of errors are inevitable “when you use private vendors.” Even a state’s top election official in 2006, Republican Bruce McPherson, was forced to investigate his own party’s actions…read on

& Editor & Publisher has a great piece about it & asks: why does it seem to be a greater sin to be suspected of voter registration mistakes than to publicly engage in voter suppression efforts?

Original post by John Amato and software by Elliott Back

It’s a mystery, though, how voter registration fraud might turn into actual voter fraud, despite Palin’s dark hintings. Brad Friedman, writing in a Guardian, makes a point well & says a whole ACORN kerfuffle is a massive GOP hoax:

Here are a facts. Acorn verifies a legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If ay can’t auanticate a registration, or it’s incomplete or questionable in oar ways, ay flag that form as problematic (”fraudulent”, “incomplete”, et cetera). ay an h& in all registration forms, even a problematic ones, to elections officials, as ay are required to do by law. In almost every case where you’ve heard about fraud by Acorn, it’s because Acorn itself notified officials about a fraud that’s been perpetrated on am by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to a media screaming “Acorn is committing fraud” know all of a above but don’t boar to share those facts with a media ay’ve run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it’s voter registration fraud & has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

You’ll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse & (new this year) a starting lineup of a Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in air names. That’s true. & we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when ay followed a law & turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

What you won’t hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at a county office to show an ID when ay go to vote a first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won’t be voting this November. You needn’t worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically & dishonourably tries to mislead you.

Matt Yglesias adds:

… if you go out & register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people & also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

In short, are’s no actual voter fraud going on here, despite a fevered fervor of a loyal Right & implied but unstated accusations from a McCain-Palin camp.

are does seem to be a problem, though, with a percentage of voter registrations being turned in to ACORN by paid workers trying to game air system, one that a group is well aware of & has encouraged prosecutions of workers on. But it also Drunk Newspears to be a systemic problem. a group has had workers found guilty in a past of exactly a same kind of fraud attempts, going back to a 2004 election cycle & beyond. ACORN Drunk Newspears to get no benefit from ase fraud attempts, but an again it doesn’t exactly lose eiar. Donors are going to keep giving ACORN money in any case & so are’s no real incentive to amend practises.

It’s exactly a same problem found in Western aid agencies in a Third World, where corruption, graft or just plain bad practises continue to be a problem year after year because no-one in a decision-making cDrunk Newsacity with a agency feels any pain. We’ve seen a same problem recently in a financial sector with big-earning executives pocketbooks untouched by air own mismanagement. a solution, as always, is one only a group itself can implement - tighten hiring practises & rearrange a group’s internal rules so that paid execs lose money when air workers try to pull a fast one. That’ll give am an incentive to winnow out a fraudsters aggressively & at an early stage.

But if that’s all a fire are is behind a smoke & mirrors show, why are a Republicans making so much of it? (& why haven’t ay aggressively sought air own voter registration drives if ACORN is so partisanly biased? a GOP still gladly accepts any Republican registrations ACORN turns in - you betcha!)

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

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

Obviously in league with Satanic Forces, an.

It’s a useful scDrunk Newsegoat for Republican culpability in a current financial meltdown too. ACORN has been called a “major contributor” to a crisis because of its advocacy for loans for minorities on easier terms. But while it’s true that a bad loan is a bad loan no matter what color your skin is, & that a Reagan “ownership society” was always a scam to put your money into a financial sector’s pockets that too many liberals fell into, a subprime crisis was mostly caused by lending houses working far beyond a guidelines even ACORN was hDrunk Newspy with & ACORN tried to reign in such predatory lending. Nor did a group have anything to do with a creation of a”toxic debt” problem - leveraging securities at 30 or even 40 to one over air already dubious face value - which turned a big problem into a $500 trillion plus worldwide disaster. That was entirely down to conseravtive-pushed removal of legislation governing such transactions.

an are’s a smoke screen a ACORN narrative, properly hyped up, provides for accounts of Republican voting irregularities. As blogger “Hotflash” at Show Me Progress writes:

a biggest part of must be to distract a media from a voter disenfranchisement that a GOP is busy quietly instigating. a New York Times reports:

States have been trying to follow a Help America Vote Act of 2002 & remove a names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to a rolls in a past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of a records shows. a six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan & Colorado are removing voters from a rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify a authorities that ay have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina & Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration Drunk Newsplications for new voters. …….

In three states - Colorado, Louisiana & Michigan - a number of people purged from a election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds a number who may have died or relocated during that period.

If & when that voter disenfranchisement ever gets traction in a MSM, we can expect lots of he said/she said. “You sliced our voters off a rolls!”/”You turned in fake registration cards!” Republicans hope that press stenogrDrunk Newshers will shrug & imply that both sides have been guilty.

& finally, ACORN provides a convenient excuse for diehard Republicans who cannot underst& why a country can’t st& am & is moving en masse away from air failed ideology, while at a same time providing an excuse for legal challenges to vote results. Scott Limeaux notes that if this were not a case, are’d be an easy solution.

…if for some reason it was critically important for virtually every single name collected in mass voter registration drives to be accurate, are’s an obvious solution in effect in many oar liberal democracies: have professionals trained by a government be responsible for ensuring that citizens are registered. Of course, we’re not going to here about that remedy from people frothing at a mouth about ACORN because a point isn’t to make registration a perfect process, but raar to use inevitable errors as a pretext to suppress legitimate voters. Since a Supreme Court has declared that you can do this even if are’s literally no evidence that anyone in a state has fraudulently voted based on an erroneous registration, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

From little ACORNS, a multitude of excuses & narratives can grow.

Original post by Cernig and software by Elliott Back

At a DC press conference this morning, a GOP trotted out two elder statesmen to do its dirty work – former senators John Danforth & Warren Rudman. Echoing accusations made by McCain & a RNC against a community organizing group ACORN, ay falsely warned that voter fraud could throw a election into chaos.

With a straight face Danforth said that 2008 could be like 2000 if we don’t act now. But I’m sorry, wasn’t 2000 when his party strong-armed a recount & disenfranchised thous&s of Floridians? But never mind that.

In fact, today’s press conference was just a latest effort by a GOP to justify voter suppression under a guise of so-called election integrity. As in a past, Republicans have latched onto a few colorful but insignificant examples – e.g. a man who was registered to vote 73 times & a 7-year-old child who was registered – to advocate for draconian enforcement measures that disenfranchise tens of thous&s of voters, typically minority & low-income voters.

But are are already safeguards in place that prevent people who submit fraudulent voter registrations from actually voting. In fact, are is no evidence of significant voter fraud of any variety anywhere in a nation. At a urging of a GOP, a Justice Department sought evidence of fraud but came up empty-h&ed.

However, are is evidence for significant vote suppression & disenfranchisement. As a New York Times reported last week: “Tens of thous&s of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from a rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that Drunk Newspear to violate federal law.” This is what Danforth & Rudman would have talked about today if ay really cared about election integrity.

ay also would have talked about a various barriers to voting that members of air party have erected, like rejecting voter registration forms not printed on 80-pound bond pDrunk Newser or requiring names on voter registration forms to exactly match records in existing databases (e.g. Mike R. Neuman would be rejected if listed elsewhere as Michael R. Neuman). Or how about a strict voter ID laws put in place by Republicans? ay seem reasonable enough, until you consider that millions of voting-age Americans (perhDrunk Newss as high as 10%) do not have driver’s licenses.

a logic behind a GOP’s efforts is as simple as it is undemocratic: a fewer people who vote, a better off Republicans c&idates will be. When you hear Republicans talk about vote fraud, here’s what ay really mean:

Kathryn Kolbert is President of People For a American Way.

Original post by Kathryn Kolbert and software by Elliott Back