Excerpted from Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Steal Back Your Vote" investigative comic. You can download all 24 pages at www.StealBackYourVote.org.

Odd thing about the 207 voters of precinct 999 in Dona Ana County, New Mexico.

Not a single one could choose between George Bush and John Kerry in 2004.

Or at least that’s what their ballots said.

The Secretary of State at the time told me, “Some of those people just can’t make up their minds.” Dirt-poor Dona Ana is 63% Hispanic and the precinct is made up entirely of overseas voters, mostly the Chicano soldiers in Iraq or on duty. The machines say that Hispanic soldiers don’t care who becomes their commander-in-chief.

Or maybe, the machines failed to register their votes.

Few Americans realize that in 2004, 1,389,231 ballots were never counted because they were “spoiled.” How do ballots spoil? They get left out of the ‘fridge? No, they’re supposedly unreadable, blank, or just somehow lost in the machines.

Here’s an unfun fact: not everyone’s vote spoils the same.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that the chances of an African-American voter losing their vote is 900% higher than a white voter. Hispanic votes vanished at a rate 500% higher than Anglo votes.

Something’s rotten.

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Go to www.StealBackYourVote.org to download the guide for free or pick up print copies of the investigative comic book by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Every donation you make for copies of the comic allows us to send more out to low income groups in states like Ohio, New Mexico and Colorado.

Get the guide now - all copies will be sent out via priority mail. If your group would like to distribute the Steal Back Your Vote guide please contact keri (at) gregpalast.com for special rates.

After you've picked up the comic book get the t-shirt. Wear it into the polling place and tell them that they can't steal your vote! Support the fund by picking up the Steal Back Your Vote t-shirt by the cool people over at Clothing for the American Mind. A portion of every purchase goes to support the Palast Investigative Fund. (Show me more...)

So, these ten nuns walk into a polling station and... Oh, you’ve heard that one?

What you didn’t hear is that, besides the Sistersof the Holy Cross who lost their vote because their drivers licenses expired, 144,896 other legal voters were told to scram in this year’s primary —all caught attempting to vote without a license. The rejected were, disproportionately, African-American,according to data from the University of Washington.

Apparently, the idea for this racially rancid rule came to Karl Rove while he was buying his Pampers: “If I try to cash a check at a grocery store, I have to show an ID. Why not for voting?”

The answer, Karl, is that for a century, Indiana folks have voted without photo ID with not a single known case of voter identity theft. It’s true the law nabbed Shirley Preiss, a 98-year old Democrat whose driver’s license expired. Drop that ballot, Shirl, and no one gets hurt.

Santiago Juarez sees some truth in Rove’s remarks. We met with Santiago in Espanola, New Mexico, where he was running a registration drive among low-riders, the young Mexican-Americans who cruise the street in hopping, bopping, neon-outlined Chevys. He says, “The same poverty and racism that keeps these kids from getting credit cards keeps them from getting ID.” A young Mexicana he escorted to the polls was turned away from her first-ever attempt to vote for failure to produce an ID to the white pollworker’s satisfaction, despite Santiago’s protest.

“She said, well, something you can’t print, and refused to try again. She said, ‘They don’t want me to vote, anyway.’” (Show me more...)

An excerpt from the Steal Back Your Vote! investigative comic

Voter suppression is real. It’s a crime. And it’s happening to YOU.

But there’s something that you can do to prevent it. That’s what this guide is about. Start with page 19: ‘7 Easy Steps to Steal Back Your Vote.’

For many years, top investigative reporter Greg Palast and I have been exposing voter suppression.

This is a deliberate strategy to keep minorities from voting, senior citizens from voting, young people from voting in an effort to suppress the vote and maintain their hold on power.

Our concern is not partisan. We need every American to vote: Democrats and Republicans. You can do all the campaigning you want in a battleground state like Ohio or New Mexico, but if your voters aren’t counted, you’re going to lose the Presidency–and our democracy.

Pass on this link: www.stealbackyourvote.org. Go to the site. Download copies of this comic book, buy copies in bulk and watch Greg's BBC Newsnight film. Get out the word! There’s still time to steal back your vote!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
From Steal Back Your Vote! The Investigative Comic (Show me more...)

Rachel Maddow calls the investigative comic book "really cool." Download it now for free at StealBackYourVote.org or pick up some print copies and support the Palast Investigative Fund.

Maybe it's not a free nation anymore - but at least it's a free comic book.

STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE, the investigative comic book voter guide by Bobby Kennedy and me is now available to download for free free free at StealBackYourVote.org.   (That's thanks to your generous donations to date.)

And now you can get packs of the full-color print edition for the cost of printing and shipping. Less than a buck a book.  And we'll shoot it to you right now by priority mail.

Officially, 2.7 million voters have been purged from the voter rolls since the last election. And those voters weren't vanished by ACORN or Mickey Mouse.   'The Purge'n General," "Nuns on the Run" and "Votes Gone Rotten."  What's so funny about the death of Democracy?  Would you rather CRY?

Based on my investigation with Kennedy in the current issue of Rolling Stone.  Featuring art by the graphic gonzo's Ted Rall, Lukas Ketner and Troubletown's Lloyd Dangle. Download the guide and find out what really is happening in the scary world of election theft, and (Show me more...)

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.

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...)

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 (Show me more...)

M.S. Bellows, Jr. for HuffingtonPost.com

(Visit the HuffingtonPost.com article to listen to exclusive audio interviews with Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)

The perennial issues of vote fraud and voter suppression are becoming front-page news as several states conduct early voting and as Election Day itself nears. The candidates themselves will continue to stump, trying to win votes in contested states, but after tonight's final debate, the parties will focus less on persuading undecided voters and instead put more and more energy into "get out the vote" or "GOTV" efforts or, more ominously, into "voter suppression" efforts, which discourage or bar the other side's likely voters from casting ballots.

GOTV includes simple acts like helping homebound voters obtain and cast absentee ballots or driving voters who don't have cars to the polls on Election Day. More broadly, the concept also can include all kinds of efforts to increase voter turnout: voter registration drives, websites that help voters confirm that they're still registered in time to fix any problems (one good, nonpartisan example is the National Association of Secretaries of State's CanIVote.org), and public service announcements reminding voters that Election Day is approaching.

Voter suppression practices are the flip side of such efforts. Suppression efforts can appear innocuous, such as requiring voters to show photo I.D.s - a requirement that excludes a surprising number of poor, minority, very young and very old voters and kept several elderly nuns from voting in Indiana's Democratic primary this year. Suppression can pose as false righteousness, such as Fox News's 342 negative mentions of a single voter-registration group in just four days (casting the group's efforts to register underrepresented demographics as a threat to democracy, and frightening voters registered by that group into thinking that their registrations might be unlawful), or the past Republican practice of stationing armed, uniformed "Ballot Integrity" personnel in minority polling places (again, tamping down turnout).

Read the rest and listen to the audio podcasts of the interviews at HuffingtonPost.com

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by: Sari Gelzer, t r u t h o u t | Report

Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believe that the 2008 elections have already been stolen. What's an American to do given these circumstances? They suggest: "Steal it back".

Palast, an investigative journalist, and Kennedy, a voting rights attorney, paired up to create a nonpartisan voter guide that illustrates the six ways that American votes will be stolen this election and seven ways to steal them back.

(Show me more...)