Steal Back Your Vote!
Friday, August 29, 2008
Palast: One out of five Colorado voters purged from voter registration
Outcome of 2008 election likely to be skewed by unethical tactics
By David O. Williams
August 27, 2008 — Robert Kennedy Jr. had a pretty good excuse for skipping his scheduled appearance with investigative journalist Greg Palast to promote their latest project, “Steal Back Your Vote” — a report on voting irregularities and fraud in the 2008 election.
Palast, speaking at the Progressive Democrats of America gathering at a downtown Denver church during the DNC Tuesday, excused Kennedy’s absence to be with his uncle, Monday’s inspirational surprise speaker Sen. Ted Kennedy, and introduced a surprise replacement of his own, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
Progressive investigative journalist Goodman asked a delegate to hold up a goody bag with sponsor logo from AT&T on one side and decried the influence of big corporate money on the modern American political process.
She talked about trying to get into a delegate gathering at Mile High Stadium Monday and being denied access by towering security guards. Goodman said delegates at a corporate party are in training for just how skewed by campaign contributions politics in America have become, and added that there can be no good reasons to keep the press out, only bad ones.
“When you’ve got money saturating politics, and even if you care deeply about the public good, you’ve got to see where the money is and that’s what this is about every four years,” Goodman said. “It’s about teaching (budding politicians) big-money politics.”
Goodman said AT&T’s sponsorship of the DNC is the Democrats’ reward for refusing to block a bill several weeks ago giving telecom companies retroactive immunity for facilitating domestic spying by the feds. She also urged support of independent media during both parties’ political conventions in order to limit and expose excesses by police against protesters in Denver and Minnesota.
Palast took back the microphone to talk up his project with Kennedy, which will be the subject of a feature in a major national magazine next month and which also will be released as a 24-page comic-book-style PDF illustrated by three top political cartoonists. The report will be available on the Web site www.stealbackyourvote.org.
Palast said former Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson has made the state the epicenter of the rampant practice of purging voter registration lists for alleged irregularities — a tactic now even more en vogue in the wake of new legislation backed by the Bush administration.
“Now under the Help America Vote Act the entire nation is Floridated, but the champ, [former Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris, ain’t got nothing on Colorado,” Palast said. “We’re sitting at purge ground zero. The reason that there’s a convention here is this is a swing state where Democrats are piling in, tens of thousands of new voters in Colorado at the top of the bucket, but at the bottom of the bucket the spread sheets are going (poof).
“What’s happening? Donetta Davidson, who had been secretary of state in the state of Colorado, removed 19.4 percent — one out of five voters in the state of Colorado, she removed their names. And what happens to Davidson as a result of this? The answer is George Bush made her head of the brand new Election Assistance Commission, where she can train all 50 secretaries of state in her purging ways. In fact, President Bush, instead of calling her chairwoman of the EAC, was going to call her the Purging General.”
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How are these fraudulent practices allowed to continue following the last two presidential elections. Are we simply a bunch of sheep? I sometimes find myself a little embarrassed when people I meet here in Miami ask me what country I am from. I plan on working at one of the poll sites here in Miami in November, what more can I do?
Greg,
As a very concerned citizen of the state of Colorado, what can I do to help stop this now? Where do we begin? Time is running out for the November election and we need all of our votes counted!
Thankyou very much,
Redding Bacon
We are at war.
No, I don't mean in the deserts of Iraq and Afganistan, although surely that's the case too. I mean right here, on the streets, kitchen tables, cafes and blogs of the good old U.S.A.
As we wake up this morning there is a war going on for the hearts and minds of America. Depending on what paper or magazine you read, the war is going very differently. There are factions at work on both sides in the press, the polling industry, the entertainment industry, that are fighting a deathmatch before our eyes. One side may not survive, and they both know it.
This war will last less than sixty days and is not about the issues, it is not about grand ideas, it is not about which party is more qualified to lead us, although certainly all that too is at stake.
The war is about sustained momentum. It is about what drives it. Character. Most of all, it is simply about PERCEPTION of those things.
The race for the White House has become about how long John McCain can sustain the illusion that he and Sarah Palin have taken over momentum. Make no mistake, its an illusion. The race from this point forward is the difference between what McCain wants you to believe about the race versus the reality of the race. The national polls do not reflect a winner, they reflect a perceived trend. Obama is winning the electoral college, but if perception doesn't shift, that could change.
John McCain hopes that you and more importantly Barack Obama will panic. He hopes that you will do his bidding to make illusion of victory translate to the reality of it. As I type this he is trying to guilt the press into accepting his version of truth. He doesn't need to convince the entire nation or even the entire main stream media of the country is swinging his way.
No. He just needs to cast enough doubt. Just as in the primaries much of the crystal ball reading by pundits and polls engaged in theatrics for the benefit of purely some undecided voters in Iowa, all of the histrionics about Sarah Palin and the national polls now are soley for the benefit of a few undecided swing voters in OH, NV, NM, MO, and FL. The entire nation isn't embracing Sarah Palin and John McCain, but if a voter in Miami or Cincinnati THINKS that's the case, he or she just might jump on the bandwagon.
How do we combat this? Or better, how does Barack Obama combat this? By being blunt. By showing up to a knife fight with a gun. Obama needs to be more blunt than any candidate for President in U.S. history. He needs to pull back the curtain and show us Oz's saggy white bottom. He needs to expose the propaganda blow by blow in ways even a fifth grader will get.
We need to do the same.
Some of the most partisan polls and lies are also about padding the floor for the jaw drop that might occur should McCain actually win. He needs a narrative to justify his unlikely victory and to prevent a blowback that would make Bush's inauguration look like an episode of Sesame Street. He needs to sell the American electorate a bill of goods so that he can say, "See, wasn't I a genius? I picked Palin and that's why I won."
No John, its not.
If John McCain wins, it'll be because his shock troops hit you with manipulated facts and figures and meaningless celebrity ala Paris's purse or Palin's glasses. That'll work to a point to confuse, demoralize and create a lemming effect in a few swing states. Beyond that, they're gonna cage votes. They're gonna deliver too few voting machines to minority neighborhoods. They're gonna send you to the wrong table to vote so you get a provisional ballot you can wipe Oz's saggy butt a second time with.
All they need to do to win is suppress voter turnout enough so that their propaganda narrative can allow them a shot. They have none otherwise. Its worthy to point that out.
Its also worthy to point out that they can't steal the election outright. There has never been one person pulling the strings in one grand scheme, its death by a thousand cuts in local races, and the perps have to guestimate voter turnout, which they may underestimate thanks to our unprecedented involvement getting out the vote.
But Sarah Palin will not gain McCain the White House. That's political propanganda, smoke and mirrors. A distraction that drives as many people away as she does to McCain. If you really examine the actual polls thats what you'll find. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/09/poll-madness-mccain-takes_n_125158.html
The truth of the matter is that the GOP can't sustain Sarah Palin. They're trying to beat the information black out clock that's running out on her. Right now, McCain is simply gambling everything he's got that the house of cards won't crumble in the next 57 days or so.
You see, McCain plays craps in Vegas, sometimes for up to 14 hours at a time. Right now he's got his whole wad sitting on lucky 6 and he's praying you roll the hard way. He's decided to take his campaign completely negative NOW in the hopes something will stick while there's still the perception that hes not a loser. He's made the race about perception of character and this is a fight that he can and must lose.
Character. It is the key to victory.
With the ad that McCain released last night accusing Obama of wanting to teach five year olds sex ed, when in reality the bill in question was to ID sexual predators, McCain just crapped out. It is the biggest mistake of McCain's already reckless campaign if it is smashed down correctly. It's the nuclear strike that opens McCain for attack on everything from the Keating Five to his blatant and consistant lies every day on the campaign trail. It takes away any shred of teflon Palin had left as well.
It gives Obama an excuse to go hard on character issues. Take the Obama campaign's reply to McCain's sex ed ad; "“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls – a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds,” said campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.”
See what the campaign is smartly doing here? "A father of two young girls." They're phrasing in ways people will get emotionally and they're playing hardball on McCain's character. Have some faith in the campaign's response here. We should follow this lead. Bigtime.
Today will bring some serious accusations back and forth and this contest will be from now on only about whom the American people trust to tell the truth.
Framing the race emotionally has to be done because the undecideds left aren't looking at the issues or they would have picked a side by now. Saying Obama is a guy who's single mom was on food stamps, who grew up without privilege, a guy who passed up 700 corporate jobs to help the unemployed, to be a civil rights attorney and a constitutional law professor, is stronger than any fact or figure about any issue in the minds of those holdout voters.
Barack Obama will follow the law. McCain won't. The answer is in their characters and we can provide the imagery Obama needs. Because its the truth.
John McCain is telling those holdout voters that he's a war hero and that makes him qualified to be president. Its important to note that John McCain is NOT a war hero. He is a war SURVIVOR who deserves our respect and admiration for his service to our country, but simply surviving a horrible situation doesn't give you an automatic pass on character issues and it isn't something you should be allowed to hang an entire campaign on.
John McCain swore up and down that he would never make baseless character attacks after he himself was slandered viscously in 2000 over his imaginary "illegitimate black child" and yet he hired the same guy to slime Obama that had slimed him. Saying so does far more to damage McCain than anything else that could be said to those swing voters. This works because McCain himself has made it all about his character. POW POW POW. MAVERICK MAVERICK MAVERICK.
McCain and Paln are no mavericks, they're sidekicks. Yesman to corporate and GOP interests, which are one in the same.
The way to attack Palin is by informing people about her record at odds with her words, her habitual lies about it, and her extreme views, all in the context of McCain; "Here's Palin, a fringe right wing radical who's extremist views remain a mystery even to John McCain, whom John McCain has placed into a position of power for short term political benefit at the expense of his country." Leave it at that. Moving on.
Remember, this is all about a few hundred thousand people in those swing states. Its also about McCain trying to steal the race by creating false perceptions about it. The polls aren't real, they're 1250 shadows of an electorate hoping to be real.
This is about more concrete stealing. There's election fraud going down in those swing states, happening now, bigtime, and if the campaign doesn't address it, this thing will be far more of a nail biter than it has to be.
Our efforts to register voters may overwhelm the fraud like Chinese paratroopers throwing themselves at the machine guns, but do we want to gamble on whether there are more troops to sacrifice than bullets?
Election fraud is an issue I can only hope and pray the campaign is paying attention to because if they don't, Obama is Al Gore all over again. Its not something we'll se at the polls, it's invisible because many people with inaccurate registrations will vote absentee or provisionally and never know their vote has been challenged because they never checked. Its incremental and its death by a million cuts. Its passing a voter ID law in Indiana that results in 30,000 seniors staying home because they can't afford health or wealthwise to get out and get an ID.
How do we address something as shadowy as election fraud? Tell every voter to check that their registration is valid and have them do it NOW. The campaign has the soapbox to get the word out for 57 more days. I've been saying this for two years and too many people look at me funny because they don't believe it could happen in America.
Do you really believe every major race since 2000 has come down to 10,000, 5000, 500 votes in a few states? Are we THAT evenly divided?
No. John Webb won Virginia by such a narrow margin of a few thousand only because the GOP slightly under-estimated the amount of voter turnout they needed to cage by sending hundreds of thousands of DO NOT FORWARD letters in order to challenge votes when letters came back. Same with Gore and Kerry and a host of others. The statistical odds of so many close races are blowmind. If voters would have checked, they could have challenged the challenge.
If new voters literally didn't cross a T, if they didn't dot an I, their registration may be thrown out, especially if they live in a vulnerable state with mostly Republican election boards like OH or NV or NM which has a history of such events. Hell, three members of the OH election board were tried and convicted of election fraud after the debacle of 2004 yet the main stream barely heard a peep about it.
Yesterday I wrote the campaign to suggest they do a PSA for both established voters and new ones asking them to please, please, PLEASE check their voter registrations to make sure its accurate. Otherwise they may show up at the polls to find they're not on the rolls and to be innocently handed a provisional ballot that is a waste of paper because their most likely Republican Secretary of State will opt not to count them.
Hell, I personally know six people who's registrations had been tampered with on Super Tuesday and thus weren't allowed to vote. I saw a hundred such cases as a poll monitor, and that was in two Pasadena precincts! What do you think its gonna be like in Ohio?
I would suggest everyone reading this check their voter registrations and inform every person they meet from now until November fourth to do the same. The GOP is relying on voter laziness to skate by.
I would also ask every person reading this to contact the Obama campaign and force them to run PSAs on the issue of checking EXISTING voter registrations as well as new ones for accuracy and ask their friends to do the same.
Gregpalast.com wants to run psas that you can donate to on the issue of election fraud. I highly recommend his site. Greg's a respected American reporter for the BBC that works with Robert Kennedy Jr. and I also cannot recommend his book "Armed Madhouse" enough if you want to know precisely how election fraud is being done around you NOW.
All of this, the whole enchillada, boils down to one thing. John McCain is a politician displaying a lack of honor and the neocon radicals that have hijacked his party have even less so. He's a man who has put principles and country aside in favor of short term poltical gain at any cost. We should put nothing past him and a frightened Bush GOP that may go down in flames of scandal for good if they don't win and cover their messes.
That one simple fact, that McCain is not the man that once earned our respect, that he clearly has lost his honor in a desperate, reckless grab at power which by default will protect criminal elements in his own party, will tie every other issue together.
It is the grand unification theory of victory.
We have 57 days.
If you can, I would suggest getting to a swing state either online or in person because the best way to win a revolution is to show up. The swing states deserve every microscope and voice we can raise.
Best,
Lance Mungia
ENOUGH
Mike Coffman is Secretary of State in Colorado!!!
Who is this Donetta Davidson???
There is a lot of suspicion that Mike Coffman won his position fraudulently, esp. considering every other statewide office went to DEMS that year!!!!
There was a huge election day debacle in Denver in 2004 that kept thousands of voters from voting!! Perhaps they were already setting up the 2008 theft of Colorado years ago by installing Coffman!!
OK, here's the poop on Davidson:
Donetta Davidson is the current chair of the United States Election Assistance Commission, sworn in January 3, 2007.
She previously served as secretary of state of Colorado from 1999 until 2007. A Republican, she was first appointed to the office in 1999 by Governor Bill Owens and was subsequently elected to the office in her own right in 2000 and was reelected to a full four-year term in 2002.
Here's the poop on her shenanigans in helping Repugs set up election fraud:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4144
Greg -- you and Robert have done a GREAT THING! Thank you! Heard you, once again, on the Randi Rhoades show today. You were somewhat lighter and in a more humorous mood than usual, and I don't think Randi goes there! When she said "Vote early" (which she totally denounced during the primary elections) and you responded "and often!" she clearly said "no". I appreciate all that all of you do, but sometimes we have to laugh amongst ourselves. I've responded on the SBYV website asking that everyone contact the Florida governor's office regarding the Palm Beach County Commission's concern that Palm Beach County won't be ready come November 4th. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/elections/sfl-1007election-day-fears,0,1634215.story
Keep in mind this the same county -- home of the infamous butterfly ballot and hanging chads -- and Republican Mary McCarty, one of the county commissioner's, is currently under FBI investigation, seeking to win the Katherine Harris Election Killer Award 2008 (KHEKA in future reference).
Wotzis "register your girlfriend, your wife, your mailman and your mommy" -- ?? After 88 years can't women register themselves?