The Missing Votes
A Rolling Stone Magazine Investigation

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
have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.
Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of ‘Jim Crow’ tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

– A fired US prosecutor levels new charges – accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as “fraudulent.”

– Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called “caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters.  The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There’s more:

– Since the last presidential race, “States used dubious ‘list management’ rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls.”

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico – a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote.  For Maez, the state’s purging his registration was particularly shocking – he’s the county elections supervisor.
The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.
“Republican operatives – the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics,” report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are “systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats.”
The investigators level a deadly serious charge:
“If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls – they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.”
Block the Vote by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast in the current issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.
[Media enquiries – Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]
Note – Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft ‘antidote’: a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which you can download for free.
*  *  *  *  *
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse and Vultures’ Picnic , a BBC Television Book of the Year.
HELP US FOLLOW THE MONEY. Visit the Palast Investigative Fund’s store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!
Subscribe to Palast’s Newsletter and podcasts.
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
www.GregPalast.com