Vote-Blocking Will Determine Presidential Election Outcome

note: this is a sobering damnation of the American voting Machine and its corruption by Republicans. Better check your registration and ID before you TRY to vote…. Michael

BLOCK THE VOTE
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast
Rolling Stone Magazine
October 30, 2008

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote/print

Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots
determine the next president?

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Video: Behind the Story With Kennedy Jr. and Palast
http://tinyurl.com/67wcl7

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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, which can be reviewed and discarded by
election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of
all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of
voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives —
the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new
federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this
year’s race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP’s nationwide
campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. “I
don’t think the Democrats get it,” says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney
in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to
the ballot. “All these new rules and games are turning voting into an
obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral
strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich
— a principal architect of today’s Republican Party — scolded evangelicals
who believed in democracy. “Many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo
goo’ syndrome — good government,” said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral
Majority with Jerry Falwell. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want
everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections
quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Today, Weyrich’s vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according
to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters
have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6
million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the
commission’s own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high.
To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials
used a wide range of pretexts, from “unreadability” to changes in a voter’s
signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote
Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform
designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the
presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards
for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections,
and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose
eligibility is challenged at the polls.

But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican
superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his
clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney,
were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the
“reforms” created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast
a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican
election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give
GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to
registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters
at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an
alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that
resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when
the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to
drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. “They wanted
some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes
of illegal voters away,” says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico
who was fired in December 2006. “We took over 100 complaints and
investigated for almost two years — but I didn’t find one prosecutable case
of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico.”

There’s a reason Iglesias couldn’t find any evidence of fraud: Individual
voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration’s
main point person on “ballot protection” has been Hans von Spakovsky, a
former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA
to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election
Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be
stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly
shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by
Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal
courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of
hundreds of millions of votes cast. “The claim of widespread voter fraud,”
Minnite says, “is itself a fraud.”

Allegations of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to
disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who
traditionally support Democrats. “The Republicans have a long history of
erecting barriers to discourage Americans from voting,” says Donna Brazile,
chair of the Voting Rights Institute for the Democratic National Committee.
“Now they’re trying to spook Americans with the ghost of voter fraud. It’s
very effective — but it’s ironic that the only way they maintain power is
by using fear to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote.”
The recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters include:

1. Obstructing Voter-Registration Drives

Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken
steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida,
where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to
$5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning
in voter-application forms. Facing potentially huge penalties for trivial
administrative errors, the League of Women Voters abandoned its
voter-registration drives in Florida. A court order eventually forced the
legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to $1,000. But even so, said
former League president Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines “create
an unfair tax on democracy.” The state has also failed to uphold a federal
law requiring that low-income voters be offered an opportunity to register
when they apply for food stamps or other public assistance. As a result, the
annual number of such registrations has plummeted from more than 120,000 in
the Clinton years to barely 10,000 today.

2. Demanding “Perfect Matches”

Under the Help America Vote Act, some states now reject first-time
registrants whose data does not correspond to information in other
government databases. Spurred by HAVA, almost every state must now attempt
to make some kind of match — and four states, including the swing states of
Iowa and Florida, require what is known as a “perfect match.” Under this
rigid framework, new registrants can lose the right to vote if the
information on their voter-registration forms — Social Security number,
street address and precisely spelled name, right down to a hyphen — fails
to exactly match data listed in other government records.

There are many legitimate reasons, of course, why a voter’s information
might vary. Indeed, a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found
that as many as 20 percent of discrepancies between voter records and
driver’s licenses in New York City are simply typing mistakes made by
government clerks when they transcribe data. But under the new rules, those
mistakes are costing citizens the right to vote. In California, a Republican
secretary of state blocked 43 percent of all new voters in Los Angeles from
registering in early 2006 — many because of the state’s failure to produce
a tight match. In Florida, GOP officials created “match” rules that rejected
more than 15,000 new registrants in 2006 and 2007 — nearly three-fourths of
them Hispanic and black voters. Given the big registration drives this year,
the number could be five times higher by November.

3. Purging Legitimate Voters From the Rolls

The Help America Vote Act doesn’t just disenfranchise new registrants; it
also targets veteran voters. In the past, bipartisan county election boards
maintained voter records. But HAVA requires that records be centralized,
computerized and maintained by secretaries of state — partisan officials —
who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible.
Ironically, the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida — the
same corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place.
Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and
her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000 voters, most of
them African-Americans, because their names resembled those of persons
convicted of a crime. The state eventually acknowledged that the purges were
improper — two years after the election.

Rather than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them.
Maez, the elections supervisor in New Mexico, says he was the victim of
faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state. Hector
Balderas, the state auditor, was also purged from the voter list. The
nation’s youngest elected Hispanic official, Balderas hails from Mora
County, one of the poorest in the state, which had the highest rate of
voters forced to cast provisional ballots. “As a strategic consideration,”
he notes, “there are those that benefit from chaos” at the ballot box.

All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their
rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the
record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP
successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their
state’s voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance
Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to
the states on “list maintenance” methods.

4. Requiring Unnecessary Voter ID’s

Even if voters run the gauntlet of the new registration laws, they can still
be blocked at the polling station. In an incident last May, an election
official in Indiana denied ballots to 10 nuns seeking to vote in the
Democratic primary because their driver’s licenses or passports had expired.
Even though Indiana has never recorded a single case of voter-ID fraud, it
is one of two dozen states that have enacted stringent new voter-ID
statutes.

On its face, the requirement to show a government-issued ID doesn’t seem
unreasonable. “I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to
show a little bit of ID,” Karl Rove told the Republican National Lawyers
Association in 2006. But many Americans lack easy access to official
identification. According to a recent study for the Election Law Journal,
young people, senior citizens and minorities — groups that traditionally
vote Democratic — often have no driver’s licenses or state ID cards.
According to the study, one in 10 likely white voters do not possess the
necessary identification. For African-Americans, the number lacking such ID
is twice as high.

5. Rejecting “Spoiled” Ballots

Even intrepid voters who manage to cast a ballot may still find their vote
discounted. In 2004, election officials discarded at least 1 million votes
nationwide after classifying them as “spoiled” because blank spaces, stray
marks or tears made them indecipherable to voting machines. The losses hit
hardest among minorities in low-income precincts, who are often forced to
vote on antiquated machines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its
investigation of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans
were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected,
a ratio that holds nationwide.

Proponents of HAVA claimed the law would correct the spoilage problem by
promoting computerized balloting. Yet touch-screen systems have proved
highly unreliable — especially in minority and low-income precincts. A
statistical analysis of New Mexico ballots by a voting-rights group called
VotersUnite found that Hispanics who voted by computer in 2004 were nearly
five times more likely to have their votes unrecorded than those who used
paper ballots. In a close election, such small discrepancies can make a big
difference: In 2004, the number of spoiled ballots in New Mexico — 19,000
— was three times George Bush’s margin of victory.

6. Challenging “Provisional” Ballots

In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were
refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a
technicality. Instead, these voters were handed “provisional” ballots, a
fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed
votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in
the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1
million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election
officials.

Many voters are given provisional ballots under an insidious tactic known as
“vote caging,” which uses targeted mailings to disenfranchise black voters
whose addresses have changed. In 2004, despite a federal consent order
forbidding Republicans from engaging in the practice, the GOP sent out tens
of thousands of letters to “confirm” the addresses of voters in minority
precincts. If a letter was returned for any reason — because the voter was
away at school or serving in the military — the GOP challenged the voter
for giving a false address. One caging operation was exposed when an RNC
official mistakenly sent the list to a parody site called GeorgeWBush.org —
instead of to the official campaign site GeorgeWBush.com.

In the century following the Civil War, millions of black Americans in the
Deep South lost their constitutional right to vote, thanks to literacy
tests, poll taxes and other Jim Crow restrictions imposed by white
officials. Add up all the modern-day barriers to voting erected since the
2004 election — 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.

………..

Contributing editor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the nation’s leading
voting-rights advocates. His article “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” [RS
1002] sparked widespread scrutiny of vote tampering. Greg Palast, who broke
the story on Florida’s illegal voter purges in the 2000 election, is the
author of “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” For more information, visit No
Voter Left Behind <http://www.novoterleftbehind.net/> and Steal Back Your
Vote <http://stealbackyourvote.org/>.

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