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Originally Posted by Boon Mee Like what fraud, eh? |
Like, this one:-
Karl Rove's ssistant Busted in Scheme of Massive Voter Fraud
Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.
Key voters on Griffin's hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn't mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.
However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails -- potential evidence of a crime -- to email addresses ending with the domain name "[at]GeorgeWBush.com" he sent them to "[at]GeorgeWBush.ORG." A website run by prankster John Wooden who owns "GeorgeWBush.org." When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.
And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called, "Caging" lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.
The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts marked, "Do not forward." Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city's State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.
If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as "suspect" and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these 'cages' captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.
We telephoned those on the hit list, including one Randall Prausa. His wife admitted he wasn't living at his voting address: Randall was a soldier shipped overseas.
Karl Rove's ssistant Busted in Scheme of Massive Voter Fraud
And heres Wiki's report about some of the shenanigans in the last two elections:-
Specific issues concerning the voting process:-
Voter registration
Facilitating voter registration was the main goal of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. States were required to make registration more widely available, notably through driver's license agencies (hence the nickname "Motor Voter Act"). In 2004, however, there were incidents in several states in which people who had submitted registration forms through a motor vehicle agency were not found on the voter rolls on Election Day.
There were also complaints about the rejection of registrations by government agencies. College students encountered difficulties in registering where they attended school. Some officials rejected voter registration forms on grounds that were contested, such as a failure to use paper of a particular weight (Ohio) or a failure to check a box on the form (Florida).
Aside from such official actions, there were disputes about other voter registration activities. In Nevada and Oregon, a company hired by the Republican National Committee solicited voter registration forms, but was accused of filing only the Republicans’ forms and shredding those completed by Democrats. A nonprofit organization, ACORN, was accused of submitting false voter registration forms and of carelessly or deliberately failing to submit some valid ones that it had received.
Purges of voter lists
State efforts to purge voter rolls have led to disputes, notably in Florida. Before the 2000 election, Florida officials purged 57,700 registered voters on the grounds that they were convicted felons (and therefore ineligible to vote under Florida law). Many of those whose names were purged were "false positives" (not actually felons). (See
Florida Central Voter File.) A post-election lawsuit brought by the NAACP, the People for the American Way Foundation, and other organizations resulted in a settlement in 2002 in which the state agreed to restore eligible voters to the rolls and take other steps to improve election procedures.
The issue returned to prominence in 2004 when Florida announced another planned purge, again based on a list of felons. The state government initially attempted to keep the list secret. When a court ordered its release, it was found to contain mostly Democrats and a disproportionate number of racial minorities. Faced with media documentation that the list included thousands of errors, the state abandoned the attempt to use it. Some of the voters improperly purged in 2000 had not been restored as of May 2004.
Voter suppression
The term "voter suppression" is used to describe methods of discouraging or impeding people from voting. The government agency or private entity doing so believes that the would-be voters thus turned away would have been more likely to vote for an opponent. For example, Dennis Kucinch described voter suppression in his state, Ohio:
Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registration through some Democratic activist groups were invalid and that Kerry voters were to report on Wednesday because of massive voter turnout. Phone calls to voters giving them erroneous polling information were also common. John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator in Michigan said in the summer of 2004, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."
Exit polling
The 2004 election brought new attention to the issue of exit polls, which are generally considered more reliable than pre-election opinion polls. Many pointed to widespread discrepancies between exit polls conducted during Election Day and the officially reported results.
They pointed out that the official results were more favorable to Bush than were the polls, and that these discrepancies were more likely to arise in swing states. Full Article- 2004 United States election voting controversies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Voter fraud is a serious issue, and should be absolutely eliminated anywhere it is found- otherwise people lose faith in the democratic process. It is pretty obvious on the balance of evidence however that it is the Democrats who have suffered from this far worse than the GOP, and who probably have more to fear in the coming election also, given some blatantly prejudiced attempts to exclude qualified individuals from voting on the flimsiest of grounds- as previously co-ordinated by Karl Rove and his minions.
I suspect that some of the Right wing Republican bitterness about Obama stems from this very fact- he is just plain too smart, and wise to their dirty tricks. Obama has been running a 'register to vote' campaign for a couple of years now, and I am not just talking about Acorn- which incidentally received around $80,000 from the Dem's, not the $800,000 being bandied about.