How Voter Suppression Could Swing the Election

Yes Magazine
Greg Palast

It won’t be easy to protect our votes from being sidelined and stolen this year, but here are a few simple things we can do.

In more than 100 years, there has not been a single case of voter identity fraud in the state of Indiana. Yet, in 2008, 145,000 legitimate voters there were turned away from the polls because they could not produce the photo IDs acceptable to state officials on a crusade against “voter fraud.”

Approximately two out of three of those voters were black. Ten of them were black and white (nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Cross). One nun, aged 98, had given up her driver’s license as had her “younger” sisters.

Now, 16 states have passed voter ID laws similar to Indiana’s. The story is that legislators are trying to stop an epidemic of people voting under false names or casting the ballots of dead people. But nobody’s come up with more than a tiny handful of cases where that’s happened. Taking away the votes of hundreds of thousands of people to stop one or two fake votes is like killing a flea with a shotgun.

Moreover, no fewer than 68,029 Indiana citizens, and 488,136 voters nationwide, had their absentee ballots thrown out on nutty technicalities like using the wrong size envelope or crossing out a bubble instead of filling it in.

In all, my fellow investigator, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I found that more than 5.9 million citizens were wrongly barred from voting or having their ballots counted in 2008.

Nonetheless, Indiana, birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, was won by a black man, Barack Obama, despite the massive number of votes tossed and voters turned away.

That happened because in Indiana, and nationwide, a massive turnout of African-American voters and record registration of young voters—both groups that are hugely affected by voter ID laws—overcame efforts to block votes.

Because of all the attacks on voting I’ve reported, I’ve been asked, “Why bother? If they’re going to steal my vote, then why should I vote at all?”

The answer is, “That’s what the thieves want you to say.” If someone steals your wallet, you don’t take the rest of  your money and throw it in the street. If someone steals your vote, don’t just hand them the next one.

It won’t be easy to protect our votes this year—estimates say the new restrictions could again disenfranchise as many as 6 million people. But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. protected the votes of African-Americans when voting while black meant risking your life. Our task in 2012 is far easier.

First and foremost, check your voting status. Think you’re registered to vote? Check again. Under new federal laws, secretaries of state have eliminated 22 million voters from the registries in the past two years. Check online right now. 

Do you live in a state with new ID laws? Find out what ID you need, and figure out a way to get it. It may not be easy—but that’s the point. They’re hoping that people will just throw up their hands—and throw away their votes. Do you vote at one address and register a car at another? That’s asking for trouble. Have you added your middle initial to your signature? Well, don’t.

Read the instructions on your absentee or mail-in ballot. If they tell you to fill in a bubble, don’t cross it out. If they say to use a pencil, don’t use a pen. It may seem like trivial stuff, but it killed almost half a million votes last time.

The people who don’t want your vote to count are counting on you to give up easily. Don’t do it. We can work to fix the laws after the election. But right now, the most important thing is to find out what rules are in place and make sure you follow them.

Get informed—then get going. Voting is for We the People, not Them the Ballot Bandits.

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Greg Palast wrote this article for It's Your Body, the Fall 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. Greg is a widely published investigative reporter and author of several books. His latest, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, a look at the role of big money in the current election, features comics by Ted Rall. BallotBandits.org

Eugenics: An American Tragedy

ExpPats Post


“There is one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” ~Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

Not long ago I sat down and turned on the TV to catch up on the latest in politics. What I saw instead was a riveting interview by CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper with professor and author, Paul A. Lombardo, who discussed his 2008 book, Three Generations: No Imbeciles. While I make no claims to being an intellectual, I have a college degree and have done some post-graduate work. Not once had I read, nor been instructed in my classes about the practice of eugenics or social engineering in America and its subsequent influence on practices of the Hitler regime.

Paul A. Lombardo stated in the interview that forced sterilization was practiced in the United States from 1907 to well into the 1970’s. Appalled and aghast, I had to find more information. Has this been another chapter in American history books that has been conveniently tossed aside along with details of our internment of Japanese Americans, true accounts of slave and child labor, or a novel such as The Catcher in the Rye? What I will give you here is a cursory glimpse into the accounting of Paul A. Lombardo from his book. My hope is that it will spur you, as it did me, to read more of this horrific time.

According to Lombardo, legally-mandated sterilization was supported by a eugenics movement in the United States. The impetus behind this was to approve sterilization of the “socially inadequate.” Lombardo states, “Indiana enacted the first law allowing sterilization on eugenic grounds in 1907, with Connecticut following soon after. Despite these early statutes, sterilization did not gain widespread popular approval until the late 1920’s.” It then spread to at least thirty states. From what I have read so far, the grounds were rather arbitrary and were to be adopted as a cost-saving strategy “to relieve the tax burden in states where public facilities for the insane and feebleminded had experienced rapid growth.”

Court approves warrantless searches of cell phones

Raw Story

(Reuters) – Police can search a cell phone for its number without having a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

Officers in Indiana found a number of cell phones at the scene of a drug bust, and searched each phone for its telephone number. Having the numbers allowed the government to subpoena the owners’ call histories, linking them to the drug-selling scheme.

One of the suspects, Abel Flores-Lopez, who was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, argued on appeal that the police had no right to search the phone’s contents without a warrant.

The U.S. Court of Appeal for the 7th Circuit rejected that argument, finding that the invasion of privacy was so slight that the police’s actions did not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.

The case gave the 7th Circuit an occasion to examine just how far police can go when it comes to searching electronic gadgets.

Indiana GOP Threatened With 'Contempt' Amid Voter Fraud Charges Against Sec. of State Charlie White

Brad Blog
Brad Friedman

Dems accuse Repubs of 'running out clock' for new state law allowing GOP Governor to appoint replacement SoS...

 Last month we reported on the seven felony counts charged against Indiana's newly elected GOP Secretary of State, Charlie White. Three of the charges are related to voter fraud by White, the chief election official in the state with the most draconian polling place Photo ID restrictions in the nation. (Indiana's law, approved by the Rightwing U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, has already resulted in unknown numbers of disenfranchised voters, including 90 year-old nuns, elderly veterans, and untold numbers of otherwise-legal student and minority voters --- the real target of such GOP voter suppression schemes disguised as "ballot integrity" laws.)


White represents just the latest in a series of high-profile Republican voter fraud cases --- including recent allegations against Utah's former governor, Jon Huntsman, a potential 2012 Presidential hopeful, and, of course, GOP voter fraud queen Ann Coulter --- most of whom have found some way to get off the hook entirely.

White was charged by a grand jury of, among other felonies, having been registered to vote at an address where he did not live in the town of Fishers, where he previously served (apparently illegally) on the town council, and then knowingly voting in the wrong place last November as he ran to be Sec. of State. White may, or may not, be as lucky as fellow GOP voter fraud scofflaws like Huntsman and Coulter, even as his friends on the State Republican Committee seem to be doing all they can to help him run out the clock in various ways, as revealed this week during new legal volleys in both the criminal and civil complaints against White...

While the criminal case against White moves forward, a civil case is being brought by state Democrats arguing that the Indiana Recount Commission is slow-walking the Democrats' challenge to White's eligibility to have been on the ballot at all last November, since he was illegally registered. Last December, the Commission dismissed the challenge entirely, though earlier this month the judge in the civil case ruled their complaint is valid, and ordered the Commission to move forward with it. The Democrats argue White's illegal voter registration made him ineligible to be on last year's ballot and therefore, they argue, Democratic candidate Vop Osili --- the highest vote-getter legally on the ballot --- ought to named to the post.

At the same time, White's attorneys are arguing that the criminal case should be resolved before the civil case --- or action against him by the Indiana Recount Commission --- can move forward at all.
Yesterday, Carrie Ritchie and Mary Beth Schneider, reporting for the Indianapolis Star, detailed the newest developments in the case this way:

A Marion County judge has ordered the Indiana Recount Commission and the State Republican chairman to explain why they haven’t moved quickly to resolve Democrats’ challenge to Charlie White’s eligibility to serve as secretary of state. 

On April 7, Marion Circuit Court Judge Louis F. Rosenberg ruled the Democrats’ challenge is valid and told the Recount Commission to move forward with it quickly.

Attorneys for the Democrats filed a motion today to urge Rosenberg to resolve the matter in his court or to set a schedule the commission must follow to resolve the complaint.

...

The Democrats claim the commission hasn’t moved quickly enough to set hearing dates and they also criticized State Republican Chairman Eric Holcomb for not appointing a commission member to replace White, who serves on the three-member commission but has recused himself from matters pertaining to his own case.

“It just looks like they are trying to run out the clock,” Democratic chairman Dan Parker said this afternoon.

In an order issued this afternoon [Monday], Rosenberg ordered Holcomb to appoint someone to replace White within two days. He also ordered Holcomb and Recount Commission Director Bradley Skolnik to appear in court Thursday to “show good cause, if any there be, why the Commission should not be held in contempt” for not moving quickly, as the judge had ordered.

Clearly feeling heat from the judge, as the Star's Ritchie reports in a follow-up today, Holcomb has finally taken action by naming Thomas Wheeler, former chairman of the Indiana Election Commission, to take White's seat on the panel.

Ritchie also offers one of the reasons why Republicans may be trying to run out the clock on this case:

In the motion the Democrats filed Monday, they accused the Republicans of stalling the case so the legislature can pass a law that would ensure Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, could appoint White's successor. Democrats say that if White was ineligible to run, Democrat Vop Osili should take his spot.

We'll keep an out for the results of Thursday's hearings. Should be interesting.

In the meantime, Republican legislatures across the nation continue to push various Photo ID restrictions at the polling place, claiming an evidence-free epidemic of "voter fraud," despite the fact that some 20 million legal American voters (most of them Democratic-leaning) may well be disenfranchised by such laws, according to studies cited by the League of Women Voters.

That, despite the fact that, as seen in Minnesota this week, where such a law is being pushed by GOP officials under the guise of keeping felons from illegally voting, there is usually little or no fraud committed in elections by people attempting to impersonate someone else at the polling place. Most "voter fraud", what very little there is of it, is more often committed via absentee voting, which polling place Photo ID restrictions do nothing to protect against.

On the other hand, Election fraud, in the meantime, as committed by insiders who are able to change the results of entire elections with a few keystrokes on an electronic voting tabulator, remains a serious threat to democracy, as demonstrated by scientific study after scientific study. That problem, however, is one that Republicans (as well as Democrats) have shown little interest in combating.

* * * UPDATE 4/26/11: Today's NYTimes aptly slams the new "Republican threat to voting," described as "the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century." They describe "more than 30...states...joining the bandwagon of disenfranchisement, as Republicans outdo each other to propose bills with new voting barriers."

Indiana Prosecutor Suggested Fake Attack on Wisconsin Governor

FoxNews

INDIANAPOLIS -- An Indiana prosecutor said one of his deputies resigned Thursday

after admitting he sent an email to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker suggesting the Republican fake an attack on himself to discredit the public employee unions protesting his plan to strip them of nearly all collective bargaining rights.

Johnson County Prosecutor Brad Cooper said Carlos Lam resigned in a phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday after acknowledging that he sent the Feb. 19 email to Walker suggesting "the situation in WI presents a good opportunity for what's called a 'false flag' operation."

"If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the public unions," Lam wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

Cooper said Lam initially denied sending the email and said someone had hacked into his email account. But Lam later acknowledged he had written the message, and resigned hours before the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reported the contents publicly Thursday.

"He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email," Cooper told the Daily Journal newspaper in Franklin, south of Indianapolis.

A message left by the AP at a telephone listing for Lam was not immediately returned Thursday.

Lam's email was sent amid daily protests at the Wisconsin Capitol against Walker's plan to take away public employees' rights to collectively bargain for anything except wages no higher than inflation.

"We cannot have the public unions hold the taxpayer hostage with their outrageous demands," said the email, which urged Walker to "stay strong."

Lam is the second Indiana prosecutor to lose his job over volatile comments about the Wisconsin protests. Jeffrey Cox, a deputy attorney general, was fired last month after tweeting that police should use live ammunition against labor protesters.

Wisconsin Republicans eventually used a procedural maneuver to pass the collective bargaining measure without Democrats who had fled to block a vote and Walker has signed it in to law. But a judge has issued a temporary restraining order to block the law from taking effect while courts consider a lawsuit alleging the Republicans' move violated the state's open meetings law and constitution.