One Way Obama Could Still Lose: Vote Fraud (And It Is Happening Already!)

[MandM]

It is very clear that Barack Obama has a huge lead over John McCain now. Electoral-vote.com has Obama with 364 electoral votes and McCain with only 171. But massive, widespread vote fraud could still steal this election from Obama.

There is evidence that vote fraud is ALREADY happening in West Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and other swing states:

http://shatteredparadigm.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-way-obama-could-still-lose-vote.html

[Nailer]

the vote fraud thing will not even matter as the peoples vote does NOT elect the president  but instead the electoral votes do cast by "Picked officials" in each state  .  AKA  the electoral college. Why do they even have the people vote? Because the people/sheeple  can say they made a decision , DUH....

[wvoutlaw2002]

It is very clear that Barack Obama has a huge lead over John McCain now. Electoral-vote.com has Obama with 364 electoral votes and McCain with only 171. But massive, widespread vote fraud could still steal this election from Obama.

There is evidence that vote fraud is ALREADY happening in West Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado and other swing states:

http://shatteredparadigm.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-way-obama-could-still-lose-vote.html

Voter fraud can swing both ways. The winner has already been pre-selected, and the criminals will ensure the pre-selected winner will "win" the rigged election. Obama is the "messiah", the "chosen one", the "change" man. All the Democrats and their mindless sheep say "it's the Republicans". They don't - and will probably never - realize that BOTH political parties are owned by the super-wealthy elite and have worked together to destroy the Republic and are now working to destroy democracy. They don't realize that both candidates are in the same hoity-toity elite clubs. When you mention the CFR or Bilderberg, the fake conservatives say "THE CFR AND BILDERBERG DON'T EXIST, YOU COMMIE" and the fake liberals say "The CFR and Bilderberg exist only in the minds of evil right-wing John Birchers".

Look at the U.S. House race in West Virginia. Both candidates are for Big Oil. Both candidates work to serve the establishment. (Shelley Moore Capito is a Bushite neocon, and Anne Barth is a Rockefeller liberal (the Rockefellers hate coal because it competes against their Big Oil empire), hand-picked by Nancy Pelosi, and worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. It's like the Man-E-Faces character from "Masters of the Universe". The faces may be different, but it's the same bullshit artist.

I just commented on the Readers Voice section of the Charleston Gazette about how all four candidates (Capito, Barth, Obama, and McCain) are all servants of the Rockefeller oil empire and how the American political system is a one-party Republicrat dictatorshop. Odds are 1.1:1 that my comment won't be printed in the paper or on the site.

[bigron]

Published on Monday, October 20, 2008 by Agence France Presse


Could The US Election Be Stolen?

by Mira Oberman



TOLEDO, Ohio - With John McCain and Barack Obama already swapping accusations of widespread voter fraud, experts warn that a bitter and protracted fight could ensue if the race to the White House is decided by a narrow margin.

US voters lining up to register in January 2008. With John McCain and Barack Obama already swapping accusations of widespread voter fraud, experts warn that a bitter and protracted fight could ensue if the race to the White House is decided by a narrow margin. (AFP/File/Ryan Hanson) The legal battle over election rules has already made it all the way to the Supreme Court as Republicans fight to block potentially false registrations from being validated and Democrats struggle to prevent voter disenfranchisement.

Compounding the problem is the decentralized US electoral system, which hands often partisan local officials the power to make rules and maintain the voter registration rolls.

"I'm hoping it's not close," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor who specializes in election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

"I am certain there will be problems on election day."

An estimated nine million new voters have registered for the hotly contested November 4 election, and the Obama campaign says Democratic registrations are outpacing Republican ones by four to one.

The McCain campaign contends that an untold number of those registration forms are false and warns that illegally cast ballots could alter the results of the election and undermine the public's faith in democracy.

Republicans have launched a slew of lawsuits aimed at preventing false ballots from being cast, the most high-profile an attempt to challenge as many as 200,000 of more than 600,000 new registrations submitted in the battleground state of Ohio that was blocked by a Supreme Court ruling Friday.

They point to investigations into whether liberal-leaning community organization ACORN deliberately submitted false voter registrations as proof of "rampant" and widespread fraud which McCain said could be "destroying the fabric of democracy."

But the Obama campaign said this was just a "smokescreen" to divert attention from Republican "plotting" to suppress legitimate votes and to "sow confusion and harass voters and complicate the process for millions of Americans."

Voters whose registrations have been challenged or those who find their names have been removed from the rolls are often required to cast provisional ballots, which are not immediately counted in some jurisdictions and are often rejected due to technicalities.

Meanwhile, a 2007 study by the New York University School of Law concluded that "it is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

"For these problems to be really decisive they have to be within the margin of litigation, which is typically a few thousand votes," Hasen said in a recent interview.

The 2000 election took weeks to resolve as Democrat Al Gore fought Republican George W. Bush all the way to the Supreme Court after Bush won the state of Florida, and thus the election, with a margin of a few hundred votes.

Four years later, Democrat John Kerry conceded defeat despite allegations of widespread voter suppression in Ohio, which handed Bush his second term with a margin of nearly 119,000 votes.

In the meantime, electoral litigation has become part of the standard play book.

The number of lawsuits filed over elections has more than doubled from an average of 94 in the four years prior to the 2000 election to an average of 230 in the six years following, Hasen found in a study published in the Stanford Law Review.

Misinformation has also been used to discourage voters from showing up on election day.

Students in Virginia, Colorado and South Carolina were wrongfully told by voting officials that they could lose their scholarships and their parents would no longer be able to claim them on their income taxes if they registered to vote in their college towns.

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights launched an advertising campaign this week to combat misleading rumors - some started by local officials in mailings to voters - that people would be denied the right to vote if they lost their home to foreclosure, have a criminal record or do not have photo identification.

Such tactics are not new, said Laughlin McDonald, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's voting rights project.

Despite strict constitutional and legal protections for the right to vote, "the history of the country has been one of flagrant vote denial," McDonald told AFP.

Many of tactics once used to keep blacks from voting in the south - poll taxes, literacy tests, violence and intimidation - have been eliminated.

But some have been adapted, including the practice of purging voting rolls of people likely to vote for the other party by challenging them en masse.

"There's more (attempts at voter suppression) that's been going on in the lead-up to this election than any I can remember," McDonald told AFP.

"The fact remains the people who have the power to make the rules are all too often willing to do so in ways that serve their partisan interests."

© 2008 Agence France Presse

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[bigron]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 20, 2008
12:50 PM
 CONTACT: Common Cause [1]
Mary Boyle, (202) 736-5770
 

This Election: Deceptive Practices 2.0?

Report Exposes New Generation of Online Voter Suppression


WASHINGTON - October 20 - Amid daily reports of voter suppression and dirty tricks in the 2008 Presidential election, major civil rights organizations today released a report exposing a worrying new generation of online deceptive practices designed to mislead and intimidate voters. The report, released by Common Cause, The Century Foundation and The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is entitled Deceptive Practices 2.0: Legal And Policy Responses [2] and describes potential online dirty tricks to disseminate false or misleading information over the Internet.

Its release follows recent media accounts of deceptive emails [3] targeting Texas voters with misinformation about the functionality of voting machines in that state. In the last several election cycles, deceptive practices have been common: often targeted at minorities, these dirty tricks have taken many forms, from false flyers to misleading "robocalls." Now, experts fear the widespread circulation of false information disseminated via the Internet, email and other new media. The report also examines existing state and federal laws that might be used to stop these troubling scams, finding that while many laws are not adequate, some laws currently on the books in many states can be used to address online voter suppression. 

Reporters and bloggers are also invited to join an informal roundtable discussing these reports in more depth from 2-3pm at EPIC's offices at 1718 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC. To RSVP to this roundtable please call 202-483-1140 x 111.

"Misinformation campaigns, such as false flyers or intimidating robocalls, often aimed at minority communities, are not new," said Tova Wang, Common Cause vice president for research. "What this report demonstrates is the very real danger that in this election these tactics will be replicated online. Given what we've already seen during this presidential campaign and the Internet rumors already circulating, the much more widespread dissemination of false information through the Internet is a real danger."

"Our organizations have always been dedicated to giving voters the tools they need to make sure they are able to cast a meaningful ballot," said Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "We realize that in the digital age, we need to inform voters as to how to protect themselves against these new scams."

The report examines state anti-hacking and computer crimes laws, as well as state laws regarding the unauthorized use of state seals and the impersonation of public officials. At the federal level, the report analyses the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the Can-Spam Act in stopping online misinformation campaigns. It also makes recommendations for how these state and federal laws might be improved to stop the kind of efforts to misinform voters that have proliferated during this presidential campaign.

Common Cause and Election Protection are also requesting that anyone who receives an email with false information or sees a spoofed website with misinformation forward that information by going to www.commoncause.org/DeceptivePractices [4] or forwarding suspect email messages to DeceptivePractices2008@gmail.com [5]. Voters can also call the Election Protection Hotline, 866-OURVOTE to report any deceptive practices or receive voting information.

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[bigron]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 20, 2008
4:30 AM
 CONTACT: FairVote [1]
Adam Fogel, Right to Vote Director
W - (301) 270-4616 C - (216) 288-7610
afogel@fairvote.org [2]
 

New Study: Lack of Planning in Virginia May Cause Election Day Problem

Concerns Linger on Poll Booth Allocation Plans, Campus Polling Locations


TAKOMA PARK, Md. - October 20 - Virginia voters could experience problems at the polls this Election Day due to lack of uniformity, insufficient preparation and limited access for students, according to a report released today by FairVote, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

FairVote surveyed 96 out of 134 Virginia city and county election officials and found that the state does not have a standardized method for allocating poll booths, which may cause long lines on Election Day. Long lines are often caused by an inadequate number of poll booths and have plagued voters, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods, in the past several election cycles. Researchers found that only 19 counties, out of the 96 surveyed (20-percent), plan to create a written poll booth allocation plan for their county. Creating a written plan gives voters an opportunity to review election preparedness and outlines contingency plans in the event of unexpected turnout on Election Day. One of the primary reasons given by county clerks for not creating written plans is that such preparation is not required by state statute.

Students hoping to vote on campus in Virginia may be disappointed. Thirty-two of the jurisdictions surveyed have a community college or university and of those, only 2 will have on-campus polling locations for November. This percentage of on-campus polling locations was by far the lowest of any state surveyed for this project. Students have traditionally been one of the least represented groups in the political process and Virginia's lack of access to the polls for students could have a detrimental effect on their ability to participate in this year's presidential election.

"The vast majority of jurisdictions we surveyed really make it difficult for students to participate in the election," said co-author of the report, FairVote's Adam Fogel. "Virginia has a long way to go in ensuring the standardization of booth and machine allocation across precincts and more transparency in the way local officials plan for Election Day. We can accomplish these goals by increasing funding for elections and better federal and state guidelines, including minimum standards for election preparedness."

FairVote is a non-partisan electoral reform organization founded on a belief that democracy depends on respect for every voice and every vote. Part of FairVote's Democracy SoS project, Uniformity in Election Administration: A 2008 Survey of Swing State County Clerks-Virginia Edition is the fourth in a series of reports published by FairVote this fall, designed to shed light on practices of county election administrators, as well as their interpretation and compliance with state law. The Virginia Edition is the final report in the state series, which also included reports on Missouri, New Mexico and Colorado. The National Edition, surveying election officials in counties with at least 500,000 residents in ten "swing states" will be released next week.

Read all of the state reports and press releases: http://www.fairvote.org/sosresearch [3]

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[bigron]

Published on Monday, October 20, 2008 by The Free Press

Critical US Supreme Court Ruling Against Rovian GOP Vote Meddling May Prove Temporary


by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

A critical US Supreme Court decision against GOP voter meddling in Ohio may prove temporary.

In its on-going campaign to inject chaos and confusion into the voting process, the GOP has sued Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, demanding that she release to county boards of elections lists of registered voters whose information does not precisely match government data bases. The right to vote of such registrants---by most estimates as many as 200,000 in Ohio alone---could then be challenged on a case-by-case basis. George W. Bush was awarded Ohio's 20 electoral votes in 2004 with an official margin of less than 119,000 votes, though more than 100,000 votes cast in that election remain uncounted.

The 200,000 voters targeted by the Republican Party were all registered since January 1, 2008. News source estimates suggest 75-80% of these newly-registered voters are Obama supporters.

Brunner, a Democrat, has argued that the process of sorting through the minutiae of the registration discrepancies and forcing the use of provisional ballots would cause mass confusion, and would do nothing to legitimize the vote count. By all accounts, the discrepancies are usually caused by typographical errors in numbers entered for the Social Security administration and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Rarely do such discrepancies indicate fraudulent behavior or illegitimate registrations.

Last week, after a twisted back-and-forth trail of contradictory lower court decisions, the Supremes ruled that the Republicans "are not sufficiently likely to prevail" in their argument that such discrepancies pose a significant threat to the legitimacy of the electoral process. The Court also ruled that the GOP had not standing as a private organization to file such a suit.

The decision pertains to Ohio, but could have major national impact. Throughout the US, the GOP has been working to strip voters from registration rolls and challenge voting rights predominantly in districts leaning toward the Democrats. Our next article will include an estimate of how many voters that campaign could actually disenfranchise in Ohio.

But the GOP continues to seek ways to disrupt the registration and voting process. In a separate case, the Ohio Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 that the Secretary of State must allow partisan observers into voting stations where early voting is proceeding. Outside the early voting sites, Republican operatives have photographed early voters and recorded their license plates in an attempt to intimidate and challenge new voters.

The idea of massive fraud by voters continues to be proven as a hyped-up myth. The Cincinnati Enquirer has provided a detailed analysis of Ohio's more than 8 million registered voters and found that problems involving illegitimate voting are minimal. The Enquirer found only 6567 voters who had duplicate registrations. All are individuals who registered twice at their own address, a common routinely resolved by election officials and poll workers. An investigation by Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips of the 2004 election found that of the nearly 800 duplicate registrations he analyzed, none voted more than once. The Enquirer also flagged 589 registered voters who won't be 18 on Election Day.

So contrary to Republican hype, overall the total number of problematic voters appears to be miniscule. The Enquirer concluded that "Data-entry errors make matching voters to other databases an inexact science. Variations on first names, maiden names, and misspellings could red-flag an otherwise eligible voter."

On the other hand, several female Ohio voters have contacted the Free Press asking why the Republican Party would send them absentee ballot forms under maiden names they hadn't used in years. Two of the women feared that they were being targeted for challenges at the polls, since they had a history of voting Democratic.

Since 1953, only six Ohioans have been sent to prison for voter fraud, according to the Columbus Dispatch. But Republican sheriffs and prosecutors are in the midst of a partisan witch hunt the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1960s in the Deep South. to harass, arrest and prosecute voting rights groups registering new voters.

In Franklin County, Republican prosecutor Ron O'Brien has issued subpoenas to 13 voters linked to a 527 group - Vote from Home. Joe Deters, a disgraced Republican former state treasurer now Hamilton County prosecutor, has opened a similar investigation.

Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer opened an investigation of 304 new voters, mostly college students, prompting Columbus's African-American mayor Michael B. Coleman to write, "Whether a buffoonish mistake or partisan scheme gone wrong, there's no excuse for such blatant voter intimidation, in which young college students are told they may have to go through a sheriff's investigation just because they registered and voted in Ohio."

The FBI has also opened an investigation of ACORN, the national grassroots organization established in 1970. ACORN has registered some 1.3 million new voters this year, and has become a whipping boy for the GOP nation-wide anti-voter campaign.

This bizarre hysteria against "voter fraud" can be traced directly to the White House and to the McCain campaign. In order to divert attention from voter suppression tactics that helped win Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004, the Bush administration created the myth of "voter fraud." Karl Rove and his political operatives like Mark F. "Thor" Hearne used fake "voting rights" organizations and other obscure groups to finance civil suits and put pressure on the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against voter registration organizations. Twelve federal prosecutors were fired by the Bush Administration for refusing to go along with this witch hunt.

Hearne testified before Rep. Bob Ney's committee at the Ohio House in 2005. Speaking on the last panel, Hearne followed Ohio's Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who engaged in a bitter verbal dispute with Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Cleveland), since deceased. Among other things, Jones accused Blackwell of using his official web site to spread outdated information that may have led prospective voters to wrong voting locations.

Hearne claimed to represent the "non-partisan watchdog" group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). He did not tell the Congressional committee that the ACVR was newly formed and that he was national election counsel to Bush-Cheney '04. Hearne's nonprofit center's publicist, Jim Dyke, is a former communications director for the Republican National Committee.

Based on scant evidence and a single incident of a volunteer allegedly linked to crack use, Hearne pushed a version of voter fraud in Ohio that directly attacked not only ACORN, but the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and ACT-Ohio. By attacking this combination of groups, Rove and Hearne were targeting the leading forces for registering blacks, poor, union workers and young people in Ohio - those most likely to vote Democratic.

Aided by The Free Enterprise Coalition, a front group connected to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, local Republican operative Mark Rubrick filed an Ohio corrupt practices lawsuit (RICO) against all the voter registration organizations listed above in Wood County.

The civil RICO case, backed by financing from the Free Enterprise Coalition, alleged that the voter registration groups provided ". . . payments made in connections with the violations (in the form of, among other things, 'bounties,' payments or other rewards for collecting and/or processing the registrations including but not limited to illegal drugs, paid to individuals actually engaged in the violations), . . ." At the bottom of the document filed by attorneys Jeffrey Creemer and Douglas Haynam of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, a law firm based in Toledo, the following words appear: "jsc\Free Enterprise Coalition\Amended Complaint.doc" calling into question who was behind the lawsuit.

The suit was later quietly withdrawn after election rights attorney Cliff Arnebeck discovered that the Free Enterprise Coalition had indemnified Rubrick and had promised to pay any and all expenses related to his RICO suit. "I told Rubrick in no uncertain terms that his accusations that the NAACP was a criminal organization were false and that the indemnification from the Free Enterprise Coalition wasn't worth the paper it was written on," Arnebeck said.

Elsewhere throughout the US, the Republicans have used caging and a wide range of other tactics to strip as many likely Democratic voters as possible from the voter rolls. More than 308,000 were disenfranchised in Ohio prior to the 2004 election. At least another 170,000 have been eliminated since, an overall total of roughly ten percent of the Ohio electorate. Nearly all those disenfranchised come from heavily Democratic urban areas. Similar disenfranchisements are being reported throughout the US.

In 2007 Brunner succeeded Blackwell as Ohio's Secretary of State. Blackwell also served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, and helped choreograph the theft of the Buckeye State electoral votes that tipped the election. Brunner has generally attempted to open the voting process in Ohio 2008, but has met with fierce resistance from the GOP, which still controls the Ohio legislature. Among other things, Brunner's attempt to provide paper ballots for all Ohio voters who want them has been reduced by GOP resistance to just 25% availability. The GOP also resisted early and open voting procedures that have allowed Ohioans to cast their ballots for several weeks now.

This new US Supreme Court decision removes a significant morass of confusion and chaos from the voting process. Many of the myriad discrepancies among official data sources "bear no relationship whatsoever to a voter's eligibility to vote a regular, as opposed to a provisional ballot," Brunner explained. The mismatches "may well be used at the county level unnecessarily to challenge fully qualified voters and severely disrupt the voting process."

Trailing badly for the presidency and nearly all other federal offices, the GOP is desperately seeking other routes to inject chaos into the electoral process. It has filed new motions in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, which has seven Republicans and no Democrats, and was re-shaped by more than $7 million in illegal and anonymous campaign donations linked to the US Chamber of Commerce. With this latest filing, the GOP is clearly hoping to revive this challenge to at least 200,000 Ohio voters, and to make this restrictive and confused process into a standard nationwide. The Republicans continue to deploy challengers to the polls wherever possible, and to foster legal attacks against ACORN in particular and the voter registration process in general.

In Ohio and elsewhere the GOP is desperately seeking a way around this new US Supreme Court decision. In 2000 the high court overruled the Florida Supreme Court in a "one time only" decision that stopped a recount and put George W. Bush in the White House.

But if this surprising new pro-democracy decision holds, it could set important precedent for protection of voter rights and help guarantee a fuller and fairer electoral process this year. If not, the electoral system could be crippled yet again, for years to come.

© 1970-2008 The Columbus Free Press
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, and WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, all available a http://freepress.org [1], where this article first appeared.

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[tritonman]

Well Ron does any of this really matter given the two corrupt candidates we are given>>  yes we  will vote for a third party of course,, but these two both should be thrown out anyway given the vial things they represent.

[peepnklown]

The 2000 Election was stolen.
The 2004 Election was stolen.
The 2008 Election could be stolen.
Sadly, it does not matter if Obama or McCain wins, we all lose. I am also doubtful of the mainstream media hyping Obama as the clear winner. I am also trying to prepare the majority of Obama supporters at work for no change and more of the same.
I’ve gotten a lot of email from Greg Palast about preparing for a stolen election in 2008; you all might want to subscribe.