Home foreclosing? Michigan doesn't want you voting.

Voter Suppression in Michigan?
They "will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,” according to party chairman James Carabelli.

State election rules allow parties to assign “election challengers” to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they “have a good reason to believe” that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a “true resident of the city or township.”

The Michigan Republicans’ planned use of foreclosure lists is apparently an attempt to challenge ineligible voters as not being “true residents.”

The hell, people. If it weren't bad enough that lots and lots of people are losing their homes because of the mismanagement of our economy, now the same party responsible for tanking things so badly wants their victims to stay away from the polls as well.

One expert questioned the legality of the tactic.

“You can’t challenge people without a factual basis for doing so,” said J. Gerald Hebert, a former voting rights litigator for the U.S. Justice Department who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington D.C.-based public-interest law firm. “I don’t think a foreclosure notice is sufficient basis for a challenge, because people often remain in their homes after foreclosure begins and sometimes are able to negotiate and refinance.”

The article takes a while to come right out and call this vote suppression, but eventually they do.

“At a minimum what you are seeing is a fairly comprehensive effort by the Republican Party, a systematic broad-based effort to put up obstacles for people to vote,” he said. “Nobody is contending that these people are not legally registered to vote.

“When you are comprehensively challenging people to vote,” Hebert went on, “your goals are two-fold: One is you are trying to knock people out from casting ballots; the other is to create a slowdown that will discourage others,” who see a long line and realize they can’t afford to stay and wait.

This is yet another reason to doublecheck your voter registration. You can register to vote online now, and if you're already registered, you really need to use this site's tool to doublecheck that your registration is still valid. This isn't just for people in Michigan. Vote suppression is a big problem. VA hospitals aren't allowed to have voter registration drives. Stricter ID laws don't actually really help with voter fraud (since it's not really common for people to try and vote a billion times under different names--it's hard enough to get people to vote once), but they do keep people who don't have the money to keep around certain forms of ID from voting (for example, naturalized citizen papers for legal migrants, or passports for the rest of us).

It's one thing to make sure that everybody voting brings a valid ID so that you can check to make sure they should be there. It's quite another to have coordinated, concerted efforts to keep as many people as possible from voting. I question any party that needs to do that to win. Hell, I question any party that wants to do this to win, since it says a lot about how much they really care about representing their constituents.

And before someone says, "This isn't McCain's fault! These are just locals being assholes, and you can't pin that on the actual official campaign," I want you to check this part out as well.

The party is creating a spreadsheet of election challenger volunteers and expects to coordinate a training with the regional McCain campaign, Graves said in an interview with Michigan Messenger.

When asked for further details on how Republicans are compiling challenge lists, he said, “I would rather not tell you all the things we are doing.”

Go check your registration. Michigan's not the only state with a history of this nonsense. It's not uncommon, which means you guys need to be careful you don't get screwed over. We call this an ownership election! If your vote is invalidated because you're not the kind of person they want in the polls, you're on your own. You need to stay up on this to make sure that you can vote in a party that *gasp* wants you to vote.

Dear Veterans: Stay Home in November. Love, the VA.

Help Our Veterans Vote

WHAT is the secretary of Veterans Affairs thinking? On May 5, the department led by James B. Peake issued a directive that bans nonpartisan voter registration drives at federally financed nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and shelters for homeless veterans. As a result, too many of our most patriotic American citizens — our injured and ill military veterans — may not be able to vote this November.

I have witnessed the enforcement of this policy. On June 30, I visited the Veterans Affairs Hospital in West Haven, Conn., to distribute information on the state’s new voting machines and to register veterans to vote. I was not allowed inside the hospital.

Outside on the sidewalk, I met Martin O’Nieal, a 92-year-old man who lost a leg while fighting the Nazis in the mountains of Northern Italy during the harsh winter of 1944. Mr. O’Nieal has been a resident of the hospital since 2007. He wanted to vote last year, but he told me that there was no information about how to register to vote at the hospital and the nurses could not answer his questions about how or where to cast a ballot.

I carry around hundreds of blank voter registration cards in the trunk of my car for just such occasions, so I was able to register Mr. O’Nieal in November. I also registered a few more veterans — whoever I could find outside on the hospital’s sidewalk.

There are thousands of veterans of wars in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan who are isolated behind the walls of V.A. hospitals and nursing homes across the country. We have an obligation to make sure that every veteran has the opportunity to make his or her voice heard at the ballot box.

Why would this craziness be happening? Why in the world would our government not want veterans voting? Particularly when they supposedly tend to go Republican, right? Shouldn't this administration be clambering all over themselves to see as many military folks voting as possible?

Nope. Because this year military organizations are not favoring the Republican candidate, and active duty personnel aren't donating too much to him either.

This one is particularly interesting. The article from The Carpetbagger Report cites this, but I thought it deserved a mention in its own right here.

According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain.

(snip)

Individuals in the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps have all leaned Republican this cycle, but the only branch in which that ideology has carried over to the presidential race is the Marine Corps, where McCain leads Obama by about $4,000. In each of the other branches -- including the Navy, in which McCain served when he was taken prisoner during the Vietnam War -- Obama leads by significant margins.

"That's shocking. The academic debate is between some who say that junior enlisted ranks lean slightly Republican and some who say it's about equal, but no one would point to six-to-one" in Democrats' favor, said Aaron Belkin, a professor of political science at the University of California who studies the military. "That represents a tremendous shift from 2000, when the military vote almost certainly was decisive in Florida and elsewhere, and leaned heavily towards the Republicans."

In 2000, Republican George W. Bush outraised Democrat Al Gore among military personnel almost 2 to 1. In 2004, with the Iraq war underway, John Kerry closed the gap with President Bush, but Bush still raised $1.50 from the military for every $1 his Democratic opponent collected.

For Republicans, who generally seem to rely heavily on the support of troops, this is a scary scary thing. Of course, it's to be expected. Our troops are starting to realize that Republicans don't care about them.

Maybe now they'll start voting with their own interests. And maybe that's what has this administration so damned scared they'll vote at all.

So Dear Veterans:

Stay home in November. 

Love, the VA.

Because the best way to empower women is to rob blacks of their vote.

From this entry by insomnia.

Recently, there were numerous reports in North Carolina of anonymous, caller-ID blocked robocalls in North Carolina from a black man claiming to be a "Lamont Williams", urging voters in predominantly black communities to return their voter registration form to the State Board of Elections... without voting.

Well, it turns out that these anonymous calls from a ficticious black male were made by Women's Voices Women Vote, a D.C.-based PAC which aims to boost voting among "unmarried women voters."

Unfortunately for WVWV, the State of North Carolina was able to track them down and the media attention was significant, so they put out a statement saying that it was a mistake...

Nevermind the fact that the calls are clearly illegal, as calls that use a blocked phone number and provide no contact information are a clear violation of North Carolina rules regulating "robo-calls" (N.C. General Statute 163-104(b)(1)c). It is also a Class I felony in North Carolina "to misrepresent the law to the public through mass mailing or any other means of communication where the intent and the effect is to intimidate or discourage potential voters from exercising their lawful right to vote."

... or that they're not targeting women voters with these calls, and apparently too ashamed to even identify themselves and promote their efforts to register women voters.

... or that they made the same "oops!" mistakes in Arizona, Wisconsin, and numerous other states, which led to the State of Wisconsin singling WVWV out as having "ignored or disregarded state deadlines" . . . causing "hundreds of Wisconsin voters who think they registered in advance" to not be. Jan Brewer, Arizona' Secretary of State, was even more blunt in her criticism, calling the organization's tactics "misleading and deceptive".

Of course, the unbiased nature of WVWV would be a lot easier to believe if Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, wasn't one of their boardmembers.

But please, don't be swayed by the fact that the organization is run by a major Clinton donor who donated $4200 to Hillary, another $2500 to H
ILLPAC, and a whopping $5000 to Emily's List, donating to them after they publically endorsed and started campaigning for Hillary Clinton.

You could perhaps overlook the fact that despite WVWV's supposedly neutral stance on the candidates, the organization's founder practically gave an endorsement speech for Hillary Clinton at the 2007 WAND/WILL conference.

... and did I mention that the organization's Executive Director worked for Bill Clinton,"assisting in the development and implementation of all polling and focus groups done for the presidential primary and general election campaigns"?

Now, ordinarily I would say this could potentially be a mistake... but when you repeat the same mistakes over and over again, are repeatedly called on it, and not only fail to change the content of your robocall campaign, much less the timing... well, that sounds an awful lot more like a carefully-thought out voter supression tactic to me...

... with legal advice provided by Holly Schadler, "an operator for the Clinton White House", who "along with Robert Bauer and Judith Corley--two of her partners at Perkins Coie--incorporated the Back to Business Committee, set up in 1994 . . . to defend Bill and Hillary." This committee later became part of James Carville's "Education and Information Project", which performed the same function: protecting the Clintons by attacking their critics. Once again, Schadler was one of the founders of James Carville's project, willing to dedicate her time and energy to discredit and potentially run ads against an independent federal prosecutor appointed to investigate the President.

Really, this org's repeatedly "accidental" slimy acts of voter supression, combined with numerous hardcore ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign makes "Swiftboat Veterans For The Truth" look like a bunch of kids making mudpies.

For such a professionally advised organization, how could they possibly overlook the fact that they have a responsibility to the public and to the states whose laws they repeatedly violated? In what way *don't* their repeated criminal acts justify that *someone* gets thrown in jail for at *least* a few months?!

I'm including this because obviously not everyone watches my LJ friends page. Seriously, though. This guy's a great blogger, and you should all go comment on this entry over there.