Politics: Bogus registration claims a ‘smokescreen’ for GOP suppression efforts
Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
Republicans and their allies in the mainstream news media are stating publicly that it’s Democrats who are trying to rig the 2008 elections by submitting voter-registration applications with phony names and other such chicanery. Funny how the media is either missing out on the real story or is working in concert with their friends in the GOP to suppress it as the GOP has been efforting to suppress Democratic voter turnout.
“This has been an election of enormous interest to the American people, and we think that’s something that should be celebrated. Our opponents seem to have a different view of that,” Obama-Biden campaign manager David Plouffe said on a conference call with reporters this afternoon to discuss the latest smear from the McCain-Palin campaign, that the Obama-Biden camp has partnered with outside groups that have been engaging in fraudulent voter-registration efforts aimed at skewing the ’08 presidential election.
The reports – breathlessly reported in the media – that voter-registration efforts in either 11 or 14 swing states, depending on who is doing the reporting, have come under investigation are so much bird-cage liner, as are the partisan investigations like the perp-walk-inspired raid on the Nevada headquarters of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, a nonprofit that has registered 1.3 million new voters this election cycle and has for years been the target of top Republicans, including former senior White House adviser Karl Rove and former attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, for its success in getting people registered to vote.
The Obama-Biden campaign has been engaged in its own substantial voter-registration efforts organized by its paid staff, registering thousands of Shenandoah Valley residents dating back to the initiation of its registration campaign in June and millions nationwide dating back to the beginning of the ’08 nomination season. “Our approach has been to make sure that all Americans who have expressed such interest in this election and in their future have their voices heard, that their votes get counted, and that the integrity of the voting system is protected. That is our guiding principle,” Plouffe said.
The story that is being missed has to do with the voter-suppression efforts of Republicans that is apparently ongoing here in the Valley. Even as there has been much ado made about the campaign at the conservative Liberty University to register students there expected to vote Republican in Virginia on Election Day, there has been a for the most part quiet attempt in Harrisonburg to tamp down voter registration among students at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, as Harrisonburg Democratic Committee vice chair Joseph Fitzgerald reported in a column published today in the Augusta Free Press.
“The State Board of Elections listed 1,794 new city voters from February to the end of September, a week before the deadline to register. Almost 390 were listed by the State Board as rejected,” wrote Fitzgerald, who then noted that the numbers “suggest that almost 18 percent of new registrations in the city were rejected, but it does not reflect the 500 forms the registrar reported receiving just on the final day, nor does it reflect any that may have been rejected from that group. Adding to the confusion, it is not clear if those who received the “irregularities” letter have since been officially rejected.”
“The registrar and the senior member of the Electoral Board are Republicans, and polls suggest new voters this year will tend Democratic. Again, it is fair to question the intentions in the office. The effect, regardless of intent, is a Republican registrar disenfranchising several hundred potentially Democratic voters,” Fitzgerald wrote in the column. “The number may seem small in a state where more than 3 million people may vote, but three statewide elections in the past two decades have been decided by fewer than 10,000 votes, one of them by fewer than 500. Virginia is leaning Democratic in the presidential race this year, and Republicans have a vested interest in limiting the electorate, where possible, to those who have kept the state Republican in past presidential elections,” Fitzgerald wrote.
The issues being raised by Republicans regarding ACORN and the registration aims of the Obama-Biden campaign are a “smokescreen” for what Republicans are doing behind the scenes to suppress Democratic voter turnout, Plouffe said. And what we’re seeing now in that respect is just the tip of the iceberg. “We have no doubt that their efforts at suppression and intimidation are going to be unprecedented,” Plouffe said.
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Chris: ACORN has been involved in shady operations for decades, but with the advent of the internet and new writers/investigators, a lot of what was missed or covered-up in the past, is now being caught and exposed (and I don’t care whose ox get gored).
The whole history of Obama’s background and associations would have been based solely on books about himself that he may not have written (or with uncredited ghostwriters), if internet researchers hadn’t done some really good investigations (i.e. Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinksy, Don Rose, William Ayers & Bernadine Dohrn, and Mike Klonsky, etc).
A number of years ago, I was assigned a superfund waste site case to handle by myself (I was a Senior Paralegal at the time) because the attorney was tied up in court. I reviewed the few “documents” that the Opposing Counsel had provided to the govt as the basis of their claim for $25 million in site clear-up costs.
After a minute of reading them, I told the attorney that this was a bluff, that the documents were not trustworthy, and that we needed to do some real research on the history of the site before the govt should take any position on clean-up costs.
(One govt agency was willing to pay the $25M without challenging it).
I found a “smoking gun” document, along with other materials, which totally wiped out the Opposing Counsel’s claims. I had called their “bluff” and when they tried to lay down their cards, they had nothing.
Saved the taxpayer $25M. Not bad for a short period of research.
Many things you hear or read about today are only surface covering. When you dig deeper, you can hit gold, oil, paydirt, or a cesspool. ACORN is a cesspool and this is only the top of that pool.
People are now researching other areas of Obama’s past and associates, and what they are finding is appalling. However, you won’t find them in the mainstream media. CNN’s show on terrorist Bill Ayers was based on work that others have done for decades. (I testified before Congress about Ayers and SDS’s ‘Days of Rage’ back in August 1969).
Seems CNN were a little slow on the uptake, but with what is at stake in this election, you would have thought that every news/media institution in the US would have been doing “dig to the center of the earth” research, but they haven’t.
The price for this incompetency, bias, and coverup may be the establishment of America’s first “autocracy”, or as one other writer called it “thugocracy.”
Just look at Venezuela and you will see this work in progress. Could it happen here? Perhaps, but I don’t want to risk it.
There is so much more to this story than I can write here, but I will try to get out a column for AFP which summarizes what is at stake.
If ACORN is found to be as corrupt as it appears, remember that one acorn can grow into a mighty oak.
One ACORN can grow into a mighty crooked oak if left unwatched, and its roots can destroy the foundation of your house.
You’re losing me here. Seems like you’re saying that there might be something to the ACORN story, but you don’t know for sure. Unfortunately, that’s not what the McCain-Palin people are selling. They’re selling certainty.
Also, it seems that you’re buying the ridiculous assertion of the blogger who speculated that Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama’s first book. I hope I’m reading your reference to “uncredited ghostwriters” above wrong there.
Chris,
Are you saying that the Obama campaign has not paid ACORN over $ 800,000 to register voters, that this payment was not hidden in Obama expense reporting and that serious voter fraud is not associated with ACORN efforts. Please don’t tell us that the many states investigating ACORN are part of some “vast right wing plot.”
Quote me accurately, Charles. What I said here is that the allegations against ACORN are being overhyped by the GOP and the news media. The McCain-Paliners would have us believe that there is something systematic going on. And that is clearly not true, save to those viewing the same set of facts regarding ACORN through a partisan lens. And those viewing through that lens do include partisan Republicans trying to use the machinery of government (i.e. your tax dollars and mine) to try to win an election that they can’t otherwise win on their own efforts.
Chris: ACORN has been found to have performed illegal operations in the past, and what is going on now is more widespread than is often reported. It cannot be a coincidence.
To make a long story short, I don’t care what the Republicans say about ACORN. I care about what is being proven everyday in newspapers, but esp. in columns by investigative writers, across the country.
Election records are being checked and fraud has been found in ove a dozen states, with more investigations by state and federal authorities coming online every day.
The history of ACORN has long ties to the far-left and SDS from the late 60′s/early 70′s when their strategy was developed by Heather Booth, Wade Ratzke, Tom Hayden, C. Clark Kissinger, and many other SDS/far-left strategists. Add into this mix the money and personnel of the marxist created/funded Institute for Policy Studies (one of its top funders was a Soviet agent, Samuel Rubin and his daughter, Cora Weiss and her marxist husband, Peter, sit on the Board of IPS and have, for decades. I testified about Weiss’ blackmail attempts aimed at families of POWS before the House Foreign Affairs COmmittee in April, 1971).
I have the luxury of having been working in journalism since 1969, and having contacts within the Left and with internal security specialists and agents since then. I wish I could publish everything I was shown or told. Then a lot would be explained. Unfortunately I cannot write about this confidential information/documents. That is what internal security involves, often knowing but not being about to tell.
There is so much about the Ayers family that you have not seen in the mainstream media that you could write two books on it. Unfortunately pappa Ayers is dead or he could have been indicted for aiding and abetting a federal fugitive, his son William. And there is some circumstantial evidence that Bill Ayes and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, another psychopathic communist terrorist, were responsible, directly or in part, in the murder of a San Francisco policeman and the blinding of his partner. There were fingerprints on bombmaking components in a Weathermen hideout.
One day I hope all the information about what the police seized in that place are made public.
Obama has chosen friends and advisors with terrible backgrounds, ranging from racists, terrorists, crooks, crooked politicians, and possibly foreign operatives (from both Arab and communist countries/organizations – the Malley case is one; Auchi is another).
We have only scratched the surface about Obama’s connections, and they frighten me, for the first time in my life. I have helped get Hanoi and Cuban propaganda agents fired from the news media and from congressional staffs, but I have never seen anything like the infiltration and influence that the hardcore marxist left has on this presidential candidate and campaign.
Research on this will go on long after the election, and I suspect that there will be some surprises coming out that will embarrass the Democrats, if that is possible.
PT Barnum must be smiling in that great big con-show in the sky.
ACORN employees have been found to have engaged in improprieties in the past. So have Wal-Mart employees. By the standards given us here and by the McCain-Paliners, we should indict Wal-Mart as being a company of crooks, and anyone who shops there is guilty by association.
The Ayers smear is unfortunate, and is being propagated by partisans for clearly political purposes. The fear that you and others have is self-generated. The idea that is being advanced here that Obama is a marxist is extreme, and is not supported by anything other than innuendo and rumor. But smearmongering is nothing more than that, unfortunately.
As editor, I am not going to allow people to use this forum or the AFP website to advance the smears that we are seeing come from the McCain-Palin camp. Period.
Chris,
I do find it quite unfortunate that you would suppress the right to express an opinion that has been stated, no matter how incorrectly or correctly, in a civil and dignified manner.
And I must have been away for a long time.
I just read the title “The Valley’s Progressive Voice”…whatever happened to Mr. Chris “fiscal conservative, social libertarian” Graham?
Or was that a smokescreen, too?
What part, Phil, of saying “I am not going to allow people to use this forum or the AFP website to advance the smears” is “civil and dignified”?
It’s a long story, Phil. Begins with me running for city council, and Steve Landes deciding that he needed to endorse my Republican opponent. To tell it would take months, because that’s how long it has been developing. If you have a weekend, read the AFP day by day beginning around May 12. It’ll all make sense in a few hours.
Progressives, this progressive, anyway, can be fiscally conservative, much more so than the fake conservatives who really just call themselves conservative as an excuse to cut taxes on the superwealthy and otherwise put our federal budget into serious imbalance.
Conservative means keeping government spending in line, cutting programs that aren’t needed or aren’t run well, and making sure that the ones that are needed are run well, and are properly funded. That’s my approach.
Progressive is to me not a synonym for liberal, as some people mean it, but a word denoting an approach oriented toward achieving economic, social and national-security progress.
Progressive and conservative are not terms, as I live them, that are mutually exclusive.
Max’s statements were civil and dignified. It’s not like he came on here ranting, cursing, and making a fool out of himself in total ignorance.
While YOU may not consider the term Progressive to mean “liberal”, know your audience…most modern progressives in this country are substituting the term to get away from being called “liberal”.
As for your change in thought process…I’ll read the AFP from those dates you referred to, and I’ll give you my own thoughts.
Politely repeating GOP smears is neither “civil” nor “dignified.” Neither is the use of the words “liberal” or “progressive” as a perjorative. There are plenty of places where people can do that. None of them are named Augusta Free Press.