Whitman Gets a HUGE Bailout As Santa Clara Co. Acknowledges Registration In 1999

Meg Whitman was seriously on the ropes for her apparent lack of voting or even registering to vote until she was 46 years old. Her contradictory and downright puzzling alibis and statements after the fact were utterly mockable, and Chris Kelly did the honors, as he's wont to do. But all along, Whitman was looking for a lifeline - some discrepancy in the reporting that she could use to muddy the entire story, to "prove" that the Sacramento Bee was wrong in their reporting, even if 99% of the story remains true. She has found that lifeline.

Republican candidate Meg Whitman was registered to vote in Santa Clara County for nine months in 1999, Santa Clara elections officials said today, admitting that they supplied inaccurate information to The Bee and other news organizations on the issue.

The Registrar of Voters had previously told The Bee and other media outlets that there was no record of Margaret Cushing Whitman being registered to vote or voting in Santa Clara County in its current voter registration database, on its older microfiche records, or in a separate database of canceled voter registrations.
On Monday, Whitman's campaign said its own team had last week discovered a previously unknown record of Whitman being registered to vote. They said they found it in an archived Santa Clara County voter registration database [...]

DFM then found an archival voting registration record for Whitman on an old back-up file of the county's 1999 registration records not available to county staff, he said.

"The back-up file confirmed that Ms. Whitman was registered to vote in Palo Alto from February 8, 1999 to October 4, 1999," Moreles said.

Importantly, no votes took place in Santa Clara County between February and October 1999. And while Whitman, according to the Registrar of Voters, re-registered in a different county sometime after that, there is not yet a record of such a registration - at least not until 2002.

The point is that this doesn't fundamentally change the story about Whitman's voting record. She still hasn't produced the full records on her own; still hasn't confirmed any registration or vote prior to 1999, when she was 43 years old; still hasn't accounted for the "I clearly remember voting in 1984" remark she made on Fox News yesterday; still hasn't clarified numerous contradictions in her evolving set of stories; and still hasn't shown a voting record befitting any kind of engaged citizen.

However, she has one little data point where the Bee made a mistake. And she's sure to use that to try and discredit the whole article and the whole issue. Whenever asked about this from now on, she'll start with "The Sacramento Bee article was inaccurate." And she'll be technically right. And it won't answer the question.

It'll probably work, too.

It's at least good enough for Rudy Giuliani to endorse her.

New Registration Numbers Show More Increases For Democrats

The latest report of registration, current up to February 2010, shows that voters have continued to register Democratic in higher numbers even since the general election. There are now 17.3 million registered voters, 74.4% of all eligible adults, and Democrats have a 2.32 million vote advantage over Republicans. By the percentages, the state consists of 44.52% Democrats, 31.14% Republicans, and 19.99% decline to state, with smaller parties rounding out the rest of the voters.

2010 is the last year before a new census and new district lines, so the district-level numbers only apply for the next election cycle. Still, a close reading makes clear where Democrats should be focusing their registration efforts and resources for the next year.

In Congress, there are two Republican-held seats where Republicans hold less than 40% of the registration share, seen as a key dividing line. Those are Dan Lungren's CA-03 (39.7% Republican-37.7% Democratic) and, surprisingly, Buck McKeon's CA-25 (39.7% Republican-39.2% Democratic), which has changed dramatically over the past few years and could be ripe for a well-funded, legitimate challenger. With only 351,421 registered voters in CA-25, there are additional non-voters waiting to be registered there to tighten up those numbers even further. CA-19 also has a shortfall of voters which could lead to a tightening of the rolls.

In the State Senate, the only even-numbered seat (the ones up for election in 2010) that deserves a focus is SD-12, where Jeff Denham is termed out. There are 47.5% registered Democrats and 33.1% registered Republicans. Democrats in that region are fairly conservative, and so there may not be a progressive coming out of that district, but there's no reason on Earth why Democrats shouldn't own that seat. Especially since there may be 100,000 unregistered voters out there.

As for the Assembly, the numbers look good in AD-05, AD-26 (Dems have a 42-39 lead in registration), AD-30 and AD-36, with a few other marginal possibilities based solely on the voter reg. numbers (AD-38, AD-63, AD-64, and AD-65 come to mind). There is absolutely a path to pick up three seats and a 2/3 majority in the Assembly, if the net is cast wide enough.

Of course, oftentimes Democratic officials focus too much, in my view, on voter registration statistics, and shoudl recruit good candidates and give them the resources they need to compete instead. But in this off-year, registration stats offer an opportunity to determine where to target. You can dig through them yourself at the Secretary of State's page.

What We've Been Waiting For, What We've Been Working For: The Progressive Wave Comes To California

The past few days have seen another spate of "OMG, Republican incumbents are in trouble!" stories in the traditional media. Aside from them not understanding and internalizing the theory of coattails, this problem is particularly acute among the California media, where gerrymandering is just supposed to lock up Congressional and legislative seats airtight, except when, you know, it doesn't. Peculiar to this rendering of the world is the idea that nobody ever moves, dies, or reaches the age of 18 in any particular district, and thus voter registration statistics are completely static. But of course this is not true, and once the Democratic Party started putting resources into registering new and lapsed voters, why look what happened:

One of the major reasons for these competitive contests has been the narrowing gap in registered voters between the parties. While Republicans still enjoy a substantial advantage over Democrats in all three districts, their leads have shrunk significantly.

Four years ago, Republicans led Democrats among registered voters by margins of 17 percent in the Orange County-based 46th, 15 percent in the San Diego-area 50th and 11 percent in the Riverside County-based 45th. By this year's registration deadline of Oct. 20, those leads had shrunk by 6 percent in the 50th, 5 percent in the 46th and 6 percent in the 45th.

There are still the conventional wisdom-besotted punditocracy that simply can't conceive of these major shifts in the electorate (it's not like anything has happened the past eight years that would lead people to desert the Republican Party in droves, right?), who believe that incumbents just win and that's the end of it. But just ask one of those incumbents what he fears on Tuesday:

HUNTINGTON BEACH - Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach/Long Beach said Friday he's concerned that Republicans will be discouraged by a possible Democratic landslide at the polls, affecting his re-election bid.

"If (Republican nominee John) McCain does not do well, and Republicans stay home, my lead could evaporate," the nine-term incumbent of the 46th Congressional District said.

Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook, the Democratic challenger, said the race is a "statistical dead heat," and agreed that a solid turnout for change - from the economic problems facing the country - could be the difference in Tuesday's hotly contested race.

"All the uncertainty that's going on now is helping," she said, adding that incumbents who have been "part of the system for the past 20 years" could be vulnerable.

This is all the more reason why Democrats and progressives need to remember Jim Corman and get as many voters to the polls as possible. And Don't Stop At The Top, of course.

And if the scenario is bright in the Congressional races, the Assembly looks even brighter. Why, even Dan Walters has figured this one out.

Voters may not realize that they could dramatically alter that balance, but interest groups that are pouring millions of dollars into legislative and ballot measure campaigns certainly get it.

Democrats could pick up one seat in the Senate and are so certain of gaining three to five seats in the Assembly that they've diverted resources into several marginal districts, taking advantage of Obamania-inspired voter registration gains, to shoot for the six added seats that would give them a two-thirds majority. That margin is required for the budget and tax increases and could happen as the Capitol wrestles with a rapidly deteriorating economy and a fast-growing budget deficit.

We know about those top-line seats: AD-80, AD-78, AD-15, AD-10, AD-26. But it's Linda Jones' race in AD-36 that has captured my attention. She represents the ultimate swing vote as the potential 54th Democrat in the State Assembly, the vote that would give us a 2/3 majority, which in California is a governing majority. And Linda Jones happens to be really great, campaiging on a message of green jobs in the waning days of the race.

As part of her campaign to create a stronger economy for the region, Democratic Assembly Candidate Linda Jones (36th District) today announced her “High Desert Region Green Jobs Initiative” - using ‘green jobs’ to increase opportunities for unemployed and underemployed adults in the High Desert communities. Lt. Governor John Garamendi, a longtime advocate for environmental protection and renewable energy, offered his full support of the plan, calling it a “giant leap forward” for the region’s economy.

“Investing in the ‘green economy’ is a win-win because it will create jobs and increase our clean energy efficiency,” said Linda Jones. “The High Desert Region Green Jobs Initiative will create outreach, educational, and training programs to recruit, develop, and sustain a green industry that will create jobs, increase our clean energy efficiency, and grow our economy for the region.”

There's a website, High Desert Green Jobs, that details the initiative. It's fantastic that someone in a swing district trying to become the first Democratic member of the Assembly from this region in 34 years is offering such a bold agenda.

This district had an eight-point GOP lean just two years ago. Now the registration gap is GONE. 400 votes separate Democrats and Republicans. Don't give me that redistricting stuff, nothing's stopping this progressive wave. I'm excited for Linda Jones and so is her community.

There's just one day to go. You need to Stay for Change because you can have a major impact right here in California. I'm going to give predictions on everything in the morning. But right now, I'm psyched.

Registered Voter By Birth

As the last of the lawsuits against ACORN gets laughed out of court, and as Republican Secretaries of State grumble about having to reinstate voters to the rolls, it's clear that, no matter what happens in the election, this insanity around voter registration and zombie lies about voter fraud has to stop. Exhibit A is the fact that John McCain's own head of his "Honest And Open Election Committee" can't name any evidence of voter fraud.

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which this had occurred.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,” he said [...]

Asked for specifics about the dangers of fake registration, Ben Porritt, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, provided links to 13 news clips and a 2003 Missouri state auditor’s report. Eleven of the cases did not involve registration fraud. Two recounted how felons appeared to have cast illegal votes under their own names. The lone example of a forged registration leading to an illegitimate vote comes from The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, who in April 2006 wrote that a community organizer had improperly registered a noncitizen, and “someone eventually voted in [the noncitizen’s] name.”

Michaelson, who served for 27 years as executive director of the Illinois Board of Elections, said the sharp exchanges over registration fraud have undermined voters’ confidence in the electoral system.

“The fact that so many of these illegal registrations are being made public raises a perception in the minds of people,’’ he said. “That’s more of a general concern. You don’t want to perpetuate the idea that our election process is lacking integrity.”

Asked whether his own party was responsible for fostering that perception, Michaelson said, “Well, it doesn’t help. It has captured the attention of a lot of people.” Why do it, then? “Maybe it’s because there’s nothing else to talk about,” he said.

Boy, he is part of a committee with the word "honest" in it, isn't he?

This is one of those "problems" that actually has a solution, a very smart and nonpartisan solution that would be simple to implement and would eliminate a lot of unnecessary labor. Rick Hasen asks for America to nationalize voter registration.

The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.

This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York. States would not have to use the system for their state and local elections, but most would choose to do so because of the cost savings.

There's something in this for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and there's no better way to do it than the way most mature democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.

Finally, universal voter registration is good for the country, not only because it will make it easier for those who wish to vote to do so, but because it should end controversy over ballot integrity that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our election process. If President McCain or Obama makes this a priority, we can have the system ready in time for the president's re-election.

Of course, Republicans aren't serious about ballot integrity, and their opposition to this would prove it. They just want something to carp about and undermine confidence in elections. In addition, there's a credible concern, given how the current government has politicized the Department of Justice and the General Services Administration, that giving over voter registration to them might have dangerous consequences.

But of course, there are Republican Secretaries of State doing that politicization right now. And wouldn't it be nice to create an election system where people don't have to turn in a form or remember to vote at an old precinct if they missed the cutoff, a system designed to make voting easier instead of harder?

This is but one possible innovation in elections (like expanding early voting access, making Election Day a weekend or a holiday, instant runoff voting, a mandate for paper ballots, abolishing the Electoral College, etc., etc.), but it certainly would help to defuse this massive hissy fit we hear every four years like clockwork. I'd love to see Republicans oppose the concept of registering every American to vote.

New Voter Registration Stats - 17.3 Million Californians Registered To Vote

Congratulations to Debra Bowen. Under her leadership, a record 17.3 million Californians are registered to vote in the November election. That is 74.56% of total eligible voters, which isn't too bad. Bowen released the statistics today, and there are lots of interesting numbers in there.

Here are the county stats. Democrats have a 2.25 million voter lead on Republicans, and represent 44.40% of the electorate, as opposed to 31.37% for the Yacht Party. Riverside and Imperial Counties are still below the average for eligible voters (both around 65%), but well up from earlier in the year, a great boon for Manuel Perez' efforts. Orange County is among the best for percentage of eligible voters registered, with 86%. Democrats have taken control in San Bernardino County, with a 10,000-vote lead. And in San Diego County, the spread is an incredible 400 votes (539,560 for Democrats, 539,939 for Republicans).

Let's go to the Congressional stats.

CA-03: Republicans outnumber Democrats now by just 9,000 votes, a difference of only 2.19%. If Bill Durston doesn't pull off the win, this is the #1 targeted seat for 2010.
CA-04: Still a hefty lead for registered Republicans, 45.94% to 31.06%.
CA-11: Registered Republicans still outnumber registered Dems here, but by only 3,800 votes (about 1%).
CA-26: Now a 20,000 vote spread (around 5.5% lead for Republicans).
CA-45: Republicans outnumber Democrats by 16,000 votes (4.6%). This seat also needs to be targeted heavily now and in the future.
CA-46: 31.91% for Democrats, 44.07% for Republicans.
CA-50: 31.35% for Dems, 40.55% for Republicans.

Here's the Assembly.

AD-10: Literally 100 votes separate Democrats and Republicans here. But you know, it's hopelessly gerrymandered.
AD-15: Democrats have 12,000 more votes than Republicans (3.5%).
AD-26: Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5,000 votes (2.4%).
AD-30: A 13,000 vote lead for Democrats.
AD-36: Again, 100 votes separate Democrats and Republicans. I didn't realize it was this close. Linda Jones has a real shot.
AD-37: Republicans have the advantage by 16,000 votes (around 6%).
AD-38: Republicans have a 9,000 vote advantage.
AD-63: That's only an 8,000 vote lead for Republicans.
AD-78: Democrats have fully 26,000 more registered voters than Republicans (a lead of 11%).
AD-80: It's a 15,000 vote lead here, 44.99% to 37.17%.

Six seats flipping, given the expected big turnout, is definitely a possibility.

The State Senate shows gains in SD-12 (47.33% Democratic, 33.41% Republican), SD-15 (40.86% Democratic, 34.82% Republican) and SD-19, where Democrats hold the registration advantage by a thin 1,058 votes. 2/3 is within reach by 2010.

The Point Is To Delegitimize The Election

TPM Muckraker has a good rundown of the various voter suppression schemes that Republicans have attempted thus far this election season. Fortunately, most of them have failed to this point. Despite pressure from George W. Bush, the Justice Department has decided not to step in and challenge over 200,000 voter registration forms in Ohio that have not been checked against federal documents (in which case something as small as a typo could disqualify a voter). In Pennsylvania, a favorable ruling forces election officials to supply paper ballots to voters if half of the voting machines in a precinct malfunction on Election Day. Without this measure, long lines would have surely deterred people from voting.

And there are many more wins too, some through the courts, some through elections officials who stand up for justice. But as Zachary Roth notes, that's not quite the point from the Republican perspective.

Of course, the whole point of the voter-suppression game is to throw up as many gambits as possible, and hope that just a few succeed. And there's no way to measure the effect that even the unsuccessful ploys have in generating cynicism about the process itself, and thereby reducing turnout, to Republicans' advantage. So in a close election, it's still possible that voter suppression could make the difference -- as it may well have done in 2000.

But it's worth noting that -- thanks largely to Democratic control of the secretary of state's offices in some key states; the skepticism with which many courts have looked on efforts to put obstacles in the way of voting; and the role of voting-rights groups and the press in exposing the bankruptcy of Republican claims -- the nationwide GOP voter-suppression effort appears to have been far less successful than the party might have hoped.

It's true that we've done a better job ferreting this out this year. But Roth, while correct that suppression is often an end in itself, fails to capture the other element of this - the goal to delegitimize the election and create a "big lie" that a potential Obama victory is fraudulent. This will become accepted dogma on the right and will be returned to again and again to sap away at his public support. And if public confidence in elections becomes brittle, they become easier to steal - not to mention that more people become alienated from the process, leading to the very suppression that the GOP seeks.

CA Campaign Update: CA-04, CA-45, CA-46, AD-78

A few odds and ends:

• CA-04: Tom McClintock is bringing out the big guns to help his cash-strapped campaign - Ron Paul is all in!

Paul, the libertarian-Republican congressman from Texas who raised more than $34 million for his presidential race, sent out an e-mail last week urging his massive donor base to contribute to McClintock.

"Tom McClintock is one of the most promising warriors in the fight against big government we have seen in a long time, and the special interests and big bankers know it. ... You have stood with me as....

...I campaigned for the Presidency to return our federal government to its proper role. Will you help me bring a reliable ally to Congress?"

This brings up some interesting questions. Does Tom McClintock think we should withdraw from Iraq and dozens of other military bases around the world? Does he believe in abolishing the Federal Reserve? The coinage of free silver?

They do have one thing in common, however - white supremacist supporters.

• CA-45: New voter registration statistics have not been released by the Secretary of State's office, but I think they will show good news for Democrats across the state. One statistic that is measurable is the early voting number, and in CA-45, it's good news for Julie Bornstein.

Democrats have significantly narrowed the early voting gap in the 45th Congressional District, an encouraging sign for challenger Julie Bornstein in her battle to unseat Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R-Palm Springs), according to Bornstein campaign manager Walter Ludwig.

In both 2004 and 2006, registered Republicans accounted for about 54 percent of early voters, compared with just 34 percent for Democrats. Mack, now a four-term incumbent, cruised to re-election both years by more than 20 points.

This year, early voting is much more evenly split. The latest numbers from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters show that registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by just five percent among early voters.

It's like the entire Republican machine all collapsed at once. They used to be MASTERS at getting absentee votes out. This year, there's either no such effort, or it's being matched by Democrats. CA-45 is under the radar, but these numbers suggest that it shouldn't be.

• CA-46: At the Great Orange Satan, Devilstower has a great piece that could start a new meme about Debbie Cook - the anti-Palin.

Suppose there was a candidate who was as bright and as capable as Sarah Palin is confused and incompetent.

Someone who had a record of working with environmental groups, and who had a real understanding of the threat posed by our dependence on fossil fuels. Someone with a degree in earth science and the long experience to make the claim of being a genuine energy expert.

Someone who not only knew science, but also had a law degree, and was a graduate of the leadership program at the Kennedy School of Government. Someone who has held positions of honor in state and national commissions. Someone who was well respected for both her intellect and her passion.

Suppose there was a candidate who had been mayor of, not a tiny town, but a medium-sized city. And suppose she took that position as a Democrat in the midst of a heavily Republican district.

Suppose there was someone who was everything that Sarah Palin is not.

Fortunately for us, there's Debbie Cook.

Read the whole thing. And help Debbie if you can.

• AD-78: Bill Cavala, who worked the last close race in this district, took a peek at some new registration numbers which show a real advantage for Marty Block:

This year the new registration ‘close’ figures show the Democrats with 101, 131 registrants, an increase of about 4100 from the last Presidential year. DTS registrations are 49,855, an increase of about 5800 from 2004. Most remarkably, however, Republican registration has fallen by almost 8000 – from 82,615 four years ago to 74,700 today.

This means the net change is Dems up 4100 and Reps down 8000 or 12,100 in favor of the Democrat over 2004.

Forget the increase in DTS registrations – which vote more Democratic than Republican in San Diego. Starting out down 12,000 in a seat where they won by 2000 with an incumbent – it’s open this year – puts the Republican candidate squarely behind the 8 ball.

Just one of the many Assembly races where this is so.

Looking Good, But Still Some Storm Clouds

With 8 days to go, the news out of the polling world is stable and solid. Obama leads measurably in enough states to win the election, and even the toss-up states are moving his way. The election is being played out on red state turf, and with New Mexico and Iowa looking great, and Colorado and Virginia close to it, there is simply a lot to be excited about if you're the Obama campaign. Though the traditional media wants to inflate their ratings by continuing to call this a close race, they're deluding themselves.

Worried about "the tightening?"

Well, Obama's national lead has been stable at 7% for a month now. The national campaign is not tightening, and we are just seeing statistical noise.

Even if the campaign were tightening, Obama would still have a comfortable national lead. According to polling conducted over the weekend during the tracking poll "tightening," Obama reaches 264 electoral votes in states where he leads by 9.5% or more, passes 277 in Virginia where he leads by 8.0%, and hits 286 in states where he leads by 7.3% or more. So, he is actually doing even better in the Electoral College, where 270 votes are needed to win, than he is doing in national polls where he leads by 7%.

However, don't underestimate the ability of the powers that be, the gatekeepers, to desperately try to keep a hold on power, on a number of fronts, outside the normal electoral process. We have retailers telling their managers that there will be negative consequences to a Democratic victory. They are particularly frightened about the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers at a company to unionize. This is extra-legal, to indoctrinate your own employees politically, and it shows why EFCA is needed, actually, because this type of union-busting happens during a "free" election in the workplace. But it's not going to stop.

Neither are the efforts of committed Republicans to game the system in order to save the election:

"5,000 Coloradans whose voter status is in limbo because of [a] controversial check box...The registration form asks for a driver's license or state ID number. If applicants don't have that, they're supposed to check a box and then put down at least the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. But thousands of people didn't check the box. According to a policy adopted last year by Secretary of State Mike Coffman, these applications are supposed to be listed as incomplete...National and local voting-rights organizations criticize Coffman's policy, saying it violates other federal laws. They say Coffman is unfairly putting up barriers for people who are eligible to vote and want him to change his policy."

The check box is "controversial" because you are asked to check it on the form if you don't "have" a driver's license or ID card [...] So, here's the thing - what's the definition of "have?" I may have one at my house or in my car, but not with me at the very moment I am filling out the registration form. In that case, it would be logical - and, in fact, honest - for me to not check that box, while also putting down the last four digits of my social security number as my selected method of verifying my registration. Alternately, for whatever reason (privacy, etc.), I may simply feel more comfortable listing the last 4 digits of my social security number, rather than my entire driver's license number. So therefore, I might have listed my social security number and not checked the box.

And yet, if you made any of those logical choices - if you gave all the social security information required by law, but simply didn't check the box - Coffman is attempting to use that choice to potentially invalidate your registration and prevent you from voting.

And this kind of suppression is not just happening at the state level, but at the federal level as well, as George Bush has ordered the Justice Department to step into the Ohio voter registration controversy, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that the Secretary of State need not verify hundreds of thousands of registration forms against federal documents and throw out even those which have a typo on either side.

6 million or so people are going to go to the polls on Election Day and be told that they can't vote. There may be legitimate reasons for that, like lack of registration, or completely illegitimate ones, like them being purged from the rolls. But they won't be voting. And that is likely to hurt the Democrats.

I'm still more worried about November 5 than November 4. But you should educate yourself on the potential problems with your vote and be prepared to fight for it. The Election Protection wiki is a good source of information, and there's also 866-OUR-VOTE, a number you can call if you have problems on Election Day.

Today In Election Fraud

There's been something of a pattern in recent GOP voter suppression schemes - Republican officials press their claims, and the courts smack them down. This was true when the Supreme Court backed up the Secretary of State of Ohio a week ago, saying she didn't need to match 220,000 new voter registration forms to a federal document. It's happened in Wisconsin, where a similar scheme to verify forms, pushed by the Republican Attorney General (and McCain campaign co-chair), has been tossed out. And it's happened in Indiana as well.

The Indiana Supreme Court has declined to approve a bid by the GOP to shut down early voting centers in Democratic strongholds of a key county.

A lower court had similarly rejected the effort earlier this week. The Supreme Court ruled today that the case had to first be heard by an appeals court, rather than going straight to the state's high court as the Republican plaintiffs wanted.

The appeals court may yet get involved in this, but I think we'll see early voting sites remain open there. Now we have to worry about the people counting the votes:

FRANKLIN, Ind. (AP) -- A Republican county election clerk said Friday she has apologized to two employees for distributing copies of Internet blog posting referring to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama as a "young, black Adolf Hitler."

The employees, who had voted for Obama in Indiana's Democratic primary, discovered the printouts at their desks after returning from Labor Day weekend, sheriff's Deputy Doug Cox said in a police report made public this week. One of the workers complained, and surveillance video showed Johnson County Clerk Jill Jackson placing an item on one worker's desk at 5:27 p.m. on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Cox said.

"She admitted to being responsible for the letter, but only did it as a joke," Cox said. Jackson told Cox she had intended to speak with the workers upon returning to work but forgot.

I know that if I was in Indiana, I'd feel safe knowing my vote was in her hands.

Elsewhere, it's amazing to me that we still deal with faulty ballot design in this day and age, but that's what's happening in North Carolina, where their "straight-party voting" option does NOT generate a vote for President. Why the heck would that be? And this isn't a new flaw, but was in place in 2004 as well, and 3% of voters cast no ballot for President. That's absurd.

And finally, we have your good old-fashioned voter intimidation.

Minority voters in New Mexico report to TPMmuckraker that a private investigator working with Republican party lawyer Pat Rogers has appeared in person at the homes of their family members, intimidating and confusing them about their right to vote in the general election [...]

Guadalupe Bojorquez, who works in law enforcement in Albuquerque, told TPMmuckraker today that her mother, Dora Escobedo, was one of the ten voters whose names were released by the GOP. After this happened, said Bojorquez, her mother had been contacted by the voter registration group ACORN. Bojorquez, with ACORN's help, confirmed with the county clerk that her mother, who does not speak English, is indeed eligible to vote, and had been when she voted in June.

Nonetheless, Bojorquez said that her mother yesterday received a visit from a man who asked for her personal information, including an ID, in reference to her eligibility to vote. Bojorquez told TPMmuckraker that according to her mother, at one point the man asked what she would do if immigration authorities contacted her.

Read the whole thing. But if you don't, suffice to say that the GOP preys upon weakness and fear to stop people from voting.

Torres: "This is about voter suppression."

I just jumped off a conference call with some members of the Democratic National Committee and CDP Chair Art Torres about the arrest of YPM founder Marc Jacoby on suspicion of voter registration fraud. As you may know, Jacoby's firm has been "slamming" voters in the Riverside County area, telling them that they were signing ballot initiatives but actually flipping their party affiliation to the Republican Party from the Democratic Party. While the substance of the call was to talk about hypocrisy in the GOP, raising the issue of ACORN in recent weeks while blinded to the fraud their own vendors participate in, Torres was pretty unsparing in his description of YPM. "The California GOP and the RNC need to terminate their relationship with YPM immediately," said Torres. "They shouldn't wait for a conviction to distance themselves from these shady practices." It was revealed yesterday that a joint finance committee of the RNC, McCain-Palin and the Yacht Party has been paying Nathan Sproul, who owns a separate voter registration group that has been accused of rampant fraud. Said Torres, "This is a consistent pattern of bad behavior."

Curiously, nobody seems to be talking about the bigger issue here, which is the fact that YPM was not only slamming voters, but changing their ballot status to absentee, so that when a voter goes to the polling place on Election Day, they are told that they signed up to vote by mail and cannot vote in the election without their absentee ballot. There are issues with slamming, related mainly to GOTV efforts (Democrats don't try to turn out Republicans), but the absentee situation is a pretext for real disenfranchisement. So I asked Chairman Torres about this, and he agreed. "This is designed to create confusion at the polls and force people into filling out provisional ballots. There are still hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots that haven't been counted from Ohio in 2004. This is about voter suppression, and we've seen it over and over again in California." He related it to the Dirty Tricks Initiative and the signature gathering fraud used to try and get that on the ballot.

The question, of course, is what we can do about the particular voters affected. YPM is out of business and hopefully their founder will be in jail. But there is no telling how many voters had their party ID switched or their ballot status switched. Hopefully the Secretary of State can come up with some way to verify anyone who passed through YPM's hands.

We Need To Get Debra Bowen's Back - Again

Over the weekend, we learned about YPM, the voter registration company hired by the state Republican Party which was illegally switching voters' party affiliations under false pretenses, and (this is the buried lede) changing their ballot status in a clear act of voter suppression:

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

Robert Cruickshank mentioned that the head of YPM has been arrested in this case and charged with voter registration fraud. In response, the Yacht Party has decided to attack Debra Bowen:

On the eve of California's voter registration deadline, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has decided to once again show her partisan colors and charge an individual for questions surrounding his own, personal voter registration stemming from 2006 and 2007.

The fact that these charges are being leveled against an individual operating in a highly-contested area of California, and the significant gap between recent allegations and the charges we've seen today suggests that this is politically motivated.

It's clear that Bowen, herself the recipient of an ACORN endorsement (still displayed on her campaign website), has elevated these issues to achieve maximum political benefit and deflect attention from the Democratic Presidential nominee's high-profiled problems and associations with the radical community activist group ACORN.

While we condemn voter fraud in all forms, it is evident that Debra Bowen is using her office to play politics with the public's perception of political parties. This is inappropriate at least, and an abuse of her office and a willing suspension of her duties at worst.

Now, let's make clear that in the original article, YPM founder Marc Jacoby cited Bowen's work - falsely - to prove his own innocence:

He also said that plainclothes investigators for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, have conducted multiple spot checks and told his firm it is doing nothing improper.

"Every time, they gave us a thumbs-up," Jacoby said. "People are not being tricked."

But Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, said the agency "does not give an OK or seal of approval to voter registration groups."

That's an out-and-out lie, and it's completely within the purview of the Secretary of State to enforce the laws regarding voter registration. The Yacht Party is being completely disingenuous about Jacoby's illegality here ("personal voter registration" my ass), and they dredge up ACORN, which is not only unrelated to the YPM case, but a situation where paid registration gatherers were defrauding ACORN more than anything else. But it's not surprising to see the Yacht Party fan the fires of hate and use the ACORN scapegoat to answer for their own illegal activities.

And this is Yacht Party illegality. Steve Poizner paid for the YPM voter drive and put a bounty on new registrations.

This story is starting to hit traditional media. Debra Bowen did nothing but her job, and she needs to be supported. Whether you write a letter to the editor, call the Yacht Party offices (hey, here's contact information, imagine that) or just spread the word to your friends and neighbors, do something to call out Republican voter suppression today.

Fighting Back On Voter Suppression

This is welcome news from Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Secretary of State.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner told the Huffington Post on Thursday that she is ready not only to fight the state's current election law battle in front of the Supreme Court, but is also willing to wage a new fight, if necessary, to make sure hundreds of thousands of new voters are not "forced" onto provisional ballots on election day.

Spurred by revelations that the community organizing group ACORN has submitted many thousands of ineligible voter registration cards in battleground states, Ohio Republicans have been calling for a wholesale comparison of the state's nearly 666,000 new active voters against data collected by the local DMV.

Brunner charged that Republican demands are meant to create confusion at the polls and keep all the ballots from being counted.

Brunner says that, according to the League of Women Voters, there were only four instances of "illegal voting," or the actual casting of an illegitimate ballot, between 2002 and 2006 -- when just under 8 million ballots were cast. As such, she said, ACORN's registration problems are being improperly lumped in with the casting of bad ballots, something she says is not likely to occur no matter how many fraudulent registrations are turned in. "Unfortunately, despite the messaging of certain political parties ... when they bring ACORN into it, they're talking about false voter registration. Seldom does that lead to illegal voting. Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey don't vote."

ACORN itself has launched a truth-squad site and has released this statement on the news of the ridiculous FBI investigation:

ACORN has not been contacted by any federal law enforcement agencies. Should any investigation be forthcoming, we are confident that we would be exonerated. We have always, and will continue to, work with any inquiry.

It is well established and documented that in 2004 the Bush Administration was involved in a scandal where Bush Administration political appointees, working in concert with the Department of Justice, pressured some U.S. Attorneys, such as David Iglesias, to pursue partisan investigations of ACORN. Given that in the last forty-eight hours we have seen a coordinated attack by the Republican Party, including a conservative think tank in Ohio connected to the well-know voter suppresser and McCain supporter Ken Blackwell, file a frivolous lawsuit that is virtually identical to the lawsuit filed in 2004 that was dismissed for lack of evidence, followed by Senator Voinovich, a supporter of Senator McCain, calling for a Justice Department investigation, followed by Senator McCain's attack in the debate last night, we believe that dirty politics are at work.

ACORN is extremely proud of our work to register 1.3 million new voters this year. Through ACORN's voter registration drive, Americans of all political persuasions and all walks of life are participating in our democracy. Through the course of ACORN'S voter registration drive we hired over 13,000 canvassers most of who worked to the highest standards of accuracy. ACORN has a zero tolerance policy and works closely with local elections officials to get to the bottom of any problems, as we have in this case. But let us be clear - and this is a critical fact: issues related to voter registration are not voter fraud. These are not cases where people are able to vote multiple times. Let us repeat - these are not situations involving actual votes.

John Conyers is on this as well, as is David Iglesias, who you'll recall was fired for refusing to press bullshit investigations like this.

What ACORN needs, and the progressive movement needs, a coordinated media strategy. It's clear that the traditional media has no institutional memory and will continue to unquestioningly pass along these "voter fraud" charges without any meaningful evidence. The goal here is a legitimacy goal, not a law enforcement one. And the media are being willing dupes for this GOP strategy.

Vote Suppression Now Aided Directly By Federal Gov't

This is outrageous.

The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election.

A senior law enforcement official confirmed the investigation to The Associated Press. A second senior law enforcement official says the FBI was looking at results of recent raids on ACORN offices in several states for any evidence of a coordinated national scam.

This is a federally-backed effort to suppress the legal votes of minorities and the lower class. Bottom line.

I hate to keep making the argument over and over, but it's necessary. The FBI is taking an organization with a 97% accuracy record in turning in registration forms, certainly better than the paid signature gatherers of any right-wing ballot initiative out here in California, and subjecting them to investigations and scrutiny that is wholly unwarranted. When a paid worker for ACORN falsifies a registration form, they are not scamming the voting system, they are scamming ACORN. They are trying to get paid extra for illegal work. ACORN flags every single suspicious form and turns all of them in to election officials BY LAW in most states. If they didn't, the right wing would be screaming about how ACORN holds back forms that Republicans fill out. And then, of course, the flagged registrations are noticed by election boards (if they weren't you wouldn't be hearing so much about this). And even if they weren't, Mickey Mouse and Hugh Jass and Ivanna Tinkle aren't showing up at your friendly neighborhood polling place. Not one honest person in this country seriously thinks that individual voter registration fraud is part of a coordinated effort to tip the election. Grabbing at straws, I hear wingers claim that ACORN "dumps voter registration forms on elections officials at the last minute" to overwhelm the system. See, when there's a deadline typically a lot of whatever is requested by that date comes in at the end. Another ridiculous claim.

If you want to solve the problem of inaccurate voting registrations, there are a million ways to do it. Automatically register everyone with a Social Security number or a driver's license or a pay stub. End the practice of paying people to gather forms or signatures. And on and on. But of course, the right doesn't want to fix the problem. They want a scapegoat to point their fingers at and blame for their own electoral and governing failures. That's why they're claiming vote fraud in states where ACORN didn't even run voter drives this year.

But the real outrage here is the involvement of the FBI in the investigation. The US Attorneys scandal was almost entirely predicated on compelling federal prosecutors to pursue investigations of bogus voter fraud cases and charges against Democrats. Those who didn't got fired, and we know the consequences of those attorneys who did what they were told. See Don Siegelman in Alabama, Georgia Thompson in Wisconsin, even ACORN in Missouri. This was wholesale politicization of the Justice Department, using prosecutions as an extension of the RNC. That's exactly what this FBI investigation reveals.

The Justice Department is using its law enforcement arm to stir up doubt about a legitimate community organization as a means to delegitimize this election. This is designed to sap voter confidence in the process. It's also designed to harass and intimidate low-income and minority voters. The 1.3 million people who registered through ACORN and Project Vote this year are now seeing the law come down on that organization. They're seeing their registrations questioned. They're being accused of stealing the election. Do you think they're going to risk going to the polls? It's an open question.

There should be outrage at this maneuver, a federal attempt to step into the election process and a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. This is dirty and Congress needs to assert its voice.

We Are All Joe The Plumber Now

We Are All Joe The Plumber Now

by dday

There were early reports by Internet sleuths that the ubiquitous Joe the Plumber, the manifestation of the guy in "Swing Vote" come to life, was not a registered voter in the state of Ohio. As it turns out, he is, but with a slight misspelling - and if all elections systems were run by Republicans, that would be more than enough to disenfranchise him.

Purging voters or blocking their registration because of data errors is disenfranchisement by typo," said Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal group involved in litigation in those states. "Joe is a perfect example. If he were anew voter, he would be being challenged right now as not eligible to vote."

"Joe the Plumber is not committing voter fraud by having his name spelled differently on two different lists," he said.

Republicans have argued that there are safeguards against improper purges, and state officials say their lists are more accurate, and their purges more careful. They also note that voters whose registration is challenged can vote by provisional ballot.

National Review's Jim Geraghty wrote that "if there's a typo in the voter rolls, I trust local election officials to sort it out and ensure that that provisional ballot is used and subsequently counted once it's certain that the voter in question is the person on the registered voter list."

"Provisional ballots are not a substitute for actually voting," said Waldman, who pointed to data suggesting provisional ballots are rejected at a high rate, and that voters who are told their names don't appear on the rolls often simply walk away.

And he produced cases in which typos similar to the one affecting Wurzelbacher have knocked citizens off the rolls.

For instance, Florida officials in 2006 removed the name of Jose Lopez-Sandin, after officials typed his name in as "Joseph Lopez-Sandin." They also removed the name of Anne Nguyen after election officials typed her name as "Ann Nguyen."

"Because he’s the famous 'Joe the Plumber' it seems like an obvious typo, but this is the sort of error that will keep people from voting," Waldman said.

The idea that Jim Geraghty has so much "trust" in local election officials is laughable. Because the Republican Party has spent the better part of 40 years trying to break that trust.

There is a current lawsuit in the state of Ohio that would force the Secretary of State to check hundreds of thousands of new registrants, by Friday, against government documents and databases, which is explicitly not required by the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The insertion of "Friday" is important, since this is clearly impossible. We know this is going to result in thousands of Ohioans losing their right to vote at the very minimum. People like Joe the Plumber, who because of a typo would be pushed to use a provisional ballot were he a newly registered voter. (Other reports say this is less of a problem, but I'm going on the word of the Secretary of State).

Our grip on the franchise of voting is so tenuous that a mishit letter at the DMV, poor penmanship on a voter registration form, could be all that stands between you and ineligibility. And this has been exploited by experienced voter suppression operatives in the Republican Party, a number of whom work on John McCain's campaign, who
have raised this bogus spectre of voter fraud, against all known evidence, to try and lower turnout, historically in lower-class and minority regions of the country. Last night John McCain accused ACORN as "destroying the fabric of democracy." Physician, heal thyself.

A few braver Republicans are speaking up about this coordinated effort to undermine American confidence in elections and delegitimize any Democratic President.

Florida's governor says his fellow Republicans may be exaggerating claims of voter fraud in the state.

Gov. Charlie Crist said Wednesday that he has confidence in Secretary of State Kurt Browning, who says there's only been a scattering of isolated incidents.

Crist said in the closing days of any campaign "there are some who sort of enjoy chaos." There may be more of that going on than fraud, he said.

I can identify those "some" for you, Gov. Crist. They are the members of your own party who use chaos to create opportunities, in voting as well as governing.

What Actual Election Fraud Looks Like

In 2002, Republican operatives in New Hampshire jammed the phone lines of the state Democratic Party on Election Day while they were attempting to organize get-out-the-vote efforts. This impacted thousands of volunteers and party operatives who were trying to ensure their voters turned out to elect Jeanne Shaheen over Sen. John Sununu. Sununu ended up winning by a few percentage points*, close to the margin expected from a successful ground game. Allen Raymond, one of the architects of the scheme, went to jail for it and wrote a tell-all book called How To Rig An Election. Raymond acknowledged that there were dozens of phone calls between his team and Ken Mehlman in the White House leading up to Election Day. And today, James Tobin, another operative, was indicted for lying to the FBI about the operation.

That would fall under the category of ACTUAL election fraud. It was targeted at a specific race, and it sought to impact thousands of potential voters at once by disabling Democratic GOTV efforts in a form of voter suppression. Contrast this with registering one voter named "Mickey Mouse" at a time, telling election officials about it, and then hoping it slips past them and that someone in a mouse suit shows up to the ballot box on Election Day.

But when looking at news reporting about these kinds of incidents, the very real election fraud isn't mentioned, and examples of the system working, where election monitors catch bad registrations ahead of time and nobody fraudulent actually votes, becomes the scandal of the century. It's enough to make you wonder if some outside force is driving the discussion other than the very independent media.

I eagerly anticipate the first mention of Tobin's indictment on cable news.

Meanwhile, let me outsource the rest of this post to Josh Marshall, who has a sense of history that's more than two days old.

It's time again to remember the backstory of the US Attorney Firing scandal. The firings were one thing. But the story behind the firings, what led to them, is key to understanding the current 'vote fraud' scam being played by the Republicans and the media outlets that are going along with the scam.

Remember, the US Attorneys in question were all either Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. In every case, they were appointed by George W. Bush. In most of the cases their firing was tied to 'vote fraud' claims stemming from the 2004 election.

The pattern was very consistent. During the final weeks of the 2004 campaign Republican partisans started pressing claims of widespread voter fraud. In many, though not all cases, the examples they pointed to were not even allegations of voter fraud, but allegations of voter registration fraud: examples of people being registered more than once, non-existent people being registered, etc.

The Republicans making these claims argued that these problems with registration cards were opening the coming election up to widespread vote fraud. Logically, this makes no sense. And, more importantly, all evidence shows this has never happened, certainly not in any widespread sense. Every person who claims otherwise is either ignorant or speaking in bad faith.

Nonetheless, CNN and other national news outlets and especially local media outlets, either out of ignorance or bad faith, ran hard with these stories -- just as CNN is doing now [...]

That's the real story of the US Attorney firing scandal. And what we're seeing today is textbook -- exactly the same as what we saw in 2004 and 2006. It's a scam. And the very recent history should be enough for news networks like CNN and others not to let themselves become complicit in this disgrace.

Digby has some similar thoughts today. You ought to remember them when you hear useful idiots like Sarah Palin talking about "unconscionable voter fraud."

* - Avenging this stolen election with a Shaheen victory in the rematch this year is just one of the things we can do on November 4.

Fargo North Decoder

This is some major poll porn:

Barack Obama is shown with an edge against John McCain in a North Dakota presidential race that has narrowed to a statistical tie, according to a new Forum poll.

The survey shows Obama squeaking past McCain, 45 percent to 43 percent, a lead that falls within the poll’s margin of error and therefore indicates a dead heat, according to political analysts.

Still up for grabs: undecided voters, comprising 12 percent.

“It’s a statistical tossup,” said Jim Danielson, co-director of the Public Affairs Institute at Minnesota State University Moorhead, which conducted the statewide telephone survey for The Forum. Pollsters contacted 606 likely North Dakota voters by telephone Oct. 6-8.

North Dakota has no form of voter registration, so GOTV efforts can literally be targeted to anyone right up to and including Election Day.

Meanwhile, North Dakota has been getting some attention in the online world for this racist comment on the local SayAnythingBlog showing a picture of Barack Obama next to a noose. Apparently the website owner has a history of this stuff:

And I -- for one -- do not think Port deserves to be let off the hook for this simply because he pulled the offending blog post from his site. Port has a history of pulling internet stunts to try to draw attention to his website. If you click here to look at this website, you'll see someone's comment (on April 29, 2004, at 3:48 p.m.) suggesting Robbie Port used the alias "Hot Abercrombie Chick" for a span of time in an effort to generate interest in his website. (Spend a little time Googling "hot abercrombie chick" and "rob port" or "robbie port"; you'll see what I'm talking about). Port knows web traffic translates directly into web advertising money. A guy has to wonder if Port -- or his "sock puppet" -- published the offensive Obama/noose graphic in an attempt to draw national attention to his website. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me one bit.

Port has also been banished from one North Dakota Native American Indian reservation for previous racist rants on his website. This isn't a first for Rob Port.

With North Dakota getting this much attention 22 days before the election, you know something bizarre is happening.

Big Media Catches On To The Ground Game

Nice of the New York Times and the Washington Post to figure out the key story of the election three weeks before voters go to the polls. The worst part of this is that just today, Clark Hoyt released a study showing that less than 10% of campaign coverage this general election season has been devoted to substance, with the bulk of them focusing on "horse race, political tactics, polls and the like." But if you're going to write about hose race politics, there's no bigger story than the ground game. They trivialize the election and then do the trivial coverage wrong. Pathetic.

The stories have some good tidbits. Here's NYT:

What started out organically — campaign officials saw organizational promise in Virginia last year, when 20,000 signatures were gathered to make Mr. Obama the first candidate to qualify for the primary ballot — has come full circle. Now, people driving by the storefront offices are drawn in by their visibility and put to work.

The Obama campaign has broken the country into a collection of battleground states, which are dissected into precincts that are parceled one more time into neighborhood teams. (Ohio, for example, is divided into 1,231 neighborhoods.) And each of these teams, if the recruiting is up to speed, has a leader who, ideally, lives just down the block from all those doors that need to be knocked on.

This puts the lie to the talk from the right of out-of-state volunteers parachuting in like Howard Dean's Iowa "Perfect Storm" and annoying the locals. Every effort is being made for local people to canvass local neighborhoods. In California we're focusing on making all the phone calls into Nevada, but inside Nevada they're doing all canvassing.

Here's a bit about voter registration.

The first piece of the ground game plan began with voter registration.

In Virginia, the voting rolls saw a net gain of more than 300,000 people from January through Oct. 1, with even more believed to have registered in the days leading up to the deadline last Monday. And while voters in Virginia are not allowed to identify their political party, 76 percent of the new voters are 44 or younger, a figure that even Republicans concede favors Mr. Obama.

“We’re going to have to make sure they turn out, or we probably won’t win,” said Steve Hildebrand, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama. “They’ll get extra waves of mail. They’ll get extra phone calls. They will be given a lot of love.”

The targeting has been really sharp. Sporadic voters are getting the attention they need. Habitual voters are being checked as supporters but then not bombarded.

Here's something from the Washington Post:

But in scale and ambition, the Obama organization goes beyond even what Rove built. The campaign has used its record-breaking fundraising to open more than 700 offices in more than a dozen battleground states, pay several thousand organizers and manage tens of thousands more volunteers.

In many states, the Democratic candidate is hewing more closely to the Rove organizational model than is rival Sen. John McCain, whose emphasis on ground operations has been less intensive and clinical than that of his Republican predecessor.

"They've invested in a civic infrastructure on a scale that has never happened," said Marshall Ganz, a labor organizer who worked with César Chávez's farmworker movement and has led training sessions for Obama staff members and volunteers. "It's been an investment in the development of thousands of young people equipped with the skills and leadership ability to mobilize people and in the development of leadership at the local level. It's profound."

This is probably the first time Marshall Ganz has been mentioned in a major newspaper, but he's the architect of Obama's entire volunteer effort.

I'm glad that people are seeing the value of all this. I'm sure the Obama campaign would rather it stayed a secret, because they don't want the Republicans knowing what a big hole they're in.

ACLUCORN

As the McCain campaign sinks into the fever swamps and goes about as far as you can go before someone cries "racism," they've teamed up their irresponsible behavior and incitement to riot with the project to delegitimize the election itself. They just released a Web video highlighting Barack Obama's ties to ACORN.



This is all they've got left, so they're going with it. A dark, twisted conspiracy theory based on ignorance and deep-seeded xenophobia and hatred. And the BBQ-stained media is helping them along by highlighting the couple thousand voter registration forms (at MOST, and that's probably exaggerated) that ACORN alerted election authorities about being fraudulent, instead of the 1.3 million voters they registered accurately, most of them in low- and middle-income communities. This is an attack on people's right to vote and participate in politics.

In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed "Johns, Jimmy" using the address of a Jimmy John's sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar's offices have come across similar problems in recent days.

What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. [...]

The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. "It's certainly true. They did have three batches separated." she told me this morning. "There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info -- like no voter ID number or a missing birthday -- and another batch they called 'suspicious.' "

Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed "suspicious"? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana.

They turn THEMSELVES in and these idiots on the right think they're scamming the election. They're nothing but a scapegoat.

In addition, as Adam Serwer notes there is a dinstinction between registration fraud and voter fraud. To my knowledge Mickey Mouse or Moamar Qadafy or George Jetson has never attempted to vote in a national election, even if their "registrations" got by the eyes of censors, which they wouldn't, if election officials paid attention to ACORN flagging the bad forms. In fact, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud whatsoever, and this has been verified dozens of times. Josh Marshall explains in a piercing post:

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to.

In the main I would agree that it's not a good idea to pay people to register voters, especially on a per-registration basis, because it incentivizes employees to falsify forms to keep their numbers up. In the end, the only people harmed by bad voter registration forms are ACORN themselves, because it means they overpaid their workers. I would say the same thing about signature gatherers for ballot initiatives. I would support that legislation if it came up for a vote. But the conservatives never introduce such legislation, even though they yell and carp about this every couple years. They don't want to fix the problem. They want an organization they can point at and demonize, and ACORN fits the bill. They want to use the power they have through the right-wing media and the Republican National Committee and even the Justice Department to push this narrative of Democratic perfidy and black people stealing elections.

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

Meanwhile, there's a very real story about thousands of voter registrations being blocked in swing states, mass purges of the voter rolls, and all kinds of fallout from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed by Republicans and signed by George W. Bush. But that doesn't get mentioned, because there's no group like ACORN to tar and feather.

If you're poor, if you're struggling, if you are a minority, Republicans don't want you to vote. And furthermore, they don't care if this backfires. They mean to call into question the election and the office of the Presidency itself under a Democratic Administration. They win either way.

...Obama's campaign released a statement:

"Today's conference call was another effort by the McCain campaign to throw out false charges to 'turn the page' from the issues that matter to American families. Barack Obama strongly condemns voter registration fraud or any other breach of election law by any party or group. The McCain campaign's allegations about Sen. Obama are completely transparent and false. He believes that the registration of voters at record levels is good for our democracy, and the McCain-Palin campaign's false claims are nothing more than another dishonorable, shameful attempt to divert voters' attention from the unprecedented challenges facing their families and our nation," said Obama-Biden campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

Vigilantes And Acorns

Why isn't this guy being fired?

COLUMBUS — Law enforcement officials in southwest Ohio are seeking information on hundreds of voters who registered and voted during Ohio's weeklong same-day voting window.

Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer and representatives of County Prosecutor Stephen Haller have contacted the local Board of Elections asking for the voter registration cards of everyone who voted during the six-day window, which ended Monday.

Haller is the law partner of former Senator Mike DeWine, who is... wait for it... John McCain's campaign co-chair.

This gives witch hunts a bad name. The girls from Salem are whispering to each other that this guy's going too far.

Jennifer Brunner is a good Secretary of State and she'll probably turn this down flat, but that doesn't mean I'm any less unsettled.

And meanwhile, ACORN's morphing into a conservative piñata is almost complete. John McCain attacked them by name today.

"You've seen the allegations, the multiple registrations under the same name, the more registered voters than the population, these are serious allegations, my friends, and they must be investigated, and they must be investigated immediately and they must be stopped before November the fourth, so Americans will not -- will not -- be deprived of a fair process in this election.

This is completely ridiculous. The reason that ACORN employees are filling out multiple registrations is that they get paid on a per-form basis. The quality control is bad, but in every case I've seen, they SPECIFICALLY FLAG SUSPECT REGISTRATIONS before they send them to the Board of Elections, effectively turning themselves in. Furthermore, if Mickey Mouse is on a voter registration form, it's not like Mickey Mouse is showing up at the polling place. Don't believe me - believe The Wall Street Journal, ferchrissakes.

And the delegitimization project continues.

Delegitimization Project, Cont'd

The GOP is so incensed about the suggestion that they would try to stop foreclosed voters from voting in Michigan that they sued the news outlet that reported it. I mean, it's ridiculous on its face! Michigan is a safe blue state; McCain pulled out. Clearly the GOP will get more mileage out of stopping foreclosed voters from voting in Indiana.

Democrats are concerned that Republican officials in Marion County and elsewhere might use home foreclosure lists as a way to challenge the residency of voters at the polls. The campaign of presidential candidate Barack Obama filed a lawsuit to keep the Michigan GOP from doing just that.

County GOP Chairman Tom John said foreclosure opens the door to a residency challenge, but he said his party has no plans to pursue such challenges. However, he wouldn't rule it out.

"We might end up challenging on that," he said. "It's entirely possible. I think it would be a solid basis for asking someone to vote provisionally."

I eagerly await the lawsuit against the Indianapolis Star.

Meanwhile, the anti-ACORN scaremongering continues in Missouri.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

If this is anything like the Nevada raid, ACORN was well aware of the discrepancies and in fact alerted election officials about them. That never seems to make its way into the lede.

I'm guessing this story won't show up on Instapundit this morning.

Tens of thousands of eligible voters have been removed from rolls or blocked from registering in at least six swing states, and the voters' exclusion appears to violate federal law, according to a published report.

The New York Times based its findings on reviews of state records and Social Security data.

The Times said voters appear to have been purged by mistake and not because of any intentional violations by election officials or coordinated efforts by any party.

That's if you believe that the Help America Vote Act wasn't designed to sow confusion through stringent standards, and create the very problems it was supposed to solve. It's a feature, not a bug.