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Remember Sproul & Associates?

You know, the Arizona-based consulting firm that conducted voter registration drives around the US in 2004 and was accused in some places of destroying Democratic registrations and in others of changing them to Republican registrations, without the voters' consent.

Well, back in July Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas published a story, little discussed in the blogosphere, detailing how the RNC paid Sproul $8 million and then tried to hide it.

Election Fraud: Team Bush Paid $8 Million for Dirty Tricks to Suppress Votes - and Tried to Hide It

By Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas
The Baltimore Chronicle

Wednesday 13 July 2005

In the months before the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group - run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party - had been hired by the Republican National Committee.

Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states - and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."

It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?

If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.

In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.

(Read the whole thing.)

Jonathan David Jackson Responds To Steven Sherman

Jonathan left this in the comments. I think it should be read by all.

I guess my only problem with Sherman's CounterPunch article (a great publication by the way) is the identification of the peace movement as "predominately white" and the manner in which the author's very writing narrows the pitch of his message to apparently privileged white peace movers who must now bring their attention to downtrodden blacks.

What peace movement is predominately white and where? Just because Steven Sherman hasn't interacted with a lot of blacks for peace (or other non-whites, for that matter) does not mean that blacks and indeed many nonwhites are not actively thinking, writing, and working for peace. And, in consideration of the fact that whites in many major cities are becoming voting minorities as latino/a and hispanic populations rise, it is incredibly important that we interrogate the problems inherent in dichotomous discourses of "majority/minority."

Nor are the black poor of New Orleans without agency (meaning, the power to act). While they may not be economically powerfull, it is imperative that we consider their power to vote, and their power on a number of spiritual and intellectual levels.

Ben, that's why your own posts on the FRAUD of the black Republican-turned mayor were so apt. There may be people who are actually afraid of those poor New Orleans blacks' power--the same power that put that fraud of a black mayor into office in the hope that he would do something, anything, for them--the hope that as a black person he would somehow empathize with the blistering, entangled racism and classicism that informs so much of everything Southern-style. Exposing the complexity of simultaneous power and powerlessness...that's what I got from those recent posts on the New Orleans mayor, the walking "race-card."

There is a quiet undercurrent of "saviorism" (to coin a term) in Sherman's otherwise strong and well-meaning rhetoric. In truth, blacks' commitment to peace in the face of racism and violence has defined peace movements in so many ways in 20th century America:

Baynard Rustin developed concepts of peaceful activism from satyagraha and applied them to his early socialist and anti-racist activities. Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. then further refined satyagraha for the civil rights movement and, of course, King was killed at the height of his agitation against the Vietnam war. Many of the agitation protest strategies employed by peace movers everywhere are constructed in the spirit of the kinds of protests that these black women and men designed. We must not forget how black workers essential contributions inform peace movements.

So, even if in your town, you only see white peace workers at your meetings, their activities contain the presence of black cultural workers as well as many different people all over the world who have sacrificed so much for peace.

The first step for any progressive movement is not to ever think that it is "predominately anything" but to reconceive of their movement as stretching beyond the bounds of people who individual workers within specific locales see in their day-to-day activities. Fundamentally, there is a level of consciousness-raising that is necessary within us as well as outside of us so that we interrogate the silent colorlines that inform our quotidian social realities and make us think that our movements can be defined within majority/minority polarities.

Black Box Voting Primers On The Mechanics Of 21st Century Jim Crow Technology

INTRO
One reason I like Heather Baum's Born Again Jim Crow essay is that she makes a clear connection between old Jim Crow practices and right wing corporate control of the voting technology industry. This connection is important for understanding the present and it is important for understanding the past.

The irrational race hatred that was (and is) used to enforce Jim Crow keeps some people from seeing the purpose of such discriminatory tactics: to keep power in the white hands of a select few. In his book The Making of Black Revolutionaries James Forman, former Executive Secretary of SNCC, recalled the comment of a white southerner in the 1950s:

"Why, in the county where my friend lives, the Negras are nine to one and his father is the sheriff of that county. Do you think if the Negras had the right to vote that they would elect his father as sheriff? We got the power and we intend to keep it." (92)

Decades ago, before companies like Diebold and ES&S controlled the ballot casting and vote tabulation processes in a staggering number of US counties, there were methods like Georgia's "county unit" system, as described by former SNCC worker Joan C. Browning, in "My vote was counted …. At least once."

The county unit system of weighing votes meant that it took more than a hundred Fulton County (Atlanta) votes to equal each Telfair County vote.

James Carmichael and my Telfair County neighbor, Eugene "Gene" Talmadge, contended for the Democratic party’s nomination for governor in 1946. Gene, "The Wild Man of Sugar Creek," was financed by the keep-taxes-and-government-services-low corporations – the railroads, Coca Cola, Georgia Power Company. He campaigned on the single issue of keeping African-Americans disenfranchised.

Carmichael received more popular votes statewide than Eugene Talmadge, but under the "county unit" system, Talmadge won the Democratic primary anyway.

In the General Election that fall, the Talmadge Telfair County Courthouse Crowd certified a consolidated county return showing 1,788 voters. Although Gene Talmadge was the only name printed on ballot for governor, 77 of the 1,788 ballots were tallied as write-in votes for his son, Herman Talmadge for governor. In addition to the official countywide voter turnout of 1,788, though, an extra 48 write-in votes were counted for Herman for governor. The 48 extras came from Helena precinct, where those 48 voters "over voted" for both Talmadges for governor. Both votes were certified.

Atlanta Journal reporter George Goodwin found that the last 34 of Helena precinct’s 103 voters had voted in alphabetical order, beginning at the letter A and continuing through the letter K.

Goodwin couldn’t locate fourteen of those 34 voters. The twenty he did find denied having voted at all.

Six of them had lived in Telfair County but had moved away more than two years before the election. Two were dead, one for four years, one for seven years. A Marine had been out of the county more than a year. One was reported to be a fictitious person.

Of the real Telfair County residents Goodwin found, one said he did not vote, and he did not have a wife although his wife was listed as voting. The wife in another couple said, "We never voted for nobody," and that she had never voted in her life and as far as she knew, she had never been registered to vote.

One name was listed twice. Another said that he had once been erroneously registered under the name on the list and that he had corrected his registration, but "neither me nor my wife voted in the general election," he said. "I remember it was raining that day and the windshield wiper on my car was broken, and neither of us went to the polls."

When the Courthouse Crowd certified the county election returns, they added votes: Cobbville precinct listed 86 persons on the voter list, but reported 186 votes; in Jacksonville, 27 became 127; Temperance’s 24, certified as 124; Milan’s 242 was crudely erased and "4" had written over the "2", making Milan’s certified total 442. Telfair County certified 600 "phantom" votes.

Under the county unit system, it would take more than 65,000 Atlanta votes to merely equal the fraudulent votes in Telfair County.

A combination of a discriminatory system, which counts some votes more than others, and an array of underhanded practices controlled the outcome of the 1946 Georgia election for governor, which should sound familiar: high tech and low tech Republican election fraud tactics were brought out in amazing force in swing states like Ohio and Florida, which each cast enough votes in the Electoral College system to have disproportionate control over the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

THE VIDEOS
The following three videos from Bev Harrris' organization Black Box Voting provide a nice primer on the basics of what is wrong with allowing Diebold and ES&S to control 80% of the electronic vote count in the US.

(All should realize that optical scan ballot counters are also electronic voting equipment with many of the same vulnerabilities and problems as DREs (aka, touch-screen machines). Unless the paper ballots that we stick into the optical scan machines are the ballot of record and are counted by hand in every precinct, they are no better than Diebold's infamous DREs.)

• Vendors Are Like Family
• Security Through Obscurity Is A Joke
• Address The Issue . . . Don't Shoot The Messenger

FURTHER READING

• Ellen Theisen, The Privatization of United States Elections [pdf]
• EllenTheisen, Voter-Verified Paper Balllots are not enough to fix DRE Problems
• CountTheVote.org, "Shocking" Election Practices Revealed In Georgia (July 18, 2005)

Born Again Jim Crow

[I originally published this piece by Heather Baum on No Stolen Democracy in January. I republish it here for the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and because it is still deeply relevant. Heather wrote "Born Again Jim Crow" last fall, when we were between the two 40th anniversary dates, mentioned, below. --BG]

by Heather Baum

Who would have thought that on the 40th anniversary of Freedom Summer and the Voting Rights Act we would be fighting for voting rights for all of America? I'm sure you understand that vote suppression is not without historic precedence. The fight for suffrage is elemental to the peoples history. In our own life times, we know this from the history of Jim Crow. A system we fought a bloody battle to bring to an end in the south. We thought it was dead. But it is not. What has happened during the last three or four election cycles is an attempt to give birth to a "born again" Jim Crow. The obvious goal is to bring it to a new era of technological sophistication and spread it throughout the country...If unchallenged this could lead to a permanent one party rule. In Minnesota, we managed to beat it back...but I believe we cannot let this stand.

Bush can not wage war around the world in the name of democracy and fail to practice it at home. What's coming out about election suppression and fraud goes way past whether it's too late to find enough votes to save Kerry. Postmortems are important, but we have a genuine opportunity to reveal the Karl Rove voter suppression strategy. Now is the time to nail the right wing anti-democracy machine to the wall. Fighting for fair elections is fundamental, not just for the future, but for the present. Bush won no mandate. Yet he has already begun to spend his "political capital" in Faluja...and this will cost millions of lives.

The true reality is voter suppression has been a long term strategy the Right has methodically applied to gain control of all four branches of government. They can not win without it and they have admitted this publicly. It is a dynamic strategy...it includes manipulation of the census count...and allowing gerrymandered redistricting. Among other things it also includes voter intimidation, stolen ballots, manipulation of mail in ballots, sending out mass mailings of unrequested absentee ballots in communities of color, mass distribution of racially sorted provisional ballots, creating 10 hour waits at the poles and finally implementation of a paperless unverifiable electronic voting system, owned by the President's supporters.

How can we know if the election is rigged if there is no paper trail? One of the reasons we won here in Minnesota is that we have a paper ballot system...we can count the votes. So to me it has gone way beyond whether Kerry won or lost. If we let this go unchallenged, not four...but two more years..(the Senate election) will come...and something will have changed...the problems will be worse...more entrenched. And then guess what?...We might have to live with Republicans in charge forever. We need to challenge the Right, fight for the vote, learn how to listen, talk to people and organize when we are doing it ...all at the same time.

The reality is that there is ample evidence not only that a totally hackable electronic voting system has been put in place but also that very massive serious voting irregularities took place on November 2nd. It seems odd to me that when you present this evidence to fair minded Republicans... they want it fixed..now. But when presented to many progressives and liberals they go into a swoon of denial... what is that about?

The Right thinks that if it says something often enough...and loud enough...that makes it true. I call that having smoke blown up your ass. The Bush Administration thinks by saying something...over and over...real loud.. they can "make us think" what they say is true. This is designed to divide the people..."progressive bashing"...used to be called "Red Baiting" in the days of Joe McCarthy...It is an old tried and true method of getting people to look the other way while someone has their hand in your pocket. We have a lot of work to do, and so I think we need to be organizing on all fronts. I choose to fight on the voting rights front, because as my Mothers daughter, and as a veteran of the Southern Freedom Movement, that is what I have done all my life. My mother and grandmothers before me fought for suffrage for all..and so do I.

How do we know that there were not enough votes cast to win, if no investigation is done? If people were wrongly prevented from voting, if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all...if we hope to ever have another fair election again... we need to know. This is a question that all fair minded people including Progressives, moderate Republicans and Libertarians want the answer to.

Stacking The Deck With Roberts: The Right Wing Plot Against Voting Rights

We already know that civil rights enforcement has sharply declined under George W. Bush. I have written previously about the Bush administration institutionalizations of its anti-civil rights agenda through the Department of Justice: it's changes to the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division and the DOJ's lawsuits to radically change the grounds of voting rights enforcement. Some of the most recent revelations about Bush's proposed appointment of John G. Roberts to the Supreme Court suggest that Bush is now trying to give Justices Scalia and Thomas a strong ally against voting rights.

Bush's DOJ Tears A Page Out Of Roberts' Anti-Civil Rights Agenda In The Reagan DOJ
In Monday's Washington Post, R. Jeffrey Smith, Amy Goldstein, and Jo Becker brought to light John Roberts' role in the Reagan Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith.

[Roberts] wrote vigorous defenses, for example, of the administration's version of a voting rights bill, opposed by Congress, which would have narrowed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He challenged the US Commission on Civil Rights's arguments in favor of busing and affirmation action. He described a Supreme Court decision broadening the rights of individuals to sue states for civil rights violations as causing "damage" to administration policies, and he urged that legislation be drafted to reverse it. And he wrote a memo arguing that it was constitutionally acceptable for Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil rights cases. (Emphasis added.)

In January, I explained that in

court battles, pre-election 2004, over how provisional ballots would be counted and the legalities of voter challenges at the polls, Bush administration lawyers argued that individual voters may not sue over violations of the voting rights set out in the Help America Vote Act [HAVA]. The DOJ argued, instead, that only the Attorney General has power to bring lawsuits to enforce the provisions of the 2002 law--provisions that include a requirement that states provide "uniform and nondiscriminatory" voting systems, and that they give provisional ballots to those who say they have registered but whose names do not appear on the rolls. In a 1969 US Supreme Court Ruling on enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Justices said "the achievement of the act's laudable goal would be severely hampered ... if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the attorney general."

In the Bush Justice Department's attack on private right of action in voting rights cases, we can see a close alignment with Reagan's overtly racist agenda. Bush's policy record on civil rights issues strongly implies that he chose Roberts because of his substantive involvement in Reaganite reactionary politics.

Bush DOJ Wants To Use The Help America Vote Act To Bypass The Voting Rights Act
The DOJ has not yet had a ruling in its favor on the private right of action in voting rights violations. It must be understood, however, that current implementations of HAVA's provisional balloting were a major avenue for depriving citizens of their right to vote in 2004. As long as provisional balloting exists in its current form, there will be a steady flow of voters who lose their vote to this supposedly "fail-safe" procedure, and there will continue to be more lawsuits in which the DOJ can persist in its arguments against the private right of action in voting rights violations. If John Roberts becomes a Supreme Court Justice, the Court will be further stacked against voting rights.

Last fall's court battles over provisional ballots and private right of action indicate that Republican vote suppression strategies have a double purpose. The first, most obvious purpose, of the thousands of Republican challenges to voters was to keep people of color, low-income people, and students from getting to vote. But it was also the case that when challengers questioned a voter's status, the stop-gap measure was often to hand the voter a provisional ballot. Numerous provisional ballots were never counted for purely bureaucratic reasons, and numerous others were thrown out for having been cast in the wrong precinct. Voters who were unfairly deprived of their votes through provisional balloting must seek recourse under the provisions of HAVA and, therefore, provide the DOJ with new opportunities to argue against private right of action in court—which is the the second, little discussed purpose of Republican voter suppression strategies. Each voter disenfranchised through provisional balloting provides the DOJ with a new opportunity to make an unprecedented reversal through the courts of how voting rights can be protected.

The DOJ And The Voting Rights Act: Anniversary Gifts Don't Always Prove Your Commitment
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has recently been pursuing violations of the Voting Rights Act in cases of discrimination against language minorities.

BOSTON - The federal government filed a lawsuit Friday, as part of what it said is a national initiative in several states, alleging that Boston's election practices discriminate against Hispanic and Asian American voters.

The Department of Justice's suit, which a city attorney called "unsubstantiated," claims Boston violated the federal Voting Rights Act. It was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.

Boston's growing Hispanic population since 1992 has required the city under federal law to provide all election materials in Spanish. But the lawsuit alleges that the city's elections Web site and notices posted in polling places were only in English. A check Friday night of the Web site, however, showed there is a link to a Spanish language version.

Boston also has failed to recruit and maintain a pool of bilingual poll workers to help Hispanic, Chinese and Vietnamese speaking voters, the suit alleged.

"Despite having had an unequivocal obligation _ for 13 years _ to provide Spanish language information to voters who need it... the city of Boston has consistently fallen well short of the mark," Bradley J. Schlozman, acting assistant attorney general, said in a prepared statement.

I have no doubt such violations have occurred in my own hometown of Boston. I support rigorous enforcement of the law in these cases, but with gross inaction by the DOJ in more pervasive violations of the Voting Rights Act [pdf], the Boston case reads as a PR gimmick. As the nation turns towards fortieth anniversary celebrations of passage of the Voting Rights Act, and as debate concerning reauthorization peppers the news, the recent DOJ legal actions will give the false impression of a commitment to enforcement and contribute towards a false sense of security if some version of Voting Rights Act reauthorization goes through in 2007.

The Bush DOJ's Anti-Voting Rights Agenda
In typical Bush administration fashion, it will not matter what the law says if there is not proper implementation or enforcement. Despite token cases such as the new one in Boston, the Voting Section at the DOJ is still the same one that Jeffrey Toobin described in the New Yorker last fall:

The Attorney General had come forward [in 2002] to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft's proposal favored the "integrity" side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would "deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice."

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access.

Toobin goes on to note that current staff attorney for the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, has been emphasizing that "voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers."

In September, 2004, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported [pdf] that:

• "The Voting Section does not have a reliable method to consistently record and document telephone calls received alleging voting irregularities";
• "The Voting Section does not routinely track its election monitoring activities through the Interactive Case Management (ICM) System, the Justice Department's formal process for tracking and managing work activities";
• "The Justice Department, due to its lack of specific information about allegations of voting irregularities, and Justice Department actions taken to address them, is unable to provide the public and Congress with clear information concerning election procedures."

If untold numbers of voting rights violations simply disappear down an Orwellian memory hole, if the DOJ's Voting Section does not consistently promote voter access, if taking cases to court may seriously limit the ability citizens to pursue legitimate complaints, then what what voting rights protections can we hope for right now?

Support Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act
Despite my pessimism about the current enforceability of the Voting Rights Act, I still urge one and all to ask your Senators and Representatives to to renew and restore the Voting Rights Act. The specific measures of the VRA that are at stake are enforcement provisions that allow for federal oversight of state and local voting functions. It is essential that our legislators know their constituents want the legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be revived and carried forward into the twenty-first century.

~
Do read the rest of the Washington Post article that I cited above. Roberts' expressed disdain for civil rights protections was multi-faceted, from voting rights, to job discrimination, to busing, to Title IX, to affirmative action. Thanks to Marsha Joyner for sending me the link. Also see today's post from Professor Kim, which links to the Washington Post article about Roberts and to an earlier piece she wrote about a very personal experience she had with a racist in the GOP, the night Reagan was elected President. I hope Kim will collect her memoir pieces into a book one day.

"Nations were made by men, not by paper Constitutions and paper ballots"

This voice from the past is a reminder of why voting technology activists need to keep on the front burner the racial politics they embraced widely up through January 6, 2005.

Nations were made by men, not by paper Constitutions and paper ballots. We're not free because we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings were free men . . . if you can make men out of paper, then it is possible with a scratch of a pen in the hands of a tyrannical judge or a vicious attorney general, to transform by its magic 18 million blacks into 18 million kings....

This is a white man's government, conceived by white man and maintained by white men through every year of its history. And by God of our fathers, it shall be ruled by the white man until the archangels shall call at the end of time!

(A FIVE POINT ACTION PROGRAM: AN ADDRESS BY LOUIS W. HOLLIS, Executive Director, CitIzens' Councils of America to THE REORGANIZATION RALLY SAVANNAH CITIZENS' COUNCIL SAVANNAH, GEORGIA, July 22, 1963, p. 17)

'

Ohio Secretary Of State J. Kenneth Blackwell's Partisan Thuggery

Back in December there were serious allegations by Hocking County, Ohio Board of Elections Deputy Director, Sherole Eaton that an employee of Triad, the company that services all of Ohio's punch card machines, tampered with the tabulator computer, which records the results from the individual machines around the county. There is now evidence that Eaton has been asked to resign or be fired, for her whistleblowing. Even more damning, however, is a recently leaked letter to all Ohio elections officials, from J. Kenneth Blackwell, threatening dismissal of any officials who do not follow his directives.

Though comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, the Hocking County Board now pressuring Eaton continues to act under direct threat from Secretary of State Blackwell. Blackwell administered the 2004 election in Ohio while serving as the state's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign. He has been widely criticized in Congress, in the media and throughout Ohio for heavy-handed partisan manipulations that resulted in Bush carrying Ohio and the presidency.

In a letter dated October 5, 2004 to Republican Chair of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Robert Bennett, Blackwell specifically threatened removal of any board member who refused to follow his direct orders. The threat undermines Republican arguments that the election was fair because both Democrats and Republicans serve on election boards. "Be advised that your actions are not in compliance with Ohio law and further failure to comply with my lawful directives will result in official action, which may include removal of the Board and its Director," Blackwell wrote Bennett.

Under Ohio law, all election board members serve at Secretary of State Blackwell's pleasure. Cuyahoga Election Board member James Vu mentioned the letter at a Congressional hearing staged at the Ohio statehouse by Republican Congressman Bob Ney. Ney brought the hearing to Columbus in part because Blackwell refused to testify in Washington. The hearing was highlighted by angry, bitter exchanges between Blackwell and US Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who co-introduced (with Senator Barbara Boxer of California) the historic Congressional resolution challenging the seating of the Ohio Electoral College delegation for Bush.

In his October letter Blackwell made it clear that any Election Board official, Republican or Democrat, who challenged Blackwell's decrees would be summarily removed. Election Board positions are well paid, and Blackwell's threat erased widespread claims the presence of Democrats on Election Boards guaranteed that the election was administered in a neutral, bi-partisan manner.

In fact, with the club of a loss of substantial salaries, this leaked letter makes it clear Blackwell was running the election with an iron partisan hand, and that claims of true bi-partisanship were strictly for show. (Emphasis added)

(Read the whole thing!)

John Conyers Does The Math

22: The number of times the phrase "voter identification" or "voter ID" was said at the first Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform hearing on April 18, 2005. The mantra of Republicans is that dogs, dead people, and cartoon characters are allowed to cast fraudulent votes. Republicans are advancing that strict voter identification requirements are the means to eliminate such voter fraud and state legislators are passing voter identification legislation as fast as they can with little debate or delay. In recent months, Indiana and Georgia have enacted voter identification requirements that have been characterized as some of the most severe and unreasonable voter identification requirements in the country. Several other state legislatures have similar legislation pending. At this first Carter-Baker Commission hearing, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Barbara Arnwine told of the real-world consequences of these measures: More than 10 percent of eligible voters currently lack government-issued photo ID, and would be arbitrarily disenfranchised.

6: The number of days the American Center for Voting Rights, a new, "non-partisan," "voting rights" organization, had been in existence before it was called to testify by Republican members of Congress before a House Administration Committee hearing on March 22. The American Center for Voting Rights was formed by a lawyer for the Bush-Cheney campaign and the notoriously anti-voting rights Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri, who described the group as a non-partisan, voting rights advocacy group. He testified and submitted a report on Ohio election irregularities, which highlighted the Mary Poppins Conspiracy in this country. If you haven't heard about it, the Mary Poppins Conspiracy consists of many, many ineligible voters—using the names Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive F. Turkey—fraudulently voting in elections.

Unfortunately for advocates of this conspiracy theory, a precinct has yet to report that a citizen by the name of Mary Poppins showed up on Election Day and voted. Searches for Dick Tracy votes and Jive F. Turkey votes have also come up empty.

598: The number of days left in the 109th Congress to pass election reform legislation. The debate over whether voting machines were hacked or there was deliberate suppression of minority votes will continue. We should all agree—given the shoddy, unaccountable and unverifiable state of our election machinery and procedures—that, unless we act, the next close election will prompt the same debates and public confidence in our democracy will suffer a potentially fatal blow. Of even more importance, we must be vigilant as Republicans try to roll our voting rights backwards.

Read the rest of "The GOP's Attack On Voting Rights," by Rep. John Conyers, Jr.

Voting: Another Heinous Act Of Citizenship

That's another choice phrase from Joe McNally:

Finally someone has identified a voting problem we can do something about.

Even though the media have gone berserk since the presidential election trying to justify inflammatory Republican Party claims of vote fraud in Milwaukee, they have failed to identify a single fraudulent vote.

What the local newspaper says it has found - after sacrificing hundreds of acres of trees to a muddled investigation - is that at least 82 convicted felons, who had not yet had their voting rights restored, may have voted in the November election.

That is similar to the newspaper's claim after the 2000 presidential election that convicted felons may have voted illegally.

At that time, District Attorney E. Michael McCann charged three convicted felons with voting when they were ineligible. Those charges ultimately were dropped because prosecutors couldn't prove that the three knew they weren't allowed to vote.

There is a very simple solution to this problem. Legalize all voting by convicted felons. There are a number of compelling reasons to do so, not the least of which is the embarrassment of charging citizens in a democracy with committing the act of voting.

In fact, the state of Wisconsin already recognizes the importance of allowing convicted felons to vote. Some convicted felons are allowed to vote in Wisconsin and others are not. That is probably the primary reason ineligible felons erroneously commit such a heinous act of citizenship. . . .

So why should law-abiding citizens care about whether felons are allowed to vote or not? The most obvious reason is that law-abiding citizens should be concerned about creating more law-abiding citizens. It's the same reason only people who haven't thought about it would support shortsighted efforts of politicians to allow employers to discriminate against convicted felons in hiring.

If an ex-offender can't get a legitimate job, he doesn't have much choice except to return to some illegitimate means of survival. For public safety, everyone has an interest in trying to help convicted felons reintegrate into the legitimate life of the community.

We all should be able to tell the difference between crime and good citizenship. The charges filed by McCann after the 2000 election threatened to send three ex-offenders back to prison for violating their parole. It was not for committing a crime that endangered their community, but for trying to improve their community by voting.

Disenfranchising those convicted of felonies further marginalizes people who already feel marginalized in our society. It also extends the racial bias of the criminal justice system to the right to vote. . . .

Of course, Republican attempts to make voting difficult have nothing to do with fairness. They reflect a crass political calculation that requirements such as a driver's license and photo ID card for voting turn away more Democrats than Republicans.

It's in the best interest of democracy to convict more Republican CEOs and legislative leaders. Then both parties will get interested in restoring the vote to convicted felons.

(Whole thing.)

DNC Stiffs Black Press Over Election Ads In 2004 And 2000

Remember John Kerry, Hypocrite Opportunist? Here's another chapter from the same story:

“This is the first time I have ever known that the Democratic Party almost totally ignored the Black Press as far as advertising in its publications,” says Dorothy Leavell, publisher of the Chicago New Crusader. “They did this targeted kind of advertising in battleground states and ignored the rest of the Black Press.”

Two months before November’s election, NNPA Chairwoman Sonny Messiah-Jiles wrote a letter to DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, pressing him about ad dollars that he’d promised the Black Press.

“Well, we are in the final 60 days and there is a lot of work to be done. Unfortunately, the National Newspaper Publishers Association has not heard from the DNC regarding its advertising plans. As a result, I am sending you the proposal previously submitted in June, 2004 by the National Newspaper Publishers Association to ensure The Black Press of America is a part of the strategic advertising campaign to educate and mobilize voters to go to the polls and vote in November,” she wrote. “During a meeting with the leadership of NNPA, [Democratic Presidential Candidate] Senator [John] Kerry and you both made a vow to advertise with The Black Press of America in a big way. Considering during the last presidential election, the Democratic candidate made a promise to advertise in Black newspapers and did not follow through, I am sending you another copy of our proposal in an effort to avoid history repeating itself and remind you of the commitment.”

(Whole thing.)

Georgia Voter Disenfranchisement Legislation Signed Into Law

I meant to blog this story when the Georgia's new, highly restrictive voter ID bill passed the State Senate, but now it's been signed into law (registration required; via ConyersBlog) by Governor Sonny Perdue. The bill makes Georgia the first state in the US not to permit voters an alternative to photo ID, such as a signed affidavit. Representative Conyers' comments are worth repeating here:

It is quite an amazing and discouraging development, and one that we are seeing in other "Red" States. The GOP is clearly engaged in a power ploy, and they are stopping at no means in their effort to eradicate all political opposition. We began with the ruthless effort to stop the Florida recount. Than we had the amazing mid-decade gerrymands in Texas and Colorado (the latter thrown out by the courts), which singlehanded gave the GOP 5 seats in the 2004 elections. We all saw what Ken Blackwell accomplished in Ohio for Bush-Cheney, and this year Georgia has redistricted and is now enacting a new "poll tax" in disguise. Many other states are planning the same discrminatory ploy, such as Indiana.

What really saddens me is that the GOP is doing this with no solid evidence of vote fraud -- that is to say individuals knowingly going to the polls who are not entitled to vote. Please let me know of any documented cases of this occuring in the last decade. I know the new photo id laws will prevent legal voters from voting, but I doubt it will prevent a single case of the intentional vote fraud the bills claim to be aimed at. Is it any wonder minorities are so alienated by the Republican Party?

In response to this development, twenty-one members of Congress have joined Representative Conyers in a letter asking the Department of Justice to throw out the Georgia legislation for being in violation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which applies special scrutiny to states, such as Georgia, with a history of restricting African American voting rights before 1965.

    Our objections to voter identification provisions are grounded in history as well as contemporary evidence.  During their day, poll taxes and literacy tests, which were also said to protect against fraud and breed confidence in elections (as the Georgia law purports to do), had the direct effect of erecting a barrier to minority voters.  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 specifically outlawed these and other similar devices because they could be arbitrarily administered by local registrars and state officials in a discriminatory manner.  We strongly believe that requiring government-issued photo identification at the polling place would inevitably create similar barriers and hurdles for racial and ethnic minority voters and would have a chilling effect on voter participation.

    The negative effect of these provisions has been widely recognized at the state and federal level.  Consider the following:

•    The Federal Elections Commission noted in its 1997 report to Congress that photo identification entails major expenses, both initially and in maintenance, and presents an undue and potentially discriminatory burden on citizens in exercising their basic right to vote. The burden of this requirement would fall disproportionately and unfairly upon racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as voters with disabilities, since a disproportionate number have neither identification nor the financial means to acquire it.  For this reason, the vast majority of states recognize the barriers of photo identification and have adopted other identification procedures.  

•    On November 5, 2001 a federal court prohibited the use of an identification requirement, with an alternative signature attestation option, at the polls in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  Both the Department and private plaintiffs argued, and the court found, that "the burden imposed by this requirement will fall disproportionately on the Latin American community, thereby violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. ¡ì 1973."

•    The Department of Justice has taken issue with identification requirements for having a discriminatory impact on minority voters.  In the City of Lawrence case, the Department noted that, "our experience in jurisdictions around the country suggests that minority voters — especially those who do not have the required identification with them at the polls ... — may be disproportionately disadvantaged by such [identification] requirements, either by difficulties at the polling place or by fears of such mishaps that make them unwilling to go to the polls.["]

•    In a directly analogous case, the Department objected to the use of photo identification requirements without also permitting a signature attestation for first time voters under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act because it had a disparate impact on minority electoral participation. Since black voters were found four to five times less likely to have photo identification, the Department believed that this requirement would have a "retrogressive effect on the opportunities of black voters" and would likely "have a disproportionately adverse impact on black voters in the state."

    We believe that there are many voters who simply do not have identification and requiring them to purchase identification would be tantamount to requiring them to pay a poll tax.  Moreover, as the Department has argued in the past, the burden of this requirement would fall disproportionately and unfairly upon racial and ethnic minority voters, as well as voters with disabilities, since a disproportionate number have neither identification nor the financial means to acquire it.  A burden such as this, which disproportionately affects minorities, would clearly be retrogressive under Section 5 and not subject to preclearance.

    We know you to be a man of integrity who takes his responsibilities under the law quite seriously, and we would hope that you will not allow such an obvious and discriminatory limitation on voting rights to take effect particularly during the year of the 40th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

    We thank you for your immediate attention to this matter and look forward to meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our views.  Please contact us through the Judiciary Committee Staff, Keenan Keller at 202-225-6906, fax 202-225-7680, B-351 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515 so that we may discuss this critical matter with you.

Very Truly Yours,

Cynthia McKinney, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jan Schakowsky, Bernard Sanders, Linda T. Sanchez, Dennis Kucinich, Adam Smith, Russ Feingold, Charles A.Gonzalez, Jose E. Serrano, Ed Towns, Sanford Bishop, Jr., Melvin, L. Watt, David Scott, John Barrow, Chaka Fattah, William J. Jefferson, Bobby Scott, Joseph Crowley, Charles B. Rangel, John Lewis.

Given its aggressive reversals of its own historic mission to protect voting rights, the DOJ will most likely respond—if it responds at all—in favor of Georgia's voter disenfranchisement bill.

Also see: Some Arguments Against ID Requirements For Voting.

The Brad Blog Strikes Back

RP: Well, they are not going to be listened to.

BB: So, you are suggesting that somehow, for some reason, you should have more power over our American democracy than any other American Citizen? Are you kidding me?!

RP: Well, apparently I do have more power because otherwise you wouldn't care so much about what the commission is doing.

BB: Yes, we care, because it's an important commission...It needs to happen...Such a commission is necessary, very necessary...but the way this thing has been fixed and stacked...

RP: It is not stacked.

BB: Who appointed the members of that commission?

RP: The members of the commission are Republicans and Democrats and individual non-partisans...

BB: Who appointed them to this commission?

RP: You have a problem with three or four of the commission members and one of the academic advisors, but there are probably more Democrats than Republicans on the commission...

BB: I don't care how many...This isn't about Democrats or Republicans, Bob. There should be Republicans on the commission...We have no problem with that! What we do have a problem with is Bush/Cheney and Voting Machine Representatives...is the lead attorney from the Kerry/Edwards campaign on the advisory board, Bob? . . .

RP: No he's not. But there are people on the Right that have problems with all the Democrats on the committee.

BB: I don't give a damn about the...There's no problem with Republicans on the committee, Bob...It's not...

RP: Do you know who won the last election?

BB: Uh...Not really...Do you?...

RP: You don't know who won the election?

BB: Not really...I wish I did, but...

RP: The Republicans won the Presidency! And both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate!

BB: How do you know that?...

(Phone conversation, Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog (BB) and Robert A. Pastor (RP), Executive Director, National Election Reform Commission.)

To address the growing number of concerns about the National Election Reform Commission (see previous post), The Brad Blog set up a page on The Velvet Revolution website where anyone who cares to can send a letter of protest to President Carter at the Commission. The Velvet Revolution is a coalition of 100+ election reform and voting rights organizations.

After receiving thousands of emails via the Velvet Revolution page, the Commission's Executive Director, Robert A. Pastor, called Brad Friedman on the phone on Tuesday (4/19) and chewed him out for "harassment." Brad took notes while they spoke, and the dialog above is from their conversation. It is a remarkable conversation, which ought to be read in full.

I am puzzled as to what Republican electoral victories have to do with the selection and conduct of the Commission's members. While some of Pastor's bluster seems due to ignorance of how email and internet communications work, he also seems deeply alarmed that the Commission is a source of controversy. It appears that Pastor was operating under the assumption that his organization would conduct its hearings, make high profile recommendations that undermine the work of the election reform and voting rights communities and then fade out of sight, no questions asked. I hope my readers here will head over to the Velvet Revolution page and help make sure that Mr. Pastor continues to hear that the American public does not consider the Commission, in its current form, a legitimate body for the pursuit of election reform.

I mentioned in my last post that one major source of controversy regarding the Commission is that it is has excluded Representative John Conyers, Jr., from the its ranks. Representative Conyers has investigated the 2004 presidential election tirelessly and has been a constant voice for election reform and voting rights. It is therefore incomprehensible that any national election reform commission would not think his participation essential to its mission.

Yesterday, Representative Conyers met with Mr. Pastor to express his own concerns about the Commission directly.

I had a lengthy, substantive, and frank meeting with Dr. Robert Pastor, Executive Director of the Baker-Carter Election Commission. I shared my concerns about the Commission with him. Among other things, I remain concerned about the involvement of Mr. James Baker, III, in this Commission, and the emphasis of some of the Commission's work thus far. In this meeting, Dr. Pastor displayed great familiarity with my report on the 2004 Ohio Presidential election and expressed his strong commitment to election reform. Dr. Pastor has established an open channel with me to continue discussing these concerns, and I intend to continue this dialogue. I also intend to attend future meetings of the Commission, and personally meet with President Carter and other Commission members. In sum, I want to assure you that I will be monitoring this Commission and its work very closely. In other words, I am on the case.

We're certainly not out of the woods, but it is reassuring to know that Conyers is taking an active role in the Commission, all invitations aside.

The contrast between Pastor's tone and demeanor in his Tuesday conversation with Brad and his civil cooperation with Conyers on Thursday is stark. The change must certainly be in no small measure because of Conyers' unflappable diplomacy. The contrast should also be taken as evidence that public pressure is, in fact, effective and that ongoing vigilance is essential.

If you go The Brad Blog or to The Velvet Revolution, do take note of the new email address for correspondence with Pastor in his capacity as Executive Director of the the Baker-Carter Commission. Representative Conyers and Brad Friedman have asked concerned citizens to use the new address as a good faith measure, in return for Robert Pastor's conciliatory response in the Thursday meeting.

Just Because They Say "Election Reform" and "Voting Rights" Doesn't Mean They're Promoting Reform And Protecting Rights

I've been meaning to point readers towards discussion and criticism of the new Carter-Baker Commission On Federal Election Reform (CFER).

The two places to read up on it are The Brad Blog and Representative John Conyers, Jr.'s blog.

The short version of the story is that after the terrible problems in Florida (and elsewhere!) in the 2000 presidential election, a blue ribbon commission was established, with former presidents Carter and Ford at the helm. The Carter/Ford Commission issued a report, decidedly middle of the road in it's policy recommendations, but nevertheless far reaching, delving deeply into the issues and addressing many of the key areas of election reform. The report was a guiding document for the under funded and badly administered Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)—which has turned out to be much more dubious than the tempered, bi-partisan efforts of the Carter-Ford Commission.

After the 2004 presidential election, which had even more disenfranchisement and irregularities than in 2000 (Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, etc.), a new commission was formed, again with President Carter, but this time with former Secretary of State James Baker III as Carter's Republican counterpart. James Baker, you may recall, led the efforts to block the recounts of Florida's votes in 2000. It was Baker's success that led to the US Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush as president and the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Florida voters. An odd choice for co-chair, no?

In the lead up to the first FCEF hearings earlier this week, The Brad Blog began covering a related scandal concerning the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), a phony election reform organization, which is really a right wing Republican front group. The leader of ACVR is Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, who is also the National Counsel for Bush/Cheney 04, Inc. ACVR's publicist Jim Dyke was previously the Communications Director for the Republican National Committee. In a Raw Story report on this scandal, Larissa Alexandrovna explains that

Dyke pioneered “astroturf” letters, or letters to the editor that appear to be written by constituents but instead are drafted by political operatives. During the 2004 election, Dyke traveled the country creating what appear to be front groups to disseminate anti-Kerry disinformation. He was also the source of many of the registration irregularity complaints generated in Ohio, and recently set up a Social Security lobby group.

As a spokesman for the RNC, Dyke commented on the Purple Heart bandages he helped distribute: “Democrats continue to try and hide their own candidates’ many positions on the same issue (Iraq) by attacking the president’s leadership.”

ACVR, which is neatly located at a Texas P.O. Box, was invited to join the Baker-Carter Commission on Federal Election Reform within weeks of its formation.

To help publicize ACVR, team Dyke and Hearne turned to Cybercast News Service, which has intimate connections to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, Unfit for Command—a character assassination of Kerry’s Vietnam years—and to the CBS memo controversy through a mutual relationship with Creative Response Concepts a PR firm that deals in political battles.

To make matters worse, ACVR's leader, Hearne, has been seated on the Academic Advisory board for the Carter-Baker Commission.

In her article, Alexandrovna also raises concerns about the partisanship of a number of the other Commission panelists:

Ethics and Integrity Panel:

John Fund is a highly partisan Wall Street Journal editorial board member who has repeatedly attacked election reform activists as conspiracy theorists, stating "When it comes to electronic voting, most liberals are just plain old-fashioned nuts."

Colleen McAndrews is a partner in a law firm representing Governor Schwarzenegger and the treasurer for his campaign. She is considered to be a “behind the scenes force in the Republican Party.”

Elections and Help America Vote Act Current Status Panel:

Kay J. Maxwell is president of the non partisan League of Women Voters, whose strong support for a paperless ballot, despite the demands of hundreds of its members, split the League (here and here).

Gracia Hillman is the chairwoman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is an official part of HAVA. She was appointed by President Bush.

Voting Technology and Election Administration Panel:

Jim Dickson is the Vice President for Governmental Affairs, American Association of People with Disabilities, a highly regarded non-partisan group. He has called all who question electronic voting "geeks."

Nobody from the Kerry/Edwards campaign is on the Carter-Baker Commission. Nobody from any of the numerous election reform groups that worked tirelessly to raise objections to the counting of Ohio's illegitimate electoral votes were invited to participate in the Carter-Baker Commission. And, most shockingly, Representative Conyers was not invited to be on the commission, submit his report [pdf] on Ohio's elections, or to participate in any fashion.

Representative Conyers wrote a letter [pdf] to President Carter, protesting his exclusion and the exclusion of other individuals and groups involved in electoral reform and voting rights. He's also written more on the matter here and here.

The silent scream of numbers

The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states, causing an estimated one-third of the voters in these precincts to drop out of line without casting a ballot; why so many otherwise Democratic ballots, thousands and thousands in Ohio alone, but by no means only in Ohio, recorded no vote for president (as though people with no opinion on the presidential race waited in line for three or six or eight hours out of a fervor to have their say in the race for county commissioner); and why virtually every voter complaint about electronic voting machine malfunction indicated an unauthorized vote switch from Kerry to Bush.

This, mind you, is just for starters. We might also ask why so many Ph.D.-level mathematicians and computer programmers and other numbers-savvy scientists are saying that the numbers don’t make sense (see, for instance, www.northnet.org/minstrel, the Web site of Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, lead statistician in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit challenging the Ohio election results). Indeed, the movement to investigate the 2004 election is led by such people, because the numbers are screaming at them that something is wrong.

And we might, no, we must, ask — with more seriousness than the media have asked — about those exit polls, which in years past were extraordinarily accurate but last November went haywire, predicting Kerry by roughly the margin by which he ultimately lost to Bush. This swing is out of the realm of random chance, forcing chagrined pollsters to hypothesize a “shy Republican” factor as the explanation; and the media have bought this evidence-free absurdity because it spares them the need to think about the F-word: fraud.

And the numbers are still haywire. A few days ago, Terry Neal wrote in the Washington Post about Bush’s inexplicably low approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, 45 percent, vs. a 49 percent disapproval rating. This is, by a huge margin, the worst rating at this point in a president’s second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” asks exit polling expert Jonathan Simon, who pointed these latest numbers out to me. Bush mustered low approval ratings immediately before the election, surged on Election Day, then saw his ratings plunge immediately afterward. Yet Big Media has no curiosity about this anomaly. (Emphasis added.)

Simon, who spoke at the Nashville conference — one of dozens of speakers to give highly detailed testimony on evidence of fraud and dirty tricks from sea to shining sea — said, “When the autopsy of our democracy is performed, it is my belief that media silence will be given as the primary cause of death.”

In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care? (Emphasis added.)

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

            ***         ***         ***

Related links:
• Bush's Poll Numbers The Worst On Record (Washington Post)

• US Count Votes' National Election Data Archive Project, Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies, Executive Summary [pdf], Full Report [pdf]

• Solution or Problem? Provisional Ballots in 2004, Press Release (summary) [pdf], Full Report [pdf]

• Demos, Continuing Failures in Fail-Safe Voting: A Preliminary Analysis of Provisional Voting Problems

•Shattering The Myth: An Initial Snapshot Of Voter Disenfranchisement in the 2004 Elections, Press Release (summary), Full Report [pdf]

• Vaporizing Votes (The Republic, summary article from November on election problems)

Coalition of Electoral Reform Groups Call for James Baker's Resignation from Electoral Reform Commission;Plan Presence at April 18th "Public Hearing"

[If you're in the DC area, please consider attending. --BG]

Press Advisory
April 13th, 2005

For more information:
Brad Friedman, brad@velvetrevolution.us,
Alysia Fischer, 513-330-0063, Ted Glick, 973-338-5398

Scores of voting rights and electoral reform organizations
nationwide have united to demand real electoral reform
proposals from the private, blue ribbon, Baker/Carter
Commission on Federal Election Reform. They are organizing a
visible presence at 10:00 a.m. in front of the Kay Spiritual
Center on the American University campus where the
Commission is planning what they call "public hearings."

These groups, including Code Pink, Progressive Democrats of
America, U.P. (United Progressives) for Democracy and Velvet
Revolution, are opposed to the inclusion in any form of
James Baker III on the Commission. Baker was the lead
attorney in Florida for the 2000 Bush/Cheney campaign which
engineered Bush's selection as President by five Supreme
Court justices.

The pro-democracy groups are also opposed to two other
members of the Commission who have direct ties to Mr.
Baker's law firm, Tom Phillips and Robert Mosbacher, and to
Ralph Munro, CEO of VoteHere, a company that manufactures
vote-counting machines.

On April 11, Congressman John Conyers, minority chair of the
House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter
expressing his concern about the inclusion of Mr. Baker and
strongly urging that the Commission include members of the
voting rights coalition.

The last two national elections here have been marred by
irregularities that have called into question the legitimacy
of the results. In 2004, there were literally tens of
thousands of documented cases of impropriety that, in many
cases, significantly affected the vote count. Over the past
five months, grassroots electoral reform groups have joined
together in a pro-democracy campaign calling for a range of
reforms in order to restore integrity, trustworthiness and
accountability to the elections process. Some of their
demands include: a constitutional right to vote for all
citizens, paper ballots as the official record of all votes
cast, independent analysis of all vote machine software and
hardware before and after elections, unified national
standards for national elections, election day registration,
independent and non-partisan administration of elections, a
strengthening and reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act,
public financing of elections and fair ballot access for all
candidates and parties.

The pro-democracy coalition will hold a press conference
outside the Kay Center following the conclusion of the
"public hearing" at 2:30 p.m.

Okay, Things Are Basically In Order

I took that giant mush called "Some Links" and divided it into subject areas. This also gave me the chance to fix a few links whose paths had changed since I first posted them, drop a few extraneous things, and add a bunch of links, mostly elections and voting rights related, that I'd put up on No Stolen Democracy. Also added in the Elections section are things that should have been in my mix of links a long time ago, like The Sentencing Project and VotersUnite! Note that for the most part, the link collections are not intended to be at all comprehensive: they are generally things that I've found while researching specific posts on this site or that I consider essentials.

Incidentally, I am not posting current material on No Stolen Democracy. At present, I am maintaining that blog only as an archive of materials relating to the grassroots movement that led to Senator Barbara Boxer joining Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones in her objection to the counting of Ohio's electoral votes on January 6, 2005. If there's anyone out there with some server space who'd like to host the site and save me the monthly fee on typepad, please get in touch.

My one sad discovery in doing this bit of site maintenance is that We Were The Heart of the Struggle: Women in the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement now seems to be gone from the Sage Colleges website. This was a wonderful senior thesis, consisting of oral histories from female participants in a corner of the Movement that tends to be associated almost exclusively with charismatic, male leaders. If you had the foresight to download the files or you figure out before I do how to find cached versions of the files on the Google servers or elsewhere, please email me or comment on this post. I've emailed the professor who is listed on what I think remains of the department site that used to host the thesis, so perhaps I'll get a hold of it that way or possibly even get the department to put the thesis back online.

Yesterday's News

Last weekend the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice held a conference on historical injustices, restitution, and reconciliation. Things started off on Thursday with a session led by Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, and David Dennis, former field secretary for CORE. Their subject was the impending trial of Edgar Ray Killen, who has been charged with the murders of Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

Rita Bender hopes people will talk when Edgar Ray Killen finally walks into a Neshoba County courtroom to face murder charges for the deaths of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., more than 40 years ago.

She hopes they will talk about racism, atonement, and why ''good folks" don't confront evil. She hopes they talk about the many unpunished politicians and police officers who encouraged men like Killen to terrorize their black neighbors.

She hopes. But she's not sure it will happen.

''If having this trial can allow that discussion, then the trial is worth having," said the widow of Michael Schwerner, who was killed along with Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney in Philadelphia, Miss. in 1964.

But if it's about a small town burying its bloody past and polishing its image, forget it. ''We don't say that we're past all that simply by convicting one crazy old man. . . ."

The Neshoba County district attorney trying Killen's case today says it's unlikely anyone else will be charged with shooting the men and burying their bodies on a muddy farm. But the killers were undoubtedly part of a larger conspiracy, Dennis said. ''It was the culture that existed in the country at that time."

The FBI did not protect black and white activists, who left northern states and southern hometowns to register voters during ''Freedom Summer," he said. The agency did not move quickly to find the workers' bodies, and local politicians accused the civil rights movement of staging the men's disappearances to gain sympathy.

Bender said that many of the local police were Klansmen, and that they exchanged information with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was formed to resist integration and the looming Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When commission files were finally made public in the late 1990s, lists of civil rights workers' cars, license plate numbers and addresses including hers and her husband's were revealed, she said.

The government spied on activists and threatened those who helped them, she said. Sharecroppers who registered to vote were forced from their land; many who registered also lost their jobs and homes.

''They were the white-glove counterpart of the Klan," Bender said of the officials.

If Killen lives to see trial (via Neshoblog), and if he is actually convicted of his crimes, the small moral victory will convince many that we have finally arrived at the just conclusion of a shameful chapter in our history. You will hear many comments like this one, for example, at Neshoblog. As Bender and Dennis (and Steve Schwerner) explain, the responsibility for the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—and for the widespread fascist terror against African Americans and their allies that was the status quo in Mississippi—extends far beyond Ray Killen's role in these matters. The roots of that terror run deep into the state's infrastructure, and the hanging tree was watered by collusion from the Department of Justice and members of the US Congress.

The current Republicans, and the spineless Democrats who do not meaningfully oppose them, depend on a new, 21st century conspiracy of silence on race. Racist politicians refrain from race baiting, a token number of historic racial murders are finally "solved," the President, whose policies show nothing but contempt for communities of color and low-income people, surrounds himself with Latinos and African Americans.

We are led to believe that the conversation on race is over because it has been artfully excised from the public sphere by Karl Rove and his enablers, the DLC. And if a certain African American leader discusses race and Bush policies in the same breath, the Thought Police IRS is called out to gag his public speech with an audit of his organization. And if Bush and Co. can keep Julian Bond and the rest of us quiet just a little longer, Ward Connerly and his ilk will get their race data collection bans passed to compliment the quieter disappearances of data on discrimination already underway [pdf].

In the present focused blogosphere the Boston Globe report on Rita Bender and David Dennis' talk at Brown University is already ancient history, but their analysis of the Killen trial is far from yesterday's news.

ELECTION RIGGING 101: A National Teach-In

ELECTION RIGGING 101
A National Teach-In

On the 2004 election and what we must do to restore democracy

With Bob Fitrakis
Ohio Attorney, Editor, Free Press of Columbus OH

with Lynn Landes, Jonathan Simon, Medea Benjamin, Larry Bensky, Butch Wing, Emily Levy

Jim March (Black BoxVoting), Kathy Dopp (US Count Votes), John Gideon, (VotersUnite!), Bob Kibrick, (VerifiedVoting) and many more!
scroll down for complete program listing
Saturday, Feb. 26th

10am - 4pm

1st Congregational Church

2501 Harrison St. Oakland

$10 suggested donation

please bring lunch

Program Overview

I. The Arc Of Justice: We've Been Here Before

* DVD excerpt: Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., "Martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement"
* Lynn Landes, journalist, "How America Used to Vote"
* John Gideon, VotersUnite!, "Analysis of HAVA Misinformation in the Press"

II. Voter Suppression

* DVD excerpt: "Columbus Ohio Election Day Footage", by Linda Byrket, http://www.votecobb.org/video/#video5
* Bob Fitrakis, Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), "The Taking of Ohio Prior to Nov. 2"
* Emily Levy, Project Coordinator for Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., "Ohio--How the Election was Stolen"
* Warren Stewart, National Ballot Integrity Project, "Recounting New Mexico"

5 Minute Stretch
III. What Happened In 2004: Exit Polls - Were They Right?

* DVD excerpt: Susan Truitt, Ohio attorney
* Jonathan Simon, Alliance for Democacy, "The Edison/Mitofsky Report: The Bottom Line You Won't Hear on Nightline"
* Allyson Washburn, US Countvotes.org, "An Alternative Explanation for the Exit Poll Discrepancy: Fraudulent Vote Tallies"
* Larry Bensky, KPFA, "The Disappearing Media"

IV. The Age of the Machines

* Jim March, BlackBoxVoting.org, "How to Hack a Diebold Vote Tabulator"
* Wayne Madsen, journalist, "The Privatization of the Vote"

Lunch (45 Minutes)
V. Litigation

* Paul Lehto, Washington attorney, "Verifying Democracy 101: Sue First, Ask Questions Later"
* Bob Fitrakis, Free Press, "History of Moss v. Bush, the Sanctions, Future Legal Actions"

VI. Legislation

* Butch Wing, political director, Rainbow PUSH, "Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s Constitutional Amendment Guaranteeing the Right to Vote"
* Bob Kibrick, Verifiedvoting.org, "Pending Federal Legislation for Electoral Reform"
* Sharon Cornu, Alameda County Central Labor Council, "Organized Labor and Election Reform"
* Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, "A Voters' Bill of Rights"

VII. Action

* Walter Riley, community activist, "Organize County by County, Precinct by Precinct"
* Lynn Landes, journalist, "A Paper Ballot is the Only Solution"
* Alan Dechert, Open Voting Consortium, "Open Source Code Machines"
* Kathy Dopp and Allyson Washburn, UScountvotes.org, "A Plan to Restore Democratic Elections by 2006"
* Open Microphone -- Share proposals and join in citizen action to reclaim electoral democracy

This Teach-In has been organized by the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, http://democraticrenewal.us
and the MMOB (Mainstreet Moms Operation Blue), http://www.themmob.com.

For full program details, click here: http://www.wellstoneclub.org/involve/teachin.htm

If you plan to be attend, please click here to send an RSVP
(say Yes! in the subject line)

Help spread the word! Click here to download a PDF flyer you can print and hand out

Dan Ashby
e-mail: dan@redefeatbush.com
This message brought to you by Left.org
Click here to download the Left.org prospectus

Voters Disenfranchised by N.C. Supreme Court

By Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina

In early February, the N.C. Supreme Court outlawed all the ballots cast on Election Day by voters at a polling place outside their home precinct. Out-of-precinct voting began in North Carolina as part of a national effort to provide secure and accessible voting opportunities. The Court's disappointing decision moves us backwards, further away from fulfilling the promise of "one person, one vote."

At a minimum, the Supreme Court has just disenfranchised more than 11,000 citizens who followed the rules and cast provisional ballots. Many of them weren't notified where to vote because of the backlog in processing a record number of new registrations. On the other hand, more than one million North Carolinians cast out-of-precinct ballots during the early voting period in 2004. Inexplicably, the Supreme Court allows those votes to count but rejects those cast out-of-precinct on Election Day.

The Court's decision is simply wrong when it says the State Board of Elections counted these "improper" votes in an "unauthorized," "unilateral" manner. Legislative leaders of both major parties knew that the 2003 state law authorizing provisional ballots would allow out-of-precinct and partial-ballot voting in the voter's "jurisdiction" (i.e., county). NCGS 163-166.11(3) and (5) indicate ballots shall be counted "in whole or in part" after a determination of "all ballot items on which . . . the individual was eligible under State or federal law to vote."

After the 2003 law passed, the State Board of Elections staff developed regulations to administer the provisional voting process fairly and efficiently. Those regulations, including how to handle out-of-precinct voting, were approved by the Republican and Democratic members of the Board and by the U.S. Justice Department, which must pre-clear election changes in compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act.

As the Court notes, North Carolina's statutes speak about "the precinct" as central to the voting process. The new law does create conflicting language in the statutes. But rather than disenfranchise voters, we should insist that state law be amended to define clearly a fail-safe method for fraud-free, out-of-precinct, same-county voting similar to the early voting process. The language in the state constitution requiring a person to vote in their "precinct, ward or other election district" should also be clarified to make it plain that "other election district" means "county."

Given today's technology and mobility, the precinct has become an obsolete administrative unit for casting a ballot, as the popularity of early voting demonstrates. The Court's decision is wrong when it says there is "no way" to allow out-of-precinct voting "without overwhelming delays, mass confusion, and the potential for fraud." In fact, there was no evidence in the record that out-of-precinct balloting caused "mass confusion" or similar problems in North Carolina.

The Court uses speculation and fear of chaos to justify a decision it did not need to make. The justices seems not to understand the mechanics of securing the integrity of the voting system, nor do they recognize how the out-of-precinct voting tool is especially helpful to voters who recently registered or moved within the county, who don't have the freedom to take off several hours from work, or who don't have easy access to transportation. Out-of-precinct voting especially helps working class, young, and minority voters. Our research shows that black voters cast more than one third of the state's out-of-precinct ballots, while less than one fifth of all votes in November's election came from African Americans.

To now throw out all these votes, to spurn these voters who obeyed the rules, sends a terrible message. The State Board of Elections, encouraged by the Democratic Party, made a major mistake when it didn