About voter fraud:
John McCain paid $175,000 of campaign money to a Republican operative accused of massive voter registration fraud in several states, it has emerged.
As the McCain camp attempts to tie Barack Obama to claims of registration irregularities by the activist group ACORN, campaign finance records detailing the payment to the firm of Nathan Sproul, investigated several times for fraud, threatens to derail that argument.
The documents show that a joint committee of the McCain-Palin campaign, the Republican National Committee and the California Republican Party, made the payment to Lincoln Strategy, of which Mr Sproul is the managing partner, for the purposes of “voter registration”.
Mr Sproul has been investigated on numerous occasions for preventing Democrats from voting, destroying registration forms and leading efforts to get Ralph Nader on ballots to leach the Democratic vote.
You could probably hear the primal scream as you read that- “B-B-B-B-UT WHAT ABOUT ACORN!!?!!”
Blow it out your hindquarters, wingnuts. Only one arrest this election cycle for fraud, and it just so happens to be a guy paid by the McCain/Palin campaign. Funny that. Presumably these crimes were only committed in the pro-America parts of America.
Bubba Dave
It’s OK by the GOP; he wasn’t registering scary black people to vote.
J.
Aren’t you the optimist (or naive). Have we heard any less about Joe the Plumber since he has been thoroughly discredited?
Conservatively Liberal
Karma baby!
It may shut McCain up but I am sure that the wingnut bloggers will have an excuse up in short order.
Prepare for hilarity. ;)
jake 4 that 1
I’d guess Anti-America parts of the country. The votes of Anti-Americans shouldn’t count anyway so it isn’t really a crime to keep them from voting so shut up, that’s why, so let’s go back to discussing each and every person who has ever worked for ACORN and the friends, relatives and acquaintances of people who worked for ACORN until we can show they’re all the lackeys of Wm. Ayers.
NonyNony
Eh. Hypocrisy has never stopped them before. Why should it stop them now? Besides, ACORN is an evil conspiracy dedicated to helping poor people vote. If you think that Obama’s a socialist, that makes ACORN a group of Marxist rebels ready to topple the government and install a Communist totalitarian worker state. Or something.
The story says California, so that would be a "no". Which probably makes it a-OK for the wingnuts because he was only doing his duty in the hellhole anti-American parts of the country. Those parts with "San Francisco Values" or something.
zmulls
Boehner already doubled down on ACORN. He made some pretty strong statements yesterday, all but calling for them to be totally defunded. They’re still trying to gore that ox in any way they can.
I’d like to hear some full-throated defense from Democrats….
Zifnab
Bullshit we will. The fact that John McCain’s campaign was FORCED to commit voter is just further proof that ACORN has damaged the fabric of our electioneering system.
Besides, these unfounded allegations against McCain are just being used as a distraction by the MSM to cover up the massive real voter fraud being perpetrated by the hobo brigades recruited by ACORN. It’s obvious that this is all one giant conspiracy to get Barack HUSSIEN Osama into power so that he can blow up America and convert us to Sharia Law, abort our babies, gayify our children, and destroy all of Christianity.
JL
In GA you do not declare a party when you register. The only time you have to declare is when you vote in a primary.
Grumpy Code Monkey
I have been saying all along (although not here) that all the handwringing about "voter fraud" is classic misdirection; it’s the equivalent of pointing and screaming "Look! Wetbacks!" and stuffing the ballot box while everyone’s looking the other way.
Bleat enough about "voter" fraud and people won’t be talking about rigged machines or improperly scrubbed voter rolls or last-minute eligibility challenges or phone calls warning potential voters that they risk getting arrested at the polls or anything like that. You know, stuff that actually sways elections one way or the other.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Tickets will come cheap for the post election Great Wingnut Scapegoat Hunt. Self examination, from the champions of personal responsibility crowd, will be cheaper still.
Michael D.
Lincoln Strategy
Lincoln Savings & Loan
At least McCain is consistent on something.
jcricket
Don’t forget about the other recent voter/election fraud indictments in… wait for it… the case of the GOP’s 2002 NH vote jamming.
Yes, vote fraud is a problem, it’s just a GOP problem.
Zifnab
They’re giving poor Abe a bad name.
amorphous
We’ll never hear the end of it. My investment in "Sean Hannity begins to refer to it as Al-Qorn" futures is looking like a better decision every day.
P.S. AYERS!!!!!!
jcricket
Josh Marshall has been all over the GOP vote suppression/fraud tactics. This latest salvo is a classic example.
If there’s a scandal we’re not hearing enough about it’s not the issues with Diebold or long lines. It’s the GOP’s 50 year campaign to disenfranchise as many elderly, poor and minority voters as they can get away with.
In this age of close elections, it’s more important than ever that Democrats understand what the GOP is doing and take steps to make it extremely difficult for the GOP to continue doing so. Bitching and whining in the press (a la the GOP about ACORN) won’t accomplish jack. But making their tactics illegal, enforcing existing laws and making it easier for people to register and vote will eliminate the impact of these tactics (which is to say, it will increase voter turnout, which helps Dems).
Bill
A relative in STL told me a few weeks ago that somebody had approached him to ‘help him register.’ He looked at their form and noticed that it was a registration form for CA, maybe w/ GOP ID pre-selected. I didn’t really track the details b/c it just sounded too crazy. Said relative is hardcore union, pro-Obama, etc and always passing along stories of GOP evil. Anyway, thanks for the heads up on this story. Maybe there’s a tie in w/ the CA thing. I’ll send this along to him.
Michael D.
@jcricket:
I’ve never understood how voting machines disenfranchise voters. I’m serious. I’m not being contrarian, I would like it explained, because I don’t get it.
[In Canada, we use paper ballots (unless something’s changed since I last voted there years ago), which I think make way more sense, by the way.]
Edit: Just re-read your statement, and it wasn’t an indictment of Diebold or voting machines. My bad.
gbear
@amorphous:
Yep. Ratings for Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reilly (if I spelled them wrong I don’t care), etc. are going to go thru the roof once Obama is elected. They’re going to be the first stop for freaked out conservatives, and it’s going to be ugly.
Evinfuilt
Is there anything the Republicans accuse Dems of that they aren’t committing?
Shaggy
@Zifnab:
You misspelled "Hussein".
Evinfuilt
@Michael D.:
Its supposedly that the older, fragile machines are sent to poorer districts. So they constantly malfunction and cause backups, massive lines and lots of votes to be just thrown out.
I’ve voted in a few areas around Houston. In Sugarland, everything was flawless, efficent and with no worries.
Downtown area, the lines moved well, but the computers they gave us must have been designed in the 70s. The interface was rotary.
A poorer area west of Galleria, we had to vote out of someones Apartment of all places. It was cramped, and lines long whlie we waited to access one of two booths.
Now in a suburb again, modern machines. That print out a form which you can double check. Then you take the form to a scanner (made by Diebold mind you) which tallies the votes and the form gets deposited elsewhere for a paper trail. Convoluted in someways, but it was easy to vote, and you felt safe that it would count.
Gus
It’s not like the American media will pick this up. I suspect they’ll stick with the voter fraud bullshit. What choice do they have? If McCain loses, do you really expect him to concede gracefully?
Mike
Obviously the guy was set up by the socialist FEC and arrested by the socialist Police Department. Next, we’ll see a BDS-suffering activist judge legislating from the bench who will find him guilty of trying to save democracy.
The Moar You Know
Actually, yes – I do. It is his running mate’s reaction that has me concerned, in all honesty. She has already shown that she has no compunctions about whipping adoring crowds into a murderous rage.
Martin
I wonder how representative Florida is of the Obama campaign? They have 160,000 volunteers in Florida alone, 5,000 of which are lawyers monitoring voting sites.
So far, the RNC hasn’t managed to succeed on too many of their efforts. I know CO rolls have been purged pretty badly and a few other states, but those are state efforts.
Perry Como
Heterosexual sex.
David Hunt
I would only expect her to go totally overboard if she felt that she had no shot at some sort role in Presidential Race in 2012. Her place as McCain’s VP choice has been the Kiss of Death for him, but it has placed her in the national spotlight. If she manages to keep her nose clean and studies how to talk about national and international issues without totally embarrassing herself, she could have a hope of being a factor in the next election.
That’s right folks. Sarah Palin II: The Wrath of Pawn.
bedlam UK
If I can just ask, why do people have to register if they are Rethugs or Dems anyway?
Isn’t that a private thing like your vote anyway. You’re free to discuss it, but why does it need to be officially registered?
Here in the UK I tend to vote for the party that ISN’T in power, unless its only for the second term and they did well in the first term. Usually by 8 years they’ve all become screwy and criminal so its time to swap ’em over and give them ‘opposition’ time to sort themselves out.
Hey, it works for me, which makes it so hard to understand how normal people can vote Rethug this year after the last 8 years and such a terrible election season.
They are completely party-blind.
Vote for the best for the country. If thats not your party, then do the right thing dammit.
Martin
Not just that, but remember Ohio 2004 when some precincts had people waiting 5 or more hours to vote because they were given too few machines. Most people don’t get time off to vote. They certainly don’t get paid if they do get time off. They have kids and other needs. My elderly neighbor could never wait in line for 5 hours – she can’t stand that long. My wife and I would have trouble if we had to wait that long – with 2 kids, school that day for them, work for me, etc. With paper ballots, you can parallelize the process very easily – getting 10, 20, 50 people filling out ballots at once. You’re only limited to how quickly you can hand out ballots and check the rolls. With the machines, things are highly serialized – you can only have as many people voting as machines. If you don’t want people in a precinct voting, don’t send them enough machines, and then they can’t vote.
Until 1870, there were a host of different efforts to limit who could vote. At first only land owners could vote. Some states implemented literacy tests to keep immigrants from voting. There were religious restrictions very early on, and of course women couldn’t vote until much later than 1870. The GOP is trying to roll back as much as possible to these previous times when states could control who would be allowed to vote. If you can control who can vote, you can control who will win.
Martin
We use those machines, and they’re pretty good. They don’t need to be calibrated like the touch screens and are easier for many people to use. They’re also much cheaper and more reliable. iPod uses a rotary interface. One benefit is that rotary interfaces scale infinitely – they are very mechanically simple, and if you are doing something wrong, there’s only one other alternative – dial the other way. There’s virtually no learning curve on them.
We’re doing early voting here and the county is set up so that when you go in they look you up in a computer linked to the county registrar. They give you a code which you enter which tells the computer to give you your local ballot – so you can vote outside your city, but still vote on local issues, your city council, etc. You have to stay in-county, but that’s a big improvement over before. The rotary interface makes it much easier to program the machines to offer up different ballots, and they offer a paper trail.
I understand they’re looking to expand the system statewide. There are a lot of OC/LA county crossovers from home/work, and up in the bay area as well, and allowing voting out of county would help a lot of people.
Martin
Well, that varies by state quite a bit. North Dakota doesn’t have voter registration at all. You flash your drivers license or water bill or whatever to show that you are a resident and then you vote.
For the primaries, some states – and this even varies by party within the state – you can only vote in the primary if you are registered with that party. CA allows parties to decide, so anyone could vote in the Democratic primary but only Republicans could vote in the Republican primary.
There’s two reasons why large parties would want to secure registrations in their party:
1) the voter rolls are used as starting recruitment lists. If I’m registered Democrat, I’ll get mail and calls based on that fact. But it gives parties a free mailing list to start with, which is worth a lot to them, so they promote party registration. If nothing else, it helps the parties understand to the degree to which they are in favor in the state, without having to do any work.
2) polling uses a sample that is representative of the state. Here in CA the GOP has regularly engaged in party switching – changing people’s party registration from Dem to GOP without their knowledge (usually they ask you to sign a petition for some ballot amendment which is actually a registration form). So if it appears that there are more Republicans than there are in the state to the pollsters, then the pollsters will weight their samples wrong. The assumption is that when the pollsters do their calling, that they are unlikely to get one of these false registrations, so the people that do respond will get overweighted in the poll and it’ll look like the Republicans are doing better than they really are.
For smaller parties, their voter registration percent is needed to field a candidate on the ballot. You might need to have 5% of the public registered with your party to get a Presidential candidate slot, that kind of thing. Otherwise, what threshold would you use to allow people onto the ballot?
Matthew
You forgot, "voter fraud" really means "voting or registering Democrat". They weren’t actually worried about election shenanigans, which is why there’s always the deafening silence each time tens of thousands of voters are illegally kicked off the rolls.
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
MattF
I keep forgetting the Republican Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would accuse others of doing unto you.
Origuy
Not exactly. The Democratic party allows Decline to State voters to vote in its primary. If you’re registered Republican, though, you can only vote in the Republican primary. The Republicans have the same rule.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_decline.htm
California did have an open primary system, required by the 1996 Proposition 198. The SCOTUS ruled that was unconstitutional in 2000. [Ibid]
Chuck Butcher
John,
At this point you still expect rational behavior from the Republicans? I thought that was why you quit them.
I can think of no time that these idjits have let reality interfere with their tactics. Why would they stop claiming vote fraud just because their guy got arrested for it? ACORN looks poor and black (or other) and that makes it a nice fat target for Republicans. The point is to make a bunch of noise, not sense. Noise rules if that is what you’ve got.
John, tell me what line of attack the Republicans have that doesn’t involve noise. I’m not kidding here, if they abandon the BS what do they have left to try to win with? In my run I was fortunate to have a big fat fact rich target, I have no idea where I’d have been if I were a John McCain. I didn’t win and I learned a lot from that, but none of what I learned involved having to go to BS.
Damn, the real problem Republicans have is that they are Republicans – where does a Republican go from there? Gordon Smith is a 2 term incumbent Senator and he’s in trouble, despite his pretense to being an almost Democrat. He’s rolled out the whole scheme, be a pretend Democrat, run the smear machine by lie and deceit, and flatly state things for himself that don’t even exist. His incumbency and money have kept it close, but geeze, he has nowhere to go. Loyal party ID is most of his vote.
demimondian
Not exactly. The Republican Golden Rule is "Do unto others, and then use the knowledge to accuse them."
jcricket
Right, Republicans are so good at detailing how voter fraud and cheating ones’ constituents would work because they’re already doing it. Ha!
Yes, this wasn’t actually my point (as Michael picked up in his edit), but that’s the issue.
Again, this is why all-vote-by-mail is the best alternative for right now. When everyone votes using the same system, you just have to maintain good equipment at the central tallying place. You eliminate having to staff (train) and maintain equipment at all the polling places which are only periodically set up. You can actually monitor security of ballots better (once they come) at a central location. Outside observers can watch the counts, you have to have paper ballots, etc.
Plus, as I’ve mentioned 1-zillion-times – voting by mail increases turnout and drastically reduces the ability of the GOP to use their standard disenfranchisement tactics. Coupled with some other sensible reforms that encourage registration, discourage spurious registration challenges (by making them punishable by death), etc. and the GOP loses another wedge issue.
That’s how we can win as Democrats. Don’t try to get everyone to pay attention to touch screen issues. Just push another alternative that cuts the rug out from under them.
Chuck Butcher
Republicans hate VBM. OR has had the system for quite some time now and it works and they scream "Fraud." There isn’t any evidence, but they keep trying. Tonight I will fill out my ballot at my leisure at the kitchen table and tomorrow drop it in the ballot box rather than mail it because I drive right by one.
Thunderheart
John,
Seems to me any fraud should be prosecuted, whether perpetrated by McCain supporters, Obama supporters, or any other third party candidate supporters.
It’s not a matter of ideology, it’s a matter of making sure no monkey business from any corner can influence the election’s outcome.
I hope there’s no one who disagrees with the above, but alas I’m sure there are those few who do.