First, Doghouse Riley in the Midwest:
THE Freedom Defenders at Clear Channel have announced that dozens of the [VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY!] billboards will be removed immediately, since the Freedom Defenders at Whatever Anonymous Family Foundation Which Was Accidentally Permitted To Fund Them Contrary To Clear Channel’s Own Rules has–wisely, we think–decided it would rather remain anonymous than further its voter education efforts in the open.
The billboards have been erected in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere, in what the headline writers described as “predominantly poor neighborhoods”, which is the faux-balanced way of pretending the targeting might not have been racist.
And, since our own No Preteritio policy is enforced by the same legal team that vets Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings’ contracts, we’re not going to mention that the odds of Clear Channel accidentally contracting to put up anonymous political billboards targeted at You Know Who are identical to the odds of Clear Channel accidentally revealing the name of the foundation in question. It’s just math. Contracts are hard. I’m sure they don’t understand what they’re signing half the time…
Next, Rebecca Schoenkopf at Wonkette reports that “This Is Not The Voter Fraud Virginia Republicans Are Looking For“:
Guys, guys, calm down now. You may have thought you finally found some voter fraud after all these years of searching far and wide and under every ACORN, but it is pretty clear to the Virginia attorney general, registrar and Board of Elections that you didn’t. To them, it is quite obvious that a guy working for the RNC conducting voter registrations, who was caught blocks from their office shadily throwing completed voter registration forms in someone else’s Dumpster, simply cannot be guilty of voter registration fraud, despite working for the company widely known to commit voter registration fraud for the RNC. How do they know this? Because nowhere on Virginia’s voter registration applications does it list party affiliation! Therefore, dude would have no way of knowing the forms he was throwing away belonged to Democrats. And there are so many other reasons he might have thrown away people’s applications! Investigation closed! Wait, really, the investigation’s closed? Sho nuff.
“There’s no way to tell by party when people fill out these forms, what party they’re affiliated with, so I don’t think there’s any political motivation,” Virginia Registrar Brandi Lilly said Friday.
…
And this is why GOTV is key: We don’t just need to win, we need to stockpile enough votes to overcome the Rethugs’ broad-based, well-funded “margin of suppression”.
Hill Dweller
The guy decided to commit several felonies just for giggles.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Yeah, it’s not like the guy could have gone on the internet and googled if any of the individuals donated and who they might have donated to.
anibundel
I assume they’re not having Cucchinelli look into it because they know he’d refuse to find anything wrong.
Ash Can
This guy isn’t off the hook, though, right? The AG isn’t investigating, but it doesn’t say the guy’s been released or that charges have been dismissed.
dmsilev
For a bunch of people who loudly proclaim their Christian virtues, they sure do love “the ends justify the means”, don’t they?
Dexter
Saw on DKos a new NH poll by University of NH. Obama leading by +8.
Redshift
@Ash Can:
This one guy was charged by the local law, so that will proceed. AG Kookinelli refusing to get involved basically means that the company and the party won’t get investigated to find out if this was a widespread practice. Color me shocked.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
“Prosecutorial Discretion”, my arse. If the kid had been throwing out GOP reg forms dressed in a hoodie with a pocket full of skittles, he’d be wormfood.
Is there any other (legal) way to get this little bastard?
Can DOJ do anything?
beltane
@dmsilev: They loudly advertise their Christian virtues because they don’t possess any virtues of any kind, Christian or otherwise. They are, in short, scum.
Brachiator
Don’t know if this was noted earlier, but damned inspirational voting story.
I will think about Mr Tanabe, too.
Frankensteinbeck
I have come to think this is important. Very important. National media absolutely does not want to accuse racists of being racist, because they’re terrified of the huge blowback. Consider. Obama just might win a landslide electoral victory and lose a landslide popular victory because of red states and specifically white Southern voters going Republican in huge, unprecedented percentages. (They’re getting, what, 20-40 point leads?) There is no feasible explanation for this other than racism – but if a major media outlet says that, every single Romney voter will believe they’ve been personally called a racist and explode. The ones who are actually racists will explode harder, because they have so much emotionally invested in pretending to themselves that they’re not. The news media is struggling for profits as it is, so this subject is anathema to them.
Cris (without an H)
Whoa.
This is the first I’ve heard of this case, so maybe there’s some defending it, but my first impression is pretty much the same as the closing quote:
Spaghetti Lee
“There’s no way to tell by party when people fill out these forms, what party they’re affiliated with, so I don’t think there’s any political motivation,”
So, uh, destroying voter reg forms is A-OK as long as it’s indiscriminate between party members? Am I missing something?
IIRC, the kid was in Rockingham County, which is probably gonna go 80-20 Romney or something ridiculous. So maybe the joke’s on the GOP this time.
Xenos
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Google? I am sure he could tell who they were going to vote for just by looking at them, if-you-know-what-i-mean.
Ash Can
@Redshift: OK. I thought so, and that’s obviously better than nothing. And I do agree that it’s a crackpipe dream to think Cuccinelli would ever go after any GOP vote fraudsters (quite the opposite, I would think). I have to wonder, though, if the feds would get involved if this became rampant or otherwise egregious.
Redshift
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Apparently the usual MO of Sproul’s companies is to claim they’re doing a survey or poll when you fill out a voter registration form, so they can ask you who you’re supporting. But the fact that they’ve done it in the past is of course no reason for Cuccinelli to suspect that they might be doing it now.
For those of you who don’t live in such a state, the non-sleazy way to do partisan voter registration in a state with no party registration is to ask up front if they’re supporting the Democratic candidate. Most people who aren’t Democrats will just walk away, and you register the ones who stay. And since we’re honest, even if they tell us they’re Republicans, they can still fill out a form. And since we’re not a criminal operation, we turn it in.
Of course, there are places like public libraries where you’re required to be nonpartisan, and there we just encourage everyone to register.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Cris (without an H):
Must have used defective sheep’s bladders.
Seriously, though, a scary case. Not content with standing idly by as Religion engages in a war on science, the State apparently wants a taste of the action, also, too.
MikeJ
I take it Brandi Lily was appointed by Bob McDonnell?
beltane
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m really sick of our national media providing cover for the morally diseased segments of our population. We have a big problem in this country and it will never be fixed until we address it. The red states are like a gangrenous limb spreading disease to the rest and generally stinking up the place with their rot, but the media’s response is to hold a perfumed hankie up to their noses and pretend nothing’s wrong.
The long-term blowback, once whites are no longer a solid majority in this country, is going to be very nasty indeed, largely because our institutions have coddled the white supremacist assholes for so long.
Redshift
@MikeJ: Presumably. The party of the governor gets to appoint a majority of the Board of Elections in every locality. In Fairfax, where I live (20% of the entire state population), McDonnell appointed Hans Van Spakovsky to the BoE.
pseudonymous in nc
The New Yorker has a big profile of Hans von Doktor Strangelove, systematically exposing his bullshit but also pointing out that he’s ready to rig elections nationwide.
@Spaghetti Lee:
It means “bad apple, isolated incident, obviously not a widespread campaign, nothing to see, move along”. Yeah, right.
Bobby Thomson
@Xenos: I’m sure the pigmentation of the people filling out the discarded applications is a mere coincidence.
Woodrowfan
@Xenos: Or just ask who they support, or tell them that they have to add a party registration “for our records.” it’s not difficult. I’ve registered voters in Virginia before and a lot of people tell you who they support without you even asking.
kay
Did they submit the forms or contact the people?
That would be horrible, to think you’re registered and get turned away when it’s too late to do anything.
Culture of Truth
Oh good – so Democrats can just start chucking out GOP voter registrations then. Wait, what?
Bulworth
Wonder how the wingnuts will react if Romney wins the popular vote and O wins the electoral vote. I’m sure they’d accept such a Constitutional result graciously…..if not, I’ve still got a few of those “Get Over It!” emails from 2000 they can have.
Schlemizel
@dmsilev:
Remember, lying for Jesus is not a sin! Seriously folks, many fundies believe this & it forms a basis for a lot of the religious tracts you can find scattered around by fundies.
The Moar You Know
@Cris (without an H): You’re talking about a country in which rape defendants are released as a matter of course if the victim was wearing jeans.
Italy has a lot of pretty buildings and countryside covering up a lot of dark, awful, primitive thinking.
pseudonymous in nc
I also noticed that sections of wingnuttia are going batshit about the prospect of a grand total of 44 election monitors from the OSCE being in the US, offering the usual threats of violence should one of them show up at their polling place, which sort of proves the point about the criteria for judging free and fair elections.
Dee Loralei
I saw a pic on twitter the other day with McDonald and Sproule together at some function, taken a few months ago. I think there may have been one of Cuchinelli too.
Lurker
@Bulworth:
I think Democrats are held to a different standard than Republicans.
NotMax
Who bought Clear Channel and subsequently was instrumental in the leveraged buyout which took the company from public to private?
Bain Capital.
beltane
What is the point of maintaining a military when we give free reign to fascist thugs like Hans Von Spakovsky to destroy our country from within? No matter the outcome of this election, the treasonous entity known as the Republican party has done irreparable damage to this country. Their little passive-aggressive rehashing of the Civil War is just as damaging as the original but I don’t see an adequate mobilization against the enemy this time around.
Culture of Truth
“It starts with an earthquake…”
Fuck ALL the chickens! (né Studly Pantload, t.e.u.u.)
Hey, look who piped up just in time for tonight’s debate!
“I guess this is what happens late in the tight presidential race. Ronna Romney is the ex-sister-in-law of Mitt Romney. She’s apparently remained close to the Romney family. She has a minor role in the Romney campaign in Florida and has recently appeared at campaign events in Michigan with her daughter.
“Earlier this afternoon she posted this grotesque image of the mangled body of the late Ambassador Chris Stevens with the words “Obama killed him” surrounded by dripping blood.
“You can see her Facebook page here.”
I did not click the Facebook link. Don’t really feel the need to.
Culture of Truth
and to think Bayou Gilligan wanted to end volcano monitoring
Ash Can
@kay: That’s what really worries me about this. What happens to the people who filled those dumped forms out? I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s hell to be paid at some polling places here and there around the country on election day, because of this and other vote-suppression tactics.
Shalimar
I didn’t realize there was a mens rea for voter registration fraud. I always thought the crime was simply not turning the registrations in.
kay
@Fuck ALL the chickens! (né Studly Pantload, t.e.u.u.):
Isn’t it odd how none of Romney’s relatives have gotten any press at all?
I thought they were going to start digging thru Obama’s sister’s trash in 2008. Just complete media silence on the Giant Romney Clan.
CNN went to freaking Indonesia to harass people at Obama’s grade school, fir God’s sake.
What happened to the all-important vetting? It only applies to non-white and non-rich?
IowaOldLady
If a news source isn’t getting blowback from somewhere, they’re doing it wrong.
Alex SL
I am still astonished that it is necessary in your country to register voters in the first place, and that some bozos with a clear party affiliation – be it ACORN or Republicans – are actually allowed to do it. Why is not everybody automatically registered locally once they have announced to the town council or tax authorities that they have moved into town? You know, like virtually every other developed country does it?
Walker
@Alex SL:
You can automatically register if you get a driver’s license. But there is a nontrivial segment of the population (e.g. poor, urban) without those.
celticdragonchick
@Cris (without an H): I have been following the case for awhile, and it reinforces my belief since the Amanda Knox conviction debacle:
Prosecutors in Italy have gone fucking insane.
Seismology in particular is a difficult discipline to even begin to comprehend (I inquired about the seismology doctoral program at NC Chapel Hill and found you essentially need a degree in math as well as geology to start with…and I just don’t love calculus that much)
One scientist at the link said this:
I have to agree. How in the hell can the judge et al even know what the hell they are talking about here? They don’t have any clue how the science even works…and they claim that the scientists are not doing the very thing that they don;t understand in the first place. Christ on a crutch! Convicted of not predicting an earthquake??! The stooopid! It hurts!
kay
@Ash Can:
It gives me fits in Ohio. I take them in to the Bd of Elections because I don’t want to find them in my car on election day. I have to SEE them accepted.
I don’t really understand this sort of cavalier attitude about voting among Republicans. It makes me think they shouldn’t be trusted with state records work, in general. “Deed? What deed? Lemee check my purse”
David in NY
@Ash Can: I read that the Sheriff was contacting all the people on the forms.
But one was named Mickey Mouse, and they haven’t been able to find him. (bad joke)I assume the Sheriff was going to tell them to register again, or to question them about what the guy was doing. If it turns out the guy had been was asking what party they were in, it might put a different light on Cuchinelli’s theory. Also, one of the voters was a student who had registered for the first time, according to his mother.The Moar You Know
@Alex SL: We don’t want everyone voting. Hell, we’ve kept our voting day on a Tuesday just so that people will have to lose a day’s salary to be able to cast a ballot.
Americans talk all the time about the virtues of democracy. Not a one of us actually believes that bullshit.
@Walker: Californians fought for decades just to allow voter regsitration forms into the DMV. They still can’t accept them from you, you still have to mail the to the registrar.
Every “motor voter” law (registration on driver’s license renewal) has failed in the legislature since well before I was able to vote.
gwangung
Robo-signing, eh?
pseudonymous in nc
@Alex SL:
You’ll hear various technical reasons about local sovereignty over elections and the need to address statutory disenfranchisement for felons and whatnot. You’ll hear other arguments that the local bureaucracy is underfunded and often a bit shambolic.
The actual reason? The right of Certain People to vote is still a contentious political point in the US. Yes, that’s one of those places where it is not exactly a developed country.
Mnemosyne
@Alex SL:
Because we still have large areas of the country where, for years, it was technically legal for black men to vote, but the local laws were set up in such convoluted ways that it made it virtually impossible for most of them to do so.
If you’ve ever heard or used the phrase “Grandfather Clause,” what it refers to is the laws passed by many Southern states after the Civil War stating that black men would only be allowed to vote if they could prove their grandfather had done so. If they couldn’t (ie if their grandfather had been a slave), they were prohibited from voting.
We have a long, long history in this country of trying to prevent anyone who’s not a property-owning white man from voting, and that tendency didn’t change just because we passed a few laws in the 1960s.
MikeJ
@Alex SL:
Most people don’t notify the town when they move in. They may register a deed, but renters don’t. We typically don’t pay council tax here, so that’s not an issue. Utilities tend to be privatised these days. Why would you call up city hall when you move in?
kay
@gwangung:
Right. Exactly. One would think they’d watch property but I’m not confident.
These are the same people who obsessed over an ordinary state birth record for 4 years, which no one has ever questioned before, and never will again.
“Oh, those forms went in the trash”
Obama should have said that. “I left it in a drawer”
Haydnseek
@NotMax: Game, set, and match. NotMax, you scoundrel! You beat me to it, and good on you for getting it closer to the top of the thread….
Redshift
@David in NY:
Of course it would, that’s why Cuccinelli’s statement says, in essence, “we’re not going to look for that.” He knows exactly what he’s doing, and impartially enforcing the law isn’t it.
Redshift
@kay:
Yes, the guy who discovered them took them to the local board of elections. Of course, that’s just the one bag he saw being dumped; who knows how many others there were, there or in other localities.
Seanly
@Cris (without an H):
Prosecutions like this have happened before in Italy. 14 engineers were prosecuted after the 1950’s Viaont Dam collapse (there was some negligence in the design or maintenance), 3 of whom were eventually given sentences of 6 years. That one at least had some basis.
It’s a little strange to prosecute someone for what is a random occurence. Are the seismologists supposed to now get on TV every morning & warn everyone that there’ll be a massive quake today? [I know I am over-generalizing what occured]
Gian Michele Calvi, one of the convicted, is an engineer who is on the cutting edge of bridge seismic analysis. He’s a seismic expert, but his end of the knowledge is how to make the bridges last through the EQ, not anywhere near being able to predict the where & when of a major quake. [I mention him because I regular have to try & decipher the new displacement approach to bridge seismic design – not my favorite thing]
A prosecution like this has never been done in the US, though people lose licenses, professional reputation or positions. Most engineers & scientists are protected from all but outright or willful incompetence & negligence by corporate insurance or government indemnity.
EconWatcher
@pseudonymous in nc:
That New Yorker profile got me really curious about Hans’ father, Anatol von Spakovsky, who is identified as a White Russian who fought communism twice, first in Russia and next against Tito in Yugoslavia (during World War II).
Hmmmmmm. Now, to be clear, Soviet Communism, especially under Stalin, was of course a vast evil, and many of the century’s best people died fighting it. But….
There were basically two kinds of White Russian. There was a smaller, genuinely liberal faction. And then there was a much larger grouping of antiSemites, protofascists, and other assorted monsters who fanned a lot of the hate that would come in so handy when the Nazis were looking for local help rounding up and murdering Jews a few decades later. Which group included the senior von Spakovsky?
Then, when Mr. von Spakovsky was fighting against Tito’s partisans in the war, who was he with? Again, there was a small faction who were fighting both Tito’s communists and the Nazis. If that’s who he was with, he has all my respect. But the larger groupings fighting Tito included types like Croatia’s Ustashe, who were, well, just local Nazis.
Of course, Hans is not responsible for his father’s crimes, if there were any. But when you hear a White Russian described as a freedom fighter, you really need to know more.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
Tuesday voting made sense when the majority of the voting population (again, white males) were farmers or farm laborers who would not travel on Sundays (the Sabbath!), and voting on Tuesday gave them all day Monday to travel to wherever the voting location was.
It makes no fucking sense whatsoever in a 40-hour workweek world where most people live in densely populated urban and suburban areas where — newsflash! — it doesn’t take two days to go 10 miles anymore.
PurpleGirl
Today I received the Vote Reminder Notice from the Board of Elections NYC. In large letters is says “Your Poll Site May Have Changed”. On both sides of the post card. Now, my actual site hasn’t changed but the Election District number has. As I’ve done before, I’ll bring the card with me when I go to vote.
Ann Marie
This reminds me of what an Irishman I knew told me about discrimination in Northern Ireland. The government would claim there was no religious discrimination because they didn’t ask about religion, but my friend said that with just three questions (not about religion) you could tell the answerer’s religion in most cases (your name, where you live, and where you went to school). In this case, demographics might not completely predict party, but would be an excellent sorting tool for someone wanting to hurt one party.
Seanly
My 23-yr memory from Engineering Ethics was a little faulty. The Vaiont Dam disaster wasn’t a collapse, but on overtopping due to a landslide into the reservior. And in that case, there were some parties who should’ve been prosecuted that weren’t.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@kay:
Isn’t this (pretty much) what happened with MERS during the housing bubble?
“Meh, no time for paperwork! We’re too busy making deals!”
Ohio Mom
I have occasion to pass one of those “Voter Fraud is a Felony” billboards a couple of times a month. It’s in a working class African-American neighborhood in Cincinnati and I think it’s very cleverly placed.
It’s on a road that a lot of people from many other neighborhoods take and as they pass it by, the sign no doubt subtlely reinforces what some of them already think, that “Black people are always committing crimes and I hope I live through driving past them.”
If it really is going to be removed, I’ll be glad not to see it again.
Todd
Guzzling rum punch at a pool bar in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Forgetting all about elections.
pseudonymous in nc
@EconWatcher:
What got me curious was the reference to his parents moving to Huntsville, AL in 1951, right around the time that Wernher von Braun started his missile work at Redstone Arsenal. So while von Spakovsky senior may have been teaching philosophy, it just happened to be in the city with a sudden influx of German scientists and engineers with somewhat blurry pasts and hazy job descriptions.
@Ann Marie:
And if those didn’t suffice, they’d ask you which football team you supported, which is one reason why Man Utd and Liverpool were adopted by a lot of Norn Irons, because it avoided the Rangers/Celtic sectarian shibboleth.
EconWatcher
@pseudonymous in nc:
Curious, isn’t it, that the dad is identified as fighting against communists in Yugoslavia, but not against Nazis. I mean, there were plenty of Nazis available at the time, right there in Yugoslavia.
I think this matters, in part because von Spakovsky also claims to have no memory of the civil rights movement, even though he grew up in Alabama in the 50s and 60s. Did he grow up in an unrepentant Nazi family? I’d really like to know.
Mnemosyne
@Ann Marie:
I remember seeing in a documentary about the history of rock (can’t remember which one) that in Elvis Presley’s first radio interview, the interviewer made a point of asking him which high school he had gone to in order to reassure listeners that Presley really was white, no matter how “black” his singing sounded to them.
People are alike all over.
Citizen_X
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: There’s a travel slogan: “Italy, birthplace of the scientific method–and the war against it!”
pseudonymous in nc
@EconWatcher:
I’m not a sins-of-the-father type, but as you say, Jane Mayer’s writeup — and she’s fastidious — is interesting in its omissions. As for Herr von Spakovsky, there’s a hint of the von Braun in his attitude: “Once the ID laws pass, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!”
TenguPhule
You do realize of course that the commonly accepted solution to gangrene is sharp knives and hot fire, right?
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
You’ve obviously never had to deal with Atlanta traffic during a rainy rush hour.
J R in WV
Wow!
You don’t suspect they might have – asked the person they were signing up whether they wanted to be a Democrat? Or is that too sophisticated for Republicans trying to sigh up R’s and not sign up D’s?
Whatever. We know ethics and Republicans are a Venn diagram with no overlap between sets. This is so obvious I fail to see how a actually really religious Christian person could participate in the R’s bogus actions.
But then how many actually religious people are Republicans? As opposed to people trying to stay out of hell while becoming jillionaire ambassadors. Or just pretending to be religious to cover up their basic immorality, like priests and Sandusky and Ryan the Granny starver.