ATTN Pennsylvania. Misleading Calls Say Vote Nov. 5
A registered Democrat in Pennsylvania writes the Huffington Post to report that she has received an anonymous phone call telling her she should go to the polls on Wednesday.
“I received a phone call from an unidentified caller yesterday telling me that because of the expected high voter turnout, Democrats will need to vote on Wednesday, November 5th,” she writes.
The calls are obviously misleading, as voting ends on Tuesday. And apparently they have been going on for quite some time. This past Friday the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported“robocalls making the rounds in Pittsburgh region” disseminating the misleading information. The reader who contacted Huffington Post was from the Philadelphia suburbs, at the opposite end of the state.
Contacted by the Huffington Post, a spokesman for the Obama campaign’s Pennsylvania operations said he was aware of the misleading calls but “not worried about” their impact.
If you hear anything more about this or other last-minute election tactics, please contact the Huffington Post.
McCain Campaign Paid Republican Operative Accused of Voter Fraud
Oh, the irony. Accuse ACORN of voter fraud when you, yourself, have hired a shady operative to commit voter fraud on behalf of the GOP.
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.
In October last year, the House Judiciary Committee wrote to the Attorney General requesting answers regarding a number of allegations against Mr. Sproul’s firm, then known as Sproul and Associates. It referred to evidence that ahead of the 2004 national elections, the firm trained staff only to register Republican voters and destroyed any other registration cards, citing affidavits from former staff members and investigations by television news programmes.
One former worker testified that “fooling people was key to the job” and that “canvassers were told to act as if they were non-partisan, to hide that they were working for the RNC, especially if approached by the media,” according to the committee’s letter. It also cited reports from public libraries across the country that the firm had asked to set up voter registration tables claiming it was working on behalf of the non-partisan group America Votes, though in fact no such link existed.
The career of Mr. Sproul, a former leader of the Arizona Republican Party, is littered with accusations of foul play. In Minnesota in 2004, his firm was accused of sacking workers who submitted Democratic registration forms, while other canvassers were allegedly paid bonuses for registering Bush voters. There were similar charges in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Oregon and Nevada.
That year, Mr. Sproul’s firm was paid $8,359,161 by the Republican Party, according to a 2005 article in the Baltimore Chronicle, which claimed that this was far more than what had been reported to the Federal Elections Commission.
Mr. McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin have been linking allegations of registration fraud by ACORN, the community group, to theObama campaign.
ACORN has been accused of registering non-existent voters during its nationwide drive, with reports of cartoon characters such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse being signed up.
The organization insisted that these are isolated incidents carried out by a handful of workers who have since been dismissed.
However, the Republican nominee insists that the group is involved in fraudulent activities, noting that Mr. Obama, before leaving the legal profession to enter politics, was once part of a team which defended the organization. At last week’s debate, he said that ACORN was “perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history”, a claim which the Obama campaign says represents political smear.
The revelation of Mr. Sproul’s involvement with the McCain campaign – he has also donated $30,000 to the ticket and received at least another $37,000 directly from the RNC – could undermine his case.
“It should certainly take away from McCain’s argument,” Bob Grossfeld, an Arizona political consultant who has watched Mr. Sproul’s career closely, told the Huffington Post. “Without knowing anything of what is going on with ACORN, there is a clear history with Mr. Sproul either going over the line or sure as hell kicking dirt on it, and doing it for profit and usually fairly substantive profit.”
In May this year, both ACORN and Mr. Sproul were discussed at a hearing of the House subcommittee on commercial and administrative law. One Republican member, Congressman Chris Cannon, concluded: “The difference between ACORN and Sproul is that ACORN doesn’t throw away or change registration documents after they have been filled out.”
Update: NY Voters Being Reported As “Inactive”
I am an NYU graduate, a magazine reporter and someone who just found out last week I was “Inactive.”
I’ve been reading your work, Mark, and also that of Naomi Wolf, who speaks very highly of you in her latest book Give Me Liberty.
I just wanted to thank you both for sending this email out to people. Unfortunately, it is too late to change your status UNLESS you can get someone at your borough’s board of elections to send you a new “confirmation notice” in the mail – this confirmation notice, once sent out, automatically moves one from the “inactive” to the “active” status.
I know because I got someone to do it for me last week. I had contacted the ACLU’s voting rights project (Neil Bradley, who I’ve cc’d on this email) and also Election Protection dot org, in DC, and had a list of the laws ready to read to whomever at the voting office was unlucky enough to answer my phone call. Basically I badgered them for two days until they moved my name.
I URGE everyone who finds out they are “inactive” to call, call, call their borough’s board of elections, where they were last registered, and beg them to do whatever they can.
I can provide more information on the specific laws I cited when I talked to them, if you’re interested.
Regards,
Melody S. Wells
PEOPLE Magazine
Reporter-Researcher
Protect Yourself and Your Vote!
Regular readers will notice that DVN is growing longer and longer as the election gets closer and closer. There will be a time, probably within a week of the election, when DVN will just be too long to be of use in a once-a-day publication. When that happens, as I have done in previous years, I will split DVN into a “Morning Edition” and “Evening Edition”.
One of the issues that bears watching is voter registrations. The news has contained many articles, of late, about the huge influx of voter registrations. Counties are under the gun to get the registrations completed and filed into the data base. The big question is will they be able to do it in the time they have left? How many voters who filed new registrations or changes in their registrations are going to end up being told they have to vote on a provisional ballot? And then either not have that ballot counted because the county has decided not to count provisional ballots because they won’t make any difference in the outcome as we have heard in the past; OR, have their ballot not counted because the county never did get the voters application processed? &&& Remember please, do NOT use the straight party option if you get that option. Take the extra few minutes and vote each race on the ballot.
National: Feds question new voter checks in 6 states
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5goXdqiHHk8p0cqXGZHuUAqEI205gD93LV1FG0
National: Battles rage over new voters Legal disputes loom as the political parties spar over voter lists,
new registrations
http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/10/07/battles-rage-over-new-voters/
National: Election Protection Wiki Safeguards Voting Rights
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0810/S00165.htm
National: Editorial – Avoid absentee voting trap
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2008/10/08/a18a_absente_edit_1008.html
National: Hack-A-Vote
http://www.motherjones.com/blue_marble_blog/archives/2008/10/10132_hackavote.html
National: Students at Rice learn how vulnerable electronic voting really is
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08100837
National: Electronic voting machines software extremely vulnerable to rigging
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/electronic-voting-machines-software-extremely-vulnerable-to-rigging_100104873.html
(more…)
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