Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of “GOP vote tampering” on a massive scale.
• Republican election officials of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge—10 times the average state’s rate of removal.
• While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.
Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of “Jim Crow” tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.
• A fired US prosecutor levels new charges—accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as “fraudulent.”
• Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called “caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone article predicts that, this Nov. 4, it will be far worse.
There’s more:
• Since the last presidential race, “States used dubious ‘list management’ rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls.”
Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, N.M.—a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state’s purging his registration was particularly shocking—he’s the county elections supervisor.
The revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.
“Republican operatives—the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics,” report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are “systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats.”
The investigators level a deadly serious charge:
“If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls—they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.”
“Block the Vote” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast is in the Oct. 30 issue (#1064) of Rolling Stone.
Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call the vote-theft “antidote”: a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website StealBackYourVote.org.
Greg Palast, a correspondent for BBC TV’s Newsnight and the London Observer, is the author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild [Penguin]. He also produced a film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans. See his investigative reports at www.gregpalast.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2008
Subscribe to The Progressive Populist