Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today 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 Secretaries of State 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 - ten 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 duo predict that, this November 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, New Mexico - 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 Kennedy-Palast 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. & Greg Palast in the current issue (1064) of Rolling Stone. [Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com. Note - 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, http://www.StealBackYourVote.org
For updates and video reports, also see:
http://www.RollingStone.com
http://www.GregPalast.com
5 comments:
For as important and central as voting is to our freedom and way of government - one would think that voting would have the same "teeth" we give to things like banking and social security.
At the very least, there should be a national (not state based) system of voter registration, and the list should be accessible, and limited voter information available (i.e. voter Joe the Plummer is registered, and voting records for his vote were processed for so and so vote and counted towards the tally). I have not given this much thought, but this is not a hard task. Not from a technology point of view. Logistically yes, but in these days of political misconduct, we need transparency on this.
Such evil Republicans! Maybe we should let ACORN run the whole election. Seriously, I will have to read what you sent more carefully - that is just my initial reaction. But, I promise there are better venues than Rolling Stones magazine to get information from. That being said if there is ANY validity to what you are saying it should and would be in the front page of every newspaper in the world since everyone seems hell bent on having a relatively unknown man be our next president.
Sorry to be so strident...
Where are you getting all this radical stuff ?My sources of information paint an entirely different story.
Greg Palast is an extremely well known and respected journalist. Rolling Stone also very often carries extremely well written and researched stories. If they researched and wrote this specifically for Rolling Stone then it wouldn't be headline news, yet. We'll see what happens, if anything, in the next few days. But mainstream news isn't really about news, it's about ratings. If the company that owns the news outlet has something to lose by reporting the story, then they probably won't.
Can I just say - is it not sad that these days we are relying on Rolling Stones and such (outliers of the main-stream news media for sure), to do any serious investigative news reporting?
In the past, newspapers and TV news programs (60 minutes and such), performed an invaluable service as the "fourth" branch of governmental checks and balances.
The advent of internet news has forced most paper based news to decline precipitously. As news reporting has become more powerfully capitalistic (by necessity), it is less now about news, and more about entertainment and ratings.
Post a Comment