Dirty tricks campaign

[lederhosen]

Ganked from RoO:

Story here.

Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day...

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations...

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law...

The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.

Nevada is a swing state. Registration closed today.

There are so many things Australians take for granted. One of them is the Australian Electoral Commission, an independent government-funded body which handles everything from voter registration to tallying of returns. It goes a long way to reduce this sort of downright fraud.

Comments

[frou-frou.livejournal.com]

That's umm...incredible! What a wild and crazy place that nation is...gobsmacked, I really don't think I have anything to say except that at least it's been identified. They must be breaking some sort of law, surely?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Yes, assuming it can be proven - which should be possible, if they can produce shredded non-processed registrations.

But it's not going to be much consolation to the people who've now missed the deadline (unless the Republican governor can be persuaded to extend the registration deadline).

And as we learned from Abu Ghraib, the beauty of contracting this stuff out is you can blame the contractor even if you do get caught.

[jazzmasterson.livejournal.com]

The last time something similar to this happened was in Florida, where a few thousand african american voters were rubbed from the voting rolls because they were mistakenly identified as felons.

The problem wasn't corrected until shortly after the 2002 elections.

The company identified in that article has moved to another swing state, and is conducting business there, as well...

[harliquinn.livejournal.com]

Apparently after the situation was broken into the open by a reporter the issue was sent to the local government and to the FBI. The local police seemed indifferent and issued a statement that was less than encouraging; I don't recall what they said exactly.. The FBI hasn't issued a sneeze.

This according to the radio station that has the least amount of National Public Radio spin as of yet. Of course, after hearing the full article and an interview this afternoon, and a sound-byte later on I cannot find anything on their site about it. ....Same station that broadcast a heated debate about Women's Right for Abortion this afternoon.

I don't expect this to be resolved soon.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

(wry grin) It's not who votes, but who *counts* the votes. If you think *this* is anything, wait until you get a load of those untraceable e-voting machines without any kind of verifiable voting record! ;-)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I've been complaining about those for years, now :-)

I don't have much occasion to say nice things about Schwarzenegger, but at least he *did* sign to enforce a paper trail in CA. One point in his favour.

Seriously, though, you guys badly need something like the AEC before the election thing falls apart altogether.

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

You mean to prevent things like this?

Or how about the interesting series of connections surrounding Sinclair, in light of their decision to order their television stations to pre-empt prime-time programming to show an anti-Kerry movie?

It's not even worth the time being surprised or outraged. We just concentrate on fighting back.

[jazzmasterson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in 2000 and since we learned the answer to the question, "have you no sense of decency?" Answer: no. Hence, being shocked and expecting things to right themselves once brought to light are not reasonable tactics, sadly.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

The Greens campaign manager I worked with referred to the AEC as a national treasure. More and more, I think he is right...

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

When this discussion started taking place in turnberryknkn's journal yesterday, I was also asking myself the inadvisability of not having a government-directed and regulated election machine.

Let's see if this grows up. Let's see what we can do to make it get louder.

[jazzmasterson.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah; by the way, in fact most voter registration is not handled by private companies in the US. I, for example, registered to vote through the government of my town.

Private companies doing voter registration is news to me, but not terribly surprising... the GOP loves private industry taking over public functions.

It's less accountable.