GOP Voter Registration Fraud In Virginia: The Scandal Spreads

Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, posting on Oct. 25 on Salon, tells us as much as was known a week ago about the voter registration scandal that began with a simple case of a hired Republican voter registrar dumping completed Democratic voter registration forms in a dumpster... and has broadened to include reports of fraudulent voter registrations in Florida as well as reports of additional destroyed Democratic registrations in Colorado and Nevada. And that appears to be just the beginning. I expect to find follow-up information.

H/T Politics Plus
(click for TomCat's post)

A name that threads through all these allegations is Nathan Sproul. Through a series of shell organizations, Sproul set up a GOTV and voter registration organization for the benefit of the Republican Party, then was himself "fired" (but not really), leaving those GOTV/VR org's in place, doing dastardly deeds to voter registrations by prospective Democrats. Even in Texas you could go to jail for that kind of behavior. But apparently Sproul has been at it for years, and no door has clanged shut behind him.

I do not know what I shall do if I become convinced that a presidential election duly won by Obama was stolen by GOP voter registration fraud and GOP manipulation of the votes themselves. But unlike sElection 2000, I shall not take it lying down.

Texans: You Can VOTE Starting TODAY!

This is it. In some states it's already been underway; in Texas, early voting starts today. If you need details, start with my early voting information post. If you vote today, expect a crowd, bring a book or magazine and wear comfortable shoes (heh... as if I have comfortable shoes). I am probably voting tomorrow instead.

Sweaters? jackets?
Not in Houston!

And remember to take your list along with your voter registration and, just in case (though it's not officially required), a government-issued photo ID which has your address on it, typically a driver's license. The self-appointed voter patrols (e.g., King Street "Patriots") are supposed to be out, checking up on everybody and making trouble. If someone hovers behind your polling station either to observe how you vote or to "advise" you, turn around and offer them instant dental work: you have an intrinsic right to a secret ballot, but that right is ill-protected in law. The bastards are probably just hungry anyway: offering to feed them a knuckle sandwich will likely make them go away.

If your poll has an e-voting system, in Texas, chances are good it's a Hart InterCivic eSlate. If you're inclined to vote straight-'D', remember that any subsequent selection of a candidate's name after you select the straight-party item de-selects that candidate.

May you be blessed with nothing worse than crowds interfering with your voting!

Texas: It's Almost Time To Vote Early

Basic info and necessary links for Harris County residents are available in my earlier post here. Early voting starts Monday, Oct. 22, and ends Nov. 2. The romance of Election Day voting (Nov. 6) is pretty much gone, superseded by wholly negative practical considerations... long lines, possible voting system failures and "failures," possible voter ID challenges at the polls by Republicans who do not like your skin color, etc. The short version: vote early.

Even if you overcome those obstacles, your vote may or may not be counted. In Texas, more than 200 counties including Harris now use DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines and systems made by Hart InterCivic, systems not without their problems over the years since their introduction after the 2000 debacle. Even at best, the systems generate no paper trail, and individual votes are aggregated by the polling-place-level system. Your individual vote disappears into the ocean the moment you press "Cast Ballot". But it's too late to request an absentee ballot, and those are fraught with problems of their own.

While not a catalog of the horrors of voting by DRE systems, this NYT article from 2008 has an assortment of examples. The history is not encouraging. Not only is stealing elections made easier than ever, but accidental loss of votes, sometimes whole precincts of them, is a possibility in ways it never was before.

How common is trouble with all sorts of voting systems in America? VerifiedVoting.org has a map of the status of voting systems in all 50 states; only five have the status "good." Expect problems, maybe in your state.

And Republican attempts to steal the election are already underway. Recently, for example, in Virginia, a Pennsylvania man working for a contracting firm in the employ of the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested after being seen tossing completed Virginia voter registrations (presumably by likely Democratic voters) in a dumpster. (The man's name is Colin Small; make of that what you will.) And this happened months after Myth Rmoney sent a letter to the Virginia attorney general asking for an investigation of alleged voter registration fraud by Democratic organizations. What GOPers do themselves is what they accuse their opponents of... isn't there a name for that phenomenon? other than "strategy," I mean...

When the CEO of Diebold, Wally O'Dell, told Republicans in a fundraising letter before the 2004 elections that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year," he gave a warning that all Democrats should heed. Heads up, Democrats (indeed any non-Republicans): your vote is in danger, more than ever before.

(I don't know about you, but I resent like hell having even to think about this. It just isn't right.)

Hart InterCivic eSlate/ePoll Voting Machines Owned By Company That Shares 11 Directors With BAIN CAPITAL

That's right. My county's voting machine, a Hart InterCivic eSlate, the one on which I shall attempt to cast a ballot for Barack Obama, is owned indirectly by HIG Capital, whose directors... 11 of them in common with Mitt Rmoney's old company, Bain Capital... bought into the voting machine manufacturer in 2011... just in time for the 2012 elections. And HIG's directors? Several of them are big-dollar bundlers of contributions for the Rmoney campaign. Here's a segment from the David Pakman show (YouTube... H/T ellroon and oranges and lemons at Kos):



(Apologies for the godawful but sometimes amusing automated speech-to-text transcription in the video.)

As Pakman and friend point out, this is not the first time a voting machine vendor has promised to help deliver the presidential election to a Republican... remember 2004, and Diebold Corp.'s CEO who said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president [Bush] next year"?

Many psychologically disturbed people tend to attribute flaws to others which they silently perceive in themselves. You know the howl going up from the GOPers about vote fraud this year? Could this be the source?

One is supposed to be properly sympathetic to the plight of mentally deranged people. But in this case I am not: I WANT TO MURDER SOMEONE...

No. What I really want to do is hold a Houston Voting Machine Party, sending all those Hart InterCivic machines to the bottom of the Houston Ship Channel before the election. A return to paper ballots, with a strict chain of custody supervised by representatives of all interested parties, is minimally essential to a restoration of representative democracy in America. As long as we have e-voting systems, we will have large-scale, mostly invisible election theft, a fraud committed not (as alleged) by individual Democratic voters but rather by malevolent Republican IT personnel. What cannot be stolen vote-by-illegal-vote can be stolen en masse by a few taps and clicks.