Republican Voter Registration Fraud

  First off, a little side-note for you.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr (D-IL) plans on introducing a national voter registration law in the new Congress which is basically intended to get around most of the voter suppression laws passed by the Republicans in many states such as Florida. More...

  The RNC has canceled all of its swing-state voter registration drives after the fallout from the calamity down in Florida.

For the better part of two years now, Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Republican Party have been scouring the state like a sheriff and his posse, hot on the trail of election bandits.

Turns out, our Republican gunslingers didn’t have far to look. The wily varmints corrupting Florida’s electoral process have been working right under their noses.

(snip)

After the story broke last week, roiling through the newspapers, political blogs and cable television, the Florida Republican Party fired the outfit. So did the state Republican Party organizations in North Carolina, Colorado and Virginia. And finally the Republican National Committee, which had paid the firm $2.9 million to work its magic in swing states, announced that it was severing its relationship with Strategic Allied Consulting. The Florida party bosses also filed a formal election fraud complaint against its own vendor.

State Republicans find fraud close to home

Page two of the article also has some juicy snark worth reading if you enjoy a good laugh when it is points out that after months of trying to weed out noncitizens from the Florida voter rolls, the state has found "198 suspect voters out of 11,446,540 registered statewide." Actually the total, according to the Florida Division of Elections website is 11,583,367. That number includes 4,173,177 Republicans and 4,627,929 Democrats, which means there are currently 454,752 more Democrats than Republicans registered in Florida. So if Rick Scott's desire to decrease that Democratic advantage, he failed miserably while wasting tax payer dollars on the project. Rick Scott has also made it a priority to increase Republican registrations in the state.   Hungrycoyote

  So just how bad is the voter suppression in Florida? Well, Ari Berman at The Nation has done a little research on the subject and has traced the Republican suppression efforts as far back as 2000.

  You aren’t surprised, are you?

In a deeply sardonic twist, Republicans committed the only voter registration fraud that has occurred since the law was overturned. “It’s kind of ironic that the dead people they accused Acorn of registering are now being done by the RPOF [Republican Party of Florida],” Paul Lux, the Republican supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, told NBC News.

And, unlike with ACORN, Strategic Allied Consulting didn’t alert authorities to the voter registration fraud—that was done by local election officials. Prosecutors are now investigating the group for criminal misconduct. (The case hasn’t put an end to GOP hypocrisy about voter fraud, however. Last week the attorney general of Texas invoked ACORN to justify similar restrictions on voter registration drives in his state, even though no charges were ever filed against the group.) Maybe in 2013 the Florida legislature should pass legislation specially preventing Republicans from running voter registration drives.

Here’s why this scandal matters: the Florida GOP committed voter registration fraud while undermining the right to vote for everyone else—particularly minority voters, who have been historically disenfranchised in the state and are key supporters of Barack Obama and Florida Democrats. The common thread between these different voter suppression efforts has been to make it more difficult for minority voters to cast a ballot.

A Recent History of GOP Voter Suppression in Florida

Technorati Tags: the Republican Party,Florida,Voter Suppression,Rick Scott,Mitt Romney,2012 Elections,Current Events

 

Mondays Pundit’s Take On Mitt Romney

  Just a few of the commentary’s of some well known political commentators from some of the bigger newspapers.

Keli Goff  on Romney’s possible reach out to the racist groups:

Now the Romney campaign finds itself at a crossroads. With just over a month to go before the election, the question becomes: Will he be willing to do what McCain wasn't, in order to win at any cost? Will he give in to the temptation and begin lacing his ads and language with messages to appeal to those who miss the days of the Southern strategy -- and the days of a white Republican president?

We've already seen him begin flirting with the racially inflammatory line by making a joke about his birth certificate that many saw as a reference to the manufactured controversy surrounding the president's birth. Romney's language in the debates will confirm whether or not he is willing to cross that line in the quest for victory.

Michael Kinsley on Romney’s campaign incompetence:

If, as seems possible, Mitt Romney is not elected U.S. president on Nov. 6, he will not be the first presidential candidate to run on the issue of competence and then lose because he ran an incompetent campaign. He will not even be the first governor of Massachusetts to do so.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis, who was ahead in the polls just after the Democratic convention, declared in his acceptance speech: "This election isn't about ideology. It's about competence." Then he proceeded to blow his large lead and lose to George H.W. Bush, who turned out to be a tougher old bird than anyone suspected.

It would be hard to think of two politicians more different than Dukakis and Romney. [...]

Even if Romney wins the election, because of some unpredicted development between now and Nov. 6, the judgment on his campaign is fixed: It has been terrible. Despite his success in business, he's a lousy politician. And if he loses the election, that will be a comment not just on his campaign strategy but also on his whole way of thinking.

  Last but not least, Carl Hiaasen look at those 2 corrupt Koch brothers and their attempt to purchase the Florida courts:

The new stealth campaign against three Florida Supreme Court justices is being backed by those meddling right-wing billionaires from Wichita, Charles and David Koch.

They couldn’t care less about Florida, but they love to throw their money around.

Last week they uncorked the first of a series of commercials from their political action committee, Americans for Prosperity. The targets are Justices R. Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince.

They were three of the five-vote majority that in 2010 knocked down a half-baked amendment slapped together by state lawmakers seeking to nullify the federal Affordable Health Care Act.

The Florida Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions in finding that the proposed amendment contained “misleading and ambiguous language,” the hallmark of practically everything produced by this Legislature. Stoned chimpanzees have a keener grasp of constitutional law.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,2012 Elections,Florida Courts,The Koch Brothers,Current Events

 

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