Do We Need Foreign Observers for the Elections?

yada yada... blah, blah...woof woof...

she's making me xenaphobic...

Just bring up edit. Wipe out posted material and type duplicate post.

Violence to GOP HQ is not a joke. It does seem like it to you Kerry supporters. The Democrat Leadership must condone it also, since they haven't come out and condemned it. This is what the country is seeing from the Dems, and it is not pretty..

http://www.10tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2458796

Election Fraud Cases Under Review
Featured Video

Voter Fraud Cases Under Review

Hundreds of cases of suspected election fraud are under review in Franklin County.

"I was surprised by the number," county prosecutor Ron O’Brien told 10TV.

Stacks of voter registration applications are now being scrutinized. Prosecutor O'Brien’s office is reviewing them for irregularities after the applications raised red flags with the Board of Elections.

"What causes some of this to happen is that people are being paid to register new voters," O’Brien said of the practice of paying people by the application.

One application being examined was signed in the name of a man who passed away in February. Another 25 applications show different addresses for the same man.

Six of the suspicious forms were submitted by representatives of the Columbus Urban League, while 62 others came from ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Both groups say they've fired people suspected of fraud.

Kevin Eugene Dooley, involved in Project Vote as an employee or agent of ACORN, was indicted by the grand jury earlier this year for two felony election offenses -- false election registration, and submitting false election signatures to the Board of Elections. Dooley is alleged to have falsified and forged a new voter registration card that was submitted to the BOE.

And you might recognize the name of Nuradin Abdi. He’s a native of Somalia charged with plotting to blow up a Columbus mall.

"As far as board of elections is concerned, Abdi is a registered voter," board of elections director Matt Damschroeder said.

We now know according to federal officials, he's an illegal alien. That would mean he can't legally vote. But the Franklin County Board of Elections had no way of checking that when they sent him a voter registration card early this year.

The board takes a person's word, that they're a U.S. citizen.

"Right now, we're in between not having a way to full check," Damschroeder said.

Elections workers do check new signatures with old records -- and watch for voter registration confirmation cards that are returned in the mail: Red flags for election fraud.

"Anyone responsible will be prosecuted," O’Brien said.

Election fraud is a felony.

I had my own case of crazy behavior from the party of tolerence last week when my drivers mirror was knocked off because of my Bush sticker.

Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of African Americans who were WRONGFULLY removed from Florida's voting rolls STILL cannot vote. And they NEVER were criminals.

Unless you have something to back up your story, you shouldn't spread the propaganda coming from the Dems.

Find anything, anything where you have the interviews, or statements made by these "thousands" of African Americans.

All I hear about that is coming from the Democrats, so far I haven't seen anyone post one bit of evidence...

Xena-Living in Florida I can attest to having followed the problems of purging voter rolls and the facts are that many blacks were innocently disenfranchised...I really don't think it was a plot.

On your behalf I would venture that the problems with voting shenanigans is attributable to both sides...rather equally...so I say why not?

Why not have impartial observers?

VANISHING VOTES: (FL, etc) Purging Registries, Provisional Balloting: 1M votes

Vanishing Votes


by GREGORY PALAST


On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.


First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.


The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.


The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an African-American.


If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in election offices.


Second, once registered, there's the chance you'll be named a felon. In Florida, besides those fake felons on Harris's scrub sheets, some 600,000 residents are legally barred from voting because they have a criminal record in the state. That's one state. In the entire nation 1.4 million black men with sentences served can't vote, 13 percent of the nation's black male population.


At step three, the real gambling begins. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote--but it did not guarantee the right to have their ballots counted. And in one in seven cases, they aren't.


Take Gadsden County. Of Florida's sixty-seven counties, Gadsden has the highest proportion of black residents: 58 percent. It also has the highest "spoilage" rate, that is, ballots tossed out on technicalities: one in eight votes cast but not counted. Next door to Gadsden is white-majority Leon County, where virtually every vote is counted (a spoilage rate of one in 500).


How do votes spoil? Apparently, any old odd mark on a ballot will do it. In Gadsden, some voters wrote in Al Gore instead of checking his name. Their votes did not count.


Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a member of the Commission on Civil Rights, didn't like the smell of all those spoiled ballots. He dug into the pile of tossed ballots and, deep in the commission's official findings, reported this: 14.4 percent of black votes--one in seven--were "invalidated," i.e., never counted. By contrast, only 1.6 percent of nonblack voters' ballots were spoiled.


Florida's electorate is 11 percent African-American. Florida refused to count 179,855 spoiled ballots. A little junior high school algebra applied to commission numbers indicates that 54 percent, or 97,000, of the votes "spoiled" were cast by black folk, of whom more than 90 percent chose Gore. The nonblack vote divided about evenly between Gore and Bush. Therefore, had Harris allowed the counting of these ballots, Al Gore would have racked up a plurality of about 87,000 votes in Florida--162 times Bush's official margin of victory.


That's Florida. Now let's talk about America. In the 2000 election, 1.9 million votes cast were never counted. Spoiled for technical reasons, like writing in Gore's name, machine malfunctions and so on. The reasons for ballot rejection vary, but there's a suspicious shading to the ballots tossed into the dumpster. Edley's team of Harvard experts discovered that just as in Florida, the number of ballots spoiled was--county by county, precinct by precinct--in direct proportion to the local black voting population.


Florida's racial profile mirrors the nation's--both in the percentage of voters who are black and the racial profile of the voters whose ballots don't count. "In 2000, a black voter in Florida was ten times as likely to have their vote spoiled--not counted--as a white voter," explains political scientist Philip Klinkner, co-author of Edley's Harvard report. "National figures indicate that Florida is, surprisingly, typical. Given the proportion of nonwhite to white voters in America, then, it appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the USA, as many as 1 million votes, were cast by nonwhite voters."


So there you have it. In the last presidential election, approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.


One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.

IRCC, Neal Boortz has an outstanding challenge to produce a single African-American from Florida that was actually disenfranchised.

Let's write to Willie Steen...he doesn't seem to have his voting priviliges returned yet.

The felon purge is still on. Willie Steen, the non-felon in the Bush Family Fortunes, is going to be filmed attempting to vote. He's supposed to be on the voting rolls, but apparently the rolls were never cleaned up after 2000. Palast called Steen's (Republican) county election official. Steen's still on felon list! He can't vote, even though he's never been a felon.

The vast majority of the 93,000 names from 2000 remain purged. The new 47,000 list is not, because it was killed before it could be implemented. For those who want to get off the felon list, Florida is making it very difficult. They're being required to provide fingerprints and jump through other hoops to prove they are who they are.

OOPS! <edited>

The US civil rights commission has started a criminal investigation of Jeb Bush's purported investigation of absentee voting problems that targeted older African Americans. Unfortunately, Ashcroft is in charge of making sure it's completed. That gives you an idea of the chances that anything will happen.


http://www.grassrootsforamerica.us/taking-root/taking-root-v1-12.shtml

Thank you for that,

It is terrible if someone is named a felon and he isn't, that is not right.

But with regards to the conviced felons, that's the way it is. That's the law, it may be that you do have a large ratio of black felons in these counties, but, that is where you have to change the law. If you commit a felony, you should know if you get caught your in danger of losing your rights to vote. I guess they don't think about all the consequences of committing felonies until after they are convicted..


With regards to spoilage. How can you honestly count a vote if they weren't done right. It's the same thing with the little old ladies with their punch cards.. There is a certain amount of spoilage in every election. They should have more information for potential voters on the system being used. Educating the public should on what to do is in everyones best interest...

You're right Xena, the 2000 election highlighted a lot of problems. And who's to say that Daddy Kennedy didn't "buy" the 1960 election?

McG, the reason no blacks have come forward to dispute Borz's challenge is that their radio dials don't go that far to the right...

You're right. It IS terrible, and not right. And there were thousands who fell victim to this. So then why is it that Jeb Bush cannot see to it that these people are rightfully re-instated before November 2nd? He didn't even do that for the 2002 mid-term elections.

Dookie, Jeb is a genius compared to his brother but I think in this case blood is thicker...

There weren't thousands of blacks that were affected like that..
There is no perfect way to do anything. The two or three cases should be taken care of though.

There are instances were these things happen in every State, not on a scale where an election is in jeopardy..