Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast

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.

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, StealBackYourVote.org

For updates and video reports, go to RollingStone.com, http://www.GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org.

LA Times: ‘Man Arrested in Voter Fraud.’ It’s A Republican!
October 20, 2008, 12:42AM

Maybe it really is true — what goes around, comes around.

SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud. [LA Times.]

Mark Jacoby’s firm, Young Political Majors (YPM) was hired by the California Republican Party to register voters. The only requirement to perform this job is a California law that says the signature gatherers must be eligible to vote in California. Apparently, Mr. Jacoby does not live in California, so he used an address where he used to live — as a child.

But that’s not what first brought him to the notice of the police. It seems there was a rather large fraud that was also involved:

Jacoby’s arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

YPM received $7-$12 per head if the person registered as a Republican.

For reasons that are unclear and unexplained, it took seven squad cars and nine police officers to arrest Mr. Jacoby outside of a hotel in Ontario, CA.

Mr. Jacoby’s attorney, Dan Goldfine, gave what is quite possibly my favorite line in this article when he said the arrest was part of a “long pattern of harassment against Mr. Jacoby for an entirely valid voter registration effort.”

Mr. Jacoby was released on bail Sunday evening, but he might want to keep more bail money handy. Investigations into YPM have already started in such diverse areas as Florida and Massachusetts. And these came after his recent stint as a defendent in an Arizona civil rights lawsuit.

The California Republican party played its part well when it announced that the charges against Mr. Jacoby are “politically motivated.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone to find that a Democrat is the culprit behind the motivation. They say that Secretary of State, Debra Bowen (D), is “using her office to play politics.”

Norwalk is approximately 15% black
Bridgeport is approximately 30% black.

So non-blacks have the edge, if they turn out to vote.