Republicans have known for decades that the way to win elections is to reduce the number of voters so that the odds are improved for the conservative and right wing candidates. Purging voter roles, make it hard to register, scare people away from the poles, tamper with voting machines, make sure the folks that make the voting machines are loyal Republicans, make sure all the election officials are loyal Republicans, "Caging," are only a few of the techniques proven to be successful in stealing elections.
URGENT UPDATE: Today on the local news cast it was reported that in Page County, US attorneys obtained the voter records for unknown reasons! Evidently, the records are being examined for "accuracy" to root out fraud. Stay tuned!!
Of course it's all in response to tales that Rove himself created and spread through his network of political operatives:
Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.
Remember, it's public opinion only, that is the issue here, not actual voter fraud. An April 12, 2007 report in the New York Times indicates that
"despite a five-year-old crackdown, the Justice Department has turned up “virtually no evidence” that organized fraud exists. The few people who have been convicted of voter fraud, the piece makes clear, are mostly confused felons and immigrants. And yet the White House, again per the Times, was anxious enough about the issue that it obscured the conclusions of a federal panel that found little evidence of fraud—the panel report’s conclusion was changed to allow for the (apparently baseless) possibility that rampant voter fraud is a real problem."
It's whipping up the populace to a frenzy and making bogus court cases to discredit voters and candidates of the opposing party. It's all about accusing the OTHER side of the cheating going on by the DEMOCRATS! From a former campaign staffer:
Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about (the losing candidate's) election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that."
Fast forward to the recent firings of 8 or 9 or 10 federal prosecutors. In this exchange on Democracy Now!, David Iglesias and investigative reporter Greg Palast are weighing in on the issue:
DAVID IGLESIAS: They wanted a political operative who happened to be a US attorney, and when they got somebody who actually took his oath to the Constitution seriously, they were appalled and they wanted me out of there. The two strikes against me was, I was not political, I didn't help them out on their bogus voter fraud prosecutions.
GREG PALAST: Rove personally ordered his removal. As a prosecutor, Iglesias says that if missing emails prove the firing was punishment for failure to bring bogus charges, Mr. Rove himself is in legal trouble.
DAVID IGLESIAS: If his intent was, look what happened with Iglesias, if that was his intent, he’s in big trouble. That is obstruction of justice, one classic example.
GREG PALAST: Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can't be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City.
And as Iglesias predicted, they reveal a story the party would rather keep buried. Voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., reviewed the evidence in our cache of emails and concluded:
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: They ought to be in jail for doing this, because they knew it was illegal, and they did it anyway.
GREG PALAST: What is it that was so obviously illegal that law professor Kennedy thought they deserved prison time? The evidence that shook him was attached to fifty of the secret emails, something that GOP party chiefs called caging lists, thousands of names of voters. Notably, the majority were African American. Kennedy explained how caging worked.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Caging is an illegal way of getting rid of black votes. You get a list of all the black voters. Then you send a letter to their homes. And if the person doesn't sign it at the homes, the letter then is returned to the Republican National Committee. They then direct the state attorney general, who is friendly to them, who’s Republican, to remove that voter from the list on the alleged basis that that voter does not live in the address that they designated as their address on the voting application form.
GREG PALAST: In all, the Republican Party challenged nearly three million voters, a mass attack on minority voting rights virtually unreported in the US press.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: So they disenfranchised millions of black voters who don't even know that they’ve been disenfranchised.
GREG PALAST: Page after page of voters with this address, Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, hundreds, thousands of soldiers and sailors targeted to lose their vote. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.
And what does this have to do with the prosecutor firings? Take a look at the name at the top of the secret missing email: Tim Griffin. This is the man in charge of the allegedly illegal caging operation. He is research director for the Republican National Committee, special assistant to Karl Rove, and as of December 7 Karl Rove's personal pick for US attorney for the state of Arkansas. Is this a case of the perpetrator becomes the prosecutor?
Stay tuned friends and neighbors. The process of stealing the 2008 election is underway. Page County? Soon Rockingham County?
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