All-
Please take this not as alarmist news, but as factual news and a must-do call to action for us all.
More information is being confirmed regarding the Republican tactics to "purge" voter names from the registers. This means you can mail in a ballot or show up to vote in person and NOT be eligible to vote or have your vote counted. This practice is happening in up to 13 states and for sure in all battleground states. To prove my point please see the article below from Rolling Stone magazine about the just-released study by Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast. They have been making the rounds on radio and the media blogs with this vital information. Kennedy and Palast have studied the election frauds of 2000 and 2004 and are well versed in what is going on. In short, Kennedy and Palast say that "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." Kennedy and Palast predict that over 1.1 Million voters will be effected by the illegal purging or other practices. Shocked? We should be. Yes the Republican practices are illegal, yes they are wrong and yes we in my opinion we have NO choice but to do the following:
1) Re-check NOW to make sure you are registered. Go to www.voteforchange.com to check. There you can also find links to your State's Election Officials/Registrar information should you need to contact them. (Important- even if you have received an absentee ballot, double check to make sure you are registered. Kennedy and Palast state that approximately 750,000 absentee ballots were not counted in 2004 due to the smallest of discrepancies. Be safe, not sorry!)
2) EARLY VOTING...and I don't mean on Election Day!.......We must take advantage of early voting and not wait until Election Day. Why? Because should you find your name has been purged from the records once you arrive to vote you will have ample time to get it corrected, contact the Registrar, etc. and still be able to vote by 11/4. If you show up on Election Day and find you are purged, you may be out of luck. VOTE BY EARLY/MID NEXT WEEK at the latest is what I suggest. Check here to find your State's early voting dates ( www.voteforchange.com and click the "Early Voting" tab. You can also check Rock The Vote's site and see the Early Voting states http://www.rockthevote.com/electioncenter/ )
3) Do not accept a "Provisional Ballot" These ballots are given to people on the spot at polling places when something is wrong with their registration or for other reasons. Demand an Official Ballot. Thousands of Provisional Ballots were not counted in the last elections. If your polling place does not have an Official Ballot, call your election officials or Registrar's Office, or check back later at the polling place if they tell you they will have them at a later time.
4) Register Others and Make Sure They Vote!- This is a numbers game. The only way we win is to outnumber the others, amidst the fraud and smears. Volunteer, make calls at Neighbor to Neighbor on this site, canvass, sign up to be a poll worker, etc.
5) Get FIRED UP! - Barack warned today that he has concerns we are getting complacent due to the polls. We can't afford that this time! Ignore the polls, talk to everybody you know. Light the fire!
Check with your local Obama field office for assistance as well. You can find your field office here : http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/statepages
PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY AND DON'T THINK EVERYTHING WILL JUST WORK ITSELF OUT - "You must be the change you want to see in the world"- Mahatma Gandhi
Yes We Will!
PS- See Kennedy and Palast's 24 page booklet "Steal Back Your Vote". www.stealbackyourvote.org. They ask if you download the booklet to donate anything as small as $1.
ROLLING STONE: IT'S ALREADY STOLEN
Investigation by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast released today
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. [Media enquiries - Dave Falkenstein, Sunshine Sachs & Assoc, via interviews@gregpalast.com.]
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, www.GregPalast.com and StealBackYourVote.org.
