Tuesday, June 05, 2007

" CAGING " & OTHER WAYS TO RIG ELECTIONS REPUBLICAN STYLE

Let us begin with a little song since as the dwarf in David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS says " Where we come from there is always music in the air " :

Jimmy Cliff & Erykah Badu performing Bob Marley's " No Woman No Cry " which is another favorite of mine-- From: califucho ( for more versions of the song go to YouTube)






Anyway there are more allegations of voter fraud by the Republicans as directed by Gonzales & Cheney & Bush but do Americans care as they are about to go off on their Summer Vacations or are they just cynical they're all crooks so what difference does it make ?

Anyway let's see if we can connect some dots - election fraud has become part of business as usual for the Republicans under George W. Bush & his co-conspirators & yet for some reason this did not become the focus of the media - Once a story about voter fraud was dealt with the media & the public went on to the next political story or more importantly to the high-jinks of some public persona like Brittney Spears or Paris Hilton which of more importance to Americans than whether or not their National or State elections are honest & reflect the will of the voters - is it indifference or cynicism since " all politicians are liars & crooks "- or as long as they have their " bread & circuses " it doesn't matter -

Added: October 15, 2006
From: BI30
A little reminder for this election year. Shortly before election day 2004, KLAS News in Las Vegas found stacks of voter registration cards, all Democrats, in a dumpster behind the HQ of a private voter registration company. Those whose job it was to pass out and collect voter registration cards were schooled on how to deceive Democratic voters and only sign up Republicans.



Democrat voter registrations found in dumpster (2004)



and :
Added: November 07, 2006
From: representativepress

Republican Dirty Tricks


From Keith Olbermann in case you missed it : Keith Olbermann: Gonzo-Gate Election Fraud



Keith Olbermann reports on the Monica Goodling hearings 5.23.07



Florida election Fraud Scandal 10-26-2004

From: MasterpieceConCen
In Jacksonville, to determine if Republicans were using "caging lists" (1,886 names and addresses of voters in traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.) or other means of intimidating voters, newsnight filmed a private detective filming every "early voter" - the majority of whom are black - from behind a vehicle with blacked-out windows. The private detective claimed not to know who was paying for his all-day services. On the scene, Democratic Congresswoman Corinne Brown said the surveillance operation was part of a campaign of intimidation tactics used by the Republican Party to intimidate and scare off African American voters, almost all of whom are registered Democrats.


Part 1 of 2



( its illegal if the democrats do it but not when Republicans do it ? or everbody does it therefore it is ok. )



And more on voter fraud - seems few Americans care - if these irregularities occurred in some country disliked by Bush such as Venezuela the Bush Regime would start sounding hysterical & start planning to invade or just bring about a nice little coup as they did in Guatemala , Iran , Chile etc.

Friday, March 23, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Explosive New Vote Fraud Developments Continue To Rock Ohio and Florida

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Breaking news in vote fraud cases in both Ohio and Florida are feeding a firestorm of controversy that is likely to continue escalating, with major implications for the 2008 election and the future of e-voting machines.

In Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, the newly elected Secretary of State, has received two of the four resignations she requested from the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE). The two Democrats on the Board, Edward Coaxum, Jr. and Loree Soggs, have complied with her call for their departures from Cleveland’s scandal-ridden election authority.

However, Robert Bennett, who chairs both the Cuyahoga BOE and the Ohio Republican Party, has thus far refused Brunner’s request. So has Sally Florkiewicz, Bennett’s fellow Republican on the BOE. Should they continue with their refusal to resign, Brunner has threatened to hold public hearings, in the wake of which she could force the resignations.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that a criminal investigation is underway which centers on the Cuyahoga BOE’s conduct of the November 2006 election. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason has turned again to Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter who recently won felony convictions of two BOE workers for rigging the 2004 presidential recount for another criminal investigation. Baxter will be investigating “possible criminal wrongdoings” related to ballot security and the scanning of absentee ballots.



And from The Free Press -- Independent News Media The GOP's cyber election hit squad
by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
April 22, 2007

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote– from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves – must be added to the growing congressional investigations.

Another one down another one bites the dust, as it were, this is getting interesting it is getting more & more like some spy novel or more like a pulp thriller unbelievable with some rather dopey bad guys like the three stooges meet the bowery boys one wonders if these clowns were rigging the election in this way in Arkansas then how many other districts were manipulated in this fashion

US Attorney Resigns Following Conyers’ Request for BBC Documents
by Greg Palast

Tim Griffin, formerly right hand man to Karl Rove, resigned Thursday as US Attorney for Arkansas hours after BBC Television ‘Newsnight’ reported that Congressman John Conyers requested the network’s evidence on Griffin’s involvement in ‘caging voters.’ Greg Palast, reporting for BBC Newsnight, obtained a series of confidential emails from the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign. In these emails, Griffin, then the GOP Deputy Communications Director, transmitted so-called ‘caging lists’ of voters to state party leaders.

Experts have concluded the caging lists were designed for a mass challenge of voters’ right to cast ballots. The caging lists were heavily weighted with minority voters including homeless individuals, students and soldiers sent overseas.

Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee investigating the firing of US Attorneys, met Thursday evening in New York with Palast. After reviewing key documents, Conyers stated that, despite Griffin’s resignation, “We’re not through with him by any means.”

Conyers indicated to the BBC that he thought it unlikely that Griffin could carry out this massive ‘caging’ operation without the knowledge of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rove.

Griffin has not responded to requests by BBC to explain this 'caging' operation. However, in emails subpoenaed by Conyers' committee, Griffin complains to Monica Goodling, an assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, about the BBC reporter's reproduction of caging lists in Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse."


Here is an explanation of what " Caging " is :

Raging Caging What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care?
By Dahlia Lithwick at Slate
Thursday, May 31, 2007,

...One of the reasons the mainstream news reports (including mine) barely touched the vote-caging story was that nobody had any idea what Goodling was talking about. "Vote caging, what's that?" we e-mailed each other at Slate. The confusion seemed to extend to Goodling herself. The subject came up in her testimony about former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. In saying he had not been forthright with the House judiciary committee in his testimony on the firing of the U.S. attorneys, she cited three areas, one of which was McNulty's failure "to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in 'vote caging' in the president's 2004 campaign," when he spoke to Congress.

Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren't living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you'll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans—Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC's Newsnight in 2004. He's been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:

The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked "Do not forward" to voters' homes. Letters returned ("caged") were used as evidence to block these voters' right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and—you got to love this—American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.

Why weren't these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation—and the soldiers were overseas.

Palast supplies evidence linking Tim Griffin, then-research director for the RNC, to this caging plot; specifically, a series of confidential e-mails to Republican Party muckety-mucks with the suggestive heading "RE: caging." The e-mails were accidentally sent to a George Bush parody site. They also contained suggestively named spreadsheets, headed "caging" as well. The names on the lists are what Palast's researchers deemed to be homeless men and soldiers deployed in Iraq. Here are the e-mails.

As Palast points out—and Griffin himself has observed—the American media barely touched this story, and Griffin has yet to explain the e-mails or the lists. He did tell The New Yorker's Jane Mayer last March that "caging is not a derogatory term. ... [I]t's a direct-mail term. It derives from caging categories of mail in steel shelves and files." Still, that hardly explains why he was allegedly caging only transient African-American voters in those shelves or files, which would likely violate the Voting Rights Act.



The scandals as they unfold reveal undue influence being used by the Bush administration has been widespread affecting one state after another -falling like dominoes -
Here's a bit on the Alabama Scandal

Rove Linked to Prosecution of Ex-Alabama Governor
By Adam Zagorin
TIME Magazine

Friday 01 June 2007

In the rough and tumble of Alabama politics, the scramble for power is often a blood sport. At the moment, the state's former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman, stands convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges and faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison. Siegelman has long claimed that his prosecution was driven by politically motivated, Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys.

Now Karl Rove, the President's top political strategist, has been implicated in the controversy. A longtime Republican lawyer in Alabama swears she heard a top G.O.P. operative in the state say that Rove "had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Siegelman, with help from two of Alabama's U.S. attorneys.

The allegation was made by Dana Jill Simpson, a lifelong Republican and lawyer who practices in Alabama. She made the charges in a May 21 affidavit, obtained by TIME, in which she describes a conference call on November 18, 2002, which involved a group of senior aides to Bob Riley, who had just narrowly defeated Siegelman in a bitterly contested election for governor. Though Republican Riley, a former Congressman, initially found himself behind by several thousand votes, he had pulled ahead at the last minute when disputed ballots were tallied in his favor. After the abrupt vote turnaround, Siegelman sought a recount. The Simpson affidavit says the conference call focused on how the Riley campaign could get Siegelman to withdraw his challenge.

According to Simpson's statement, William Canary, a senior G.O.P. political operative and Riley adviser who was on the conference call, said "not to worry about Don Siegelman" because "'his girls' would take care of" the governor. Canary then made clear that "his girls" was a reference to his wife, Leura Canary, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Alice Martin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.

Canary reassured others on the conference call - who also included Riley's son, Rob, and Terry Butts, another Riley lawyer and former justice of the Alabama supreme court - that he had the help of a powerful pal in Washington. Canary said "not to worry - that he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman," the Simpson affidavit says. Both U.S. attorney offices subsequently indicted Siegelman on a variety of charges, although Leura Canary recused herself from dealing with the case in May 2002. A federal judge dismissed the Northern District case before it could be tried, but Siegelman was convicted in the Middle District on bribery and conspiracy charges last June.

William Canary called the allegations "outrageous" and "the desperate act of a desperate politician." Terry Butts said, "I do not recall this telephone conversation - this whole story must have been created by a drunk fiction writer." A White House spokesman told TIME that since the case of former Governor Siegelman remained before the courts, it would have no comment


Take Care,
GORD.

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