The slippery slope of election/voter tampering

Fearing the blue wave in a few weeks, the GOP works to limit voter participation in South Dakota, Georgia and Nevada to name a few states. It is pitiful to see a once strong party sinking to such crooked means to gain an advantage.


On Monday, the Palast Investigative Fund announced it was releasing the names of 90,000 residents of Las Vegas and Reno (Clark and Washoe counties) purged from the voter rolls based on flawed evidence that indicates they have moved. Nevada is a Senate battleground state and these purges could tip the election.

Rather than face me in federal court, Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State, Barbara K. Cegavske, on Thursday turned over the list of every Nevada voter whose registration Cegavske cancelled in 2016 and 2017.

Cegavske used the same notorious “purge by postcard” and “Crosscheck” methods of cleansing voter rolls as GOP Secretaries of State Brian Kemp of Georgia and Kris Kobach of Kansas.

Our experts, reviewing these lists, have found that the overwhelming majority of voters who have supposedly moved out of state or out of their home counties have, in fact, not moved an inch — most remain at their original registration address.

The NAACP and League of Women Voters have cited the “Crosscheck” program used in Nevada and other GOP states as wildly inaccurate and racially biased.

My investigation of these purge systems follows from my original exposé in Rolling Stone.

https://www.occupy.com/article/90000-voters-purged-vegas-and-reno-could-tip-senate#sthash.irpMqAIt.JTnxwWxR.dpbs

Slippery slope indeed - reports are that in-person early voting in Georgia is skyrocketing. On the first day (Monday 10/15), more than TRIPLE the number who voted in 2014's mid-terms showed up -- 69K+ vs 20K+!! Wanna bet which side accounts for most of it? "We'll see what happens" when all is said and done.

RealLindaL wrote:Slippery slope indeed - reports are that in-person early voting in Georgia is skyrocketing.  On the first day (Monday 10/15), more than TRIPLE the number who voted in 2014's mid-terms showed up -- 69K+ vs 20K+!!   Wanna bet which side accounts for most of it?  "We'll see what happens" when all is said and done.

I'm cautiously optimistic about increased voter turn out. Understandably, with all the dissatisfaction with the traditional political parties there is an increasingly large number of voters signing up as Independents. The news out of Georgia is wonderfully encouraging. I hope this trend continues and that there is a Blue Tsunami on the 6th of November!

On the verge of moving to New Orleans, seeing Louisiana shown as blue reflects the numbers of registered voters in each party but the 2 senators are notoriously (stupidly) in 45's camp. LA does have a Democrat as governor who had to come in and clean up after Bobby Jindal ended up with a huge deficit.

Democrats no longer control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or for that matter most of the governorships or state legislatures. But they still maintain a toehold in the political process with their edge in the realm of voter registration. At least that is the case in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that register voters by political party.

As of this month, 13 of these states (plus the District) boast a Democratic plurality in registered voters, compared to eight states where there is a Republican plurality. In the other 10 states, there are more registered independents than either Democrats or Republicans, with Democrats out-registering the Republicans in six of these states and the GOP with more voters than the Democrats in the other four. They are indicated in the chart as “I(d)” or “I(r).” Nationally, four out of every 10 registered voters in party registration states are Democrats, with slightly less than three out of every 10 registered as Republicans or independents. Overall, the current Democratic advantage over Republicans in the party registration states approaches 12 million.




http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/registering-by-party-where-the-democrats-and-republicans-are-ahead/

More attempts at voter suppression in Georgia.

Dozens of black senior citizens in rural Georgia were ordered off a bus bound for the polls after county officials said the event constituted prohibited “political activity.”

A Jefferson County clerk reportedly told staff members from the Leisure Center in Louisville on Monday ― the first day of in-person early voting in Georgia ― that roughly 40 black people couldn’t take part in the trip after receiving a complaint from an unnamed caller.

The trip had been organized by the nonpartisan Black Voters Matter, which is embarking on a bus tour across several southern states with the goal of urging black people to vote. The caller said the bus, which was painted with the words “The South is Rising Tour,” should not be allowed to bring people to the polls, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jefferson County Administrator Adam Brett said the trip, set to depart from a county-run senior center, was political and therefore violated guidelines imposed on county-sponsored events, the AJC reported. Although Black Voters Matter is a nonpartisan organization, Jefferson County Democratic Party Chairwoman Diane Evans helped organize the event.

Officials “felt uncomfortable with allowing senior center patrons to leave the facility in a bus with an unknown third party,” Brett told the AJC. “No seniors at the Jefferson County senior center were denied their right to vote.”

A representative for the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

But Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown pushed back on Brett’s reasoning for ending the trip.

“We knew it was an intimidation tactic,” Brown told the AJC. “It was really unnecessary. These are grown people.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-voters-matter-bus-georgia_us_5bc76a27e4b055bc947ce32b