The game play at the GOP Convention in Tampa has far-reaching implications for the future. Watch this news report on the little-known impacts of yesterday’s sham vote:
A GOP delegate took video of the convention teleprompter suggesting that the GOP hierarchy, even prior to hearing the “Aye’s” and “No’s”, had already decided the outcome of the vote on the controversial rules change.
Here’s a transcript of the rolling teleprompter, seen before the speaker spoke the words and before the vote was cast:
All those in favor signify by saying “aye.”
All those opposed say “No.”
In the opinion of the chair, the “ayes” have it and the resolution is adopted.
Click HERE for an excellent local Fox New’s Report on the vote.
If you’re a conservative poll watcher on Election Day, you’re probably a racist! That’s essentially the charge leveled in an August 25 Washington Post-published article by AJ Vicens and Natasha Kahn of the News21 Carnegie-Knight Initiative. Entitled, “True the Vote and other poll watchers motives questioned,” Kahn and Vicens opened their article by noting the paranoia of a Milwaukee voter creeped out at the fact that there were three white poll watchers at her mostly-black polling precinct on the recall election day a few months back:
As Jamila Gatlin waited in line at a northside Milwaukee elementary school to cast her ballot June 5 in the proposed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, she noticed three people in the back of the room. They were watching, taking notes. Officially called ‘election observers,’ they were white. Gatlin, and almost everyone else in line, was black. That’s pretty harassing right there, if you ask me, Gatlin said in the hall outside the gym. Why do we have to be watched while we vote?
Two of the observers were from a Houston-based group called True the Vote, an offshoot of the Houston tea party known as the King Street Patriots. Their stated goal is to prevent voter fraud, which the group and founder Catherine Engelbrecht claims is undermining free and fair elections.
Did I miss the conspiracy here? What is so evil about poll watching? It’s perfectly legal and it’s designed to insure confidence in our electoral process. For example, poll watchers could play a crucial role in preventing and combating the sort of voter intimidation that occurred in Pennsylvania during the 2008 election at the behest of the Black Panther Party.
No, with the legality of poll watching unquestionable, Vicens and Kahn turned to liberal academics to make that case that “white poll watchers in minority areas can have a disenfranchising impact even if there’s no direct interaction.”
“In a community where voter participation is not very high and where folks are not as politically active, any barrier that prevents you from getting to the polls or that discourages you from getting to the polls is potentially a problem,” Vicens and Kahn quoted Nic Riley of New York University’s Brennan Center.
Read more from this story, by Asian-American Matt Vespa, HERE.
And here’s the “Bob the Racist” video attached to Mr. Vespa’s article:
Voter fraud has a shocking new meaning in eastern Kentucky.
That is where in some cases, major cocaine and marijuana dealers admitted to buying votes to steal elections, and the result is the corruption of American democracy. The government continues to mete out justice in the scandal, as two people convicted in April in a vote-buying case face sentencing this week, and another public official pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy.
“We believe that drug money did buy votes,” Kerry B. Harvey, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, said of a separate vote-buying case.
He described a stunning vote-buying scheme that includes “very extensive, organized criminal activity, involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in many cases that involves drug money.”
Harvey has led a recent string of federal prosecutions exposing the widespread and accepted practice of vote buying in eastern Kentucky. The soft-spoken federal prosecutor, along with his team and state authorities, are waging a battle against what he characterizes as a vote-buying culture embedded in many of the communities for generations.
Read more from this story HERE.
View the video reporting on the cocaine-vote buying outrage here:
Photo credit: Vishnu Balunsat
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign is asking Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to launch an investigation into voter-registration forms that are being sent to Virginia residents and addressed to deceased relatives, children, family pets and others ineligible to vote.
The errant mailings from the Washington-based nonprofit group Voter Participation Center have befuddled many Virginia residents, leading to hundreds of complaints.
The organization has been mass-mailing the forms — pre-populated with key information such as names and addresses — to primarily Democratic-leaning voting blocs such as young adults, unmarried women, African-Americans and Latinos.
In a letter to Cuccinelli’s office and the State Board of Elections, Kathryn Bieber, an attorney for the Romney campaign, calls for an investigation into the matter by law-enforcement officials, claiming that the mailings appear to violate “at least one and maybe several Virginia laws aimed at ensuring a fair election.”
Bieber refers to the mailings as “tactics that amount to, or at the very least induce, voter registration fraud,” and says the issue “presents a very significant risk to the proper administration of the upcoming general election.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Washington will become the first state to offer voter registration via Facebook with a new application to be launched as soon as next week, according to a state election official.
Once online, the app will be accessible on the secretary of state’s Facebook page, said Shane Hamlin, co-director of elections for the state.
Washington, which has approximately 3.7 million registered voters, conducts elections entirely by mail and enacted online registration in 2008. Since online registration started, Hamlin said close to 500,000 voter registrations or address changes have been processed.
Facebook, Washington state and Microsoft have teamed up to create an app that allows users to register on the social media site through the state’s new “MyVote” app. The effort came about last fall when Microsoft approached Washington state after Facebook contacted the software giant with the idea.
When Facebook users download the application, they will have to agree to allow Facebook to access their information, including name and date of birth, which is pre-filled into the voter registration form.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo credit: Thos003