FOR an organization of Christians the romney-ryan cabal sure is resorting to a lot of lies, deceptions, manipulations and misleading tactics to suppress the right to vote of many Americans. From PFAW, People For The American Way...
In the last few weeks and months we’ve already seen the Right employ some outrageous dirty tricks to suppress the vote.
The job of election officials should be to make sure every eligible
voter who shows up to cast a ballot can do so and have that vote count.
But we’ve seen numerous right-wing secretaries of state and county
election supervisors instead take it upon themselves to act as partisan
operatives, placing their thumb on the scale to benefit their party’s
candidates. And right-wing political operatives and activists have been
using various tools to confuse, misinform and intimidate voters.
This is just what we’ve seen so far. Who knows what we’ll see in the final days leading up to Election Day and on Election Day itself!
Here are the Top 11, in no particular order:
- Voter ID – In the
last couple of years, right-wing state legislatures have trumpeted the
thoroughly debunked myth of widespread individual voter fraud in order
to scare voters about the legitimacy of elections and pave the way for
burdensome restrictions on voting, most notably, by requiring photo ID
to vote. Many students, elderly, poor and urban voters don’t have
drivers licenses or other acceptable forms of ID and can’t easily obtain
them for a variety of reasons. Voter ID laws are for the most part a
clear attempt to make it harder for traditionally Democratic-voting
constituencies harder to vote, and there are have been some legal
victories against some of the most recent laws, but studies have
estimated that millions of eligible voters nationwide could be
prevented from voting due to onerous ID requirements.
In some states, recently passed voter ID laws have been halted due
to court challenges, yet the states have continued circulating
information referencing the new laws which could be incredibly
confusing to voters. In Pennsylvania, a conservative judge who had
upheld the state’s voter ID law before a federal court blocked it,
ruled that even though voters do not have to show ID to vote, officials can still request it – and the state is using this to justify keeping up billboards that imply voters must have ID to show up.
- Calls about voting by phone – Reports have come in in Florida, Virginia and elsewhere
that primarily elderly voters have received phone calls telling them
they could vote over the phone, so did not need to show up at the polls
(something that is completely untrue).
- Calls about poll workers checking car insurance/registration – Similar misleading calls have been reported by African American and Latino voters
that “inform” voters that their car insurance and registration status
will be checked at the polls as a requirement to cast a vote. This is
also a complete lie.
- Intimidating “voter fraud” billboards – These ominous billboards reminding voters of the legal penalties for voter fraud were put up in minority communities
in Milwaukee, WI and in Ohio in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
Clearly intended to make minority voters unnecessarily nervous about
showing up to vote, PFAW and our allies like Color of Change brought
pressure on the two companies that owned the billboards to remove them
-- and they did!
It was a good victory, but for the days the billboards were up, there
was certainly damage done. Expect signs and flyers with a similar
message to pop up in minority communities across the country in the
final days of the election, especially in swing states.
- Tea Party groups challenging the votes of eligible voters –
this is exactly what it sounds like and every bit as despicable. All
around the country, and especially in hotly contested battleground
states like Ohio, so-called “True the Vote” and other Tea Party organizations are exploiting state laws to challenge the votes of minority voters and others who primarily fit into groups that tend to vote Democratic.
- Romney campaign training poll watchers to mislead voters – In Wisconsin, we have reports
that the Romney campaign has been training poll watchers not only to
provide incorrect information to voters, but to hide their own
affiliation at the polls.
- Restricting access for election observers – Not only is the Right escalating their voter intimidation efforts, but their also doing their part to make it harder for fair elections groups to observe and counter those efforts.
- Voter registration fraud (the really dangerous kind) – There’s been at least one arrest,
and after the Florida GOP distanced itself from the private voter
registration vendor Strategic Allied Consulting for apparent fraud in
that state, some members of Congress
are calling for a DOJ investigation into more widespread fraud,
particularly by that group, which is led by notorious right-wing dirty
trickster Nathan Sproul.
You no doubt have heard about the right-wing uproar over fake voter
registrations submitted by ACORN in years past – in that case, the
registration fraud consisted of paid canvassers submitting phony
registrations under names such as “Mickey Mouse.” No voter fraud was
committed. ACORN turned in all the registrations they collected (even
the obviously flawed ones) as they were required to, but if any
fraudulent registration forms did result in actual registrations, the
fake voters (who probably also had fake addresses) never received
registration cards – and Mickey Mouse certainly didn’t show up to vote.
What right-wing operatives are doing here is much more deliberate
and actually causes serious harm. In addition to dumping Democratic
registrations, it appears fraudulent changes to existing registrations
were made, which means when real (presumably Democratic) voters show up
to the polls, their registration will have been changed unbeknownst to
them and they will be ineligible to cast a ballot.
- Businesses threatening their employees –
One of the most insidious forms of voter intimidation we’ve seen this
cycle has to do with right-wing corporate CEOs threatening their
employees’ livelihoods to pressure them to vote Republican. Mitt Romney
has even gotten in on the action by encouraging business executives to do this.
- Restricting early and absentee voting and limiting access to provisional ballots – It’s like three dirty tricks in one!
- Throwing out absentee ballots based on signatures “not matching” – Does your signature look exactly the same now as it did when you first registered to vote? In Florida,
canvassing boards are simply throwing out some absentee ballots they
feel have signatures that don’t match the ones on file for voters. In
these cases, the voters are not even being informed that their vote has
been challenged or will not be counted.
In addition to the voter suppression tactics on this list, instances keep popping up of voters
receiving confusing or incorrect voting information
from state voting authorities. We’re not listing it as a dirty trick
because there’s no evidence of intent to disenfranchise, the states
simply claim incompetence, and these are primarily the same states –
run by Republicans – that have just had major changes to voting
requirements. But the result for voters is the same, and we’ll let you
draw your own conclusions.
And finally,
we urge the Department of Justice to keep a
close eye on this election, both to prevent voter suppression and to
make sure votes are counted properly. There have been
widespread problems with certain types of electronic voting machines
and vote counting machines reported over several election cycles. In
this election, there’s an appearance of severe impropriety in that many
voting machines, including many used in the all-important swing state
of Ohio, have been provided by a company that is essentially part owned
by Tagg Romney as well as some of the largest donors to Mitt Romney’s
presidential campaign.
Democracy should be free of the suspicion created by the
corporate entanglements of the business interests of candidates, their
families or their closest supporters.
Read more about the Right’s campaign to keep millions of Americans from the ballot box
here.
http://blog.pfaw.org/content/top-11-republican-dirty-tricks-so-far
