Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News Saturday, March 24, 2007

[livvy]

http://www.cagle.com/news/GonzalesFiresAttorneys/1.asp
Sigh...so many good 'toons...so little space. See more here:
http://www.cagle.com/


Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News

All members welcome and encouraged to participate.



Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread.

If you can:
1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web.

2. Post stories using the new Spring 2006 Edition of "Election Fraud and Reform News Directory" listed here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x407240

3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too.

4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread.



Please "Recommend" for the Greatest Page (it's the link just below).

[livvy]

1. New U.S. Attorneys Seem to Have Partisan Records

This really needs to be read in its entirety. I've tried to select some key parts, but there are just too many. Read it all. It's worth it


Posted on Fri, Mar. 23, 2007
U.S. ATTORNEYS

New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records

By Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Newspapers

>snip of intro

Taken together, critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys, the voter-fraud campaign and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.

>snip

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in the 2008 elections. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.

>snip

Several former voting rights lawyers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of antagonizing the administration, said the division's political appointees reversed the recommendations of career lawyers in key cases and transferred or drove out most of the unit's veteran attorneys.

>snip

In testimony to a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing this week, Rich said that 20 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have been transferred to other jobs or have left their jobs since April 2005 and a staff of 26 civil rights analysts who reviewed state laws for discrimination has been slashed to 10.

>more

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16962753.htm

[livvy]

2. Links to documents and other articles on the attorney probe

Saturday, Mar 24, 2007

DOCUMENTS FROM THE PROBE starting with:
PDF | 11 March (1)
Roundup of Justice Department e-mails
through
PDF | 23 March (11)
Roundup of Justice Department documents

Past articles:

Documents highlight Gonzales' role in the firings
House panel authorizes subpoenas in the U.S. attorneys controversy
Emails show White House interest in U.S. attorneys firings
and many more

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/usattorneys/

[livvy]

3. House Bill Would Require Paper Ballots Next Year

House bill would require paper ballots next year
By David Whitney - Bee Washington Bureau
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, March 24, 2007

Seeking to address concerns over the integrity of elections, a House panel is weighing controversial legislation requiring states to bring back the paper ballot as the official record.

Many, if not most, states are expressing concerns that Congress is moving too fast with pending legislation that would take effect in time for the 2008 national presidential elections, with primary balloting beginning in January.

Only 17 states have voter systems that would be in compliance with the proposed law.

The legislation has divided advocacy groups. State elections officials are opposed to it. County officials don't like it.

>more

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/143270.html

[livvy]

4. GOP Playbook Seeks to Exploit Alleged Voter Fraud

GOP PLAYBOOK SEEKS TO EXPLOIT ALLEGED VOTER FRAUD

By Cynthia TuckerFri Mar 23, 8:56 PM ET

There they go again. Seeking a seat in Congress, a Georgia GOP legislator is raising the specter of phony voters: illegal immigrants sneaking into the voting booth to cast a ballot.

In a letter to potential contributors, state Sen. Jim Whitehead wrote, "An illegal immigrant should no more be voting in our elections in Georgia than you or I should be voting in Mexico. That's just wrong!" according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter.

Whitehead didn't give any examples of voting by illegal immigrants because he can't cite any. Said Thomas Patterson, an expert on elections at Harvard's Shorenstein Center: "If you are an illegal immigrant, the last thing you want to do is show up at a polling place. ... We have enough trouble getting people to vote when they're eligible. The idea that people are going to stick their necks out and get (a) penalty stretches the imagination."

But an epidemic of fraudulent voters has become a favorite fairy tale of the Republican Party, a made-up monster they've planted under voters' beds that will jump out and scare us into endorsing voter ID laws. They invent stories about droves of people stealing driver's licenses or passports so they can sneak into the booth to cast an illegal ballot. GOP leaders have intimidated voters of color, unfairly purged voter rolls and set up unconstitutional barriers to the ballot box -- all in the name of cleaning up "voter fraud."

>more

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucas/20070324/cm_ucas/gopplaybookseekstoexploitallegedvoterfraud

[livvy]

5. New Yorker: Never, Ever Land

Comment
Never, Ever Land
by Dorothy Wickenden April 2, 2007

“I would never, ever make a change in a United States Attorney position for political reasons, or if it would in any way jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation,” Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18th. “I just would not do it.”

No one who has been paying attention to the troubles of the present Administration should have been surprised by what followed: two months of mounting revelations about the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys, for mostly political reasons. By last week, the revelations—along with the denials, the obfuscations, and the selective document dumps they provoked—had become a full-blown scandal. On Tuesday, the White House said that it would allow congressional committees to conduct “interviews” with Karl Rove, the President’s senior political adviser, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, but the sessions would be behind closed doors and not under oath, with no transcripts. The offer was declined, and that afternoon President Bush, in his most petulant self-dramatizing mode, declared, from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, that it was all right for Gonzales to appear before Congress, but that having his aides testify would be tantamount to holding “show trials” under “klieg lights.” Thus challenged, committees in the House and the Senate authorized subpoenas for top White House and Justice Department officials.

The President has the right to hire U.S. Attorneys with like-minded political leanings. The prosecutors are political appointees and, as such, are often replaced at the start of a President’s term. What’s unusual is to fire them in the middle of their own four-year terms. Assembling a compatible legal team is one thing; expecting its members to tailor individual investigations to partisan demands is another. The firings are symptomatic of how the Administration’s zeal for political loyalty and its intolerance of independent thinking result in chaos.

Gonzales defensively claimed in a press conference on March 13th that he had nothing to do with the dismissals, but he implied that the prosecutors were weak performers, thus inflaming those among them who had recently been commended for doing a splendid job. Subordinates were blamed for handling the matter poorly: Miers, who had initially proposed replacing all ninety-three U.S. Attorneys; and D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’s chief of staff, who abruptly resigned, ostensibly because he had not made Justice officials aware of just how closely he had worked with the White House to refine Miers’s idea.

>more

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/04/02/070402taco_talk_wickenden

[livvy]

6. Iowa: Same-Day Registration

Legislative digest

SAME-DAY REGISTRATION -- A bill that would allow Iowans to register to vote on Election Day would boost voter turnout by 5 percent, according to groups pushing for passage of the legislation.

Demos, a policy research group, and the Iowa Citizen Action Network released a study Thursday showing the bill's potential impact. The analysis argued that turnout among 18-to-25-year-old voters would jump 10 percent along with increased turnout among minority groups, new citizens and people who recently moved.

States with similar laws had an average voter turnout rate of 70.3 percent in 2004 compared to 54.7 percent in other states. In Iowa, 66 percent of the voting age population voted in 2004.

"One of our most important and often challenging missions is to increase participation in voting, especially among those that are least likely to vote," said Betty Ahrens, executive director of Iowa Citizen Action, in a statement.

Opponents of the bill argue that it would make Iowa's voting system more vulnerable to fraud.


http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2007/03/23/news/legislature/89107235c8cc0231862572a7000c1c66.txt

[livvy]

7. Shifting the Message On Publicly Financed Pol. Campaigns

Friday, March 23, 2007
Shifting the message on publicly financed political campaigns

Last year's Prop. 89 called it the "Clean Money campaign." In Portland, Ore., it's "voter-owned elections." A new bipartisan bill by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Arlen Specter, R-Penn., calls it "Fair Elections Now."

They're all different names for pretty much the same thing: spending public money for the multi-colored mailers and slashing TV ads from candidates that clog mailboxes and airwaves every election season.

Of course, in the Prop. 89 campaign, the words "public financing" was seldom heard from supporters, which mades a lot of political sense. While voters like the sound of "clean money," "fair elections" and even "voter-owned elections," they generally hate the idea of public financing, which sends their tax money into the campaigns of candidates they might not want to have anything to do with.

Truth in advertising could be coming to the good government effort, as backers of campaign finance reform look for new ways to bring voters on-board.

"We're starting to call it 'publicly financed elections' and making it clear to voters that the cost of elections is coming out of their pockets already, one way or another," said Susan Lerner, head of the California Clean Money Campaign, said this afternoon at a day-long "Clean Money, Clean Cities" conference in San Jose.

>more

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=14709

[Land Shark]

9. "VOTER-OWNED ELECTIONS" (the OR frame) is broader, includes public OVERSIGHT of elections

which is very very important, in that respect I disagree with this sfgate article.

But I do agree that TRANSPARENCY is the unifying principle that unites all these areas and we must have complete transparency throughout, otherwise the forces of cheating just move to the area of opportunity (darkness or nontransparency) just as a burglar moves to the unlocked window....

[livvy]

12. Voter-Owned Elections

Iowa:
What is Voter-Owned Iowa Clean Elections (VOICE)?

Voter-Owned Elections is a voluntary system for state elections where candidates can choose to run using public funding instead of contantly fundraising and accepting monies from power groups hoping to weild their influence. It provides qualifying candidates - those who collect a set amount of signatures and $5 donations from within their district - with a set amount of money from a public source if they promise to refuse money from all other sources.
http://www.voterownediowa.org/whatisvoi.htm

Other states:
Maine and Arizona are not the only states with Voter-Owned or “Clean” Elections. Several other states now have some form of the system in place: Connecticut, New Mexico, North Carolina, Vermont, and Massachusetts. And other states across the country are pushing for the reform. In the Midwest, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Missouri all have groups working to reclaim democracy from special interests and wealthy contributors. To learn more about what is happening around the country, check out these web sites:

* National - www.publiccampaign.org
* Arizona - www.azclean.org
* Connecticut - ccag.net
* Illinois - www.citizenaction-il.org
* Massachusetts - www.massvoters.org
* Minnesota - www.lwvmn.org/FACE, www.takeactionminnesota.org
* North Carolina - www.democracy-nc.org
* Wisconsin - www.wicleanelections.org, www.wi-citizenaction.org
http://www.voterownediowa.org/whatisvoi/otherstates.htm

Hawaii:
VOE CONTINUES THE FIGHT TO GET BIG MONEY OUT OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS!

CURRENT ACTION (MARCH 19):
Please call Sen. Clayton Hee at 586-7330 and ask him to hear our bill, HB 661, to create a public funding option for County Council races.
http://www.voterownedhawaii.org/

Oregon

Voter-Owned Elections ...

Oregon Action believes that a truly democratic election system requires access, accountablity and participation. Voter-owned elections, elections that are publicly financed, open the doors to political access by eliminating the unspoken requirement that people contribute in order to be heard, increase accountability to the electorate, instead of to the contritbutors and increase participation by allowing people who have the community leadership and experience to run for office compete on a level playing field against candidates whose greatest qualification is their ability to raise money.

We are proud of our successful campaign to pass a Voter-Owned Elections ordinance in Porltand — and leaders have provided strong testimony at public hearings attesting to the urgency of opening up the political process.
http://www.oregonaction.org/voe.htm
Voter-Owned Elections
More Choices & New Voices for Portland
http://www.oregonfollowthemoney.org/CampaignReform/Portland/portlandoverview.htm

Thanks, Landshark!

[livvy]

8. Crist Touts Elections Overhaul

Article published Mar 24, 2007
Crist touts elections overhaul
By CORY REISS

H-T WASHINGTON BUREAU
[e-mail]
WASHINGTON -- Gov. Charlie Crist told a House panel on Friday that his proposal to replace touch-screen voting machines throughout Florida "will allow every eligible voter to have their voice heard and ensure that their vote counts."

Outside the hearing of an elections subcommittee, Crist, a Republican, said he supports federal legislation that would require paper trails on voting machines and provide $300 million to states for the equipment.

The subcommittee of the House Administration Committee is considering such a bill by Reps. Rush Holt, D-N.J., and Robert Wexler, D-Fla. Wexler estimated the bill could send about $18 million to Florida, more than half the expected cost of Crist's $32 million plan.

"Our goal is to resolve voter confidence through new systems and restore voter confidence in the procedures and implementation of federal and state legislation," Crist told the subcommittee in remarks that lasted about 10 minutes.

>more

http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070324/NEWS/703240343

[Land Shark]

10. National: Bush and Rove calling for "vigorous prosecution of ELECTION fraud"!

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x469651 (and links therein)

[livvy]

11. Elected Officials and Community Leaders Attend 2nd Clean Money/Cities Conf.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Elected Officials and Community Leaders Attend Second Clean Money - Clean Cities Conference

California Political Desk
March 24, 2007

SAN JOSE - San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, Santa Cruz County Treasurer Fred Keeley, and other elected officials joined over 100 city officials, community leaders and activists from throughout Northern California for a one-day conference reviewing the benefits of Clean Money publicly financed systems for elections and how local governments are using Clean Money systems.

The conference, held in the San Jose City Hall, is the second of two Clean Money - Clean Cities conferences conducted by the California Clean Money Campaign and California Common Cause, with co-host the League of Women Voters of California. Another conference took place in Pasadena on March 15th. Attendees heard not only from elected officials about the destructive effects of money on our political process and democracy, but also from experts on campaign finance reform, costs of municipal campaigning, administering public funding systems, and spearheading Clean Money efforts in Portland, OR, Albuquerque, NM and throughout Northern California.

Fred Keeley, Santa Cruz County Treasurer and former state Assemblymember said, "As someone who has served in both local and state governments, I am aware of the corrosive effect that exists between political contributions and policymaking. The cure for that is to have as much public financing as is possible."

http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=22746

[babylonsister]

13. Task Force Formed to Investigate Florida 13th Election

http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20070323/pl_cq_politics/taskforceformedtoinvestigateflorida13thelection;_ylt=Anya2nd.P6eAAN1T18A95S_MWM0F

Task Force Formed to Investigate Florida 13th Election

By Rachel Kapochunas Fri Mar 23, 5:55 PM ET

Nearly five months after Florida Republican Vern Buchanan (news, bio, voting record) narrowly defeated Democrat Christine Jennings in the state’s 13th District, a congressional committee has organized a task force to investigate the controversial election.

California Democratic Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald (news, bio, voting record), chairwoman of the House Administration Committee, on Thursday announced the formation of the task force, which she said was needed to investigate “possible voting rights violations” in Florida’s 13th, where Buchanan prevailed by 369 votes.

Bandele McQueen, Millender-McDonald’s chief of staff, told CQPolitics.com on Friday that Millender-McDonald formed the task force after an August 2006 letter surfaced last week in which Electronic Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) — the company that manufactured the electronic voting machines that were used in the Florida 13 election — told election officials that the voting screens exhibited slow response times during testing.

ES&S said in the letter that the delays would not affect the “integrity or reliability” of the election — but the company nonetheless recommended machine updates and suggested poll workers and voters be apprised of the slow response time.

But Millender-McDonald’s committee said in a statement Thursday that “nothing was done nor were poll workers informed.”

more...