End voter registration problems. Demand reform.

It's been a long election season, hasn't it? And now that we've chosen our next President, it's tempting to forget all about elections and go back to our routines.

But before we do that, let's think ahead.

We may have seen record turnout at the polls this year, but all the while, eligible voters across the country were disenfranchised because their voter registrations were purged from the rolls, clerical errors, or worse, weren't even processed in time.

Some didn't know they were required to re-register after a move, or they missed registration deadlines they hadn’t even known about.

American voters deserve better, and the first and most important step our government can take is to implement automatic and permanent voter registration.

Join me in telling our leaders it's time to make voter registration universal.
http://www.nationalcampaignforfairelections.org/page/s/autoregis

Automatic, permanent registration will provide a simple upgrade to our voting systems without creating big and expensive new bureaucracies. It's secure, it's accurate, it's modern and it will make sure every American is automatically registered to vote when they become eligible. And after that, the registration will last a lifetime.

Automatic voter registration won't fix everything, but it's an important first step towards ensuring that every eligible vote is cast and counted in 2012 and beyond.

Tell Congress we need automatic and permanent voter registration now! We can't wait until the next election comes around. http://www.nationalcampaignforfairelections.org/page/s/autoregis

Could Allegations Invalidate MN Senate Results?

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ― Allegations have surfaced of voter irregularities involving a paid staffer of Sen. Norm Coleman, and the ramifications could have a profound effect on the outcome of Coleman's race against Al Franken.

A reporter for the Minnesota Independent, a progressive online publication, was working on a story about voter turnout when she overheard that Republican poll challengers monitoring voting at the precinct had brought in Mahamoud Wardere to help voters translate.

The Coleman campaign confirmed that Wardere is a paid member of their staff.

"I made some calls, found out his name and I confronted him and I said, 'Are you Wardare?' And he said, 'Yes, I am,'" said Priesmeyer. "At that poin I said, 'Are you working for Norm Coleman's campaign?' And he said, 'No, I am on vacation today.'"

However, Priesmeyer said voters told her that translators were telling them to vote for Coleman.

"I had already spoken to at least three people who told me that translators were telling them to vote for Norm Coleman," she said.

The issue could end up being the basis of a legal challenge. According to Prof. Joe Daly of Hamline University, state election law has a provision that if there is a deliberate, serious or material violation of state election law, a district court judge must gather the evidence and present it to the presiding officer of the U.S. Senate, who would then decide the merits of the allegations.

The Senate could even revoke the results of the election and decide who would be seated as senator.

The Somali Justice Advocacy Center says they have gotten complaints about Wardare urging voters to vote for Coleman. But Omar Jamal says he has also gotten complaints of voters being pressured to vote for Franken, admitting he had heard complaints centering on both candidates.

Cullen Sheehan, campaign manager for Coleman, said Wardare was working at the polls but he was taking a day off from the campaign, he did nothing inappropriate and he was merely working as an interpreter.

Source: http://wcco.com/election/voter.irregularities.allegations.2.857437.html

Election Day

Be sure to get out and vote - Tuesday Nov 4!!!!
To find your polling place visit: http://www.barackobama.com/index.php

Watch Slacker Uprising by Michael Moore for FREE!

If you are thinking about staying home Tuesday - WATCH THIS. Get out and VOTE!

Watch it all: http://slackeruprising.com/download/location.php?utm_medium=download&utm_source=15209299

At that link, there are five ways you can watch it free and without advertising:

1. blip.tv is providing streaming right from slackeruprising.com, free of commercials and advertising.
2. Amazon Video on Demand will provide a higher resolution version of the above stream for people with lots of bandwidth. It will be available in a few hours.
3. iTunes will make it easy for you to download "Slacker Uprising" on your iTunes, iPod, or Apple TV, and view it there or transmit it to your television. This way, the film can be portable as well as for home viewing. This will be available soon.
4. Hypernia is providing bandwidth and servers to host MPEG4 and DivX versions of "Slacker Uprising" online, so you can burn a DVD or download the film to watch on your computer, XBOX, or PS3.
5. Lycos is providing free streaming of the film and an on-demand version.

Stream it, download it, burn it now. It's the first time a major feature-length film is being released for free on the internet. You can be part of this historic moment by logging on now!

Do you know where to vote on Tuesday?

http://www.voteforchange.com/?state=MN

Just enter your address to see where to vote!

Voter Fraud

Make no mistake: If the Republicans cannot generate more votes for their candidate, they are happy to win by decreasing the number of votes of their opponent. Shortly after the 2004 election, Robert Kennedy wrote about voter fraud in Ohio, and there have been a number of films to cover the story, as well.

And it's not like the GOP is going to suddenly play fair in 2008. On Friday, Bush asked the Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to investigate 200,000 voter registrations for minor discrepancies in data. Bush is quick to look into non-issues like this one and the minor voter registration (note, voter registration, not voter fraud) allegations at ACORN, but he can't be bothered to enforce congressional subpoenas or investigate actual voter fraud allegations. (Hendrik Hertzberg wrote an excellent piece in the New Yorker explaining how the ACORN issue has been completely distorted and misused by the Republicans.) It's fair to say that McCain has the might of the federal government on his side in any election fraud-related issue.

The Ohio problems are not unique. Early voters in West Virginia had their computer monitors flip their Obama votes to McCain, and a confusing North Carolina ballot, which excludes the presidential race when someone chooses to vote a party line, may cost Obama, by one estimate, tens of thousands of votes. Today brought news of a flyer in Virginia telling Democrats to vote on November 5 (the day after the election), and a man in Florida posing as a worker for a Democratic candidate for Congress (but whose information was traced back to a consultant of the Republican incumbent) taking ballots from Democrats and promising to deliver them. And that doesn't even include the widespread purges of voters in Democratic neighborhoods conducted by Republican state officials. An excellent article on voter fraud, also co-authored by Kennedy, can be found here.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitchell-bard/obama-is-dominating-in-th_b_138634.html

Subject: Tell Mukasey: Don't suppress Ohio voters.

This year, there are over 600,000 newly registered Ohio voters, but President Bush has asked Attorney General Mukasey to investigate as many as 200,000 of them. Why? Because Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has refused to use an "exact match" standard before adding these voters to the rolls.

What is this "exact match" standard? Basically, it works like this: After you fill out your voter registration card, a local or state employee has to type in your information to add you to the voter rolls, and check to see that you really exist, usually by verifying your driver's license number or Social Security number. And as you can imagine, sometimes there are typos or other disparities when the information gets entered and matched - for example, if your last name is "De la Rosa" and it got entered as "Delarosa", you would fail to meet the exact match standard, and your registration form would be invalid.

Secretary Brunner has refused to use this standard on the grounds that it would erroneously deprive tens or even hundreds of thousands of Ohioans of their right to vote. The Ohio GOP sued her a month ago to try and get the courts to compel her to use the exact match standard, but the Supreme Court ruled that they had no standing to make that case.

Now, President Bush is trying to run around the Supreme Court by getting the Department of Justice to intervene. On Friday, October 24th, Bush reportedly asked Attorney General Mukasey to investigate whether as many as 200,000 voters need to reconfirm their registrations before November 4th - which would almost certainly result in forcing them to vote provisionally.

I just signed a petition urging Attorney General Mukasey not to act on President Bush's sickening request. I hope you will, too.

Please have a look and take action.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/doj_oh_suppression/?r_by=1321-1825442-ZmOuyfx&rc=paste

Thanks!

Who would the rest of the world vote for?

Wow, very interesting. . .
http://www.economist.com/vote2008/index.cfm?source=most_commented
Certainly says something about our candidates, don't you think?

Real voter fraud by the GOP. . .

First, the untrue voter fraud story cleared up. . .


Now, the REAL voter fraud story perpetuated by. . . . the Republicans!!!! Remember, when you point fingers, three are pointing back at you? The truth comes out eventually, Senator McCain.

Ontario police arrest man in voter fraud case http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fraud20-2008oct20,0,3842357.story

Mark Jacoby, who owns a firm hired by the California Republican Party, violated state laws with his own registration, authorities say.

SACRAMENTO -- The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.

Dan Goldfine, an attorney for Jacoby, on Sunday denied any wrongdoing by his client and called the charges "baseless."

He said the arrest outside an Ontario hotel, which involved seven squad cars and nine police officers, was part of a "long pattern of harassment against Mr. Jacoby for an entirely valid voter registration effort."

Goldfine said the case that prosecutors are bringing against his client involves charges that are rarely pressed.

Jacoby was released on bail Sunday evening from the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, Goldfine said.

After complaints by voters and Democratic Party officials, several agencies launched investigations into Jacoby's activities. They included the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, which issued the warrant for his arrest earlier this month on felony charges of voter registration fraud and perjury.

"We contacted people at the addresses where he registered, and they have no idea who he is," said Dave Demerjian, head deputy of the public integrity unit at the L.A. County district attorney's office.

Goldfine said his client does business in many states, traveling frequently, and his permanent address has been his parents' Los Angeles County home, where he received mail and registered to vote.

Demerjian said his office is continuing to investigate allegations that YPM workers improperly re-registered voters with the GOP.

Several dozen voters recently told The Times that YPM workers said they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Other voters said they had no idea their registration was being changed.

YPM has been accused of using bait-and-switch tactics across the country. Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit.

In a written statement Sunday, the state Republican Party called the charges against Jacoby "politically motivated." The party said the charges do not support accusations from voters and Democratic officials that YPM has been duping voters into joining the GOP.

The statement accused Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who announced the arrest, of "using her office to play politics."

Bowen is a Democrat.

Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

A great article about voter suppression.

Block the Vote
Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote/2

What not to wear on election day

Did you know that in Minnesota there are laws against campaigning or "electioneering" within 100 feet of polling places. Each state boasts its own specific regulations and varying degrees of enforcement.

The majority of states use language prohibiting voters and poll workers from "distributing," "circulating," "posting," or "exhibiting" campaign materials within 10 to 200 feet of polling places. This is sometimes interpreted as including buttons, t-shirts, hats, and other political garb (often called "passive electioneering"), but is more often restricted to signs, posters, fliers, pamphlets, and the like.

At least 10 states -- Delaware, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont -- explicitly prohibit the wearing of pins, buttons, stickers, labels, or other "political insignia."

Your place of polling will ask you to remove or cover up any campaign material on election day, so zip up, turn inside out, remove and stick in your purse any t-shirts, hats, buttons, tattoos, etc before going to vote on Nov 4th.

Do you know where to go to vote?

Do you know where to go to vote on November 4th?
Polling places can change frequently, there may be multiple precincts in the same building.

Go to your county website to confirm your polling place before election day to avoid frustrations (Anoka County, Minnesota http://www.co.anoka.mn.us/v2_dept/elections/anoka-polling.aspx )

lesson for Americans

The Mask Slips

By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 10, 2008

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they'd most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you've been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you'd like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It's not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don't for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.

Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan's fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan's own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president's tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the "fiscal conservatives" were back in the driver's seat. "Deficits don't matter," said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.

Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the "Nobel Appeasement Prize."

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

"The White community is so entitled," he wrote, "because, for the time being, it is the advanced race..." He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 11, 2008, on page A23 of the New York edition. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/opinion/11herbert.html?ex=1381464000&en=25d29c87d027a710&ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg

Tool to see which candidate most closely matches your views

A good tool to help you know which candidate most closely reflects your views.

You may be surprised to see what the assesment tells wehn there is no "D' or "R" behind their name.. . .
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/select_a_candidate/poll.php?race_id=13