Summary:
- Voter fraud is a minor Problem.
- Election fraud is a major problem.
- Caging is a form of election fraud.
- Election fraud is illegal.
- Monica Goodling, a former partisan hack in the DOJ, admitted under oath that Tim Griffin, formerly Karl Rove's right-hand man and now Federal Prosecutor, was involved in caging. Tim Griffin is likely a felon.
- Part of the reason for the Federal Prosecutor Purge was to place people like Tim Griffin in office, likely to aid in the manipulation of the 2008 election
Definitions
Voter fraud - individuals vote illegally. This can take many forms, such as voting for a dead family member, voting when not registered, etc.
Republicans like to talk about this as a huge issue, but the reality is quite different. For example, from the 2004 election in Washington State, only 3 cases (out of 2.7+ million) could warrant possible prosecution:
(from the Seattle Times)
Days after his wife of four decades died of liver cancer, Robert Holmgren came home to find her absentee ballot. He filled in Charlette Holmgren's intended votes for Dino Rossi and George W. Bush, forged her signature, and mailed her ballot along with his.
"I know by the law it wasn't right, but it felt right in my heart," he said. "I wasn't trying to defraud anybody. I was just going with my wife's last wishes."
In six of the state's largest counties, at least 24 dead people were credited with voting in the November election. Some of those can be explained as clerical errors - a voter mistakenly signing the wrong line in a poll book, for instance - and others are cases in which people inadvertently voted in their relatives' names but not in their own. But three of the cases, including Holmgren's, warrant referral for felony prosecution, elections officials said last night, and several others require further investigation.
Yet all we could hear about on conservative media outlets was about the massive amount of voter fraud.
Many folks think Republicans use the threat of voter fraud as a way to perform caging, a form of election fraud. More on this later.
(Note that I will refer sometimes to Wikipedia. While it sometimes has issues, Wikipedia often is a great summary source and has a lot of links to other sources. In the cases in which I use it in this document, I agree with the discussion (so far) in Wikipedia, and it was simply easier to use it rather than write up my own. If you doubt the veracity of the Wikipedia excerpts in this document, simply start Googling; you will find it is a valid source for these instances.)
Caging - Comes from the direct mail industry "After a mailing is sent, caging is when information is processed that can be learned from the returned or undeliverable mail. A caging list is the compiled information that is transferred to the organization that hired the direct mail firm, in order for them to update their mailing lists and databases."
This technique was "borrowed" for voter suppression:
(again, wikipedia)
Caging has also been used as a form of voter suppression. A political party challenges the validity of a voter's registration; for the voter's ballot to be counted, the voter must prove that their registration is valid.
Voters targeted by caging are often the most vulnerable: those who are unfamiliar with their rights under the law, and those who cannot spare the time, effort, and expense of proving that their registration is valid. Ultimately, caging works by dissuading a voter from casting a ballot, or by ensuring that they cast a provisional ballot, which is less likely to be counted.
With one type of caging, a political party sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn't present for delivery, or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent. It is this use of direct mail caging techniques to target voters which probably resulted in the application of the name to the political tactic.
On the day of the election, when the voter arrives at the poll and requests a ballot, an operative of the party challenges the validity of their registration.
A form of caging occurred in Florida in 2000, where a large number of people were purged as felons Election fraud- "Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud tend to involve affecting vote counts to bring about a desired election outcome, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates, or both."
Caging => voter suppression => depressing vote share => election fruad
My main concern in the past with election fraud has been with electronic voting machines. As a former electrical engineer and a current software engineer, I am all too familiar with how easy it is to subvert systems. Hell, as a simple computer user I have to fight viruses and trojans more than I would like. EVMs make the throwing of elections all too easy: a backdoor, a trojan/virus, a known exploit, or actual hack job and your election is tossed. Instead of just a few fraudulent voters, whole elections can be outright subverted.
While EVMs are still a threat, voter suppression is the new fraud. Not all voting places use EVMs, EVM manipulations sometimes leave traces, and EVMs are starting to come under scrutiny. Some of the voter suppression has been "legal", like the voter ID initiatives and negative campaigning. There have also been illegal cases such as the phone jamming in New Hampshire.
History
Remember: Most Republicans, and a small set of Democrats (DLC/Lieberman) don't want people to vote. They don't like democracy. Don't believe me?
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." - Paul Weyrich
So here is Paul Weyrich referring back to the "better" times before women's suffrage and before Jim Crowe laws. Who is Paul Weyrich? Per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich
In 1973, with the financial backing of Coors, Weyrich and Ed Feulner founded the Heritage Foundation as a think tank to counterbalance prevailing sentiment on taxation and regulation, which they considered to be anti-business. While the organization was at first only minimally influential, it has grown into one of the world's largest and most respected public policy research institutes and has been hugely influential in advancing conservative policies.
The following year, again with support from Coors, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), an organization that trained and mobilized conservative activists, recruited conservative candidates, and raised funds for conservative causes.
Under Weyrich, the CSFC proved highly innovative. It was among the first grassroots organizations to raise funds extensively through direct mail campaigns. It also was one of the first organizations to tap into evangelical Christian churches as places to recruit and cultivate activists and support for social conservative causes. Indeed, they proved such a wellspring that, in 1977, Weyrich co-founded Christian Voice with Robert Grant and two years later founded with Jerry Falwell the Moral Majority. Weyrich coined the phrase "Moral Majority."
Throughout history, we have always been fighting some form of election fraud. Fake bottoms of ballot boxes, forged pottery pieces... What is different now is that this is now happening in the US at the federal level. Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling, Republican Congressman, and Federal Prosecutors that are playing ball are all working to keep the poor and disadvantage from voting. They've been caught, some have admitted it, but too many people are looking the other way, including congressional Dems and the MSM. I think that it is so shocking, they don't want to believe it.
Monica Goodling was a graduate of Regent University, one of the worst legal schools in the US with a known agenda (inserting religion into government). So why would she be placed in a position of power in the DOJ? Because she was a know partisan; she worked with Tim Griffin as a opposition researcher for the Republican party. She would do what it takes to place "loyal bushies" rather than good prosecutors within the DOJ.
Tim Griffin was a party hack that eventually became a federal prosecutor.
Many believe he was put in place for the 2008 elections. One reason is he is still there.In September of 1999 he was Deputy Research Director for the Republican National
Committee (for Bush's election campaign) and during that stint was a legal
advisor for the "Bush-Cheney 2000 Florida Recount Team" (see Bush v. Gore)....
He then left to become Research Director and Deputy Communications Director for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. From September 2005 through September 2006 he worked at the White House as Karl Rove's aide, with the title of Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director in the Office of Political Affairs.
...
Documents released by a subsequent Congressional investigation showed that, in the summer of 2006, White House "officials were eager to free up the prosecutor's slot in Little Rock, Ark., so it could be filled by Timothy Griffin, a GOP operative close to White House political advisor Karl Rove, at all costs." Prior to this he was a top Republican researcher and aide to Rove. He was hand selected by Rove to be a US Attorney. On February 16, 2007, 10 days after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified that Bud Cummins was dismissed in order to make an vacancy for Griffin to be appointed to, Griffin announced that he would not seek the presidential nomination to be U.S. attorney in Little Rock.
(LA Times) "We should gum this to death," Sampson e-mailed Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House. He said officials should talk up Griffin's appointment and try to "forestall" any criticism from Capitol Hill. Just "run out the clock" on any objections, he said.
Gum it to death? Run out the clock until when? As in keeping Griffin in through 2008?
Please keep in mind that caging, especially against minorities, is against the law for Republicans:
"In 1986, the RNC tried to have 31,000 voters, most of them black, removed from the rolls in Louisiana when a party mailer was returned. The consent decrees that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that target minorities or conduct mail campaigns to "compile voter challenge lists."
It's also against the 1965 Civil Rights Voting Act.
Current Events
During the investigation of the prosecutor purge Monica Goodling spilled the beans, making all the pieces fit, but congressional Dems and the MSM were too ignorant to catch on.
Here's what happened:
Republicans led by Rove, are trying to make Voter Fraud a big issue to justify caging techniques. They wanted to have Federal Prosecutors attack anything that looked remotely like voter fraud to make their point. Some of the Prosecutors wouldn't play ball; they weren't going to prosecute something that obviously wasn't a crime just to make a point. Thus the purge was born. To take it a step further, It's easy to see that Rove wanted to make sure his political crony wasn't nailed for caging, so he had him appointed a federal prosecutor where he couldn't be prosecuted. Problem solved.
But then Goodling came out and said:
"Despite my and others' best efforts, [Deputy Attorney General, Paul McNulty]'s public testimony was incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects. As explained in more detail in my written remarks, I believe that the Deputy was not fully candid about his knowledge of White House involvement in the replacement decision, failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of the White House's interest in selecting Tim Griffin as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, inaccurately described the Department's internal assessment of the Parsky Commission, and failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote "caging" during his work on the President's 2004 campaign."
Right there, she admitted that Griffin was caging, violating the consent decree leveled against Republicans. As a bonus, she gets out of prosecution for not acting on this knowledge because she testified under immunity.
Sanchez, who sat on the committee during the interview, didn't know what caging was. Monica did a duck and weave: http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/23/goodling-caging-griffin/
Tell me: If it is just a direct mail term, why bring it up in front of congressional committe?
This nothing less than the organized subversion of our Democracy by the Republican party. WTH won't Dems wake up? If the US MSM won't cover it, force the issue: mention this at every single press conference and appearance?.
If you look for this information, you will find it elsewhere. Greg Palast has been doing a bang-job reporting on this issue. My purpose here is 2 fold:
- Summarize the issue in a way that is easy to understand and small enough to digest.
- Spread the word to help prevent the destruction of our democracy.
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