“Controlling The Access To Vote”: Volunteers For Voter Suppression Group Installed As Election Officials In Ohio
Conservative poll observers are gearing up for Election Day, when they will watch for possible instances of voter fraud and challenge voters they find suspicious. As ThinkProgress reported, many of these volunteers have been fed false or misleading information about voting rights by the Romney campaign and independent Tea Party groups like True the Vote. True the Vote encouragesits poll watchers to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote.”
But one True the Vote affiliate, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, is taking their election interference one step further. Ohio VIP has recruited and dispatched poll workers who will not be merely observing, but directly involved in the voting process in a crucial swing state. Hamilton County elections director Tim Burke told the Columbus Dispatch that VIP poll workers will represent the Republican Party:
We know that the Voter Integrity Project has recruited and through the (Hamilton) County Republican Party has placed some poll workers. I have discussed this with my Republican counterpart.
I accept the fact that he understands that the VIP pollworkers are working for the Board of Elections on Election Day and are subject to the board’s instructions, not the VIP instruction. Obviously both sides are going to have observers as well as poll workers. I, and others will spend the day responding to trouble calls.
Ohio VIP provides a 3 hour training for their poll workers, as required by the Board of Elections. The group is advertising these sessions, according to the Dispatch, “as going beyond what the secretary of state tells them.” Ohio VIP is one of the more zealous branches of the already extreme True the Vote national organization; Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) opened a criminal investigation into True the Vote due to the Ohio group’s attempts to purge thousands of students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans from the voting rolls.
While in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare, overzealous poll workers could jeopardize legitimate votes by forcing them to use provisional ballots, which cannot be counted until November 17. Ohio’s provisional ballot mess is already threatening to disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters — the bulk of whom live in urban, minority-heavy areas like Hamilton County, which contains Cincinnati. In 2004, Ohio tossed out thousands of provisional ballots, concentrated in Hamilton and the state’s four other urban counties. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) lost Ohio by a narrow margin in 2004, allowing George W. Bush to win a second term.
By: Aviva Shen, Think Progress, November 2, 2012
“A Gift From God”: Richard Mourdock Collapses In Polls In Indiana Senate Race
According to a new Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground poll, Republican Richard Mourdock’s infamous remarks about rape have doomed his chances of winning Indiana’s Senate election.
The poll shows Democrat Joe Donnelly leading Mourdock by a 47 to 36 percent margin. 11 percent are undecided, and 6 percent support Libertarian Andrew Horning.
Mourdock and Donnelly were statistically tied in nearly every survey of the race, until the candidates met for a debate on October 23rd. There, Mourdock explained his total opposition to abortion by saying “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape… it is something that God intended to happen.”
According to the Howey/DePauw poll, those fateful words all but ended Mourdock’s campaign, as 87 percent of respondents were aware of Mourdock’s remark, and 40 percent said that it made them less likely to vote for the Republican state treasurer. Additionally, Mourdock’s favorable/unfavorable rating has cratered to 30/49 percent, down from 26/32 in Howey/DePauw’s previous survey in September. And among the crucial independent vote, his favorable/unfavorable numbers stand at a distinctly unimpressive 12/48 with women and 23/51with men.
The poll, which was conducted by Democratic pollster Fred Yang and Republican pollster Christine Matthews, surveyed 800 likely voters with a partisan split of 45 percent Republican, 34 percent Democrat, and 21 percent independent.
If these results hold, then the Republican Party would essentially have no hope of winning a Senate majority. The GOP needs to gain a net of four seats to claim control of Congress’ upper chamber, a challenge that has become much more difficult due Republican candidates’ inability to stop talking about rape. In Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill — who was once considered to be the most vulnerable incumbent Democrat — is on track to win re-election with the help of Rep. Todd Akin’s startling comments that a woman cannot become pregnant as a result of a “legitimate rape.” Now Mourdock’s “gift from God” comments appear likely to cost Republicans a seat in Indiana. Depending on how competitive races play out in Arizona, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin, the Democrats may actually increase their Senate majority — something that seemed impossible just a few months ago.
If Mourdock and Akin lose, then this would be the second straight election cycle in which erratic candidates cost the GOP a chance at a majority. In 2010, right-wing candidates Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, and Christine O’Donnell defeated more mainstream opponents, and went on to lose to vulnerable Democrats.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, November 2, 2012
“Mitt’s New Dumb Lie”: Desparate And Dishonest People Say The Darndest Things
Remember when Mitt Romney took an Obama quote out of context and then built his national convention around it? Well, this is worse.
Here’s the campaign’s new attack line: Obama said something that shows how much he loves bureaucracy and doesn’t understand business. “[Obama] wants to create a new ‘secretary of business,’” vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan said on the stump in Colorado yesterday. “We already have a secretary of business. It’s actually called secretary of commerce. That’s what this agency does. Let me ask you a question: Can anybody name our current secretary of commerce? You know why? We don’t have one! It’s been vacant for over four months.”
“I don’t think adding a new chair in his cabinet will help add millions of jobs on Main Street,” Romney himself added in Virginia later in the day.
Two things: First, we do have a secretary of commerce, or at least an acting secretary. Acting Secretary Rebecca Blank stepped in this summer after former Commerce Secretary John Bryson suffered a seizure while driving in California and resigned. (She’s not Senate-confirmed, but we don’t think that’s what Ryan meant.)
Second, and more to the point, the whole point of Obama’s “secretary of business idea” is to consolidate the Commerce Department with a bunch of other agencies that deal with business to make them more efficient and easier for businesses to interact with. “We should have one secretary of business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like giving loans to SBA or helping companies with exports. There should be a one-stop shop,” Obama told MSNBC Monday. He actually first floated the idea in January, when it was received as a pragmatic, if not particularly inspired, reform idea.
And it’s an idea that you would think Republicans would support. Contrary to Romney’s claim, it actually would not be a new chair in the Cabinet, but merely the renaming of an existing one (though a new plaque would be required on the chair). The idea is to streamline government, cutting costs for taxpayers and making it easier for businesses to deal with government — two things Republicans really like. Instead, they went on the attack.
But wait, there’s more. Romney and Ryan are not only misrepresenting the “secretary of business” idea on the stump. They’re actually running a TV ad based on this dumb lie, which they released yesterday. The ad, titled “Secretary of Business,” claims that Obama’s “solution to everything is to add another bureaucrat.”
There’s really no honest way to read Obama’s comments and think he said he wanted to “add another bureaucrat.” His entire statement was about the need to consolidate bureaucracy, not expand it. Saying otherwise is dishonest, and maybe a bit desperate.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, November 2, 2012
“Big ‘Perilous’ Change”: Now More Than Ever, George W. Bush Is On The Ballot
It’s probably safe to say no publication has more consistently promoted the idea that “George W. Bush is on the ballot” in 2012 than the Washington Monthly. And that goes beyond the usual issue of the Bush administration’s responsibility for the Great Recession. We’ve argued that the 2012 campaign closely resembles the 2000 precedent in the specific policies and agendas of the GOP nominees, and the likely trajectory of the country if Romney wins. That’s why we’ve published and promoted the e-book, Elephant in the Room: Washington in the Bush Years. We’ve been here before.
But as election day approaches, there’s a final parallel that’s worth underlining: Romney is emulating Bush’s mendacious claim to be a “uniter not a divider,” and far more moderate than his party. As Paul Glastris reminds readers in the Editor’s Note in the upcoming November/December issue of the magazine (a sneak preview is available here), W. relied a lot on misleading voters about his relationship with his party:
One early summer day in 2000 I was summoned to the Oval Office along with several other White House staffers to get instructions from President Bill Clinton on what he wanted to say in his upcoming speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, a speech I was assigned to cowrite. But the president was in political strategist mode that day, and in the midst of downloading his thoughts on the speech he launched into a long soliloquy about the dynamics of the presidential contest and the nature of the man Al Gore was up against, Texas Governor George W. Bush. “Let me tell you something,” he said at one point. “Bush is a lot more conservative than people realize.”
The Big Dog certainly got that right, and the scary but unmistakable thing is that the Republican Party which Mitt Romney is trying to distance himself from at the last minute (rhetorically, though not substantively in any major way) is if anything considerably more conservative than it was in 2000. And if there’s any actual split between Romney and his party, it will only produce incompetent and dystfunctional government, as it often did when W. tried to exhibit “compassion” in order to appeal to swing constituencies:
The ideological contradictions unleashed within the GOP during those years have only grown. We see it in the increasingly stormy and dysfunctional relationship between the corporate and Tea Party wings of the party, in the freak show that was the 2012 GOP primary, and in the bottomless, robotic mendacity of the Mitt Romney campaign.
Yep, we’ve heard it all before. And as someone who was on to Bush’s game in 2000, and thinks he won (or to put it more accurately, succeeded in being inaugurated) because Democrats let him become the candidate of “safe change,” the possibility that Romney will succeed in the exact same scam is maddening.
Every voter should think about ol’ W. when they go to vote this year, and ask themselves: “Do we want to go back down that road again?”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 2, 2012
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