I came across an excellent article in truthout titled: Exclusive | Emails Detail RNC Voter Suppression in Five States. So I came here to see if anyone wrote about it. They did, but much to my dismay most of these diaires got little attention, and not one of them made the recommended list.
After reading Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse and knowing that he had come across those emails which proved that the RNC was caging voters and that is one of the illegal tactics that they used to steal the last two elections and after also reading diaries here which did make the recommended list asking when Palast was going to deliver the goods and get those emails out to the Congress and the press, why isn't anyone paying attention now that he has? This has the potential to finally take Karl Rove and his minion Tim Griffin down, and the story is huge!
First off, here are the four diaries that I could find here about the truthout article. If there are more then they didn't use the proper tags to find them and my apologies and anyone reading please link what I missed in the comments.
First one posted Thursday by feduphoosier:
UPDATED: Newly Posted RNC Emails: voter suppression in five states got a total of 38 tips.
Second one posted Saturday by Steely:
PBS Voter Caging segment has no tip jar but all of about twenty or so recommends.
Third we have this one posted by sephius1 also posted Saturday:
More Proof Of Illegal Voter Caging by Republicans which has all of 24 people giving it a tip.
Fourth we have this one posted by Dash Riprock also posted Saturday:
It's not just electronic voting machines that steal elections which also has no tip jar and all of about nine recommends.
Onto the scandal covered in Armed Madhouse and the RNC voter caging lists. For anyone not already following this story, Greg Palast had a friend who set up a George Bush parody site with a very similar URL address to that used by the RNC. They received a number of emails from Tim Griffin who is Karl Rove's little buddy who was helping him put together lists of people from mainly minority areas, homeless shelters, veterans (yes, you read that correctly, they were targetting our service men and women who are serving overseas), nursing homes, students, and anyone else they could think of that would be the least likely to know they were doing this stuff, and also the least likely to be able to defend themselves.
Their little scam went something like this. Send the person a piece of registered mail, and see if it comes back or not. If the mail comes back to them unreceived, then go to the person's polling place, and question their registration. Then when the person votes, they get forced to use these lovely provisional ballots instead of getting a real ballot. Then thanks to the Help America Vote Act, there's nothing requiring that anyone counts those votes, and that's exactly what they did. They considered them spoiled votes and they didn't count them. It's a similar scam to Katherine Harris' stunt in Florida where she purged thousands of voters' names off of the records because they had the same name as a felon.
It's been death by a thousand cuts with the tactics these people have used to steal elections and so many of them are laid out in Palast's book Armed Madhouse that I really recommend that everyone here read it if you haven't. It's out in paperback now and after you read it, share it with a friend. That's what I did. A friend has it right now and is reading it. Another type of fraud that Palast uncovered in his book was that in Ohio, they simply crossed off one voting machine at every Democratic precinct to be issued to make sure they were short changed. Thus part of the reason for the long lines we all saw on the news that day, but not the only one.
For anyone who would finally like to see these thugs put into the light of day, please read the diaries I linked above and recommend them if you still can. Check out the story on truthout and go check out the video on NOW's web site where they interview Palast on his work, and share them with your friends.
I'll leave you with some video of Tim Griffin crying during an interview he gave where he says "public service" is just not worth it. Well the type of public service this guy has done is the type that should land you in jail for a while, and he knows it.
I'll also leave you with Palast's prediction for the next scam for the 2008 elections, and that is the illegal immigrant debate. Hispanics will be their new voter purge of choice, and the excuse this time will of course be that they could be illegal aliens, and they'll make sure they knock off as many legal voters in the process as they can. The solution, register early and check that registration often, and spread the word to every friend you have who is a minority because they're going to make sure that every person who isn't lily white in this country does not have a chance to vote if they think they can get away with it.
Update: Here's the link to the Palast interview on NOW. Thank you to several of the members here for putting the link up. I should have included it in the first place instead of assuming people would find it from the articles I linked.
I also wanted to add that it was rightly pointed out in the comments that the real issue here is "election fraud" and not "voter fraud" and the rigging of elections. I was also completely unaware that writing about election theft was discouraged at the site until I read some of the comments. I in no way meant to violate any of the rules here. I honestly think that without this sort of thing going on, the last election would have been a tsunami and that the only reason the Democrats still won is that it was a tsunami that looked like a smaller win than it truly was, and you just can't cheat that as much as someone would like to try. We need to do it to them again this time, and have another tsunami out there voting. I also wanted to add that I in no way think that I have the right to tell anyone else what to read here. I titled the diary the way I did to draw some attention to what I feel are some important stories that did not receive enough attention, and not to demean anyone in this community or the community itself.