Scott Thistle, writing in the Sun Journal, explains how UMaine Farmington College Republicans parked university vans on Election Day 2010 so they could not be used to ferry voters to and from the polls. Or to put it more simply:
Maine Republicans want to suppress voter turnout.
And behind it we find Maine Republican Party Chair
Charlie Webster, who is unabashed about the tactic:
Charlie Webster, who has been campaigning against a group seeking to overturn a recently passed law that ended same-day voter registration in Maine, said in a phone interview that UMF's College Republicans reserved university vans to use on Election Day last November, but then parked the vans in a lot so they couldn't be used to take students to the polls.
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"Guess what happened in 2010?" Webster said. "The buses didn't run on Election Day because we had the College Republicans reserve them early and on Election Day we took them over and parked them in the Walmart parking lot."
Webster said using the vans to transport voters to the polls should be illegal. He believes that at a minimum, the practice its unethical.
"So we parked them for the day in the parking lot and we continued to drive people to the polls in our private-citizen cars and vans, but we didn't use taxpayer resources," Webster said. "We just reserved them early enough, before they got to them."
Webster made it clear on Monday that his campaign is not about voter fraud, but about keeping out-of-state college students from voting here while they attend classes. Students have a legal right to vote where they live; the Supreme Court so decreed in 1979 in Symm v. United States.
Webster had no comment when I asked him about Brendan O'Brien, the Chair of the Maine College Republicans who ran for a House seat in Lewiston last year. Webster claimed to not even know O'Brien, who is from New Hampshire.
I am reminded of how Republicans jammed the lines of Democratic GOTV phone banks in New Hampshire in 2002. Several people were charged with violating U. S. Code Title 18 § 241. Conspiracy against rights. The ensuing court battles left the New Hampshire Republican Party nearly bankrupt.
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To date, I have not heard any prominent Maine Republican, be it Gov. Paul LePage, Sen. President Kevin Raye, Speaker Bob Nutting, or others, condemn the actions of their Party's Chair, Charlie Webster.
Will any Republicans condemn the actions of this man?