Joe Cocker used to sing. “I get by with a little help from my friends”. And sometimes so do I. First of all, thanks to everybody for their incredible response to yesterdays diary, over 250 Facebook shares! This is how we get a story out there and make a difference! Second, my great thanks to my new bestest bud, kickbass, for bringing this update to my attention.
Sitting down? Cuz here comes a shocker! It turns out that both the Indiana State Police, and the Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson are so full of shit that they could fertilize every farm field in Indiana for the next ten years. I know, :-O Turns out that Patriot USA did not appreciate very much having their office raided, and their volunteers and workers intimidated by the thugs from the ISP, just for the crime of trying to register African American citizens to vote.
So they struck back. They hired a data analysis firm, TargetSmart to take a little lookeesee into the entire Indiana state voter file. And it turns out that the file is so chock full of inaccuracies that the registrations the IVRP submitted wouldn’t even make a blip on the radar! In a popcorn for the soul ARTICLE in USNews, I don’t know why Indiana bothers to have a system;
TargetSmart said it also found 837,000 voters with out-of-date addresses when compared to the United States Postal Service address database, or roughly one-in-five of all Indiana registered voters. The review found 4,556 duplicate registrations, 3,000 records without dates of birth and 31 records of registered voters who are too young to cast a ballot. More than 2,500 people on the rolls were listed over the age of 110. (Italics mine)
The italics are there for a reason. SoS Connie Lawson actually had a logical explanation for the people over 110 years old. You ready for this little pearl from Confucius? She stated that there are people in Indiana, including Judges and people under orders of protection, and that their birth dates are changed to 1900 to help to mask their identity. O-tayyyy. I can buy that. But really, 2,500 people under orders of protection?!? Shit! And I thought that we had a problem with the mob in Chicago when I was growing up! What, does every person in the entire U.S. Witness Protection Program end up getting planted in Indiana?
Connie Lawson has not been helping herself here, she is now flopping around like a trout in a creel on this. Last week, her office stated that the “thousands” of changes in names and dates of birth could be massive voter fraud. A few days later she had to come out and admit that the massive numbers of changes could be people rushing to correct their information online before election day.
Well, that was fun. But it doesn’t even cover the real issue here. The massive amount of inaccurate information in the voter rolls! How the hell can you have one out of every five Indiana voters with incorrect or out of date address information?!? 3,000 registrations without dates of birth? That’s one of the reasons the ISP came to kick the IVRP’s ass, missing information. And none of these registrations are new!
This isn’t the state of Indiana’s first time to this dance, and the barn has always stunk. To quote one more time from the article;
In 2006, the state reached an agreement with the Justice Department intended to bring the state into compliance with the National Voter Registration Act by purging its voter rolls of those who had died or were listed more than once. That agreement came after the Justice Department found that Indiana had hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters on its registration lists, including possibly 29,000 dead people, and 290,000 duplicates.
Two voter watchdog groups, Judicial Watch and True the Vote, then sued Indiana in 2012, accusing the state of failing to maintain clean voter registration lists as required by the National Voter Registration Act. The two groups dropped their suit in June 2014 after state lawmakers approved changes in Indiana's election laws the groups had sought.
This is not a case of one rogue third party group maliciously committing massive voter registration fraud. This is a long term, systemic pattern of incompetence and non compliance from a state agency which must answer to the U.S. Justice Department. But in this state it’s only “fraud” when it involves the registration of black and brown people.
This should be a national disgrace. How in the hell can Mike Pence stand there on a stage at a rally in Iowa and speak proudly about how his uniformed goons at the ISP are “protecting the integrity” of the Indiana voting system when there is NO integrity to the Indiana state voting system? It’s because of our efforts, through these diaries, and the FB shares and Tweets that some of the national media is beginning to take a look at this, don’t stop now!
Thanks as always for reading, you are ALL the wind beneath my wings!
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