Spoke to the Nader Campaign yesterday. They are avoiding the greens and starting their own ballot party. This is the big torch pass to Gonzalez. It will be a interesting fall if nader can raise the 10 million needed to compete in every state. --

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87802427

If the conventions is locked, We might as well switch to Partick. He is the one who Obama is stealing words from anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/user/wtmv

And he admitted "lifting words", must be another bone head move like the coke and the land bribe that we are not suppose to look into.  Youthful errors of 2006.

go america's best and brightest.  yay harvard...If you cant write it, just steal it.

jack

Today is election day here in New York and across the state, attorneys and activists are fanning out to make sure the right to vote is respected. Members of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council will be inside polling stations observing the voting, outside on the lookout for intimidation and electioneering, and in boards of election with our eyes open and ears to the ground.

Why do we do this, you ask? More after the fold...

Over on the main blog, Stephanie Taylor relates conservative pundit Ann Coulter's personal fantasy to disenfranchise every woman in the country. 

"If we took away women's right to vote, we'd never have to worry about another Democrat [sic] president. It's kind of a pipe dream, it's a personal fantasy of mine, but I don't think it's going to happen."

I can just hear Susan B. Anthony rolling in her grave.

It's interesting that Ms. Coulter is willing to disenfranchise just over half the US population in order to achieve her party's political goals.

Democrats or Republicans, we all should share a common set of beliefs around participatory democracy, democracy that our Founding Fathers fought and died for 200 years ago and that our brave men AND WOMEN in uniform put their lives on the line to defend every day.

Point of fact, Ms. Coulter - if we took away every woman's right to vote, it's not a Democratic American president that we'd loose, it would be our American Democracy, period.

This morning's Washington Post contains an Opinion piece by Tova Wang on the Election Assistance Commission's December 2006 report entitled "Election Crimes - An Initial Review and Recommendations for Future Study." Ms. Wong, a Democracy Fellow at the Century Foundation whose work was cited as part of the basis for the report, writes:

After submitting the draft in July 2006, we were barred by the commission's staff from having anything more to do with it.…

[A]fter sitting on the draft for six months, the EAC publicly released a report -- citing it as based on work by me and my co-author -- that completely stood our own work on its head.

Consider the title. Whereas the commission is mandated by law to study voter fraud and intimidation, this new report was titled simply "Election Crimes" and excluded a wide range of serious offenses that harm the system and suppress voting but are not currently crimes under the U.S. criminal code.

We said that our preliminary research found widespread agreement among administrators, academics and election experts from all points on the political spectrum that allegations of fraud through voter impersonation at polling places were greatly exaggerated. We noted that this position was supported by existing research and an analysis of several years of news articles. The commission chose instead to state that the issue was a matter of considerable debate. And while we found that problems of voter intimidation were still prevalent in a variety of forms, the commission excluded much of the discussion of voter intimidation.

The type of editorial license Ms. Wang describes enters clearly into the realm of distortion and truth spinning, the likes of which you'd expect from Fox News or a White House Press Conference, not a body established to restore trust and fait in the electoral process after the troubled elections of 2000. This type of revision(ism) doesn't just fail the authors, it fails democracy and us all.

Stephanie Taylor writes over at the DNC's main blog about a recent study in California showing the vast vulnerability of the State's electronic voting machines.

As a voting rights activist, I think the more people take the time to learn the issues and understand them, the more two things will become clear:

1) We need an auditable paper trail, ie paper ballots.

2) Keeping our democracy safe and secure is a responsibility that belong to us ALL!

The right to vote is our most fundamental tool to safeguard our liberty - let's protect it at every turn!

This evening's broadcast of NOW on PBS will look at allegations of voter caging in the 2004 campaign. 

Was there a White House plot to illegally suppress votes in 2004? Is there a similar plan for the upcoming elections? This week NOW examines documents and evidence that points to a Republican Party plan designed to keep Democrats from voting, by targeting people based on their race and ethnicity with key battleground states like Ohio and Florida of particular interest. "It was a partisan, discriminatory attempt to challenge voters of color," Eddie Hailes, a senior attorney for The Advancement Project, a civil rights group, told NOW.

Folks, this is an important one to watch.  Voter caging is a reprehensible practice that undermines our most powerful political and civil right, the right to vote.  This is the nuts and bolts of what our colleagues on the other side of the political party divide get up to on election day and the substance of what Democratic election protection efforts need to confront.

Happy watching!

Making its way around the internet is news that the Department of Justice has refused to make John Tanner, the Department’s Voting Section Chief, available for Congressional questioning. The Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties had specifically requested Mr. Tanner for the purpose of getting to the bottom of a whole host of issues that came before the Voting Section under Tanner’s tenure, specifically, Georgia’s much maligned and subsequently overturned voter ID law. In a letter to Alberto Gonzalez, Representatives John Conyers and Jerrold Nadler stated:

“We are disappointed by this decision. Brad Schlozman and Hans Von Spakovsky, both former senior Department of Justice officials who served in the CRT, recently testified before the Senate and stated that Mr. Tanner played a key role in the Department’s decision to approve the Georgia Photo Identification law.”

“…We believe that his testimony is therefore necessary for the Committee to fulfill its oversight obligations.”

“We therefore ask that you make Mr. Tanner available to the Committee for testimony specifically concerning the activities of the Voting Section. We are postponing the July 17th hearing with the expectation that we will receive the full cooperation of the Department in this matter.”

The Voting Rights Act requires Georgia and eight other states, mostly in the South, to submit changes in voting rules to that might impact minority groups for Justice Department “pre-clearance.” The Voting Section staff team recommended denying “pre-clearance” of the law because it was likely to discriminate against black voters. Mr. Tanner rejected that finding and issued the go-ahead.

DoJ - when you say that out loud, it sounds like "dodge."