Republican Vote Rigging... Helpful To Marcy Kaptur Too?

I have to admit I don't get all that worked up over the fact that the GOP Establishment has been stealing the nomination for Romney in state after state. But I should be worked up-- and not only because they're likely to also tamper with election results in November's general election when it will matter more. It's all part of the Republican Party War Against Democracy. Rachel gets into it a bit in the video above-- not the vote rigging, but the barriers the GOP is putting up to keep poor people and students and others likely to vote for Democrats from voting. At the same time, the BradBlog is looking at the vote rigging. And the part that did get me most interested was the vote rigging that seems to have played a role in depriving Dennis Kucinich of a seat in Congress.

It started with a venal Republican state legislature gerrymandering his district in such a way that he was forced into a primary with Democratic colleague Marcy Kaptur, who was given a larger share of the new district. Brad was astounded by the results in Lucas County (Toledo), where Kucinich only won 3.7% of the vote. Is that even possible? Sure it is-- when voting is done on easily hackable Diebold machines that offer no verification whatsoever. And, as Brad warns, "Some 20 to 30% of voters across the nation will still be forced-- shamefully, even after all that we now know about these oft-failed, easily-hacked machines-- to cast their ballots on the very same and other similarly 100% unverifiable voting systems on Election Day during the 2012 Presidential Election."


Here's a 10 page document, evidence of algorithm vote flipping in GOP primary elections, much of it in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. I spoke to a Member of Congress about it, mostly because of my concern that if Republicans can do it now-- and it's rare that anyone ever gets punished for it-- they'll do it in November as well. He responded with an article by Robert Kennedy, Jr, for Rolling Stone (impossible to access there, so here's a link to the article preserved by Common Dreams). Here's the part that deals with Lucas County:

Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration errors after the election-- in Toledo-- but the report by his own inspectors offers a disturbing snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued the entire state. The top elections official in Toledo was a partisan in the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the county board of elections and the county Republican Party. The GOP post was previously held by her husband, Tom Noe, who currently faces felony charges for embezzling state funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through intermediaries to the Bush campaign.

State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered "areas of grave concern." With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards. Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last. When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, "We may not get to them." The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required by law.) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline-- an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised "several thousand" voters from Democratic strongholds.

The most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to allow Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office to make photocopies of postcards sent to confirm voter registrations-- records that could have been used in the GOP's caging efforts. On their second day in the office, the operatives were caught by an elections official tampering with the documents. Investigators slammed the elections board for "a series of egregious blunders"' that caused "the destruction, mutilation and damage of public records."

On Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse where blank ballots were kept out in the open, "with no security measures in place." The state's assistant director of elections, who just happened to be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they leave. The GOP operatives refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.

In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a "Victory 2004" rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of "grass-roots" activists for special praise: "I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County."

The very basis of right-wing politics-- greed and selfishness-- makes it impossible to separate conservatism and corruption. Historically, they have always been bound at the hip and today there is virtually no difference between corruption and conservatism. They are, in effect, the same. (Take a look at the wikipedia page for the above-mentioned GOP Lucas County Chairman, Tom Noe, if you'd like to see the way the Republican Party has turned itself into a criminal operation. Or, better yet, spend an hour going through the DWT archives from 2005, when we were looking into how the Republicans managed to steal the 2004 election for Bush-- mostly in Ohio.