I have been pretty busy lately, but I took today off from work since the wife is at a conference and I needed to take care of our son. So as he runs around outside I am watching him and updating the blog for the first time in a month. So here are a couple of new voting news stories:
First off is Minnesota, where it looks like the Minnesota senate race may be decided by dead voters. Last years senate election is still being fought over in the courts and Minnesota already has very limited fraud protections since anyone can register on the day of the election and can do so without photo ID. It looks like several thousand dead people were also left on the Minnesota voting rolls and it has been confirmed that some votes were cast in the name of these people after they had died. Here are more details:
Today, Minnesota Majority announced the discovery of individuals who were deceased prior to November 4, 2008, yet have voter history records on the secretary of state’s files that indicate they voted in the 2008 General Election.
Minnesota Majority employed a data enhancement service to flag potentially deceased individuals on Minnesota’s voter registration file. Over 2,800 individuals who voted in the 2008 general election were flagged as being “deceased” prior to the election. Minnesota Majority then selected a sample of a dozen records for additional investigation. A representative drove to addresses listed on voter registration records. Interviews conducted with residents or neighbors confirmed that at least 5 individuals from the sample were deceased, the latest having died in March 2007.
In Ohio three Obama campaign workers were convicted of voting there even though they were not residents:
A Franklin County judge told three out-of-state campaigners for Barack Obama who voted here illegally that they should have known better.
The three chose Ohio over their home states — where Obama was likely to win — because they wanted to swing the Electoral College vote toward their candidate, Common Pleas Judge Charles A. Schneider said.
He ordered a year’s probation, a $1,000 fine and a 60-day suspended jail sentence for Daniel “Tate” Hausman, 32, and Amy Little, 50, both of New York, and Yolanda Hippensteele, 30, of California.
And once again ACORN workers have been indicted for illegal voter registration tactics, this time in Pittsburgh:
Authorities in western Pennsylvania have accused seven people who worked for the community group ACORN of falsifying voter-registration forms.
The seven have been charged with either forging, illegally soliciting or illegally filling out voter-registration cards in the lead-up to the 2008 election.
And if you had not heard, Obama plans to have ACORN play a major role in the next census. I can see why he wants that:
The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year’s count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States — currently believed to be more than 306 million people.
Also in Pennsylvania, the Obama administration overruled career justice department lawyers who were trying to enforce the 1965 Votings Rights Act and decided to drop charges against a group of black panthers who stood outside a polling location last November with clubs and used racial slurs towards people who showed up to vote. A video of the thugs is below the break. Here is that story:
Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.
The incident - which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube - had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms
Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as “the most blatant form of voter intimidation” that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.
Change!
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