Voter Suppression Revealed Widely

Andrew Burmon has a piece summing the voter suppression drives around the country in Salon.

Wisconsin Attorney General, J.B. Van Hollen -- a McCain campaign state co-chair -- sued the state’s Government Accountability Board, demanding more stringent voter verifications. Members of the state's board and a Madison city clerk reportedly said that would likely disenfranchise many voters by causing long lines and confusion on Election Day. The case is ongoing.

The same week Van Hollen brought suit, the McCain campaign sent out a mailer to hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters that included a state application for an absentee ballot stamped with the address of a local clerk. Many of the clerks' addresses did not correspond with the places the mailers were sent, according to a Sept. 12 article in the Wisconsin State Journal. The mailers encouraged voters to apply for absentee ballots in places where they were not eligible. The McCain campaign said it was a mistake.

And the UW-Madison Badger Herald gives a nice overview on suppression efforts in Wisconsin by Alec Slocum.

GOP Voter Fraud Hoax Gets Kocked Around

The desperate GOP is lying in unison. It's what they're good at.

And truth and civil rights aren't going to stand in the way. It would nice if just one GOP official would stand up and say, 'This is wrong. Suppressing voters is wrong,' Dare to dream.

- "Today, Senator Ted Kanavas (R-Brookfield) and Representative Rich Zipperer (R-Brookfield) wrote a letter to Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen asking him to protect the integrity of the election process by protecting every legal vote in the upcoming November election." (WisPolitics)

"On Tuesday, U.S. Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Menomonee Falls), Tom Petri (R-Fond du Lac) and Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) sent letters to Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, and to Wisconsin's two U.S. attorneys, Steven Biskupic and Erik Peterson, calling for an investigation into ACORN." (MJS)

Andrew Burmon has a piece in Salon knocking down the lie: Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria As Republicans warn of catastrophe at the polls, an expert on election fraud explains the real partisan hoax -- the suppression of Democratic votes.

Let’s talk about the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity initiative that was started under Ashcroft in 2002. It was advertised as a program that would combat voter fraud and voter suppression equally. But if you look at the program, it actually was geared almost entirely toward voter fraud. They wanted to see if they could bring cases against individual voters. The [federal] government has spent a lot of money pursuing this over the years and convicted almost no one. Then we hear all this propaganda about how much voter fraud there is.
At the very least the Department of Justice has had its priorities backward. There are thousands of people having trouble casting ballots and the federal government has decided to go after poor people in Milwaukee and Florida to create the impression that there is voter fraud. The U.S. attorney firing scandal made it hard for anyone to claim that the Bush Justice Department wasn’t politicizing voter fraud. ...The Democrats in this age have no reason to pretend that voter fraud is a serious issue, but the Republicans, particularly this year, have a very good reason to say that voter fraud is rampant. It is a simple three-step process. Fraud allegations lead to restrictive voter laws, which lead to a class-skewed electorate. As the Democrats try to get out the vote, Republicans will try to stop it.