If you’ve been concerned by the Republican cry of fraud over Acorn, maybe it’s time to think again (or think twice — he who casts the first stone). Acorn is a non-issue. It’s a ruse, a disguise, one in a series of tactics to distract voters and to rally Republicans to cry “foul play” in the event of an Obama victory. Not only was John McCain Acorn’s key note speaker in 2006, Acorn was the one who brought into question some of the goofy registrations in the first place.
As Mark Crispin Miller indicated on this week’s Bill Moyers Journal, we should be concerned, not by Acorn, but by two other types of activities. The first are the well-orchestrated and systematic attempts by Republican groups to suppress voter turn out. What is voter suppression?
Well, it means various dirty tricks and tactics and legal devices used to shrink the size of the electorate before Election Day. So here we’re talking about, for example, interfering with registration drives or making them vulnerable to partisan challenges or passing laws requiring certain kinds of documentation at polling places. You know, stuff that harks back to Reconstruction and the Jim Crow laws. Caging voters, which is sending them registered letters with forms that if they don’t fill them out, their names will be stricken from the voter rolls. Voter purges. There’s a whole huge menu of extremely ingenious devices now being used I think with unprecedented brazenness to try to make the electorate as small as possible in advance of Election Day.
The second is through actual voter fraud.
This means using the computerized voting systems which we now have in place in at least 80% of the country. Using those systems through black box technology, precisely because it is so technical and it’s so opaque and it’s all run by private companies, private companies that have close ties to the Republican Party, the use of this kind of voting apparatus is extremely worrisome and something that we should be watching very carefully.
Why should we be concerned?
Well, I, in the aggregate, it does and could easily add up to millions of voters because we’re talking about a very, very broad range of devices, you know, both legal and illegal that will have a dramatic effect and that will add up. If hundreds of thousands of people are disenfranchised nationwide simply through voter purges alone, you see? That is significant. If the caging of voters results in the disenfranchisement of another 200,000, 300,000, we’re talking here about numbers that definitely do add up, you see, and that make a difference, are meant to make a difference come Election Day.
Soon will come the day when the U.S. will need U.N. election monitors to validate our elections. I suggest you watch the entire interview.
Grave Error 