MattMaroon.com

I’ve been enjoying watching John McCain’s attempts to turn the tide in the election. It’s interesting to see the strategy of someone who is clearly down, and slipping, but not entirely out. Rather than the usual well-planned, well-executed Republican strategy, he seems right now to be in “throw some shit at the wall and hope something sticks” mode. That’s maybe not the best play when you’re already perceived as erratic. In a post later, I’ll write about the mistake he’s made that led up to this, and why I think he could be in better shape, maybe even winning. What can I say, I get off on strategy.

First there was the David Ayers story, which is humorous because it came up before in the primaries and didn’t stick then. The Jeremiah Wright story went much further (though I’m not sure it would fare any better if it were rehashed now, since it got so much play the first time) but for some reason McCain swore some time ago not to mention it, and he’s abided by that promise.

The Obama campaign came back with the Keating story, which wasn’t any better. McCain’s been in politics for a very long time, and he has one somewhat unethical blot on his record. That might have been career-ending for a CFO, but for a politician, especially one who’s been around for decades, that’s nearly worthy of canonization.

The first time I got the email from the McCain campaign (I get them from both) about Ayers I thought “that’s just going to hurt Johnny Boy.” But then what seemed like only a few minutes later I got the Keating email from the Obama camp and realized they had just given McCain the ball back. If anything, that turned out to be the bigger mistake because neither were well-received by the public (in no small part because the Dow was still cratering while the saga unfolded) and he passed up a golden opportunity to take the high road.

Then there was the quote by Biden that America’s enemies will test Obama, which McCain keeps bringing up aghast. Of course they will. They’ll test McCain too. That’s what they do, they test us, especially while we’ve still got the egg on our face from the Iraq war. In fact, that’s possibly the most disastrous thing about that war, it gave them carte blanche to push us around. See Iran.

(For what it’s worth, I have a feeling that no matter which candidate gets elected, Iran will push them too far and end up regretting it. Obama will try harder to resolve it peacefully than McCain would, I think, but I’m more sure than not that that is impossible, and neither would let Iran build the bomb.)

So now there’s ACORN. Wow, is all I can say about that one. I never thought I would see a Republican complaining about the Democrats committing election fraud, let alone a mere week after the Michigan Republican party admitted to doing so themselves. That’s right, people on McCain’s own team were caught, according to the words of the settlement, in “an illegal scheme by the Republicans to use mortgage foreclosure lists to deny foreclosure victims their right to vote.”

Seriously. Unlike ACORN, which is not affiliated with the Democratic Party (though they often advocate its politicians), this was the Michigan Republican Party. Note to politicians, don’t try to commit voter fraud if your opponent is a constitutional law professor.

In both of the last two elections we saw Republicans pursue a strategy just like the one they admitted to in Michigan this month of disenfranchising likely Democrat voters. I’m not going to say that either definitely subverted the will of the people, but both certainly tried and may have succeeded.

From 2000:

In 1999, shortly after Jeb Bush became governor and Katherine Harris took over as secretary of state, Florida embarked on a project to produce a master list of anyone who conceivably might have been a former felon, who would then be scrubbed from voter rolls.

Florida devoted unprecedented resources to the task. In 1998, under the purview of Katherine Harris’s predecessor, the Florida Department of Elections gave Database Technologies Inc. (DBT) a contract for a first-year fee of $2,317,800 to scrub the voter rolls. (The firm previously doing the work for the Florida Board of Elections had been awarded the job for a bid of $5,700.) The terms of this contract were not publicly disclosed.

Greg Palast reports that even for an ambitious effort, this payment on a per-record basis was more than ten times industry norms. The state and DBT justified this unusually high figure based on contract requirements that called for “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.” However, it appears that DBT was paid such a grand sum precisely not to verify names. One list from DBT included 8,000 names from Texas supplied by George Bush’s state officials. These 8,000 Florida voters were all listed as having been felons in Texas, and serious criminals are barred from voting. As it turns out, almost none were. Nearly all had committed only minor violations and misdemeanors. Typical was Reverend Willie Whiting, who was removed from the voting rolls for a speeding ticket twenty-five years earlier.

Under orders from Harris’s office, DBT provided matches of anyone with a close name. Thus, for example, John Jackson is a black man who had served time in Texas, so Johnny Jackson Jr., a black man in Florida with the same birth date, was purged from the registration rolls. DBT used lists of former felons that included names and birth dates and race, but counted as a “match” names that were only approximate. DBT specifically wrote Harris’s office to say that their name-match criteria would include a lot of nonfelons, and Harris’s office advised them in writing to lower the name-match criterion further to 85%. All told, DBT generated a list of 82,389 voters to purge from registries.

DBT subsequently tried to defend their lists by claiming they were 85% accurate. But that would still mean that well over 10,000 mostly minority, poor, and Democratic Floridians were illegally disenfranchised — more than twenty times Bush’s margin of victory in the state. Plus, where verification was attempted, the accuracy of the list was nowhere near 85%. Officials in Leon County, Florida, tried to verify the 694 names on the list from Tallahassee and found only 34 to be a match—a 5% accuracy rate.

Robert E. Pierre reported in the Washington Post that responsibility for this faulty voter purge lies with Harris’s office, not DBT: From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified. … “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches,” said Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, who headed the state purge effort, in a March 1999 e-mail to Database Technologies product manager Marlene Thorogood, who had warned him of possible mistakes. … Clay Roberts, director of the state’s division of elections, confirmed the policy. … “The decision was made to do the match in such a way as not to be terribly strict on the name.” “We warned them,” said James E. Lee, vice president of communications for the company. “The list was exactly what the state wanted. They said, ‘The counties will verify the information, so you don’t have to.’”

Florida officials neither sought reimbursement nor penalty, but rather awarded DBT another contract renewal, bringing total fees to over $4 million.

Full article with sources here. Another fascinating article here about the recount stopped by the Supreme Court.

And in 2004? Fascinating article here by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (also with sources) that states that Republicans stole the election once again. The most damning evidence would be the huge discrepancy between exit polls and final vote tallies, which is virtually unheard of.

The arguments for both are pretty convincing but I’ve read some pretty strong arguments that they were not as well, especially 2004. I don’t think the Bush administration had anything to do with either of them if they were. And on top of that, this sort of stuff is not endemic to the Republican Party, they just happened to be in charge of swing states when those particular races were so close and the opportunity arose. The Democrats possibly stole it in 1960, and we’ve heard allegations of it in every close race since.

But there’ve clearly been some serious shenanigans (a mix of willful intent and pure incompetence) from the Republican Party over the last eight years. There have, at the very least, been multiple attempts on their part to subvert the will of the people by disenfranchising likely voters from the other party, and there’s some chance they were successful at least once. There’s some chance they will be again.

So, with all that in mind, McCain’s allegations of voter fraud better have some pretty serious teeth. Unfortunately for him they don’t. ACORN, like many political organizations on both sides of the aisle, is engaged in voter registration drives. Theirs are generally targeted at registering voters who will vote Democratic, so lots of minorities, working class non-evangelical whites, etc.

To do this they hire workers who get paid based on quotas. Unsurprisingly, the workers sometimes come up short, and even less surprisingly, sometimes when they do, they make stuff up to meet the quota so they’ll get paid, even notably going so far as to register Mickey Mouse.

ACORN, like all organizations that participate in voter drives, is required by law to pass on all collected registrations. In fact, part of the 2004 Republican scandal involves a firm called Sproul & Associates that was hired by their national committee to run similar registration drives and was caught shredding Democratic ones. So ACORN passed the fraudulent registrations on, as they were required to by law, fired some offending workers, and even flagged them as likely frauds.

Moreover, making up fake registrations is nowhere near on the level of shredding real ones. Mickey Mouse presumably can’t walk up to a polling station, show a valid photo identification, and pull a lever, however a real person who thought their application was received can get there only to find he’s been disenfranchised by the opposing party.

A large number (somewhere up to 30%) ended up getting thrown out for things like being duplicate registrations, wrong districts, and the like which happen all the time and are the states’ job to prevent. Shockingly, the states seem to have actually done so. Who says government never does anything right?

Clearly some ACORN employees unrelated to Obama or the DNC were unethical, and maybe were even trying to register people to vote in multiple counties at once. I hope we find out. I’d rather my candidate lose the election honestly than win it via fraud (though I’d most prefer winning legitimately) and I’d certainly want that organization destroyed if this came from within.

But of the two parties, it isn’t the Democratic one that is “destroying the fabric of democracy” as the McCain camp loves to say. The fact that I can’t group theories about elections past and present being stolen in with 9/11 being a government conspiracy, bigfoot, faked moon landings, or other crazy notions scares me, and it’s mainly the fault of Republicans, if maybe only because they just had more opportunity and were the ones that happened to get caught.

In the end it makes you wonder, is the RNC somehow trying to disenfranchise voters yet again by striking from the roles all of the legitimate registrations that came through ACORN? Are they trying to set up a challenge to the legitimacy of the results if the race ends up close in swing states? Are they just genuinely concerned that people are trying to vote in duplicate counties, and that the states’ election boards will be unable to stop them? All of the above?

Or is it just a good old fashioned lob from half court with a second left on the shot clock?

This entry was posted on October 26, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Politics . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.