one way for mccain to win

From Greg Palast, John McCain can still win thanks to ongoing Republican efforts to suppress the vote.

Cribbed from here - go read the whole thing, but snips below.

How to Steal an Election in Five Easy Steps

Step One: The "Dumpster" Vote - Purge Voters, Provisional Ballots

Ten million voters purged? What the hell is going on here? Why are we removing millions from the voter rolls?

The answer is the GOP's secret weapon, the Help America Vote Act, signed by George Bush in 2002. When Bush tells us he's going to help us vote, look out. But Democrats didn't. They signed on to the GOP bill, believing this "reform" law would prevent "another Florida." Instead, "Help America Vote" Floridated the entire nation.

...

Now, here are the facts about provisionals: they don't get counted. And there are lots of them. The great unreported story of the 2004 election was that there were more than three million voters shunted to provisional ballots. Over a million (1,090,000) were never counted, just chucked in the dumpster. That's what caused Kerry to lose New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio. This time, because of Help America Vote and a Republican campaign to challenge voters, the number of provisionals will rise, as will rejections.

Step Two: "Verification" (and Elimination) of New Voters

For the first time in US history, new voters will face special new obstacles to voting. When we say "new" voters, let's be clear - we mean Obama voters. A Wall Street Journal poll shows new voters prefer Obama by an eye-popping three to one (69 percent to 20 percent).

So, the Republican game plan is simple: don't let new voters vote.

Step Three: New ID Laws

Step Four: Spoiling Ballots

Your chad gets hung. The touch screen doesn't like your touch. Or, your paper ballot had that extra mark that made the machine spit out your ballot like day-old beer with a cigarette floating in it.

Step Five: Rejecting Mail-In Ballots

You've mailed in your ballot. Last time around, over half a million mail-in ballots were junked: everything from postage due to not liking your signature to a circle checked, not filled in. Mailing in a ballot is playing Russian roulette with it. About a tenth get junked.

ohio, again

Let's just hope whatever happens on Election Day that it doesn't come down to a close vote count in Ohio... Because it is already getting ugly there (again) with Republicans suing to stop various things they don't like, to force Ohio to compare new voter registrations with other state records to look for "inconsistencies" to invalidate them.

You know, inconsistencies like being identified as "Sarah Palin" on your driver's license, but being "Sarah L. Palin" on your voter registration, clearly showing intent to defraud the Republican Party I mean American Democracy, and being further proof that the fraudulent voter in question probably pals around with terrorists, kills babies, is an elitist, and wants to speak with enemies without preconditions. Just the sort of little thing that the Republicans will seize on in their ongoing voter suppression effort.

At least this year there is a Democrat as the Secretary of State and chief election official for Ohio instead of that overtly partisan hack Kenneth Blackwell, who was so very helpful in 2004. I don't envy Jennifer Brunner. She should fight this every step of the way.

more vote suppression

Pleased that the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter ID law, Missouri Republicans are now preparing a proposal that would prevent non-Republicans from voting, period.

I exaggerate, somewhat. They just want to amend Missouri's constitution to let election officials require proof of citizenship from anybody who registers to vote. A bunch of other states are considering similar steps - not coincidentally, at the initiative of Republicans in each and every one of them.

But Missouri could have their amendment in place by election day this year.

All this allegedly to prevent non-citizens from voting. But the REAL reason is to cut back on the franchise - the Missouri Secretary of State estimates this could keep 240,000 people from registering to vote, lacking either passports or birth certificates. And the GOP's belief is these will be largely the poor and minorities - in other words, likely Democrat voters.

Because it is NOT like there is a wave sweeping America of fraudulent voters casting ballots. There are only a handful of cases. The REAL voter fraud of course is more like Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, which benefits the Republican Party and is done by computers and police intimidation and the like. But that's OK because well that just helps righteous Republicans to win, which is surely what Jesus would like, right?

Oh and I am SURE that Republicans will be fair and honest in requiring each and every Missouri person trying to register to vote to produce a birth certificate or passport or some other proof of citizenship, even that nice Baptist minister or the big corporate lawyer and other Republican supporters, right? They wouldn't DREAM of just requiring it of the suspicious sorts - blacks, Native Americans (you laugh - but the GOP tries to suppress their vote in states where they are a sizable bloc, like South Dakota), college students, the poor.

Of course they would. Of course they already do. They will use this amendment the way states in the South used to apply literacy tests only to black voters. It's a tool to disenfranchise their political enemies.

And there is another reason that wherever you are, and whatever the race, as long as the Republican Party continues to wear its current racist anti-democratic colors, you should vote for the Democratic candidate in any election, anywhere. The GOP does not deserve a place in a democracy - a democracy it attempts to undermine at every step.

accurate voting machines are important, eh?

Computer voting machines - a bad, bad thing. Believe the computer experts, who almost to a man oppose entrusting our elections to such devices. This New York Times magazine article goes into the gory details.

Recall the 18,000 undervotes (13%) in the Congressional race in Sarasota in 2006 (the "recount" in a close race WASN'T a recount because there were no paper ballots - it was just a case of hitting "print" again). The computer crashes in Cuyahoga county in Ohio. These things aren't reliable and I haven't even touched on the prospect for malicious interference, intentionally hacking the computers to change the vote.

disparaging paper receipts

Timothy Ryan today writes to disparage paper receipts as a way of ensuring that the ballot you just cast via an electronic voting machine was recorded correctly.

Ryan, of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project, complains that over history, there has been fraud and skullduggery in elections using paper ballots and also moans that paper receipts aren't helpful for the blind. He whines that counting paper copies of ballots, in a close election, could be time consuming, and finally warns that 20% of the printers that would churn out paper confirmations of the vote could fail on election day.

Ok - all of these facts are true (except maybe the intoleraby high failure rate of printers). But they do NOT mean that his alternative - using one of a couple of systems (Prime III and Punchscan, being developed respectively at Auburn University and the University of Maryland) to double-check the votes - is necessarily better.

First, maybe Ryan hasn't noticed, but their has been chicanery in elections using electronic voting systems. Or perhaps he didn't see the unusual vote counts in many Ohio counties in 2004, with minor Democratic candidates in many areas running far ahead of John Kerry, a pattern you simply do not see normally, and a pattern that wasn't seen in counties and precincts that used optical-scan ballots and other similar, verifiable and less-susceptible-to-hacking methods. (There are plenty of other examples, if you care to look for them.) Should we therefore abandon electronic voting entirely?

Actually, I'd say yes. No, paper ballots aren't perfect and neither are paper receipts. But those aren't the only choices. Optical scan balloting is much quicker to count and you still have the paper ballots to confirm things. It may be messy, it may take a little time, but if there is one thing important in a democracy, it is to ensure that votes are accurately counted. And pardon me for being skeptical, but I have real doubts about having an electronic system to ensure that an electronic system isn't on the fritz or isn't being used to pad the vote. Who would actually sell those systems? Companies like Diebold that already provide electronic voting machines and lean heavily towards the Republicans? Elections are one of those few areas that "market-based solutions" are not necessarily the best one. And the market incentives Ryan refers to are fine if you assume that companies making and counting elections are only interested in making a buck - a point that the notorious statement by Diebold's CEO about making sure that Ohio would be delivered to Bush in 2004 should make you reconsider.

a call for compassionate dismissal

It is terrible to see a person who clearly suffers from a terrible mental disorder struggle to answer questions about important events that happened just a few months ago. If de facto President Bush were really compassionate, he would fire Alberto Gonzales so Gonzales could seek immediate treatment for whatever horrible brain parasite is eating his memories.

It is significant that Republican Senators, in particular fellow Texan Jon Cornyn, Tom Coburn (who called on Gonzales to quit) and Lindsay Graham were so harsh with Gonzales. But I wonder if I detect some political strategy there. First, it is simply self-preservation not to side with somebody whose credibility is somewhere below Martin Short's lying man from Saturday Night Live days.

But I think they're also trying to keep the focus on Gonzales' mistakes and incompetence, and away from the criminal acts that are behind this scandal. Coburn, for example, said "I believe there's consequences for mistakes. . . . And I believe the best way to put this behind us is your resignation."

But the Great US Attorney Massacre wasn't a "mistake" in the minds of Gonzales or Karl Rove. It was a conscious part of the long-standing Rove strategy to push the concept of "voter fraud" (GOP code for "vote suppression"). And it was a move to punish attorneys who were too vigorous in pursuing real cases of Republican corruption (take a bow, Carol Lam, for nailing Randy "Duke" Cunningham) and were too lax in pushing cases against Democrats at a time politically expedient for the White House and Republican members of Congress from New Mexico (if not elsewhere, too).

Remember -- the scandal isn't about Gonzales lying to Congress (although that, too, is a crime). It is about firing those people to impede investigations and punish attorneys that didn't hew closely enough to the White House's political desires.

yes, create a paper trail

It looks like the Democratic Congress may move to require paper trails to be able to confirm votes in federal elections. (And Florida Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican, wants his state to switch to optical-scan ballots to count paper ballots. Good.)

In practice, any such Congressional move would probably create paper trails for state elections as well, since I doubt most states would not use the same equipment in the same way for both.

Good. Some law professor at Ohio State complains that there could be legal and administrative problems in counting paper computer read-outs. True. But is it better to allow a gross error -- for example, the 18,000 uncounted votes in a heavily Democratic Sarasota, Florida that almost certainly cost Democrat candidate Christine Jennings a seat in Congress last November?