Evidence of the latter is Karl Rove's November surprise. No, I don't mean that tinpot dictator getting to swing, I mean the dirty GOP fake Dem robocalls.
Some of his slimy operatives have been convicted in New Hampshire for their telephone fraud -- phone jamming -- last election. While they've found other ways to harass New Hampshire, but now the big story is how they're intentionally misinforming and misleading potential swing Dem voters in order to turn off voters:
What we're seeing is an apparent coordinated effort from the NRCC -- the House GOP committee -- to place calls that appear to be from the local Democratic candidate and then automatically call the same number back as many as seven or eight times each time the caller hang-ups. If the caller listens to the whole message it goes on to bash the Democratic candidate. But if the caller hangs up prematurely, the computer calls right back. Hang-ups are the Achilles heel of robo-calls. So this seems to be an attempt to cover for that weakness by making those who hang up think the Democratic candidate is basically harassing them with phone calls. The GOP wins either way.
And they accuse us of treason.
The counter for this tactic is recording messages and numbers getting set for suing after the election, and maybe getting some media traction exposing the tactic over the next 24 hours. Dirty tricks often work -- as Karl Rove learned as the head of College Republicans under Richard Nixon's longtime election fixer, Donald Segretti.
Rove and his toady henchman, Ken Mehlman, have spread this tactic to several states, according to AMERICAblog:
Kansas, NH, and now PA. This is the Republican October Surprise, launched in November. It's to cheat, pretend that they are Democrats calling voters and then piss the voters off so much that they don't vote for the Democrats.
That's called lying and cheating in order to suppress the vote, and it's illegal. And the Republican party admits they're doing it.
He also lists CT (Lieberdouche) and NY (Reynolds). The Dem candidates, like Lois Murphy, are putting info up on their websites as well -- just need a major news figure to get it out there. Maybe Rosie?
It seems that Mathew Gross has some technical tidbits of what you can do to document the atrocities, "Republican Voter Suppression -- Catch 'Em on Tape".
As for the Diebold debacle, more and more voters are choosing to do it absentee due to distrust of electronic voting (who'da thunk) and in San Diego the shortage of official forms has led to yet another truly banana republic moment in GOP-governed America:
Unusually high demand and a printing order that wasn't filled fast enough caused the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to run short of absentee ballots this week. About 5,000 photocopies were mailed out instead, said Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas.
But there's nothing to fear, Haas said. “Their votes will be counted.”
When those ballots are returned, registrar's employees will copy voters' choices by hand onto regular card stock ballots that can be run through the optical scanners that count the votes.
I always feel safer when my vote is transferred by hand to another piece of paper. And if those are now the official ballots, do they just dump the original "photocopy form" absentee ballots.
And who counts the votes? Do you? Me? Someone without a partisan agenda?
How will they shade the ambiguities.
And so it begins. Act III all the way, baby. If you need heartening, here's how we're going into it compared to the Rethugs who took over the House in 1994.
In case anyone forgets the stakes, here's food for thought.
In January, you may not be able to travel outside of America without Bush's permission.
And the shadow President, the one who's behind all the major foreign policy ideology and political execution, will never allow himself to appear in subpoena before Congress.
Democracy was invented for the express purpose of accountability.
Show everyone you mean it, America.
If you truly do.
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