the big Orwellian rethug scam: charge dems with voter fraud, while meantime purging dems

from the voting records, and also throwing votes out after folks vote:

"Obama Campaign: Count Every Vote posted by Ari Berman on 10/14/2008 @ 3:30pm

Republicans have been raising a huge stink about voter fraud in recent days, but the much bigger question on Election Day is whether every vote (or at least most of them) will actually be counted.

The New York Times published a shocking story last week, reporting that "tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law."

The article continued: "Although much attention this year has been focused on the millions of new voters being added to the rolls by the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama, there has been far less notice given to the number of voters being dropped from those same rolls."

The paper looked at six swing states: Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina. "Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters."

The net effect: in Michigan 33,000 voters were removed from the rolls in August and in Colorado 37,000 voters were purged in three weeks since mid-July. Imagine this scenario--on Election Day thousands of voters will show up to the polls, only to be told they're not registered, leading to chaos and confusion, perhaps in large enough numbers to swing the results in crucial swing states.

It's a scary thought--and one the Obama campaign says they're preparing for. On a conference call today, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and legal counsel Bob Bauer laid out their plans to ensure that every vote is counted.

"This has been an election of enormous interest to the American people and we think that's something that should be celebrated," Plouffe said. "Our opponents seem to have a different view."

The Obama campaign's massive voter turnout and voter registration efforts should give them a major advantage on November 4. In the last six months, for example, Democrats have out-registered Republicans by a margin of four to one.

Republicans won't be able to make up this deficit, so they've taken to raising questions about the legitimacy of who will vote. "We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal the election," Sarah Palin wrote in a fundraising letter on Monday.

Plouffe joked that "Fox News Channel is turning themselves into the 24-hour ACORN channel." He labeled these attacks nothing but a "smoke-screen." "We have no doubt that their efforts at suppression and intimidation will be unprecedented."

Obama counsel Bob Bauer pointed to examples in Montana, where Republicans have used change-of-address forms to improperly challenge new Democratic registrants (a federal judge called the GOP's tactics "political chicanery"); in Ohio, where Republicans challenged same-day registration and absentee voting (the 6th circuit court said the claim rested on "shaky ground"); in Michigan, where Republicans tried to use foreclosure lists to purge voters; and in Wisconsin, where the Republican Attorney General is suing the state's board of elections.

(And just today, a GOP operative was indicted for lying to the FBI about charges that he jammed the phones of the New Hampshire Democratic Party on Election Day 2002.)

Bauer promised a "ferocious response" to these challenges. "The only fraud that has occurred is on the other side," Bauer said.

"The Republican voter protection attack is frankly symptomatic of the way the entire campaign is operating," he continued. "That is, attack without facts. In 2004 they had a 72-hour get-out-the-vote program. In 2008 they have an every 24-hour press call about vote fraud."

At the end of the call, I asked Bauer to respond to the New York Times article of last week. He said: "We are very confident that election officials are working to solve these problems. They have a great amount of work to do, there's a huge number of new registrations that have been received. From everything we hear, the work is hard, but it will be successfully done.

So to the extent the article left people with the impression that somehow there's a meltdown and voters will find when they arrive at the polls that they're not on the rolls and they're told they cannot vote, I think that would be the wrong belief to take from that article."

Bauer sounded confident that by the time November 4 rolls around, every vote will be counted. Let's hope he's right."

<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/372131/obama_campaign_count_every_vote>