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lethal
10-12-2004, 09:12 PM
This is from Las Vegas, but the article says they've moved on to Oregon. Watch out there, kimpossible.

http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2421595&nav=168XRvNe

Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.

Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.

The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.

The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It's unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.

It's going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.

Call the Clark County Election Department at 455-VOTE orclick here (http://www.accessclarkcounty.com/election/lookup.asp) to see if you are registered.

The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.

nonamerasian
10-12-2004, 09:22 PM
P. Diddy was just telling voters today to call their departments to make sure they are registered.

A good thing about the last big election is that it has a lot of people on their toes this time around.

Before 2001, some people are saying that newpapers weren't picking up on pre-election complaints, which ended up causing some of the election controversy in Fl.

The hype has improved things this time around.

Arex
10-14-2004, 04:36 AM
That's some fucked up shit. What some people/organizations will do just to get their man elected. Speaking of which, I just saw this (probably old): http://bushflash.com/gta.html (re: improper removal of 55,000 qualified voters from voter rolls in Florida in 2000). This was news to me... WTF??

rX

hooligan
10-14-2004, 09:18 AM
That's some fucked up shit. What some people/organizations will do just to get their man elected. Speaking of which, I just saw this (probably old): http://bushflash.com/gta.html (re: improper removal of 55,000 qualified voters from voter rolls in Florida in 2000). This was news to me... WTF??

rX
wtf. i knew some shit went down during the 2000 election, but i had no idea that it was this bad. even if half of the things are true, that means that there's a whole lot of crazy messed up crap that happened during the 2000 election. our democracy has gone to shit.

Arex
10-14-2004, 10:29 AM
I read an article in this week's Newsweek discussing problems that may/will arise during voting this year. There was a little section in the article which mentioned all sorts of shady shit in past presidential elections. Kennedy's election, for example, was supposedly aided by rigged voting (counting?) machines and dead people voting. Kind of makes you wonder how much fraud is going on out there.

What I wanna know is, why is there no accountability? Fraud/corruption of this magnitude shouldn't go unpunished. Theft of someone's vote should be right up there with the violation of any other civil right. And why doesn't more of this stuff get reported in the mainstream media? I thought America loved sensationalism. This stuff pisses me off.

RX

kitty
10-14-2004, 10:45 AM
there's a documentary that was (i know i know) produced in part by moveon.org. before you dismiss it outright, you really should watch it... i saw it on... hbo? some other politic-y channel a month or two ago, all about florida.

If you don't wanna track that down, I think the Washington Post also had an extensive article on the whole thing when it all went down.

what happened was that the woman in charge of election counting in florida was also a senior member of the bush/cheney campaign in 2000. there's this really old law in florida that denies anyone who has committed a crime the right to vote -- if you get charged with a crime, you get put on their felony list. i believe, the problem is that it also carries over if you commit a crime in one state, you would lose your vote if you moved to florida (they described it as a rule that allows the state to purge felony names from voter lists of registered voters, but is archaic and rarely systematically exercised).

so, what they did was contract a database company to essentially take the names of everyone on the voter list (in certain highly black neighbourhoods only) and cross-reference anyone who had committed a crime in the states, and then highlight and remove anyone who matched on both lists. The PROBLEM is that the elections board (re: the woman who coincidentally also worked for bush/cheney) told the database to be unusually loose with their cross-referencing criteria... the company itself warned the elections people that it would end up with a lot of false positive hits.

For example, names with the first three letters of their first and last name matching the first three letters of the first and last names of someone who had committed a crime somewhere in the states would be highlighted and removed. So like, your name is CHARLES DARWIN and the guy who committed a crime in Nebraska was named CHACO DARBY or something would generate a hit, and poor Darwin would be taken off the list. They would ignore other relevant information like a non-matching birthdate/birthyear, non-matching ethnicity, etc...

In some instances, they also showed that people were being removed for crimes they hadn't even committed yet. Like, somehow (and this wasn't well explained how this could happen), there would be a voter removed because his or her name vaguely resembled the name of someone who committed a crime Jan. 26, 2005 or something. It was really peculiar...

All in all, because if your name is not on the list of registered voters, and people don't KNOW that they've been removed and placed on a felon list, they can't rectify the situation before election day. They go down to vote and are denied the vote... with no time to argue and reclaim their right to vote.

The really fucked up thing is that neither Republicans nor Democrats came to the aid of Florida. Black representatives of the areas that got dicked tried to submit challenges to the election decisions, and just totally couldn't find any support in Washington.

Yeahman
10-14-2004, 02:21 PM
^ I think you're talking about that independent documentary "Unprecedented." They play it on the Sundance channel sometimes. Pretty good documentary.
http://www.unprecedented.org/