(Image via ThinkProgress.com)

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from the TPM):

Pennsylvania Senate president Dominic Pileggi (R) has formally introduced a bill to award the state’s electoral votes proportionally, a move that would effectively end its position as a swing state while likely aiding the next Republican presidential candidate.

Republican lawmakers, egged on by the national Republican National Committee, have considered similar measures this year in blue states with GOP-controlled statehouses but in most cases the bills have been ruled out by top Republican officials. In Virginia, a bill to apportion electoral votes by congressional district was voted down decisively in a state Senate committee with a number of Republicans opposing it.

Pennsylvania, however, is still pressing on in a major way. Pileggi’s bill, introduced Thursday, has 13 co-sponsors, half of the 26 votes required to pass a bill through the state senate. Both Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and state Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R) expressed support for a modified version of the bill in 2011, but it never came to a vote amid widespread opposition from the state’s Republican members of Congress. Pileggi has argued the bill would encourage candidates to pay greater attention to rural, less populated parts of the state.

Subscribe

's feed

Enter email below:

(Image via ThinkProgress.com)

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From ThinkProgress:

Unlike the plan Priebus backs, the New Republican Plan would not tie electoral votes to congressional districts. Instead, it would award the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote, with two additional electoral votes going to the winner of the state as a whole. If the New Republican Plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have received 8 of Pennsylvania’ 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state by a substantial margin.

The problem with the New Republican Plan is that it would only be enacted in blue states such as Pennsylvania — the Democratic candidate for presidential won Pennsylvania in every single election for the past two decades — while red states would continue to award all of their electoral votes to the Republican.

Subscribe

's feed

Enter email below:

Arrest mugshot of Colin Small, 31, of Phoenixville, PA

The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

A Pennsylvania man employed by a company working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by investigators from the Rockingham County Sheriff’s office on Thursday and charged with destroying voter registration forms.

Colin Small, a 31-year-old resident of Phoenixville, Pa., worked for Pinpoint, a company hired to register voters on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia. Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice.

Rockingham County Sheriff Bryan Hutcheson’s office said there was no indication that the activity was widespread in their jurisdiction and said the conduct “appears to be limited in nature.” His office said there is a possibility that additional charges may be filed.

Subscribe

's feed

Enter email below:

By Bob Cesca: Throughout the previous decade, anyone who claimed that there was no real threat of terrorism was hectored, accused of hating America and temporarily driven out of politics, even though the numbers vindicated them.

According to a study by Nate Silver, your odds of dying in an airplane-based terrorist attack are around one in 10,408,947. Statistically, that’s pretty close to zero. Conversely, your odds of dying by suicide are around one in 121. In other words, you’re significantly more of a threat to yourself than any terrorist ever.

And yet for the last 10 years, we’ve spent countless trillions of dollars fighting terrorists while enacting dubious laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, along with warrantless wire taps of American citizens, torture, two wars and illusory airport security measures that include disposing of your potentially explosive bottle of water in a trash bin that sits in the middle of a crowded line of passengers waiting in line.

Why? It’s a means of controlling the population through fear, while subsidizing security and defense contractors who’ve made a fortune because we think there’s a serious chance we’ll be killed in another 9/11 style attack.

The same thing is happening with Voter ID laws. Republicans have passed law after law forcing Americans to, in effect, pay a poll tax through the acquisition of government-issued photo IDs in order to vote this year. That’s on top of the usual voter registration process. As I’ve detailed here many times, the laws are entirely intended to suppress Democratic turnout in order to stack the deck in favor of Republicans like Mitt Romney.

How do we know this? Basic deduction from the standpoint of a near zero rate of actual voter fraud. It simply doesn’t exist. Study after study has turned up at most 13 instances of possible voter fraud nationwide over the last 10 years in innumerable elections and, repeating something I reported here last week, the Bush Justice Department searched for voter fraud for five whole years and turned up nothing.

This week, the Pennsylvania Voter ID law went to trial in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the NAACP, and in a pre-trial agreement, Pennsylvania attorneys admitted to nonexistent voter fraud in that state.

“There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states,” the statement reads.

According to the agreement, the state “will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” nor will it “offer argument or evidence that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absense of the Photo ID law.”

Astonishing! So why the new Voter ID law? The answer is obvious and was confirmed by PA House Republican Leader Mike Turzai who said that the Voter ID law was designed to get Romney elected.

A similar confession occurred in Wisconsin yesterday. State Senate Minority Assistant Leader Glenn Grothman, a Republican, blurted out the truth on the Alan Keyes radio show.

KEYES: If it were upheld and in place in time for the November election, do you think — polls have shown a pretty razor-thin margin — do you think it might ultimately help Romney’s campaign here in the state?

GROTHMAN: Yes. Right. I think we believe that insofar as there are inappropriate things, people who vote inappropriately are more likely to vote Democrat.

KEYES: So if these protections are in place of voter ID, that might ultimately help him in a close race?

GROTHMAN: Right. I think if people cheat, we believe the people who cheat are more likely to vote against us.

But there isn’t any evidence of “inappropriate things” anywhere. So how the hell can Grothman know that Democrats are somehow more responsible for them? Clearly, he can’t know. Because there aren’t any numbers or prosecutions or arrests indicating anything. I mean, this is like saying, “Let’s pass an anti-hobbit law! Even though hobbits don’t exist, they’re totally gonna steal your veggies and hurl your jewelry into volcanos. Yeeehaw! Fuck hobbits!”

300,000 registered voters — mostly low income Democratic-leaning voters in Wisconsin don’t have a photo ID required to vote. In a tight race, that’s the election.

At the end of the day, this could end up electing Mitt Romney and, potentially, a Republican Senate majority. And they’re telling us that Democrats are the “people who cheat?” They’re digging up the corpse of Jim Crow in order to steal this election. Who’s the cheater again?

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

By Bob Cesca: Imagine you’re nearly 100 years old and you’ve voted in almost every election since casting a ballot for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. You’re a fully registered voter and your tattered, dog-earned registration card has always allowed you access to your constitutional right to decide which public servants should be your representatives at all levels of government.

You’re 94 years old. You don’t drive. And you live more than a dozen miles from the nearest government services office. And now, in your home state of Pennsylvania, Republican leaders (who have admitted to conspiring to disenfranchise Democratic voters) have passed a law mandating that you somehow have to attain a government identification card if you’d like to vote again.

This is the story of Bea Bookler, 94 years old, of Devon, Pennsylvania who, after all these years, has to somehow find a ride to the nearest DMV, then has to stand in interminably long and potentially confusing lines for hours on end, in order to retain her well-worn right to vote.

“How would I get there and how would I manage to stand in a line?” says Bookler, who uses a walker. She says she can barely make it to the polling place next door to her retirement community. She also doesn’t understand why she has to go to all this trouble in the first place. She already has a voter registration card.

“I have an ID which says I am registered to vote in Chester County. There is no reason why I should need anything else. It’s an outrage,” she says.

It’s absolutely an outrage, and Bea Bookler shouldn’t have to endure such a bureaucratic labyrinth in order to vote. But, according to Republicans, there’s a crazy high rate of voter fraud — so much so that they’ve shoved aside their purported hatred for government bureaucracy and created more red tape,government oversight and taxpayer expense in order to ameliorate it. Thus, Bookler, who’s been ostensibly voting since 1936, as well as brand new voters, have to leap through a prohibitive series of flaming hoops in order to vote.

But why? In my previous two columns about this topic, I emphasized the obvious reason: to prevent low income Democratic voters from casting a ballot.

However, if we’re to take Republicans at their word, there must be a seriously rampant epidemic of voter fraud plaguing our electoral system in order to pass these laws.

There’s not.

In an article titled “The “Myth’ of Voter Fraud”, progressive election law expert Tova Wang told the conservative U.S. News & World Report magazine, “What we can go by is the number of times that people have been prosecuted successfully for such crimes. And the number is ridiculously low. You have a better chance of being hit by lightning than discovering an incident of polling place fraud.”

Okay so he’s a progressive expert. In 2007, after a five year study, the George W. Bush Justice Department determined that organized voter fraud was nonexistent.

Meanwhile, state officials continue to allow electronic voting conducted by private companies without a paper record of each vote. Republicans haven’t lifted a finger to investigate Diebold and other e-voting tech companies who provide convenient technology but what amounts to black-box voting — no tangible means of counting votes. Convenient. Private corporations can ostensibly program machines to tally votes however they’d like, and in a way that’s almost entirely incapable of being re-counted or audited.

Not a single Republican has stepped forward to push for paper ballots. Not one. You might recall how Wally O’Dell, the president and CEO of Diebold, one of the biggest e-voting companies in the nation, told shareholders in August, 2003, ”I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” I’m old enough to remember how the 2004 election came down to President Bush narrowly defeating John Kerry… in Ohio.

Tinfoil hat conspiracy or not? Make up you’re own mind on that one.

Needless to say, NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice released a report yesterday about the impact of Voter ID laws.

The report said birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25. Marriage licenses, required in some states for married women whose birth certificates include a maiden name, can cost between $8 and $20. “By comparison, the notorious poll tax — outlawed during the civil rights era — cost $10.64 in current dollars,” the report states.

The study showed that more than a million voters below the federal poverty level might not be able to afford such costs, and that Voter ID laws would hinder nearly five million registered voters.

Furthermore:

–Nearly 500,000 eligible votes without cards do not have access to a vehicle, and many live in rural areas without public transportation access.
–1.2 million black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic live more than 10 miles from state offices issuing free IDs.
–People of color are more likely to be disenfranchised by these laws since they are less likely to have a photo ID than the general population.

In the absence of real policy and a real message, and coupled with their purely superficial bumper sticker sloganeering and lies, this is how Republicans will continue to win elections: by passing laws that make it nearly impossible for the rapidly approaching “brown” majority to vote. The Republicans will do anything to maintain their futile connection with the near-mythic all-white 1950s conservative utopia, even if it means combating a nonexistent threat with pre-Voting Rights Act Jim Crow legislation and disenfranchisement.

Here’s to hoping the current Justice Department carries forth the work of the previous Justice Department and reverses these unconstitutional laws. And keep your fingers crossed that old Bea Bookler finds a way to stand in line at the DMV before Election Day. Something tells me she won’t be voting for Mitt Romney.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

Voter suppression in 2012?

By Bob Cesca: If President Obama loses in November, it won’t be Super PACs or Republican lies about his record that will defeat him. It won’t be fundraising or advertising or punditry. If President Obama loses, it will almost certainly be due to Jim Crow style voter suppression and disenfranchisement. And no one is really talking about it.

Specifically, I’m referring to the Republican plot to make voting nearly impossible for low-income, working class Americans, and, therefore, disenfranchising scores of Democratic voters. There are two concurrent policies in action here: Voter ID laws and voter registration purges.

Regarding the latter, Florida governor Rick Scott has been attempting to carry on a time-honored tradition in his swelteringly ridiculous police state. Scott’s Secretary of State ordered hundreds of thousands of potential illegal immigrants and others purged from voter rolls. A fantastic pander to the far-right racist base, but clearly an act of nefarious disenfranchisement was attempted here by the Republican administration. The Justice Department stepped in and ordered an end to the purge, but Scott defied the order. Then the state’s wiser and less-Jim-Crow-ish Supervisors of Elections determined that, in an initial analysis of 2,625 names, only 13 were ineligible voters. Put another way, 98.4 percent of the voters on part of Scott’s purge list were valid registered voters. Deliberate or a massively unprecedented clerical error? Hmm. If we extrapolate those numbers and apply them to the entire purge list, 177,000 voters out of 182,000 would be unjustly disenfranchised.

We’ve watched this disgusting show before. In Florida, prior to the 2000 election, thousands of African American voters were purged from the rolls because they happened to share similar names to convicted felons and the like. Michael Moore documented the congressional protest against the purge in his film Fahrenheit 911 (timecode 3:20).

According to Ari Berman, 12,000 voters — 41 percent of which were African Americans and would-be Gore voters — were erroneously and deliberately stripped of their constitutional right to vote. When the Supreme Court stopped the recount, Gore lost to George W. Bush by 537 votes. Not shockingly, the purge was organized by Bush campaign state chairwoman (and proto-Sarah-Palin humanoid) Katherine Harris, who, by the way, was appointed by Jeb Bush.

Coupled with the new voter ID law in the state, some 100,000 voters could be stripped of their right to cast a ballot in November.

If Republicans can successfully prevent minority and working class citizens from voting, Mitt Romney will win. In a televised address, Pennsylvania state House Republican Leader Mike Turzai accidentally blurted out the truth when ballyhooing the passage of a Voter ID law there: “Voter ID that will allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done!”

Voter ID laws passed in dozens of states including Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin mandate that voters present a photo identification card issued by the state government in order to cast a ballot. On the surface, it sounds fishy but okay — until, that is, we learn that many working class and poor voters who happen to vote Democratic don’t have state-issued IDs, or they simply don’t have the financial means to get one.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which opposes the laws, says as many as 5 million voters could be turned away at the polls. About 18 percent of seniors and 25 percent of African-Americans don’t have state-issued photo identification, according to the center.

There are a variety of reasons for this. First of all, most people work during the same hours that government offices like the DMV are open. Potential registered voters are forced to miss work in order to stand in line for a photo ID or a driver’s license. Many poor voters don’t have access to transportation or the funds to pay the fee for the ID — a fee which has become a Jim Crow poll tax due to the Voter ID law. Other voters might have sketchy legal problems and are naturally fearful of walking into government offices.

How about this for Orwellian: in Mississippi, the Voter ID law requires that a birth certificate be presented in order to get a photo ID, but a photo ID is necessary in order to attain a copy of a birth certificate.

Arguably the most Democratic, pro-Obama state in the union is the president’s home state of Hawaii. But in the Aloha State, a photo ID is required to vote. And as of March, 2012, if you want to get a driver’s license, you have to produce a birth certificate and Social Security card, and — get this — if you’re a married woman who adopted your husband’s last name, you also have to present a copy of your marriage certificate to get a license to drive a car, and, thus, to vote. Citizens without ample free time and without the transportation to and from the DMV with cash or check in hand can’t possibly get an ID and so they simply can’t vote. At some point, formerly motivated voters will give up and spare themselves the hassle. (Interesting how the state at the center of the Birther controversy has an incredibly stringent ID process that includes a birth certificate.)

Sixteen states, mostly red states, now require photo IDs at polling places. In other words, in one-third of the nation, you have to pay a fee while potentially losing additional wages from lost work in order to vote. Do you seriously think Mitt Romney’s best voters are unable to pay those fees or can’t afford to take a half-day off work in order to visit the DMV?

Participation in the democratic process should be simple and universal. But, once again, fear of skin color — in this case, a thinly pitched anti-illegal-immigration zealotry — is being exploited in order to win elections for Republicans. Coupled with the well-worn Southern Strategy, one of the two major political parties in America is oppressing minority voters in an attempt to win elections. But, contrastingly, Voter ID laws are far worse than the Southern Strategy. It’s not unconstitutional to exploit white anger against minorities as a means of getting out the vote. But Voter ID steps all over the Constitution (and, contradictorily, ID laws are broadly supported by tea partiers in their tri-corner hats and Founding Fathers drag).

Thom Hartmann often airs a clip of conservative godfather Paul Weyrich proclaiming, “I don’t want everybody to vote… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Somehow, the conservative movement has managed to implant this theory into state election laws, and I get more than a little barfy when I consider the consequences, especially with the subsequent impact of Election 2000 still fresh in my memory.

Subscribe

Bob Cesca's feed

Enter email below:

The end of Santorum's Presidential campaign?

Rick Santorum suspended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday, bowing to the inevitability of Mitt Romney’s nomination and ending his improbable, come-from-behind quest to become the party’s conservative standard-bearer in the fall.

“We made a decision over the weekend, that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign today, we are not done fighting,” Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Santorum made the announcement at a stop in his home state of Pennsylvania after a weekend in which he tended to his three-year-old daughter, Bella, who had been hospitalized with pneumonia.

About 20 aides stood around Mr. Santorum on the edge of the room as he spoke. Their eyes were red. John Brabender, his long-time media adviser and strategist, was choking back tears.

The decision abruptly ends his quest for the Republican presidential nomination after weeks in which he has struggled to compete with Mr. Romney’s well-financed, highly-organized campaign apparatus.

Read more at the NYTimes…

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Rick Santorum's campaign could be near an end (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kicking off a last-ditch effort to keep his presidential bid alive, Rick Santorum returned to his roots Wednesday, saying he shared the values of southwestern Pennsylvania, where his grandfather worked in a coal mine and he shot his first deer three decades ago.

“I’m very, very proud of the heritage that Pennsylvania represents,” Santorum told a few hundred people at the Blair County Courthouse. “Barack Obama four years ago referred to this area of Pennsylvania right here as a place that holds on, clings to their guns and their Bibles. You’re damn right we do!”

Santorum, who was joined by his wife, Karen, and six of their seven children, said he would offer the clearest contrast to President Obama on such matters, while his chief GOP rival, Mitt Romney, had staked out positions on issues such as gun control, healthcare, global warming and energy policy that were similar to the president’s.

“Give us a chance to go out and make sure that there is a conservative, that there is a principled — principled — nominee of our party, someone who can go out and take it to Barack Obama, make him and his failed policies the issue in this campaign, not our nominee’s complicity in those failed policies,” Santorum implored.

After losing three more primaries Tuesday night, Santorum is making what many believe is his last stand in his home state.

“We have to win here,” Santorum told reporters earlier in the day after eating eggs, hot sausage and Italian bread at Bob’s Diner in Carnegie, the Pittsburgh suburb that he represented in Congress.

While campaigning in Pennsylvania, Santorum sprinkles his remarks with accolades for the state, from its role in the nation’s founding to the steel manufacturing that built the country’s infrastructure and helped win world wars. And he reminisces about his local ties, such as hanging out at a Hollidaysburg soda fountain run by his cousin. He capped the day going bowling with his children in Mechanicsburg.

Read more at the LATimes…

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Image via Wikipedia

Mother Jones reports on the GOP's terrifying scheme to snatch the Presidency in 2012 by implementing new rules in the electoral system. The basic premise: 

Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan—which has been endorsed by top GOPers in both houses of the state Legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett—Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. (Two electoral votes—one for each of the state's two senators—would go to the statewide winner.)

This could cost Obama dearly. The GOP controls both houses of the state Legislature plus the governor's mansion—the so-called "redistricting trifecta"—in Pennsylvania. Congressional district maps are adjusted after every census, and the last one just finished up. That means Pennsylvania Republicans get to draw the boundaries of the state's congressional districts without any input from Democrats. Some of the early maps have leaked to the press, and Democrats expect that the Pennsylvania congressional map for the 2012 elections will have 12 safe GOP seats compared to just 6 safe Democratic seats.

The most worrying aspect of this new strategy is that it doesn't seem like there is much the Democrats can do about it legally. The report is well worth reading in full – hopefully enough people will read it and figure out a way to stop this madness.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Pat Toomey, the conservative Republican senate candidate in Pennsylvania, has written an op-ed saying he would vote for Sonia Sotomayor. What does this tell us? Probably that since he’s got the GOP nomination locked up Toomey is moving to look more like a moderate, and figures the few people he upsets in wingnuttia is offset by people in the middle he might woo from Specter/Sestak. It also shows us that despite all the hullabaloo last year about Pennsylvania, that its enough in the blue state world that a conservative Republican knows he’s got to know when to fold ‘em.

Subscribe

Oliver Willis's feed

Enter email below: