rolling stone: it's already stolen

Two years ago, I blogged about a story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in Rolling Stone magazine (story here; my posts here, here and here.) The story is quite long, but if you haven't read it, I highly recommend working your way through the whole thing.

Now Greg Palast and Kennedy have investigated and co-authored an update: "Block The Vote". Here's Palast's summary.

Don't worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

There's more:

- Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls."

Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the county elections supervisor.

The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times.

"Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats."

The investigators level a deadly serious charge:

"If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."

. . .

Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, StealBackYourVote.org.

For updates and video reports, go to Rolling Stone, Greg Palast and Steal Back Your Vote.

I hope none of this comes as any surprise to you. The elections of 2000 and 2004 were both stolen. There are serious questions about the midterm elections of 2002 and 2006. Nothing has been fixed. (Or should I say "repaired"? Everything has been fixed.) So why would 2008 be any different?

My Obama-loving friends tell me it will be different because Obama is different. I don't understand why that would be. But if it's true, at least let's keep our eyes wide open. The time for magical thinking is long past.

Rolling Stone story here.

If this topic interests you, many good stories with hard evidence of the stolen elections can be found in wmtc posts labeled "election fraud".