Vote "Fraud" Shenanigans

The latest issue of Rolling Stone has a great article by RFK Jr on the Republican Voter Fraud shenanigans. It's not online, but I recommend picking up a copy.

There is also a great interview with Obama which is online. So what does he have to say about all this?

In the last two elections, the Republicans worked to suppress the vote, especially in Democratic precincts. Reporting by Bobby Kennedy in Rolling Stone has raised questions about whether the Republicans stole the 2004 election in Ohio. Are you worried about those kinds of tactics this time? And what are you doing in advance to keep that from happening?
Without leveling any accusations about past misdeeds, I can tell you that we're paying a lot of attention to how the election a month from now is going to take place. We've got an extraordinary team of lawyers in every battleground state — hundreds of them — fanning out across these states. A lot of the work is actually being done now: We have organized such a surge in voter registration that there were clerks having difficulty processing the registration, and there was some question as to legal requirements for them to hire more clerks. So there's already been a lot of work done, and I feel pretty confident that if there are any shenanigans out there that we'll be on top of them.

But John Kerry said the same thing in 2004. Lawyers are mainly useful after the fact, when it's too late. Is there anything you can do before the fact to keep the vote from being tampered with?
Well, in Ohio the thing we did was make sure there was a Democratic secretary of state.

Replacing Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican who was in charge in 2004.
Right.

That replacement is Democrat Jennifer Brunner. There have been 666,000 newly registered voters in Ohio, mostly Democrat, the legitimacy of which has been challenged in court by the Republicans.

They had a big win yesterday.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio's top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify the eligibility of new voters and make the information available to the state's 88 county election boards.

Brunner argued that it would take two to three days to create the necessary computer programs, and said nothing in the federal Help America Vote Act required her to do what the district court ordered.

Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett accused Brunner of pursuing a partisan agenda and said "her delay in providing this matching system leaves little time for election officials to act on questionable registrations."

Bennett said Brunner was destroying the public's trust in Ohio's elections system.

"Her shameful actions to disenfranchise Republican absentee voters, block the transparency of early voting and refuse the proper verification of newly registered voters have rightfully damaged her credibility as a nonpartisan election administrator," he said.”

Get that – The Democrats are blocking fair elections! Those bastards.

Most people I talk to think Obama will win in a land slide that simply cannot be blocked by Repugs regardless of their efforts. Given the state of the McCain campaign, this is likely true. I can't help but be a bit paranoid though.