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...when there is little to no way to unwind the impact of those transgressions, certainly not as against the winner. Which is why the losing party -- typically guilty of the same offenses -- tends to be outraged. And then they forget about it all, as there's always hope that they can profit from the same chicanery the next time 'round.

In the case of the GOP, which had George Will railing against McCain late into this campaign cycle for violating First Amendment rights that McCain encroached on by spearheading a bipartisan effort to institute campaign finance reform, it gets sort of dicey expressing outrage that a relative of a candidate donated money to the candidate. That's a pretty harsh muzzle.

sure that money is contributed legally. And people wonder why there is no faith left in the country's institutions.

Interesting theory. Completely on the opposite side of the universe from reality, but interesting.

of the left. Well, of course the rules should apply, just not when it is in the other side's favor. And that is what scares me about you people being in control. All acts will be justified because Bush abused his power to the benefit of his constituency.

As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." --Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Moral Majority

The GOP targets minorities when it purges voting rolls, and it's done that for decades. This is not some big freaking revelation here. If every registered Democrat votes Democrat and every registered Republican votes Republican, the GOP would never win a presidential election. And what does that reality mean? It means that a Florida resident can go to vote with her social security card, driver's license and valid voter ID card, and yet if her surname is hyphenated and one of those ID's is missing the hypen, Florida can legally purge her name from the voting rolls.

This isn't about creating some bare minimum reqirements for voting. It's about putting in place willfull roadblocks to discourage voter turnout because the GOP knows that if Democrats vote, Democrats win.

outnumber the God-fearing, doesn't mean that the majority's opinion should be shoved down the minority's throat. That was the whole point of state and federal government, although that concept is largely being forgotten. States are intended to allow a number of similar minded people to come together and live under the laws they establish for themselves.

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BLOCK THE VOTE

Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST

Rolling Stone

Posted Oct 30, 2008 11:10 AM

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. 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."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.

But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico."

There's a reason Iglesias couldn't find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration's main point person on "ballot protection" has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. "The claim of widespread voter fraud," Minnite says, "is itself a fraud."

Allegations of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who traditionally support Democrats. "The Republicans have a long history of erecting barriers to discourage Americans from voting," says Donna Brazile, chair of the Voting Rights Institute for the Democratic National Committee. "Now they're trying to spook Americans with the ghost of voter fraud. It's very effective — but it's ironic that the only way they maintain power is by using fear to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote." The recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters include:


1. Obstructing Voter-Registration Drives
Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms. Facing potentially huge penalties for trivial administrative errors, the League of Women Voters abandoned its voter-registration drives in Florida. A court order eventually forced the legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to $1,000. But even so, said former League president Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines "create an unfair tax on democracy." The state has also failed to uphold a federal law requiring that low-income voters be offered an opportunity to register when they apply for food stamps or other public assistance. As a result, the annual number of such registrations has plummeted from more than 120,000 in the Clinton years to barely 10,000 today.


2. Demanding "Perfect Matches"
Under the Help America Vote Act, some states now reject first-time registrants whose data does not correspond to information in other government databases. Spurred by HAVA, almost every state must now attempt to make some kind of match — and four states, including the swing states of Iowa and Florida, require what is known as a "perfect match." Under this rigid framework, new registrants can lose the right to vote if the information on their voter-registration forms — Social Security number, street address and precisely spelled name, right down to a hyphen — fails to exactly match data listed in other government records.

There are many legitimate reasons, of course, why a voter's information might vary. Indeed, a recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that as many as 20 percent of discrepancies between voter records and driver's licenses in New York City are simply typing mistakes made by government clerks when they transcribe data. But under the new rules, those mistakes are costing citizens the right to vote. In California, a Republican secretary of state blocked 43 percent of all new voters in Los Angeles from registering in early 2006 — many because of the state's failure to produce a tight match. In Florida, GOP officials created "match" rules that rejected more than 15,000 new registrants in 2006 and 2007 — nearly three-fourths of them Hispanic and black voters. Given the big registration drives this year, the number could be five times higher by November.

3. Purging Legitimate Voters From the Rolls
The Help America Vote Act doesn't just disenfranchise new registrants; it also targets veteran voters. In the past, bipartisan county election boards maintained voter records. But HAVA requires that records be centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state — partisan officials — who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible. Ironically, the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida — the same corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place. Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000 voters, most of them African-Americans, because their names resembled those of persons convicted of a crime. The state eventually acknowledged that the purges were improper — two years after the election.

Rather than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them. Maez, the elections supervisor in New Mexico, says he was the victim of faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state. Hector Balderas, the state auditor, was also purged from the voter list. The nation's youngest elected Hispanic official, Balderas hails from Mora County, one of the poorest in the state, which had the highest rate of voters forced to cast provisional ballots. "As a strategic consideration," he notes, "there are those that benefit from chaos" at the ballot box.

All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to the states on "list maintenance" methods.


4. Requiring Unnecessary Voter ID's
Even if voters run the gauntlet of the new registration laws, they can still be blocked at the polling station. In an incident last May, an election official in Indiana denied ballots to 10 nuns seeking to vote in the Democratic primary because their driver's licenses or passports had expired. Even though Indiana has never recorded a single case of voter-ID fraud, it is one of two dozen states that have enacted stringent new voter-ID statutes.

On its face, the requirement to show a government-issued ID doesn't seem unreasonable. "I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I've got to show a little bit of ID," Karl Rove told the Republican National Lawyers Association in 2006. But many Americans lack easy access to official identification. According to a recent study for the Election Law Journal, young people, senior citizens and minorities — groups that traditionally vote Democratic — often have no driver's licenses or state ID cards. According to the study, one in 10 likely white voters do not possess the necessary identification. For African-Americans, the number lacking such ID is twice as high.


5. Rejecting "Spoiled" Ballots
Even intrepid voters who manage to cast a ballot may still find their vote discounted. In 2004, election officials discarded at least 1 million votes nationwide after classifying them as "spoiled" because blank spaces, stray marks or tears made them indecipherable to voting machines. The losses hit hardest among minorities in low-income precincts, who are often forced to vote on antiquated machines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its investigation of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected, a ratio that holds nationwide.

Proponents of HAVA claimed the law would correct the spoilage problem by promoting computerized balloting. Yet touch-screen systems have proved highly unreliable — especially in minority and low-income precincts. A statistical analysis of New Mexico ballots by a voting-rights group called VotersUnite found that Hispanics who voted by computer in 2004 were nearly five times more likely to have their votes unrecorded than those who used paper ballots. In a close election, such small discrepancies can make a big difference: In 2004, the number of spoiled ballots in New Mexico — 19,000 — was three times George Bush's margin of victory.


6. Challenging "Provisional" Ballots
In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional" ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

Many voters are given provisional ballots under an insidious tactic known as "vote caging," which uses targeted mailings to disenfranchise black voters whose addresses have changed. In 2004, despite a federal consent order forbidding Republicans from engaging in the practice, the GOP sent out tens of thousands of letters to "confirm" the addresses of voters in minority precincts. If a letter was returned for any reason — because the voter was away at school or serving in the military — the GOP challenged the voter for giving a false address. One caging operation was exposed when an RNC official mistakenly sent the list to a parody site called GeorgeWBush.org — instead of to the official campaign site GeorgeWBush.com.

In the century following the Civil War, millions of black Americans in the Deep South lost their constitutional right to vote, thanks to literacy tests, poll taxes and other Jim Crow restrictions imposed by white officials. Add up all the modern-day barriers to voting erected since the 2004 election — the new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.

"Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not," says Donna Brazile. "We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise." Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.

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there has to be a mechanism to weed out those that are not allowed or who aren't voting legitimately. If not, why bother having the rules and just let everyone submit as many votes as they are able?

...just as I think we can agree that the "Perfect Match" laws in swing states like Florida and Iowa are driven by political agendas, not a desire for basic fairness.

Hey, if we're going to start up the desperate, last-ditch, let's-see-if-anything-sticks machine, I went in on the action!

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Campaign donor's contributions raise questions

Mystery man gives more than $120,000 to McCain and the GOP.

By Andrew Zajac, Ray Gibson and Bob Secter

October 29, 2008

Reporting from Chicago — Big campaign donors typically come with deep pockets and influence. But in Illinois this election cycle, no one who isn't himself running for office has given more to the nation's federal campaigns than Shi Sheng Hao of Roselle, Ill., a virtual unknown in business and political circles.

Before September 2007, Hao's name had never appeared in the 15-year-old federal database of campaign contributors. Since then, however, his donations have topped $120,000 -- including $70,100 on a single June day to Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Over the same time frame, a network of Hao relatives has kicked in more. The take from this group over the last 13 months exceeds $269,000, most of it to McCain and the Republican National Committee, records show.

Hao didn't register to vote at the suburban address attached to his donations until October 2007, a month after he wrote his first political check, $25,000 to the Republican National Committee.

The circumstances surrounding Hao's sudden and prolific political activism are curious and his whereabouts unclear. His name isn't listed on property records or the mailbox at the unassuming tract home listed on his donations. Hao lives "overseas," insisted a man who answered the door at the Roselle home recently. The man declined to identify himself.

The story of Hao -- whose varied roster of business associates appears to include a Taiwanese government investment arm as well as the mastermind of a decade-old Democratic fundraising scandal -- is an eyebrow-raiser in the current election climate.

Ethnic Chinese donors became an issue in the battle for the Democratic nomination last year because some didn't seem to live where they claimed on contribution records. Now, Republicans are raising questions about the authenticity of many small donations Democrat Barack Obama has received from abroad.

Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, said the timing of the Hao-related contributions appeared troubling, though there could be a plausible explanation.

"Large contributions from people who have never given previously do generally provoke questions about who they are and what they're up to and, most importantly, what they're looking for," said Krumholz, whose nonpartisan group closely tracks political donations. " . . . The public needs to be concerned because there are fraudulent donations and persons use them to gain influence and access in Washington."

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said Hao was not a "major donor" and "not a part of this campaign in terms of fundraising," but declined to discuss him further or to address the campaign's procedures for vetting donors. RNC spokesman Danny Diaz said he would not respond to questions from the Tribune, contending the newspaper was biased against McCain.

So who is Shi Sheng Hao and what are his means and motives for becoming a megadonor? No one answered a telephone listed in his name in the 630 area code and there was no answering machine. Messages left for him by phone and e-mail with several relatives went unanswered.

But this much can be gleaned from public records:

Donation disclosures list his occupation as a businessman with entities identified only by slightly different acronyms: ADECC, AAEC, A.A.E.C.C. On some he is also listed as president of American Chinese Entertainment Ltd.

Hao and his wife, Hsin-Ning, declared bankruptcy in 1995, at the time using the Roselle home as an address and listing as a business a firm called Asian American Environmental Control.

Hao holds an Illinois driver's license that lists his address as the Roselle home, but property records show the four-bedroom house has been owned since 1992 by Robert and Jen Chi, whose their last name is on the mailbox.

Contacted at the Des Plaines marketing firm where she works, Jen Chi said she didn't want to discuss Hao, though she said she knew how to get in touch with him and would have him call the Tribune. He never did.

"I don't know anything about his business," said Chi, who herself gave $15,000 to the RNC the week after Hao's first donation. "I don't want to be stuck in the middle."

Hao's wife, Hsin-Ning, also used the Roselle address when she made a $25,000 contribution to the RNC last year. In September, however, she listed a Taipei address on a $2,300 contribution to the campaign fund of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

There is no record in business databases of American Chinese Entertainment Ltd., the firm listed in some Hao donation records. However, an Asian American Entertainment Corp. was incorporated early this year in California with a Shi Sheng Hao as president.

Government records show that firm and at least two other Hao companies have connections to the family of Gene and Nora Lum, onetime prominent Democratic fundraisers in the Asian-American community who were convicted in 1997 of making political donations through illegal straw donors.

A Taiwanese firm with a nearly identical name as Hao's new California company, Asian American Entertainment Ltd., is also headed by a Shi Sheng Hao. That firm has been embroiled in a lengthy legal battle in Las Vegas over a soured partnership in an application for a casino license in Macau, the former Portuguese colony now part of the People's Republic of China.

A court filing in that case described Hao's firm as a business affiliate of the China Industrial Development Bank, a finance arm of the Taiwanese government. Hao is listed as a resident of Taiwan in corporate papers filed in the case.

It's unclear whether the Shi Sheng Hao in the lawsuit and the California ventures is the same Shi Sheng Hao using the Roselle address. But public records point to numerous coincidences, including corporations with similar names and an overlap of investors. Some political donations from the Roselle address also refer to Hao by a nickname, Marshall, the same nickname given for Hao in the Las Vegas court action.

Federal records indicate a pattern of large and coordinated donations from Hao, relatives and associates. Collectively, eight of them gave a total of $130,000 to the RNC in late September and early October of 2007.

Zajac, Gibson and Secter write for the Chicago Tribune.


Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-donorstrib29-2008oct29,0,6711378,print.story

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All supporters of the Obama campaign are illegal, I'm sure.

What's Ken Starr been up to lately?

(Note: Edited to insert a much more inflammatory photo.)