November 2008

Last week, I wrote that the links between ACORN, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, and the group Secretary of State Project were concerning. I asked how many other Secretaries of State were backed by ACORN.

Well. There’s a recount in Minnesota that will determine whether Norm Coleman keeps his seat. And another ACORN backed, Secretary of State Project-backed candidate will be doing the recount. Let’s see what they say about Ritchie.

The Secretary of State Project describes him as:

In 2006, the SoS Project helped elect one of the most progressive Secretaries of State in the nation, Mark Ritchie. How he got his start in politics? As a community organizer.

The SoS Project describes Brunner and Ritchie as their success stories. Recall that Brunner tried to throw out all of the McCain absentee ballot applications, violated federal law by sepcifically directing Ohio to turn off validity checks on registration, and encouraged county election officials to not allow Republican election officials to observe voting. In every case, courts said she was simply wrong. There is a reason that SoS Project backed Ritchie, just like they backed Brunner. Partisanship at the cost of electoral integrity.

Here’s Ritchie’s background. He used his government office for political gain:

Ritchie acknowledged asking a campaign volunteer to copy a list of participants in a civic engagement program through the secretary of state’s office to his campaign newsletter, which included a political contribution request.

He was endorsed by ACORN.

So we have a guy who was elected by a group whose practices encourage at least voter registration fraud and make it easier to cheat in elections. He was elected by a group that is seeking to make sure that the people who count votes are partisans, and their other success story in 2006 has been shot down by the court repeatedly in her attempts to rig Ohio elections. And he misused government resources for political purposes.

This is the guy counting the votes. Who is he going to dance with? The ones that brought him? We know how they play.

Cross-posted from Election Journal.

Fox28 in South Bend, Indiana has a report of an attempt to mislead voters. After a voter told the caller that she supported John McCain, the caller said that her vote had been recorded, and she didn’t need to vote on election day:

She says she received a phone call from a woman claiming to be an elections official. “This young lady was saying they’re doing something new and something different and I don’t have to go out and vote,” she said. The caller said people could now vote by phone and asked her who she wanted to vote for. The woman said John McCain. She was then told her vote was cast and she didn’t need to vote Tuesday.

Watch it:

Hat Tip: Frugal Hoosiers

During the primaries, Election Journal
correspondents traveled to election sites known for voter fraud. We
produced a little video to remind you of our greatest hits and how
serious voter fraud can be:

If you see voter fraud on election day or any suspicious activity,
please report it. Either take a picture and send it to us — even
from your camera phone — to votefraud@gmail.com or call
866-876-VOTE.

Cross-posted from
Election Journal.

Palestra.net
finds that Barack Obama campaign staffer (described on an
Obama site as a field organizer and at a Zoroastrian site as
Obama staff) Minwalla Farah is registered to vote in 3 states.

Meet Farah Minwalla, an Obama field organizer in North Carolina.
She registered to vote in Mecklenburg County, NC on October
4. According to county auditor reports, the
address Minwalla used belongs to a Wanda Nabors. But oddly
– Minwalla is also registered to vote in New York AND Nevada. All
three registrations are listed as active. So, is she a resident of
North Carolina, Nevada or New York? Technically, it appears she
could vote in all three.

Minwalla’s online bio for NextGenNow says she is currently
pursuing a degree in English and Journalism in New York City. As
recently as July, Minwalla wrote a review for a band in Brooklyn,
but now she’s registered to vote in swing state North Carolina. The
latest RealClearPolitics poll shows Obama ahead by 0.3 percent, in
New York Obama leads by 29.7 percent. As I’ve heard so often from
campaigners, every vote counts.

I checked the voter file and found that Minwalla registered on
the day of the Nevada Caucus with a mailing address in  New
York.  The Nevada caucus allowed registration and
participation on the same day. Yet, two weeks later, someone with
the same name, New York City address, and birthday voted in the New
York Presidential primary.  She registered at the New York
City address in 2007.

I have not been able to confirm the North Carolina registration,
but the evidence looks solid.

Cross-posted from Election Journal.

Palestra.net finds that Barack Obama campaign staffer (described on an Obama site as a field organizer and at a Zoroastrian site as Obama staff) Minwalla Farah is registered to vote in 3 states.

Meet Farah Minwalla, an Obama field organizer in North Carolina. She registered to vote in Mecklenburg County, NC on October 4. According to county auditor reports, the address Minwalla used belongs to a Wanda Nabors. But oddly – Minwalla is also registered to vote in New York AND Nevada. All three registrations are listed as active. So, is she a resident of North Carolina, Nevada or New York? Technically, it appears she could vote in all three.

Minwalla’s online bio for NextGenNow says she is currently pursuing a degree in English and Journalism in New York City. As recently as July, Minwalla wrote a review for a band in Brooklyn, but now she’s registered to vote in swing state North Carolina. The latest RealClearPolitics poll shows Obama ahead by 0.3 percent, in New York Obama leads by 29.7 percent. As I’ve heard so often from campaigners, every vote counts.

I checked the voter file and found that Minwalla registered on the day of the Nevada Caucus with a mailing address in  New York.  The Nevada caucus allowed registration and participation on the same day. Yet, two weeks later, someone with the same name, New York City address, and birthday voted in the New York Presidential primary.  She registered at the New York City address in 2007.

I have not been able to confirm the North Carolina registration, but the evidence looks solid.

UPDATE: A North Carolina reader confirms this in the comments.

Cross-posted from Election Journal.

Election Journal is working with a large number of activists around the country, tracking election fraud and other irregularities. Check out this video of some of our greatest hits from monitoring elections in the primary:

If you see anything at the polling place that raises a question, take a picture and send it to us — even from your camera phone — to votefraud@gmail.com or email us at electionjournal@gmail.com.

It’s not just the coal industry he has it in for

Below,
Moe writes on some shocking statements by Barack Obama about
“bankrupting the coal industry” in order to address global
warming.

Obama has it in for another industry: agriculture. Check out
these statements from
an interview he gave with Time’s Joe Klein:

As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is
contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector.
And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are
vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to
sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in
commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in
our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2
diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that
are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one
sector of the economy.

He is blaming our agriculture policy for global warming,
obesity, stroke, heart disease, etc.

If he is willing to “bankrupt” the coal industry over global
warming, what’s he going to do to the agriculture sector which
“actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our
transportation sector”?

Not the first time …

Cross-posted from
Election Journal, your source for breaking election fraud
news.

The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette compared the Allen County,
Indiana voter file to the Florida voter file and found 2,000
probable overlaps with the same name and birthday:

The Journal Gazette compared the list of 222,000 active
registered voters in Allen County with the list of more than 12
million registered voters in Florida and found that 2,172
registrations have the same first and last names, middle names or
initials and the same birth dates and are listed as active,
eligible voters in both places.

This could be very significant. Both Florida and Indiana are
close states, and Allen County contains a significant portion of
the votes in IN-03, where Congressman Mark
Souder is in a close re-election race.

How many more of these are there? How many have voted?

Recall that when the Indiana voter-ID law went to Supreme Court,
one of the plaintiffs was Faye Buis-Ewing,
who was registered in both Indiana and Florida and was fraudulently
claiming homestead tax exemptions in both states.

Could have been stopped by following the law …

Cross-posted from
Election Journal, your source for breaking election fraud
news.

Yet another out-of-state Ohio voter was discovered, according to
the
Cincinnati Enquirer:

A Connecticut man apparently registered to vote and
cast a ballot in Hamilton County while visiting during the
so-called “golden week” when anyone in Ohio could register and vote
at the same time.

The man’s ballot is being held at the request of a special
prosecutor handling a voter-fraud investigation in Hamilton
County.

This person appears to have been participating in something like
the Vote from Home
strategy, where people come in from out of state and register
during same-day registration and voting. Note that this was only
discovered when the voter himself reported it:

Further details on the out-of-state voter were not
available. The elections board said the man called the board and
requested that his ballot be pulled and not counted.

How many voters didn’t report their own participation in fraud?
Furthermore, what if he had voted on an electronic machine, so his
vote couldn’t be pulled? Election Journal interviewed several
people who did that
here and
here. Note also that if Secretary of State Jenniffer Brunner
had required HAVA checks, this registration would have likely been
caught.

These discussions about what an online right should look like seems to miss several points. There are distinct problems, and they need to be handled seperately. Some of these problems need to be solved organically, some will require time, but some can be solved somewhat mechanically.

One of the things that we need to solve immediately and may be susceptible to a mechanical solution is the crisis of information. The crisis of information is that righty information outlets are having incrementally less influence on the news cycle than lefty ones. The chart is from this WSJ story about the rise of the lefty blogs and specifically Huffington Post vis-a-vis Drudge. TPM, Chris Cillizza, Howard Kurtz, Halperin and others have been talking about this also.

On the list above, Townhall, Michelle Malkin, Newsbusters, and Redstate were the only sites to demonstrate triple-digit growth during the last election period, and only Redstate’s and Newsbusters’ was truly explosive. (full disclosure: I am a front-page contributor to both of those)

But I don’t want to focus on traffic, but rather a related question: who drives the news cycle? This used to be Drudge and still is to a great degree. But any experience watching this electoral cycle will tell you that TPM and Huffington Post are essential in setting narratives and forcing campaigns and other political actors to respond to specific reported and sourced information and distributing it quickly. With that in mind, let’s look at something Mark Tapscott said:

But I want to offer a third essential element in addition to punditry and activism. The RightRoots must make a top priority of equiping vastly more of our sites with the reportorial and investigative skills required to dig up and present credible exposes, fact-based analyses and concrete news stories.

In short, we’ve complained about liberal media bias for decades, but now that the mainstream media is steadily being displaced by online media, many of us need to become ….. journalists, or capable of doing the online analogy of traditional journalism, particularly in its investigative phase.

I would state this slightly differently. Stories are started online with HuffPo and TPM. They are completed on TV and in the newspapers. We are playing in no part of that process. One of the reasons for that is that there is no reliable place to go for fact-based conservative perspective.

This is something that we could do now. There are enough talented reporters to start training and mentorship programs for more. These people could play in the news cycle. This would not necessarily require donors to dump money on "bloggers". Rather the people would be established journalists with records.

Other parts of rebuilding the right as a coherent ideological and electoral force will depend on other things (like a coherent ideological framework linked to coherent policies). But this we can do relatively quickly and start demonstrating immediate results by attacking the terrible policies of a Democratic Congress and, potentially, a Democratic White House.