Leaked Audio Captures Romney Asking Employers To Tell Their Employees How To Vote

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Oct 17, 2012 

Newly-discovered audio from a conference call in June captures Mitt Romney asking business owners to urge their employees to vote for him.

Romney, speaking on a call to the very conservative National Federation of Independent Business, tells a group of business owners that they should “make it very clear” how they feel about the candidates. The audio, discovered by In These Times, also captures Romney telling the business owners to “pass… along to your employees” how their jobs might be effected by who wins in November:

I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.

Listen at 26:44:




There have already been some reports of employers suggesting how their employees should cast their ballots. A CEO of a Florida resort company threatened to fire his employees if Obama won. The CEO of a timeshare company did the same. And the famous right-wing Koch brothers warned of “consequences” of not voting for Romney.

GOP forced to cease voter registration efforts in five of the swingiest swing states (2 stories)

And this is the party so concerned with voter fraud? And they're the ones committing voter fraud? Again, it would be funny if it weren't so hypocritical and wrong...--jef


By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Monday, October 1, 2012

On her show Monday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow explained why the Republican Party had halted its voter registration efforts in five major swing states.

Republicans had hired Strategic Allied Consulting to run voter registration drives in Florida, Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina and Nevada. But RNC severed ties with Strategic Allied Consulting last week after Florida officials traced possibly fake registration forms back to the company. The firm has also been accused of tearing up Democratic registration forms.

“The actually worrying thing in voter registration fraud is if you do get real people to fill out real voter registration forms and they therefore believe they are registered and then because you don’t like their party affiliation, you tear it up and then that real person thinks they have registered,” Maddow explained. “They show up on election day only to find out they are not on the rolls and not allowed to vote.”

Strategic Allied Consulting was the only firm hired to run voter registration drives in those states. With many voter registration deadlines quickly approaching, Republicans have little chance to restart the registration drives.

“And the collapse of the Republicans’ voter registration scheme has resulted in the Republican Party ceasing all voter registration efforts in five of the swingiest swing states in the country with another week and a half left to register voters,” Maddow said.

Maddow’s guest, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, noted that conservatives were furious after the organization ACORN was accused of registering fake voters.

“ACORN itself, by the way, had called the attention of voter registrars to the fraud themselves, they disciplined themselves. And yet this was a big scandal and ACORN lost a lot of money and had to go out of business. Why isn’t this the same thing for conservatives?” he wondered.

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Florida Congressman Demands Bipartisan Investigation Of GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal

By Josh Israel on Oct 1, 2012

In the wake of revelations that Strategic Allied Consulting, a controversial voter registration firm that has worked for the Republican National Committee, the Florida Republican Party, and the Romney campaign, is under investigation for turning in fraudulent voter registration forms in Florida, a Florida Congressman is calling for a bipartisan probe.

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) wrote Monday in a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R):

In light of the large and apparently growing voter fraud scandal engulfing the Republican Party of Florida, I urge you to immediately appoint a bipartisan task force to investigate the accusations and ensure that the integrity of our voting rolls will not be compromised by Strategic Allied Consulting’s deliberately fraudulent voter registration operations. I also urge you to ensure that that false registrations submitted by Strategic Allied Consulting do not remain on our rolls, and that you immediately investigative whether any employees involved in this scandal are still working for the Republican Party to register voters in Florida.

Deutch observes that Scott’s silence and inaction on the scandal, to date, are “shocking and hypocritical” in light of Scott’s Ahab-like attempts to purge suspected non-citizen voters from the state’s voting rolls.

Scott has expressed a great deal of concern about potential voter fraud in Florida elections — even though state records indicate show Floridians are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. But voter registration fraud apparently does exist in Florida.

Scott signed an unconstitutional 2011 suppression law which put major new restrictions on groups who work to register new voters, requiring third-party voter registration groups like Strategic Allied Consulting to turn in completed registration forms 48 hours — to the minute — after completion, or face fines.

Scott’s communications office did not immediately have any comment on the letter or the scandal.

GOP Seeks to Overturn Historic Civil Rights Law

Voting Rights Under Attack
Friday, September 7, 2012 by Common Dreams

Civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) told the audience at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, “we have come too far together to ever turn back,” warning that Republican-led voter suppression laws are taking America back to the days when states had the right to deny voting capabilities to minority voters. Voting rights for minority voters continue to come under attack as Republican leaders are now turning to the Supreme Court to overturn historic civil rights legislation.

Several federal judges recently struck down voter suppression laws in multiple states, introduced by Republican legislators and governors, such as voter identification laws, provisional voting restrictions, limits on voter registration drives, and reduced availability for early voting.

The court rulings in Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, marked a widespread rejection of so called 'voter fraud' legislation, which seeks to greatly limit who can and cannot vote.

However, as Chris McGreal at the Guardian reports today, "Several state governments are [now] looking to the conservative-leaning supreme court, which has already expressed its doubts about racially-based policy," in order to overturn these rulings. This step would seek to challenge the historic Voter Rights Act of 1965, which gave the federal government some control over voting rules in states with a history of blocking African Americans from voting.

In question is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires "pre-clearance" for nine states – Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia – before making changes to voting laws or procedures.

Civil rights leaders and activists have expressed concern over whether the Supreme Court will actually uphold this anti-discrimination law.

"The question is not whether Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will be struck down, but when and how. Will it die a death of a thousand cuts? Or will it be killed with one swift blow?" Nathaniel Persily, a Columbia University law professor, told the Guardian.

"There has been a proliferation of cases that aim to take down and rip out this core provision of the Voting Rights Act," said Debo Adegbile, acting president and lead counsel of the NAACP legal defense fund. "I think it's fair to say that the supreme court invited these challenges."

Speaking to the DNC Thursday, Lewis continued:

Brothers and sisters, do you want to go back? Or do you want to keep America moving forward? My dear friends, your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union. Not too long ago, people stood in unmovable lines. They had to pass a so-called literacy test, pay a poll tax. On one occasion, a man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. On another occasion, one was asked to count the jelly beans in a jar—all to keep them from casting their ballots.

Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House even bragged that his state’s new voter ID law is “gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state.” That’s not right. That’s not fair. That’s not just.

Five Million Voters May Lose Rights in the 2012 Elections

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 by Color Lines
by Brentin Mock


Today’s Super Tuesday primary involves 10 states and 437 delegates at stake for the Republican Party’s presidential prospects. There are two states among that crop that are worth taking a look at: Georgia and Tennessee. Both are emblems for a growing, and troubling, legislative trend in which new election laws mandate citizens to produce photo identification to vote, ask people to prove their citizenship to vote, or outright curtail voter registration efforts.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election Day due to these new, imposing voter laws.

There are currently eight states with photo voter ID laws containing specific criteria for what qualifies as “identification”for voting purposes. Some states require that identification be state-issued and only for the state a person is voting in; some prohibit college IDs; some demand that the full name and address on the card be current; while some require that an ID card has an expiration date.

Looking at those stipulations, it’s not hard to imagine how low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans, college students, and elderly voters—groups the Brennan Center has identified as the most burdened by new voter laws—might get tangled up on voter day. The Center estimates that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper identification right now. For African Americans, it’s 25 percent—that’s 5.5 million voting-age black Americans who could get turned away at the polls for being undocumented and unphotographed.

Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people, newly divorced, newly married couples or people who’ve recently lost their homes could all have information on their drivers licenses that reflect names, addresses and faces that aren’t current. The costs for these groups will be more than an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated materials and transportation costs to handle it all.


How did we get to this point? Let’s just say the emergence of these laws are no coincidence. Thousands of Republicans from dozens of states didn’t all just wake up one day and decide we need an ID card to vote. And yet almost every voter ID law now in play or pending happened in the last four years—since Barack Obama ran for and became the nation’s first black president.

Republicans in state legislatures around the country have tried to pass these laws for years. Their efforts had been repeatedly voted down or vetoed out, mostly because the U.S. Constitution prevents meddling with voters’ rights. But in 2010, Republicans not only took over Congress, they became majorities in state legislatures across the country. Numerous states that previously had Democratically controlled general assemblies turned Tea Party-red, and one of the chief items on their agendas was changing the rules of the voting game.

An example of this is Tennessee, which for the first time since the Civil War ended saw its House of Representatives, Senate and governor’s office all controlled by Republicans in 2010. Swiftly, Tennessee passed new voter ID laws, and last year made headlines when a 96-year-old African American woman named Dorothy Cooper was denied an ID to vote.

Georgia was one of the first states with a voter ID law, first passed there in 2005, and today hosts one of the Super Tuesday primaries. Today’s vote in Georgia, and fellow photo voter ID state Tennessee, will probably reveal little about how the new restrictions impact minorities and other at-risk voting groups because they mostly vote Democrat—a fact that voter ID critics stress is not lost on the Republicans who push it. Nonetheless, election officials in Tennessee and Wisconsin, which have already hosted local elections using their new voter ID laws, have bragged about how there have been no problems.

In Wisconsin, the chief elections officer Kevin J. Kennedy noted only a few voter ID glitches where people showed up with the wrong kind of ID to vote.

The story, however, is not as much what happens at the polls when the wrong ID is used as it is what happens when people don’t bother showing up at the polls at all because they think they don’t qualify due to lack of identification. The U.S. has a long history of voting shenanigans, from Jim Crow era poll taxes to current era rumors circulated, often exclusively in black communities, about who can and can’t vote.

Come this November, during the general election, the impacts of the new laws will begin to surface. Besides the eight states already holding strict voter ID laws, there are 31 more states lurking hoping to do the same. At least eight of those states could pass voter ID laws before Election Day. And of the eight that already have strict voter ID laws, five want to pass legislation this year that would make them even stricter.

Who are the movers, shakers and shapers of these potentially disenfranchising laws? A great deal of funding comes from the Koch Brothers, who’ve vowed to remove President Obama from the White House by any means, and by any billions of dollars necessary. Another player is ALEC—or, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a body that includes banks and corporations working alongside Republican legislators to craft laws that would dismantle not only voter rights, but also environmental and labor protections.

ALEC, which has Koch funding, has drafted the model legislation that many states with strict voter ID laws have followed.

This is at least true for Tennessee, but is also true for many other states. In Nebraska, where a voter ID law is being mulled, a state senator flat-out lied when a news reporter asked him about his ties to ALEC. Sen. Charlie Janssen said he wasn’t a member of ALEC and had never been to their functions, but then was confronted with the evidence that his name was listed on their site as a committee member.

Other states share similar connections. ALEC’s Minnesota state chairman, state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, is also the author and pusher of a voter ID proposal that the governor has already vetoed once.

In Iowa, a voter ID law co-sponsor, state Sen. Linda Upmeyer, is ALEC’s treasurer. And in Tennessee, the state’s GOP Caucus Chairman, Sen. Bill Ketron, is an ALEC member.

All of this has set up a massive and high-stakes battle for civil rights organizations in 2012. The NAACP, the League of Young Voters, AARP, black church groups and college student organizations are all rallying to preserve voter protections by scrapping photo ID laws.

In Wisconsin, lawyers from The Advancement Project, League of Women Voters, ACLU and Voces de la Frontera, are in the courts battling to have Wisconsin’s law repealed on the grounds that it discriminates against people of color.

This week, Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network is leading a march from Montgomery to Selma, in commemoration of the historic Civil Rights march and to protest stifling voter ID and immigration state laws. In the federal government, the Department of Justice has intervened, blocking voter ID laws in South Carolina and redistricting laws in Texas (where there are also voter ID laws), by saying they both violate the Voting Rights Act. Attorney General Eric Holder has denounced the laws across the board and the department is side-eyeing other states that have passed them.

The irony, though, is that voter ID law proponents are using the same civil rights arguments made to secure voting rights protections to now upend them. In Texas, the state initially failed to provide data on the number of African Americans that would be impacted by new voting laws as requested by the Department of Justice. As an excuse, they said they didn’t collect data on race because the Voting Rights Act told them to be colorblind.

In South Carolina and Georgia, election officials argue that they should be released from federal oversight—put in place because of the South’s violent history with stopping African Americans from voting—because civil rights legislation has worked, and no discrimination exists now.

The states are perverting and exploiting civil rights laws in order to pretend that racial discrimination has been completely eradicated. Some even point to the election of the first black president and the record turnout of voters of color in 2008 as evidence that no traces of discrimination are left in the system. Instead, they claim to trace voter fraud—people voting with the names of other displaced, deceased or fictionalized voters—and argue this is why voter IDs are needed.

All the data shows that instances of voter fraud are negligible at best. The voter fraud argument is in many cases a ploy to disguise the racial animus that fuels the voter ID push, especially as it pertains to Latino voters. Many state legislators will state emphatically that the need for voter IDs is driven by the need to keep “illegal immigrants” from voting. Former Maryland governor and congressman Robert Ehrlich Jr., now an attorney, wrote in defense of a Maryland voter ID law that, “This ‘welcome wagon’ for illegal immigrants may reflect a majoritarian view in progressive Maryland; nevertheless, it makes the realization of free and fair elections far more difficult. … Every illegal vote cast and counted degrades our democracy. Lax immigration enforcement only magnifies the problem.”

Many voter ID proponents might argue that voter ID are made possible by the success stories of the civil rights movement, but they also want to place barriers to voting because civil rights legislation may have been too successful, as evidenced by a U.S. president who’s not only a Democrat but is black. Those working to put voter restrictions in place don’t want that kind of election to happen again.

Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy

Friday, December 9, 2011 by The Nation

by John Nichols 

 

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.

For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.

That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally outside the New York headquarters of the Koch Brothers to begin a march for the renewal of voting rights in America.

For the Koch Brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns, with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious "Public Safety and Elections Task Force," that while it wants to dismantle any barriers corporate cash and billionaire bucks influencing elections, it wants very much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.

That crude calculus, usually cloaked in bureaucracy and back-room dealmaking, came into full view in 2011.

Across the country, and to a greater extent than at any time since the last days of southern resistance to desegregation, voting rights were being systematically diminished rather than expanded.

ALEC has been organizing and promoting the assault, encouraging its legislative minions to enact rigid Voter ID laws and related attacks on voting rights in more than three dozen in states.

With their requirements that the millions of Americans who lack drivers licenses and other forms of official paperwork go out and purchase identification cards in order to cast ballots, the Voter ID push put in place new variations on an old evil: the poll tax.

“We are in the midst of the greatest coordinated legislative attack on voting rights since the dawn of Jim Crow,” says NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. “Voter ID laws are nothing but reincarnated poll taxes and literacy tests, and ex-felon voting bans serve the same purpose today as when they were created in the wake of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing ex-slaves the vote—suppressing voting numbers among people of color.”

Voter ID laws represent only the beginning of the assault on voter rights. In states across the country in 2011, conservative governors and legislators who had swept to power in the 2010 election moved to restrict access to the polls in other ways. They ended election-day registration programs in state such as Maine, ending a practice that had allowed new voters to come to the polls, fill out a simple form and cast a ballot. They restricted early-voting in states such as Ohio, making it dramatically harder for citizens to cast ballots in the run-up to an election. They scrapped weekend-voting in Ohio, where working men and women had been able to cast ballots on their days off. They placed new restrictions on voting by students at colleges and technical schools, even going so far in Wisconsin as to move the primary election date to when most students were on summer break. They reduced the number of polling places in some states, making it harder for voters who lack transportation to get to the polls. And after they established the Voter ID requirements in Wisconsin, and said that citizens had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get the proper paperwork, they tried to reduce the number of DMV offices.

“For nearly a century, there were Jim Crow laws in place that discouraged people of color from voting, explains Wade Henderson, the president and CEO of The Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights. “Today, there are different laws, but the objective is the same—to prevent millions from exercising their right to vote.”

No one who is serious about voting and elections misses the point of the project.
The point is not just to make it harder to vote. The point is to make it harder for citizens to elect legislators, governors, members of Congress and presidents who will regulate and tax multinational corporations such as Koch Industries, while at the same time establishing programs that meet the needs of the great mass of Americans. “Now, just as before, they are seeking to block us from voting in order to make it easier to come after our other rights,” says Mike Mulgrew, President of the United Federation of Teachers. “Everything we care about is at stake, from the right to a quality education to the right to a fair wage.”

It is with all of this in mind that the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund and allied civil rights and civil liberties organizations, churches and unions have endorsed the  “Stand for Freedom” voting rights campaign, which will launch with a march Saturday from the offices of the Koch Brothers to the United Nations. At the United Nations, the groups will mark Human Rights Day by calling for an end to assaults on voting rights in the United States.

The choice of the Koch Brothers office as a starting point is not symbolic. It is practical. For decades, the Koch Brothers and their foundation have funded ALEC and other groups that are now driving the attack on voting rights in states across the country.

The people are pushing back. In November, Mainers voted by an overwhelming margin to restore election-day registration. In other states, voting rights has become a central political issue. And, now, that issue is being raised at the headquarters of the Koch Brothers -- and the United Nations.

“From the beginning of our nation’s founding, Americans have understood that voting was fundamental to their pursuit of freedom and equal opportunity,” says Lillian Rodríguez López, President of the Hispanic Federation.  “Any attempt to undermine the right to vote, especially when that effort is directed at historically marginalized groups, must be treated as an attack on the very ideals that created our country: democracy and equality. And that is why we stand up for freedom and continue to fight for the right to vote for all Americans.”

Texas Democrats: Tea party ‘hell bent on disenfranchising poor’

By Eric W. Dolan - RAW Story
Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Democratic Party of Texas blasted the King Street Patriots, a local tea party group based in Houston, for inviting columnist Matthew Vadum to speak at a fundraising event. Vadum has said that registering poor people to vote was “antisocial and un-American”

Talking Points Memo reported in October 2010 that the Justice Department was investigating the King Street Patriots’ anti-voter fraud campaign — called “True The Vote” — after receiving a number of complaints about voter intimidation in Hispanic and African-American areas.

“It’s fitting that the group whose sole purpose is to harass and intimidate minority voters  would feature a rightwing extremist who thinks poor people shouldn’t be allowed to vote,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Boyd Richie. “But at least the King Street Patriots are finally being honest. This event serves as a gleeful admission from their group that folks who are likely to vote Democratic should be denied their fundamental right to vote.”

“Sadly, this group that’s hell bent on disenfranchising poor-folks and minorities is not an anomaly in today’s Republican Party,” he added. “Rick Perry, the head of the Republican Party in Texas, has taken the lead in disenfranchising Texans. Perry’s redistricting plan was struck down because it violates the Voting Rights Act and his voter suppression legislation has not been pre-cleared because it is designed to keep certain people from voting. The King Street Patriots and Rick Perry are two peas in a pod.”

Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry in May cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the King Street Patriots’ new headquarters and praised their president, Catherine Engelbrecht.