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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (19942)	11/2/2004 1:22:53 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Yep... Subject 54707 I'm clairvoyant.... J.

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (19942)	11/2/2004 1:28:47 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Voting in America's Dairy Republic The polls have only been open in Wisconsin for a few hours, but the trouble--vandalism, illegitimate registration, and more--has already started. by Stephen F. Hayes 11/02/2004 11:45:00 AM Wauwatosa, Wisconsin VOTING is off to a bad start in Wisconsin. Thirty vans rented by the Republican National Committee to use in Milwaukee get-out-the-vote efforts were rendered inoperable by vandals overnight. The vehicles were parked near a Republican headquarters on Capitol Drive, where their tires had been slashed. The GOP is scrambling to find replacement vehicles. "This is a targeted effort to sabotage a political party's effort to get out the vote," says Chris Lato, communications director for the Wisconsin Republican party The tire slashings were not the only incidents of vandalism directed at Republicans on election eve. The building that houses a Republican party office in Madison was defaced. Vandals spray-painted "illegitimate democracy" in black letters in two different locations across the building. One young woman who lives in a heavily Democrat neighborhood in Milwaukee, showed up to vote this morning to find that seven people are registered to vote under her address. She lives with one other person. The same woman reports that she was the 50th person to cast a vote at her precinct and it took her 45 minutes to do so. Her precinct is giving priority to new registrants, who get shuffled to the front of the line and, she says, are in-and-out within minutes. More trouble: A Bush-Cheney poll worker reports that laws restricting "electioneering" close to polling places have in many cases been rendered obsolete by long lines. This worker says that MoveOn.org workers at Riverside High School in Milwaukee are accosting voters and urging them to vote for John Kerry. Five days earlier, after a rally for Kerry that featured Bruce Springsteen, the Madison City clerk's office honored a request from the Kerry campaign to keep its offices open three hours after their normal closing time of 5: 00 p.m. Their objective was to encourage would-be early voters to go directly from the Kerry rally to cast their ballots. Republicans, of course, cried foul--but the offices stayed open. The attempt at cheating was not terribly successful. Newspaper reports suggest that relatively few voters took advantage of the extra time to vote early. Charges of voter fraud and harassment are not new to Wisconsin. In 2000, a New York Democrat named Connie Milstein handed out cigarettes to the homeless in an effort to get their votes. When her shenanigans were first reported, then-chairman of the Democratic National Committee Joe Andrew said she was not a Democratic "heavy hitter" and was in Wisconsin on her own, as a concerned voter. Those claims were, well, hard to substantiate. Milstein was listed by the DNC as chairman of the party's "Major Supporters Committee" and had hosted a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for Al Gore at her Park Avenue residence. What's more, she was captured by a camera crew for a local Wisconsin station saying, ""I am here representing the Gore and Lieberman campaign and I was asked to get out the vote in Wisconsin." Milstein was not charged with felony voter fraud, but settled for a mere $5,000. (Not an amount likely to discourage someone who contributed $600,000 to Democrats in the 2000 election cycle alone.) In 2002, two Democrats were captured on television by another Milwaukee TV station running a Bingo game for the mentally disabled. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that they were wearing "Doyle for Governor" t-shirts, and provided the participants with food and absentee ballots. Wisconsin is quickly losing its status as a clean elections state. No wonder.