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

To: Sully- who wrote (82080)	10/27/2010 8:48:43 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 90947

Nevada voting machines automatically checking Harry Reid's name; voting machine technicians are SEIU members By: Mark Hemingway Commentary Staff Writer 10/26/10 6:12 PM EDT Clark County is where three quarters of Nevada's residents and live and where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's son Rory is a county commissioner. Rory is also a Democratic candidate for governor. Since early voting started, there have been credible reports that voting machines in Clark County, Nevada are automatically checking Harry Reid's name on the ballot: <<< Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked. Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen. "Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong." Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said there is no voter fraud, although the issues do come up because the touch-screens are sensitive. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they make a selection at any time. >>> Now there's absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet), but it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle -- nearly all of that on Democrats. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is formerly the SEIU's top lobbyist, and former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Just in Nevada, the SEIU has given a lot to groups that are heavily vested in the state -- in just one prominent example, the SEIU gave $500,000 to the Patriot Majority PAC, which has spent $1.3 million against Reid's opponent Sharron Angle. They've and have dropped large sums directly on candidates: NV-3 Joe Heck (R) Oppose $140,000.00 NV-3 Dina Titus (D) Support $344,984.00 NV-Senate Sharron E. Angle (R) Oppose $225,000.00 Now the county voting technicians aren't unique here -- many of Clark County's employees are also represented by the SEIU. But it is worth mentioning, the SEIU is hyperpoliticized and has seen its fair share of corruption. (It certainly seems more questionable than Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer with Republican ties that was at the center of many conspiracy theories on the left during the Bush administration.) Unions increasingly have a major financial stake in election outcomes, both as a matter of their own election expenditures, and as a function of what they stand to gain if their legislative agenda is enacted. Should they really be responsible for tabulating the votes? That's certainly something voters ought to think long and hard about. Below is Clark County's SEIU contract -- On Page 75, in Appendix A, voting machine technicians are listed as positions represented by SEIU. Read more at the Washington Examiner: washingtonexaminer.com

To: Sully- who wrote (82080)	10/27/2010 9:18:05 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Watchdog Warns SEIU Contract for Nevada Voting Machines Poses 'Fraud' Concern By Judson Berger FoxNews.com Published October 27, 2010 A conservative watchdog group is calling on Nevada officials to intervene to ensure SEIU workers who operate one county's voting machines don't skew the results to boost their endorsed candidate, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. A contract between SEIU Local 1107 and Clark County -- where voting glitches were reported Tuesday -- makes the SEIU the sole union representative for, among other professions, voting machine technicians. Nevada SEIU spokesman Nick Di Archangel called the suggestion that SEIU or its technicians would manipulate voting machines "absolutely false." But Americans for Limited Government called the union agreement "positively outrageous" considering SEIU's political stake in the race. ALG has urged the U.S. Marshals, the state attorney general and the U.S. attorney's office to step in to uphold the integrity of the election. "For all intents and purposes, the SEIU has control over those ballots boxes, because they're the people who work on them ... which puts us into a new realm of potential fraud," ALG spokesman Richard Manning told FoxNews.com. Manning said it is "suspicious" that glitches were just reported in that county's machines, referring to complaints from voters in Boulder City that Reid's name was already checked when they went to cast their ballots for his opponent, Republican Sharron Angle. Fox5Vegas.com reported that several voters in the Clark County jurisdiction experienced the same problem. Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax explained that highly sensitive touch-screens may be to blame and fraud is not the issue. He told Fox5Vegas.com that nobody reported the problem to his officials and that it would be impossible for the machines to pick a candidate without the voter's consent. He also said in a statement that the supervisors are not part of the union, even if the technicians are, and that the technicians are not involved in programming. He said "extensive security measures are in place" to prevent tampering, adding that SEIU-eligible employees have worked in the Election Department for years without incident. Di Archangel said Lomax "ensures both the security and reliability" of the machines. "The machines cannot be compromised," he said in an e-mail to FoxNews.com. He added that despite the county contract, all workers are free to stay out of the union if they wish. "The agreement does not mandate in any way that only union members be assigned to specific jobs," he said. Secretary of State Ross Miller's office said in a statement that despite wide-ranging "rumor and speculation" about suspicious voting activity, no formal complaints have been lodged with Nevada's Election Integrity Task Force. "I will not tolerate any attempt by an individual, organization or campaign, to deny any Nevadan the right to freely cast their vote in a safe, secure and private manner. But neither will I stand by and allow the public's confidence in the electoral system (to) be undermined by unsubstantiated rumors and allegations," Miller said. But Manning said SEIU's involvement in the process raises concern about the integrity of the election. The union is putting big money into the Nevada Senate race to support Reid and recently went up with an ad that described Angle as "too dangerous" to have power in Congress. Though the Clark County/SEIU contract is dated March 2007 to June 2010, it is still in effect. The SEIU said that voters, to ensure the accuracy of their selections, should use the machines' "fail-safe system" to review their picks before leaving the polling station. .

To: Sully- who wrote (82080)	10/27/2010 9:27:31 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Block The Vote IBD Editorials Posted 10/26/2010 07:04 PM ET Rule Of Law: Suspicious voting-machine malfunctions and cheating candidates are the stuff of banana republics, not America. With Democrats about to suffer historic losses, is our election's integrity in question? 'It can't happen here," most Americans would say about the chances of voting one way and seeing your votes recorded the opposite. But that's what happened in early voting in North Carolina's unfortunately named Craven County last week. Voter Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern found that "an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended," the New Bern Sun Journal reported. Laughinghouse "pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked," the local paper reported. "He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result." Election personnel eventually straightened it out, but clearly a less observant Republican voter would have inadvertently voted for every Democrat on his ballot. Chuck Tyson, chairman of the Craven County Republican Party, told the Sun Journal he "got two or three calls" from voters experiencing the same problem and is not satisfied with state election officials' efforts to fix it. In Boulder City, Nev., meanwhile, where voters use computer screens, another disturbing episode was reported by Fox News. When voter Joyce Ferrara and her husband went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, they — and several others, according to Ferrara — found that Democratic incumbent Harry Reid's name was already checked. The county registrar's explanation: The high-tech voting screens are sensitive. The Nevada case is especially disturbing because the seat of the most powerful Democrat in the Senate is at stake. Beyond suspicious voting procedures, there are also practices better suited to children's playground games than the political contests of a mature constitutional Republic. The Democratic nominee for governor in Florida, state chief financial officer Alex Sink, was caught cheating in CNN's gubernatorial debate Monday night, breaking the ground rules by viewing a text message from an aide during a commercial break. In Pennsylvania, Democratic House candidate Bryan Lentz last week admitted to helping a third-party Tea Party candidate get on the ballot to siphon votes away from GOP nominee Pat Meehan. Me - 'Daytona Beach City Commissioner Derrick Henry and his campaign manager, Genesis Robinson, were arrested Wednesday, charged with committing absentee ballot fraud during Henry’s 2010 re-election campaign, the Volusia County Sheriff's Office said. .... The arrest of Henry and Robinson comes a little more than two months after Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall requested an investigation into irregularities in absentee ballot requests coming into her office. ... Power is hard to give up, but when those in power compromise campaign and election rules, we cross a sacrosanct threshold. .

To: Sully- who wrote (82080)	10/27/2010 9:42:04 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

The Left's Voter Fraud Whitewash Michelle Malkin Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. It's the Democrats' coping mechanism for midterm election voter fraud. Faced with multiple reports of early voting irregularities and election shenanigans across the country, left-wing groups are playing dumb, deaf and blind. Voter fraud? What voter fraud? More cunningly, these organizations are seeking to marginalize complaints about election integrity by casting citizen watchdog efforts as racist "scare tactics." Echoing President Obama's message to the Democratic faithful on the campaign trail, they are accusing political opponents of suppressing the votes of minorities and the poor. On Tuesday, The New York Times quoted a liberal voting rights advocate, Wendy R. Weiser, wringing her hands over individual Americans taking clean elections seriously: "Private efforts to police the polls create a real risk of vote suppression, regardless of their intent," said Weiser, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. "People need to know that any form of discrimination, intimidation or challenge to voters without adequate basis is illegal or improper." Weiser also turned up in a very similar story minimizing voter fraud and voter registration fraud that was published Tuesday by government-sponsored National Public Radio. The NPR report asserted that "most election experts" believe that fears of voter fraud are "overblown." No word on how many "experts" they surveyed (besides Weiser) to report such a conclusion, which flies in the face of dozens of felony voter fraud convictions across the country over the past two election cycles — and that's just among ACORN-tied cases. Overblown? In North Carolina and Nevada, early voters have encountered ballot machine glitches that favor Democrats in hotly contested races. In Troy, N.Y., and Daytona Beach, Fla., police investigations into suspected absentee ballot fraud by elected government officials are underway. In Harris County, Texas, the voter registrar admitted that 20 percent of voter registration forms submitted by liberal activist Houston Votes had problems. Election whistleblowers there are now being investigated by the Obama Justice Department and have been slapped with an ethics complaint by the Texas Democratic Party and a left-wing billionaire George Soros-funded group called Texans for Public Justice. In Yuma County, Ariz., election officials denied any fraud associated with thousands of requests for "permanent early voter list" status submitted en masse by open-borders group Mi Familia Vota (a social justice satellite group of the Service Employees International Union). But election officials admitted that some 6,000 out of 14,000 requests fielded by the Yuma County Recorder's Office "were reviewed and rejected, under Arizona law, either due to the fact the request was a duplicate or the requestor was not eligible to vote in this election or within the jurisdiction." Liberals shrugged their shoulders at reports of illegal alien canvassers trolling for votes in Washington State. Never mind the radical goals spelled out by SEIU International Secretary-Treasurer and Mi Familia Vota founder Eliseo Medina, who views illegal alien amnesty as a powerful Democratic recruitment tool to capture millions of new progressive voters. Funny. For the past two years, Democratic leaders have had nothing to say about the militant New Black Panther Party goons who took it upon themselves to police a Philadelphia voting booth in 2008 wielding billy clubs and shouting anti-white slurs to suppress votes. Now, they're treating citizen election monitors as if they are the jack-booted thugs. When I lauded efforts like the Minnesota Majority, which is training volunteers to watch polls and report on voter fraud, liberal critics accused me this week of "fascism." Silence dissent. Criminalize watchdogs. Whitewash fraud. Discourage grassroots engagement. Deny, deny, deny. These are the signature tactics of the left in the age of Obama. On November 2, Americans get their chance to say: Enough. Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com. .