Gawd, these people never give up.
With their party all but disintegrating because of the horrendous president they elected and the utter failure of their (insane) policies, radical Republican operatives are nevertheless attempting to sabotage yet another election with unsubstantiated charges of voter fraud in the states they still control. One of them is Alabama, where Rove's hacks had Democratic Gov Don Siegelman jailed on trumped up corruption charges just before the election (he was recently released), and they're at it again. This time they claim to have rumors of Democratic officials paying for votes and affidavits in which these supposed voters say they were encouraged to vote several times.
Federal and state authorities are looking into accusations of voting fraud in three largely black counties of Alabama, including Perry and Lowndes Counties, which played a historic role in the struggle for black voting rights in the 1960s.
In May, a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times. The affidavits were presented to state officials in Montgomery, the capital, and after the June 3 primary, the Alabama attorney general, Troy King, a Republican, seized voting records from the primary election in Bullock, Lowndes and Perry Counties.
And, of course, Bush's DOJ is "helping".
The United States Department of Justice posted a team of observers to monitor the primary, and the Alabama secretary of state, Beth Chapman, a Republican, reported hearing from one of the federal observers that a candidate had “free rein” of a polling place, where campaigning is prohibited, passing out sample ballots and instructing voters how to vote.
Chapman is also "raising questions" about absentee ballots (naturally) and generally making a big noise about the corrupt Democrats.
Anybody wanna bet that a) this whole thing goes away after the election, and b) we never see a scintilla of actual evidence that what these conscienceless dweebs say is true? The exact same charges have been filed in other states by other Republican ops and so far not a single proof has been offered by any of them and every time the "investigations" have vanished once the election was over.
But in the meantime ideological party hacks King and Chapman are going to use their power to cripple what looks to be a close election, trying to swing Alabama to McCain and the other GOP candidates in order to maintain control of their state whether the voters want them or not. That's the real vote fraud: the modern conservative's total contempt for the actual wishes of voters. To the modcons, voters are tools to be manipulated if possible, ignored if necessary, and elections are there to be fixed, stolen, or sabotaged so they come out the Right way. Mod cons have no sense of democracy, no belief in it, and the phrase "fair play" makes them giggle. To mod cons, only suckers play fair.
The rolling over-and-playing dead-act that Democrats have been doing for Bush has emboldened the GOP even as they're falling apart. They're going to try to steal another election, and the Bush/Mukasey DOJ is going to help them do it.
This is going to get ugly, but it doesn't matter because nobody's ever going to see it thanks to our compliant media. Reporter Adam Nossiter can't bring himself to mention that these are the same people who set Siegelman up but he does drag his ass around to the supposed "witnesses" and to dutifully interview them and he makes sure you know that the officials being charged are black. This report escapes the scurrilous only because this time the Pubs have produced witnesses (even though most of them admit they've allowed their votes to be bought for years, which doesn't exactly make them credible). Nevertheless, ignoring the history of these tainted GOP officials amounts to siding with them. I don't expect any other press to be any more skeptical in this, the age of GOP reporter-stenographers.
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