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ROLLING STONE INVESTIGATIVE REPORT
Block the Vote
Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast
For full story see…
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a
boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all
residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday
caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise,
Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter
fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots
in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las
Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters
were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without
explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.
This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after
state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal
legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the
GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats
get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding
access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote
to the GOP in half a dozen states."
Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald
Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in
democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who
co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a
matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission,
at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million
votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be
twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of
pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help
America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.
For full story see…
In addition to their investigation for Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. & Greg Palast have teamed up to empower voters to steal back their votes:
STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE! COMIC BOOK
WHAT'S THAT UP IN THE SKY?!
It's Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast releasing the flaming hot full-color investigative comic book, STEAL BACK YOUR VOTE!