The Oregonian's in-house wingnut is associate editor David Reinhard. Last week Reinhard wrote a column reinforcing the Republican meme about "voter fraud":
[ACORN and Senator Obama are] registering sham voters across the land.
See below for his misrepresentations (it's "voter registration fraud" not "voter fraud, and most of the proven incidents of it have been by Republican-funded groups), half-truths (ACORN did turn in false registration forms -- but they flagged those forms as possibly false and alerted elections officials) and outright lies (Senator Obama never worked for ACORN, ACORN is required by law to turn in ALL registration forms, even the ones it knows to be false)... and my 120 word LTE (Letter to The Editor) with links that reframes the issue -- as a witch-hunt of ACORN by the Republican Party and the "loyal Bushies" in the Department of Justice over the last three elections.
Trad-media is obsessed with "balance"... so even a reasonably unbiased media organization will have in-house GOP-talking-points-reciting conservatives to "balance" the reality-based writings of real reporters so there will be an apparent "balance". Here's the part about "voter fraud" in Reinhard's column:
Falling acorns: Speaking of media double standards, it's time to play that (un)favorite game of conservatives and Republicans, "What if ...?"
What if John McCain had channeled funds to a group that has spent millions to register 1.3 million new Republicans? What if McCain had been involved with the group as a lawyer and director of a voter-registration project? What if his campaign had given the group $800,000 for get-out-the-vote work -- but initially "misrepresented" this work to the Federal Elections Commission? And what if the group was accused of registering sham voters across the land?
Ah, but since the candidate is Barack Obama and the group is the Association of Community Organizations of Reform (Acorn) -- well, don't you worry your pretty little heads about it.
My letter:
David Reinhard wrote Wednesday "What if John McCain had channeled funds to a group... registering sham voters?" McCain and the GOP have! Republican-funded canvassers lie to us, saying they represent non-partisan groups. We sign their fake petitions to "toughen penalties against child molesters" and they forge our signatures re-registering us as Republicans. They pay canvassers ONLY for Republican forms and rip up Democratic forms. They fraudulently claim to live where they're collecting votes; Mark Jacoby of GOP group YPM, has just been jailed for it.
But the Department of Justice is too busy firing United States Attorneys like Todd Graves and David Iglesias (who refused to falsely indict ACORN) to investigate the GOP.
David Reinhard, associate editor, can be reached at 503-221-8152 or davidreinhard@news.oregonian.com. The Oregonian's LTE address is: letters@news.oregonian.com
Most of the other media outlets in America have published similar inaccuracies about ACORN, Senator Obama and "voter fraud". Here's the Firedoglake LTE generator. Go to it, if you're as tired of hearing this false meme as I am!!! ACORN AND Republican-funded groups have a "voter registration fraud" problem, but the difference is that ACORN actively tried to identify false registration forms and flagged them for officials while the Republican groups encouraged their canvassers to lie to registrants and forge signatures! NOTE: remember to change the subject line in step 2 to another title and to delete the letter in the body. Delete the pre-written letter and add your own. Feel free to draw from my letter and the material I link to, below. The subject line of the LTE-generated letter currently says 'Remove Fournier' and the letter concerns Fournier's close ties to Senator McCain.
Here, below, are links to source material backing up what I cite in the letter to The Oregonian.
LA Times, Oct 20, 2008:
The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario late last night on suspicion of voter registration fraud.
State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California.
Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department comes after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by his firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM. The voters said YPM tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters. The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.
Jacoby's firm broke the law in exactly the same way during the runup to the 2004 election. But the Department of Justice never followed up on this documented instance of voter registration fraud. St Petersburg Times, Oct 23, 2004:
Young Political Majors LLC, or YPM, is a company registered by Mark Jacoby at a Town 'N Country residence.
Jacoby appeared this summer at the election office in Gainesville with a box of about 1,200 voter registration cards. Of those, about 510 voters had switched to the GOP.
Corvallis Gazette Times, September 22, 2004:
An Arizona company claiming to be affiliated with the nonpartisan America Votes approached Oregon libraries about setting up voter registration booths.
But a Medford librarian checking on the request discovered that Sproul & Associates, Inc. of Phoenix was not affiliated with the national, nonpartisan group.
In fact, the group is a political consulting firm headed up by former Arizona state Republican Party executive director Nathan Sproul.
KLAS, Channel 8, Las Vegas, October 13, 2004:
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
"We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me," said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.
KGW, Channel 8, Portland, Oregon, October 13, 2004:
Bradbury learned of the conduct from KGW, which interviewed Mike Johnson, 20, a canvasser who said he was instructed to only accept Republican registration forms. He told the TV reporter that he "might" destroy forms turned in by Democrats.
...
Similar voter registration fraud was reported in Las Vegas. Johnson told KGW the group he works for was recently in Las Vegas. In Nevada earlier Tuesday, KLAS-TV, a CBS affiliate, interviewed an employee of a private voter registration organization who said hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of Democratic registration forms had been destroyed.
Eric Russell, a former Voters Outreach of America employee, told the TV station he had personally witnessed his supervisor take out Democratic registration forms from the pile and shred them.
The company has been largely funded by the Republican National Committee, the station reported.
Dismissed US Attorney, Todd Graves, Wikipedia:
U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri Todd Graves was listed on the list that the DOJ created in January 2006. He was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, an acting assistant attorney general, who became one of the first to be appointed using the provision enabled by the Patriot Act. Graves resigned in 2006 after refusing to "sign off" on a voter-fraud lawsuit that was filed against the state of Missouri by Schlozman. [46] Schlozman was appointed without Senate confirmation two weeks after Graves' resignation. Schlozman then brought indictments against four voter-registration workers of ACORN, a Democratic-leaning group, several days before the Missouri Senate election date.[47] [48] Schlozman returned to work for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. in April 2007 shortly before a federal judge dismissed the voter-fraud lawsuit.[49] More than a year after his resignation, in May 2007, Graves confirmed for the first time that he had been forced out.[50]
Dismissed US Attorney, David Iglesias, BradBlog, March 15, 2007:
... in New Mexico, in the late summer of 2004, a group of Republicans marched into the county clerk’s office and asked if there were any "problem" registrations associated with the voter registration drives. The clerk said "yes" and told them that there were some 6000 defectively completed registration forms (missing ss#’s, po box addresses, no signature, that sort of thing). The problem for the Republicans, however, was that these didn’t represent fraud, they were just typical and expected screw-ups by the registrants or the people registering them.
The Republicans nevertheless held a press conference, and grabbed headlines, announcing how terribly shocked they were to report that there were over 6000 "fraudulent registrations" submitted by these nefarious voter registration groups, and New Mexico’s voter rolls were being grossly corrupted. This had the predictable effect on the public, whose response was that they could now understand why a strict voter i.d. law would be a good idea.
The Republicans filed suit to try to get a state district court declaration that New Mexico’s very narrow voter i.d. statute (which applied only to first-time voters who had mailed in their voter registration applications) should have a much broader interpretation, under which most new voters would have to present i.d. at the polls. I represented the Democratic Party as an intervenor in the suit.
The Republicans attached to their complaint a few examples of what they alleged to be "clearly fraudulent" registration applications. This was to show how dire the situation was and how badly the state needed a more expansive interpretation of its voter i.d. law. Suffice it to say that we investigated the ostensibly fraudulent registrations and it turned out that they were clearly not fraudulent.
For example, one woman had signed two different registration applications, both of which were accurate. She signed one on a desk and one on her hand as she was walking across campus, with the result that her two signatures appeared different.
Another involved a couple who had registered at a voter registration drive table but had not received their registration cards. Worried that their applications has been lost, the husband returned alone to a registration table and filled out two new forms and, with his wife’s permission, signed her name.
These were "Exhibits A and B" to the Republicans’ allegations of rampant voter fraud. Only one of all the supposed examples was actually fraudulent. It was a registration application that a teenager had filled out as a prank. The testimony was clear that his name would never have appeared on the rolls because of the cross-checking that occurs with respect to every new registration, nor was there any indication that he would even have dreamed of trying to vote.
It was this evidence – if it can be called evidence - that the Republicans presented to David Iglesias when they demanded that he appoint a federal task force to get to the bottom of the "serious voter fraud problem" facing New Mexico. Iglesias understandably blew it off. What the Republicans wanted from him, of course, was not convictions (there was no evidence of any crimes, other than the teenager’s prank), but HEADLINES! The Republicans’ theory, probably correct, is that if they can get enough headlines about voter fraud, they will be able to sell their disenfranchising voter i.d. laws to the public. Iglesias, understandably, had better things to do with his time and with our money.