Nationwide scrubbing of newly registered voters from the voter rolls is being ignored not only by the media but by the Obama campaign. Yo yo yo's diary today has just fallen off the list. Please go find it and rec it up. And contact the Obama campaign. Nothing is more important than this.
From a Daily Kos diary today:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
What follows is a comment I tried to submit at the Obama website. Maybe it's too long. If it's uncool or illegal to quote almost in its entirety from another diary, my abject apologies to Yo yo yo. But this is too important to let it fall off the list. Since my comment has not gone through at Obama's website, I'm posting it here as a diary.
TO THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN:
New voters are being scrubbed from voter lists by the hundreds of thousands all over the country. Why isn't the campaign on top of this?
From a Daily Kos diary today: http://www.dailykos.com/...
"Bobby Kennedy Jr:
"There are about 30 scams the republicans are deliberately
using, particularly in the swing states to get democratic voters off the rolls. These scams originate in the so-called Help America Vote Act which was passed after the Florida debacle in the year 2000. It was originally suggested by Democrats and Republicans but it was
passed by a Republican congress with a Republican senate and a Republican president. And instead of reforming what happened in Florida it basically institutionalized all the problems that happened in Florida. And institutionalized a series of impediments that make it very difficult for Democrats to register, for democrats to vote and then for Democrats to have their vote counted.
"One of these requirements under HAVA is called "the perfect match" and what that does is little known but it is devastating. A quarter of the voters in Colorado have just been removed from the rolls because of this--just this one scam.
"Kennedy: And what [the Colorado scam] does is they use a
computer system to compare your registration application to all other government records of you in the state. So they’ll look at your social security records, your motor vehicle records and any time you’ve had any interaction with the government and if there is any information on your voter registration that is different than the information on another government record that they find they remove
you from the voting rolls.
"For example, if I registered as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and yet my motor vehicle license said Robert Frances Kennedy Jr. I’d be removed from the rolls. If your initial is different, if you leave an initial out, if you leave a "Jr." out, if you leave a hyphen out in your name. And what they’ve done is a study in New York that said 80% of
the errors are errors that were done by state clerks who are taking down this information. And particularly immigrant communities that people tend to vote democratic, people have names...spell Muhammad with an "o" instead of a "u" And are the Democrats fighting these abuses?
"Kennedy: No, the Democrats are doing nothing to stop it. In New Jersey, which is a swing state, 300,000 voters in New Jersey were just sent letters saying that they are now ineligible to vote. New jersey is nice enough to actually notify them--most states will not even notify them. And New Jersey intends to send out 870,000 letters so that is three quarters of a million people off the voting rolls in a state that could decide this vote by 50,000 votes. And these are Democrats that are being pushed off the rolls."
End of quote. Back to me:
When is the deadline to register and/or to verify and correct your registration if necessary? The campaign needs to send out an email NOW, to every voter who has ever given money or contacted the website for any purpose, and get the word out that all voters, not just newly registered voters, need to check NOW to make sure they have not been scrubbed from the voter lists.
If they have, there needs to be a division of the Obama campaign that can begin, NOW, to handle this.
We cannot lose this election the way we lost 2000 and 2004. We can't wait until it's a done deal. We should have been fighting this all year. If we don't start now, it's over before the voting starts. All the passion, hope, dedication - all the skill, the organization, the brutally hard work that has gone into this historic effort to bring in a new generation of voters - and you are not defending it?
I've given this campaign money I could in no way afford to give. I'll be giving more. But I want my money to be used to set up a war room and to hire lawyers - not after the election - NOW.