That didn’t take long. Yesterday I wrote a DIARY outlining the strange case of the Indiana State Police going to the length of actually raiding the headquarters of a voting registration group largely serving minority communities. But it appears that both the group and the good citizens of Indiana are fighting back, with a little help from their friends.
According to a new report in the Washington Post, the group, Indiana Voter Registration Project has asked the U.S. Justice department to look into the State Police investigation, and another group, Patriot Majority USA is starting an advertising campaign, on black oriented radio stations and newspapers starting Saturday. It’s not pulling any punches. To quote from the article;
Patriot Majority’s one-minute radio ad opens with a wailing siren and a male announcer referencing the raid: “Indiana state police recently shut down our state’s largest voter registration program. This police raid was under the leadership of Republican Governor Mike Pence. Now 45,000 citizens, almost all African Americans, could lose the right to vote.”
The ad also quotes some workers who were there for the raid, stating that they were lined up against a wall, and one African American worker was put in handcuffs. Once this gets wider circulation, I have the feeling that this will not go over well in the African American community, especially in a year when the GOP Presidential candidate, Pence’s running mate is disparaging their communities every chance he gets.
I wrote yesterday that there were reasons to believe that the excuse for the entire investigation was a little flimsy, from the mouths of the ISP themselves. The WaPo confirms my suspicion;,
The voter registration applications flagged by election officials in Marion and Hendricks counties “contained minor inaccuracies like missing Zip codes and area codes,” Varoga said. “Based on the fact that they found (problems in) 10 forms out of tens of thousands . . . to launch a statewide investigation into a voter registration program is a political agenda. Whether or not it originated in the governor’s office, it clearly has the sanction of the governor and the secretary of state,” he said.
What did Jon Stewart say in his farewell show? Oh yeah, “If you smell bullshit, call bullshit. This is bullshit. I asked in my diary yesterday if anybody reading had ever misspelled their name accidentally, or left the phone or zip code box empty and had to go back to correct it. I know I have! This is not voter fraud, this is simple human error! And for a measly 10 registration forms with inadvertent errors on them, the State Police (or is that Police State?) balloon the investigation out to 50+ counties, all centering on this one organization? To say that this is an overreach of logic is the understatement of the year.
Oh, and one more thing. Mike Pence sure as hell knows about this. In a rally in Iowa he bragged about the investigation, and called on the crowd to hold their local authorities feet to the fire to protect the integrity of the voting process. Ummmm, Mikey? Trying to disenfranchise 45,000 legitimate voters over 10 applications with accidental omissions is not protecting the “integrity of the voting process”. You are bastardizing it you dumb shit!
Thanks as always for reading, you are ALL the wind beneath my wings!
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