Exclusive Interview: Voting Experts Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast on How to "Steal Back Your Vote!"

The perennial issues of vote fraud and voter suppression are becoming front-page news as several states conduct early voting and as Election Day itself nears. The candidates themselves will continue to stump, trying to win votes in contested states, but after tonight's final debate, the parties will focus less on persuading undecided voters and instead put more and more energy into "get out the vote" or "GOTV" efforts or, more ominously, into "voter suppression" efforts, which discourage or bar the other side's likely voters from casting ballots.

GOTV includes simple acts like helping homebound voters obtain and cast absentee ballots or driving voters who don't have cars to the polls on Election Day. More broadly, the concept also can include all kinds of efforts to increase voter turnout: voter registration drives, websites that help voters confirm that they're still registered in time to fix any problems (one good, nonpartisan example is the National Association of Secretaries of State's CanIVote.org), and public service announcements reminding voters that Election Day is approaching.

Voter suppression practices are the flip side of such efforts. Suppression efforts can appear innocuous, such as requiring voters to show photo I.D.s - a requirement that excludes a surprising number of poor, minority, very young and very old voters and kept several elderly nuns from voting in Indiana's Democratic primary this year. Suppression can pose as false righteousness, such as Fox News's 342 negative mentions of a single voter-registration group in just four days (casting the group's efforts to register underrepresented demographics as a threat to democracy, and frightening voters registered by that group into thinking that their registrations might be unlawful), or the past Republican practice of stationing armed, uniformed "Ballot Integrity" personnel in minority polling places (again, tamping down turnout). And there is no lack of flatly illegal suppression schemes, such as vote "caging" (in which voter resident status is challenged merely because their house is in foreclosure or because a piece of direct mail was returned by the post office), robo-calls falsely telling voters their polling places have changed, and deceptive flyers (like the ones posted in Pennsylvania's inner-city and college neighborhoods, warning of police plans to arrest voters for unpaid child support or parking tickets).

The parties argue every year over whether vote suppression or vote fraud is the greater threat to democracy, but the numbers suggest that it's no contest: about six people are convicted each year of actually casting ballots fraudulently, while hundreds of thousands of people who are entitled to vote fail to do so because of misinformation, intimidation, deception, or bureaucratic hurdles.

Illustrating the point, the Republican National Committee has issued more than 50 press releases and convened at least 12 press conference calls in the past month to air complaints about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now ("ACORN"), which turned in more than 1.3 million new voter registrations nationwide this year. The RNC has even unveiled silly anti-ACORN mascots in time for Wednesday night's final presidential debate. In a call just this morning, however, when I and other reporters pressed RNC communications director Danny Diaz and RNC chief counsel Sean Cairncross to name specific instances of ACORN-registered voters who had actually cast fraudulent ballots, they could name just one: a single Ohio man who was caught yesterday trying, unsuccessfully, to cast a fraudulent ballot. Even Florida's Republican governor says that his fellow Republicans may be exaggerating the problem.

Two of the most knowledgeable and outspoken advocates of voting rights are Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a law professor at Pace University and cohost of Air America Radio's "Ring of Fire," and Greg Palast, an investigative journalist with the BBC. Following the Florida debacle in 2000, it was Palast who dug deep and revealed the widespread suppression efforts that, in conjunction with the Supreme Court's order to stop counting votes, led to George W. Bush's 537-vote margin of victory. And Kennedy, in a Rolling Stone article last June, carefully explained how voter suppression and election fraud cost John Kerry enough key-state votes in 2004 to hand the election, again, to George W. Bush.

This year, Kennedy and Palast have teamed up to educate citizens about how their Constitutional voting rights could be taken away and how to protect themselves -- how to, in their words, "Steal Back Your Vote!" In a new Rolling Stone article, a movie, and even a comic book, Kennedy and Palast have outlined six ways votes could be stolen and seven ways voters can "steal them back." In an exclusive interview with OffTheBus, Kennedy and Palast explained, at breakneck pace, what they're afraid of this year -- and what they hope voters will do to make sure the 2008 election is fair, open, and small-d democratic.

In the first part of the interview, both Kennedy and Palast riff on an encyclopedia's worth of voter suppression information: the nonexistence of "voter fraud"; the history of Republican (and, in some cases, Democratic) efforts to suppress the votes of African American, Latino, American Indian, young, and senior citizen voters; the ways that seemingly sensible vote "protection" measures like photo I.D. and database cross-matching requirements are designed to reduce the Democratic vote; why "provisional ballots" are really just "placebo ballots"; why absentee ballots are a bad idea; how "fraud prevention" measures cost a group of elderly nuns their right to vote in the Indiana primaries; how Colorado's Republican former secretary of state wiped 1/5 of the names off the state's voter rolls without the Democratic governor even knowing; and the new methods being unveiled this year to disenfranchise voters.

Want to hear everything you need to know about vote fraud, vote suppression, and how to protect yourself, all in 15 minutes? Buckle your seat belt, download the mp3 podcast or click the player below, and hang on:

After the first part of our interview, Palast answered more questions about what concerned voters should expect in coming weeks. Want to know why Palast believes Colorado and Nevada may be this year's Florida and Ohio? How black students and black airmen were "caged" while they were away from their college addresses for the summer or deployed overseas? Instances of Democratic officials interfering with voting rights, either out of self-interest (e.g., to force through a uranium mine on sacred native lands) or because they incorrectly believe federal law requires it? What the relationship is between the US Attorney firings scandal and this year's Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters? Why Republicans are gunning for ACORN, and what other tricks might be in store between now and the election? And, most importantly, whether Mary Poppins will actually show up to vote on Nov. 4? You can listen to the audio player below, or you can download an mp3 of part 2 of our interview here. (18 min.; edited for length and clarity.)

More resources:Much more information is available from Kennedy and Palast's StealBackYourVote.org, including:

"Steal Back Your Vote!" comic book (available for download for a donation of any amount, or for purchase in hard copy; they're also making plates available so the comic can be reproduced by college newspapers, newsweeklies, and other periodicals)

"Steal Back Your Vote: The Movie" on Huffington Post

Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild"

----

Follow M.S. Bellows, Jr. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/msbellows

Comments

[jdmba]

I want someone to write a short, concise article about how to prevent voter fraud.List the rules to Steal Back Your Vote.

[PrinceHal]

What? Only 16 comments about this post?

That couldn't be because it's not even linked from HuffPo's Page 1, could it?

Is there anything out there that's more important than THIS?

If that even APPEARS to be true, someone should write a new post that makes it much clearer just what Palast and Kennedy are reporting here.

[racetoinfinity]

I couldn't agree with you more. This is very important, and should be on the front page of huffpo. Also the MSM should be all over this, at the very least, CNN and MSNBC!

[Matt7]

Unfortunately, we're still pretty good at getting distracted. For whatever reason, Palin's $150,000 clothes budget seems to be of greater interest.

I that deep down, most Americans still don't believe that the kind of evil that is perpetuated by the Republicans, every four years, is actually possible -- and verifiably consistent.

Hope we don't all have to find out the hard way . . .

[Frenchy9]

It's not fair, and not good enough to say that to avoid the Reps tricks of vote suppression, the Dems sympathizers have to come out in greater numbers!!
What kind of "majority" rules is this?

Also it's not good enough, and not really useful to predict a uprising if Obama who has now very favorable polls, is not elected. What good will a civil war bring?

I start getting very worried about this vote suppression, and the so called "vote fraud" pretended by the Reps as a spin the cause trouble on election night!

Hope the Obama campaign, which has been so clever so far, will be able to master this very dangerous situation.

Please Dems, focus on this problem as much as possible.

[SilviaMaria]

Article on the NYT regarding Ohio: 200,000 votes. And the GOP is accusing ACORN of what?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/us/16vote.html?hp

[jubal8]

Why do these Republicans dishonor our military men and women, past and present, who have fought, bled and died to protect our freedoms, our democracy and our right to vote?

[notb observer]

They are the Neo-Con traitors who have co-opted the Republican party. They have no platform but to enrich themselves and their fellow cronies. They have no morals, no pride in country, and no qualms about doing whatever it takes to remain in power.
They have never bled themselves, or risked sending their own children to war. They let others do the bleeding and dying, and find ever more imaginative ways to enrich themselves from the suffering of others. They attack candidates with a real war record like Kerry and elect people like Bush who avoided service.
If there could be a term for these people, it would be EVIL INCARNATE. The irony is that they have harnessed the power of the uneducated, ignorantly patriotic and fearful masses who we know as fundamentalists and evangelicals, while not giving a damn about them or their beliefs.

[dwright]

I couldn't have said it better myself!

[cyclewerker]

maybe they are in fact Taoists...I am pretty sure that Lao Tzu said the best way to maintain control was to keep the people uninformed...so now we are creating a country where "common sense" and Joe Six Pack are the guiding principles, presenting aggression, grotesque conviction, and slander is more often better received than thoughtfulness and intelligence...and it works for all the great points you just made...the republicans are in it to enrich themselves, they don't care about this country, they don't care about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...they don't care that all men are created equal...they want to be more equal....

[oldgeek1]

To state the obvious the margins in the swing states are the concern.

If however the current polls hold, stealing the election will be much more difficult especially since there are many Senate and House races in the mix.

The state of the art in technology also makes voter fraud much more difficult. Forget the electronic voting, its the prying eyes of everyone with cell phones with cameras that make this sort of shop lifting harder.

If the predictions hold true, the voter turn out should be quite large which will help ensure a square deal for both parties.