Turnout Must Thwart Frauds, Lies, Health Threats

Massive voting by Americans in the midterm elections on Nov. 6 is the best way to respond to Republican campaign lies, fear-mongering, racism, and voter suppression intended rig elections for the foreseeable future.

The effect would be to continue the massive tax cuts enabling rule by the GOP donor class, which reacts to increasing budget deficits by advocatin  austerity conditions that would kill tens of thousands of Americans by reducing the safety net on health care especially.

So, it’s not enough to document abuses and read about them. It’s time to vote in such overwhelming numbers that would-be tricksters are intimidated, overwhelmed and otherwise rendered ineffective for the plan announced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to cut the budget deficit by attacking Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

New restrictions on the Affordable Care Act’s “Obamacare” protections for pre-existing conditions would likely be attempted also after 70 previous attempts by congressional Republicans (no matter what election season rhetoric), as would be threats against the continuation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump campaign election rigging and other corruption.

The scope of the crisis has finally become too grave for the major media to ignore, as indicated by such coverage as Paul Krugman’s New York Times column A Party Defined by Its Lies: At this point, good people can’t be good Republicans and the Washington Post’s Judge rules against Brian Kemp over Ga. voting restrictions days before gubernatorial election. .

Other such recent mainstream media columns and news reports are excerpted below in an appendix.

Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist and political commentator, wrote (A Party Defined by Its Lies: At this point, good people can’t be good Republicans) that the Times forbade him from using the word “lie” for any American politician, no matter what the circumstances, when he began his oped column in 1999.

In similar fashion, the mainstream media have for years virtually ignored even well-documented instances mass voter suppression and electronic election-rigging.

Fortunately, investigative reporter and author Greg Palast, shown above right, is among those who have fought hard against those tactics via columns, books and litigation.

Palast has documented GOP election cheating in such news reports as GOP’s Brian Kemp Purged 1 in 10 Georgia Voters: I’ve Got the Names for Truthout and at election eve reporting and photos on Trump’s bigotry at his Nov. 5 rally, illustrated by Palast photos at left taken by his team working undercover at a Trump rally in Georgia.

“All my East and West coast liberal friends are telling me not to worry, thinking the Dems have got  #Midterms2018 in the bag, Palast wrote. “What they’re not seeing is stuff like this. This is what much of America looks like. …Went undercover at yesterday’s #Trump/#Kemp rally at the Middle #Georgia Regional Airport in Macon, GA. It was scary as shit: QAnon, Proud Boys, and a safe-zone for white supremacists. Just a patriot hate fest.”

One former Washington Post political reporter unsuccessful in publishing allegations about electronic cheating that proved decisive in the 2004 presidential election confided to me that his newspaper had required years ago “one hundred percent proof,” a near-impossible standard for almost any news topic, before it would publish a story that might undercut public confidence in election integrity and official “results.”

By contrast, this investigative site and our 2013 book Presidential Puppetry documented, as have many others in the alternative media, how candidates (primarily Republicans in the major races have won elections via a variety of voter suppression and vote-rigging techniques (in addition to such long-standing tactics as dark money, misinformation and such dirty tricks as hoked-up sex scandals).

Puppetry showed, for example, how investigative reporter Greg Palast proved that Republicans and their election contractors stole the 2000 presidential election by quietly removing the voter registrations of more than 100,000 Floridians (mostly Democrats) shortly before the election that cost Democrats far more lost votes than the “hanging chads” that riveted the media.

The massive confusion and lack of congressional concern and news coverage allowed the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court to vote 5-4 on a party line vote to stop a vote recount and award the presidency to their fellow Republican George W. Bush.

The book reported also on how Alabama political operative Dana Jill Simpson had sought to describe as a whistleblower to Congress, the FBI and the news media how her former Republican colleges such as Bush White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove won many elections nationally by a variety of dirty tricks.

These included, by her own account and our subsequent investigations, frame-ups on corruption charges of prominent Democrats, such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, electronic tampering of election results (victimizing Siegelman in his 2002 re-election bid, and then others such as the Kerry presidential bid in 2004), and grooming with the help of dark money donors unethical politicians to ascend to secretary of state positions where the most devious pols could rig elections for others and, if they proved successful enough, ascend to higher office themselves.

Simpson was largely unsuccessful in winning congressional, Justice Department or media interest in her evidence, although CBS 60 Minutes did feature some of her allegations regarding the Siegelman frame-up in a 2008 broadcast and best-selling House of Saud, House of Bush author Craig Unger heavily quoted her findings in his important 2012 book Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove’s Secret Kingdom of Power.

Meanwhile, Palast and other authors, litigators and activists sought to maintain visibility for relevant issues, particularly regarding the core civic function of fair elections. In addition to the well-known civil rights groups, Ohio-based author-litigators Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Clifford Arneback, Code Red author Jonathan Simon of the Election Defense Alliance, and the editorial teams of Russ Baker at WhoWhatWhy and Rob Kall of OpEdNews have been tireless in documenting election shenanigans in the alternative media and to the courts. 

But Republican majorities on the Supreme Court have significantly worsened these election problems by two activist decisions rewarding the GOP majority’s radical right base.

In a 2011 5-4 party line vote, the court overturned the nation’s federal campaign finance law in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, thereby enabling major donors to fund campaigns in many ways by avoiding previous limits.

Then in Shelby County (Alabama) v. Holder, court Republicans substituted their opinion in 2013 for that of Congress by removing the extra Justice Department scrutiny that lawmakers had ordered for localities tarnished by their history of illegal voter suppression and similar tactics to reduce minority vote. The court’s Republicans theorized that officials would no longer act in biased fashion.

“Five years after the ruling, nearly a thousand polling places have been closed in the country, with many of the closed polling places in predominantly African-American counties,” according to research published in September by the Pew Trusts. “Research shows that the changing of voter locations and reduction in voting locations can reduce voter turnout.”