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I suppose Republicans could rig elections if they set their minds to it. But Democrats are past masters of the craft.

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Just because they lost the last two elections doesn't mean they weren't cheating their asses off.

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Have you figured out where that registered voter count came from?

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Direct quote from "Phread":
I suppose maybe in some parallel dimension it's possible that republicans could consider the possibility of looking at the strategy of cheating in an election, but their angelic defaco nature would prevent them from ever acting in a inappropriate way in an election. Not like those evil Satan worshiping Cheat-ocrats.

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'Tis the Season of Election Dirty Tricks: Scaring Student Voters
Flyer Warns of Undercover Police Presence at Polls on Election Day
By AVNI PATEL

Oct. 6, 2008—

Election officials and watchdog groups are bracing for the wave of sneaky or suspicious phone calls, leaflets and emails that typically hit battleground states in the final 30 days of the presidential campaign.

Young voters at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Penn. have already been targeted, with students reporting that flyers have been posted around campus warning that undercover police will be at the polls on Election Day looking to make arrests.

The flyer reads like a friendly letter to fellow students relaying a warning from an "Obama supporter": "He informed me that on the day of the election there will be undercover officers to execute warrants on those who come to vote based on the anticipated turnout," writes the anonymous student in the letter which was later posted on the Drexel College Democrats website. "He advised me if I had any outstanding warrants or traffic offenses I should clear them up prior to voting."

Political experts say the Drexel flyer is a classic example of voter suppression  a practice that involves scaring, angering, or confusing voters so that they stay at home on Election Day.

"The basic idea is that you intimidate people by saying that law enforcement is using the polling place to catch scofflaws&criminals&whoever. It's basically a deterrent to keep people away from voting," said Allen Raymond, a former Republican operative who went to prison for three-months in 2006 for his involvement in a scheme to jam the phones at headquarters of the Democratic get-out-the vote effort in New Hampshire in 2002.

Raymond says that such tactics have evolved from some of the more overt voter intimidation schemes seen back in the early 1980s when the GOP's "Ballot Security Task Force" used armed off-duty police officers at the polling places in New Jersey and posted signs reading "voter fraud is a felony."

Other underhanded tactics seek to confuse voters about their voter registration. In 2006, voters in Virginia reportedly received fake voicemail messages from the state elections commission claiming that the voters were registered in another state and could be criminally charged if they cast their vote in Virginia.

"It doesn't take much to discourage people from voting," said Dr. Larry Sabato, political analyst and director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

"Generally when people see that, they think 'I just don't want to take a risk. I've got enough problems in my life, I think I'll just skip this one."

Raymond and Sabato say voters should be on the look out for a number of other time-honored tricks, including:

- "Push-poll" phone calls using the guise of a survey to push negative information about a candidate.

- Leaflets or emails listing the wrong date or a "rain date" for the election.

- Automated voicemail messages telling voters that the location of their polling place has changed.

- Repeated late night automated "robo-calls" with a message from a candidate.

Raymond says that some of the dirtiest  and most effective  tricks are designed to trigger a "latent bigoted reaction." Perhaps the most notorious example was the smear against Senator John McCain in South Carolina before the state's presidential primary in 2000.

Anonymous opponents used push-polls and flyers to spread a whisper campaign suggesting that McCain's Bangladeshi-born adopted daughter was his illegitimate black child.

In his book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative", Raymond describes how he helped devise other subtle tricks playing on voters' prejudices during the 2000 congressional race in New Jersey. One trick involved phone calls to Democratic voters of Eastern European descent using the voice of an "angry black man," while another used taped phone messages to Democratic union households using actors with thick Hispanic accents. The ultimate goal of both efforts was to make the voters "throw up their hands" and stay away from the polls.

Such schemes may be harder to pull off today now that federal laws require campaigns and parties to identify themselves to callers, but political experts say that in the age of the Internet the dirty trickster has an almost infinite ability to carry out their schemes with easy and anonymity.

"It's easy, it's untraceable, and by the time you find anything about it, the election is over," said Sabato.

Click Here for the Investigative Homepage.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Phred said:

Oops. Sorry, that's the census figures for people of voting age. The number of registered voters is from http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081007/NEWS0502/810070368/1304/LOCAL



Phred

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The flyer reads like a friendly letter to fellow students relaying a warning from an "Obama supporter": "He informed me that on the day of the election there will be undercover officers to execute warrants on those who come to vote based on the anticipated turnout," writes the anonymous student in the letter which was later posted on the Drexel College Democrats website. "He advised me if I had any outstanding warrants or traffic offenses I should clear them up prior to voting."

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phread Firefox has a spell check in it, it's pretty difficult for me to post a miss-spelled word.

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Barack Obama reportedly is outspending the McCain campaign by three to one on television; I heard a news report a little while ago that he is outspending McCain seven to one in North Carolina. Obama's ability to make the cash registers ring is his one unique contribution to American politics. But the Democrats are taking nothing for granted: voter fraud is once again playing a role in their strategy.

The main voter fraud organization is ACORN, with which Obama has a long relationship. Currently, at least seven states are investigating evidence of voter fraud perpetrated by ACORN. The latest is Missouri:

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Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

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In Nevada, law enforcement authorities executed a search warrant at ACORN's headquarters and carried off computers as well as registration records. A number of criminals were recruited by ACORN to register voters in Nevada; you can read the affidavit that supported the application for a search warrant here.

Then there's http://www.connpost.com/ci_10661361?source=most_viewed:

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One of the phony registrations was for a 7-year-old girl in the Marina Village housing complex, whose age was listed as 27 on the voter card.

Another registration came from a man who later said he couldn't have completed the voter card purported to be his because he was in jail on the date of the document.

Joseph J. Borges, the city's Republican registrar of voters, filed the complaint with state officials after months of local complaints on the tactics that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was regularly filing applications that were ruled ineligible.

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Ohio:

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Cuyahoga County Election Board members grilled representatives of a community group Tuesday about their links to suspicious voter registration cards.

In one case, a Cleveland resident was registered to vote three times in a single day, listing two different addresses.

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http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=803756:

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Milwaukee County prosecutors Tuesday charged a convicted felon with illegally registering himself and others to vote between his conviction and his sentencing.

The complaint accuses Adam Mucklin, 22, of registering to vote in June, after he was convicted of battery in April, and after a judge told him he couldn’t vote as a convicted felon. Later in June, Mucklin signed up to work as a paid voter registrar for the Community Voters Project, something else he couldn’t do as a convicted felon, the complaint says. ...

Mucklin was among 49 voter registration workers who were referred to the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office by the Milwaukee Election Commission on suspicion of election fraud. He is the second to be charged. ...

Virtually all the workers under scrutiny were employed by either the voters project or by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

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On and on it goes. In most states, hardly any serious effort is made to prevent voter fraud. If more fraud does not exist, it is only because the effort required to cast a fraudulent ballot is more trouble than most people think it's worth. But when a well-funded national organization gets into the act, targeting the swing states that Obama needs to win to assure victory, the potential exists for significant harm to the integrity of the ballot.

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Because Republican voters are good honest citizens that never commit any crimes?

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There were reports of all sorts of voter fraud by both parties in 2004.

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