I just checked out your site. How come there’s no place to leave a comment to the stories you highlight there? Not into free and open discussions on your own site? That’s sure a great way to mislead visitors into thinking there are no dissenting viewpoints.

Seriously, why no comments? Wouldn’t that add to the value of your authors’ insights?

“George W. Bush came into office promising two tenets that are in competition now: straight talk, non-parsing – and loyalty,” the former official said. “He’s either got to choose loyalty or straight talk. He can’t do both.”….

“The Bush operating style is, you be loyal to me, I’ll be loyal back to you – and I’m not going to let my critics think they can prompt a lot of resignations just by pointing out that we said we’d fire them,” said Professor Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Florida. Senior citizens in Democratic precincts are calling their election boards by the hundreds reporting that strangers, claiming to be from the Elections Office, are offering to hand-deliver their absentee ballots for them, even though there is no such program.

Wyoming. Secretary of State Joseph Meyer interpreted the statutes there to outlaw voter registration drives, like the kind where a group sets up a card table in a mall or library. One of Meyer’s oldest friends, a classmate in both high school and college, is Dick Cheney.

Philadelphia. Three weeks before the election, a white Republican alderman named Matt Robb requested that 63 polling stations in African-American neighborhoods be relocated, thereby making it more confusing for 37,000 Democrat-leaning voters.

Florida. Once again, as in the 2000 election, the state compiled a list of felons to be barred from voting. Throughout this election year, Governor Jeb Bush’s administration struggled to keep this list secret. After a lawsuit forced it into the open, people quickly saw that while some 23,000 Democrat-leaning black felons were barred from voting, almost the same number of Hispanic felons in Florida, who tend to vote Republican, were somehow not on the list.

Ohio. Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has ruled that anyone showing up in the wrong precinct will not be able to vote there, even by provisional ballot. Immediately afterward, people began to report odd phone calls telling voters their voting place had changed, sending them to the wrong precinct.

Arizona. Students at Arizona State University were told by a reporter at Fox News and the Republican county vote registrar, that registering students was a federal crime unless students plan to stay in Arizona “indefinitely” after graduation. The Supreme Court of the United States long ago ruled otherwise. [William Tell Overture concludes]

[2:39] There are some stories, though, where you really want to slow down and relish the details.

Take New Hampshire. On election day two years ago, the Democrats offered their voters a hot-line to call if they were disabled or aged and needed a ride to the polls. Early in the morning, the phone started ringing continuously, but when the volunteers answered, the callers would hang up. This jammed the lines, and legitimate callers couldn’t get through. The Democrats complained to Verizon, which immediately traced every one of the calls to a Virginia company called “GOP Marketplace.” After a police investigation, the pesident of that firm and the former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party both pled guilty to criminal charges and admitted that they’d hatched the plan to have callers from GOP Marketplace jam the line in order to prevent disabled and elderly Democrats from getting to the polls.
[3:30] But that’s not the end of the story. The court documents refer ominously to an “unindicted co-conspirator,” a national strategist, who arranged the entire dirty trick. The Democrats launched a civil suit to find out how far up the line the order went. In October, the Democrats’ lawyer, Steve Gordon, scheduled a routine deposition of one of those involved. Twenty minutes before they were all to meet in Gordon’s office, a call came in. It was the Justice Dept. of the United States in Washington, John Ashcroft’s office, issuing an emergency halt to the deposition. The deposition would have to be postponed until after the election.

[4:10] This federal intrusion into local politics was so ham-fisted and extraordinary, that it got tongues wagging all over the state, and soon enough the tongues shook loose the identity of the mystery phone jammer as one of President Bush’s top strategists, Jeffrey Tobin, the regional directory of Bush-Cheney 04 for the entire Northeast. Two weeks ago, he resigned.

[4:38] In the past, all these tactics would have been found out by the media weeks after the election, when the perpetrators would be long gone and the damage done, but this year the Internet is ready. Every day, new accounts of political scamming surface on blogs like Atrios or DailyKos. There’s even an archive of dirty tricks maintained over at eriposte, and when you browse these sites, once hidden patterns suddenly appear. It’s sort of like how historians say that serial murder was only discovered after the invention of the telegraph, which allowed cops to quickly share evidence. This year, the blogs have allowed us to see, for the very first time, the wide, wide world of serial vote suppression.

[5:20] For example, lets look at the accounts of two librarians, who’ve never met, from opposite sides of the country. In September, Meghan O’Flaherty, a librarian in Medford Oregon, got a letter.

O’Flaherty: The letter that came to me, it’s on Sproul and Associates, Inc., letterhead. [Reading from the letter:] “Our firm has been contacted to help coordinate a national non-partisan voter registration drive. We would like to be able to register people to vote in front of your location.”
That name, Sproul and Associates — I want you to remember that.

[5:53] Now let’s leave Oregon and fly off to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, where Holly McCullough at the Carnegie Library got a similar request: Nathan Sproul, for a non-partisan registration drive. But things weren’t what they seemed. Holly, for example, had patrons complaining that the Sproul workers were quizzing them about who they would vote for.

[6:12] Unfortunately for Sproul and Associates, they tried to deceive the one group of Americans whose job is research: reference librarians. So both Meghan and Holly started digging, and here’s what they found out. Sproul, it turns out, is a partisan group, run by Nathan Sproul, the former director of the Arizona Republican Party and the state’s Christian Coalition. Sproul has received more than three million dollars in contracts this year from no less than the Republican National Committee to pump up party registration.

[6:40] And, these last two weeks, Sproul has been popping up everywhere, in as many as 10 states. Let’s soar off to one of them — West Virginia. Lisa Bragg is a temp worker there who signed on with a half dozen other temps for work described as “customer service.” She remembers it required a day of training.

Bragg: They presented us with some paperwork, and on one of the papers, on the top of the paper, it says Sproul and Associates. And, it’s a script, a voter registration script.
Hitt: Um-hm.

Bragg: And it gives you different scenarios. One is for Bush and one is for Kerry, as to how you would speak to people.

Hitt: Right. Do you remember sort of what those scripts were?

Bragg: It’s right in front of me. I kept these forms.

Hitt: Oh, really! Oh, great. Can you just, like, just if you were approaching me on the street, how would you…

Bragg: Ok, I can do that.

Hitt: How would it go? Ok.

Bragg: I would say, Hello, we are doing a simple survey. If the election were held today, would you vote for President Bush or Senator Kerry? If you were to say Bush, I would say, Great. Well this a very important election year, are you registered to vote at your current residence? If you would say no, I would say, Alright, can you please fill out this voter registration form?

Hitt: If I had said Kerry, what would you have said to me?

Bragg: Thank you very much for your time. I will record this.

Hitt: Oh, so you wouldn’t hand the person a registration card at all.

Bragg: No.

[8:03] Lisa said she quit. She didn’t like all the secrecy and covert operations involved.

Bragg: I mean another thing that said this is very suspicious and, and, very underhanded, was, on another sheet of paper it says, they were telling us that if the media approached us, to go to a payphone and call this number.
Hitt: Huh.

Bragg: They didn’t want us talking to the media.

Hitt: And when you called that number, what was supposed, what were you supposed to just say?

Bragg: Uh. The media’s coming! The media’s coming! [Hitt laughs]

Bragg: I don’t know. [Both laugh] Help! Help! The media’s here! I don’t know. I don’t know, but I didn’t want to be put in a position like that. To me, that just said this is not good, you know?

Hitt: Right.

Bragg: And, not only was I lying to people, you know, about what I was doing but — I was going to hide from the media? That’s crazy.

[9:01] Ok, Tinkerbell? Are you ready to fly off to the next spot? Look! There’s Nevada. This week, though, what happens in Vegas isn’t staying there. It’s the latest chapter in the Sproul story, one that will soon get told in criminal court.

A former Sproul worker has hired a lawyer named Paul Larsen, who explains the upcoming case:

Larsen: This young man didn’t do the screening process and just registered everybody who, you know, would let him do it. This is according to his sworn affidavit. The organization indicated to him that, you know, we’re not paying you to register Democrats and actually tore up, uh, several of them in front of him, which he retrieved from the trash and we provided to the court as exhibits.
[9:43] Two more former Sproul workers in Nevada and others in Oregon have stepped forward with allegations of more registrations being ripped up. No one knows how many may have been destroyed. So these people, all Democrats, will not be able to vote at all. They think they are registered, and may show up at the polls on election day to learn that there is no legal way, provisional ballot or not, that they could vote.

[10:12] In response to the Sproul story, Republicans in Nevada have said that Democrats engage in similar tactics. Chris Carr, the executive director of the state party, made public three Democrat registration forms with non-existent addresses. This is the way these stories go. Both sides make charges that seem roughly the same.

But on this issue, there is a qualitative difference between Democrats and Republicans. I called both camps and asked them to give me their worst stuff about the other side.

[10:40] Here’s what the Republican spokesman, Scott Hoganson, said.

Hoganson: We have been compiling hundreds of pages of media reports from all over the country of documented cases of investigations of fraudulent voter registration cases. Everything from police in Ohio investigating a pro-Kerry effort to submit faulty registration forms and pay the people with crack cocaine, to a gentleman in Denver Colorado who brags and laughs on television about having registered to vote 35 times, just the number and degree of, of faulty and questionable and outright fraudulent registrations is really quite stunning in its depth and breadth.
[11:29] He sent me a copy. It’s all newspaper clips, many of them unverified charges. There are a few that check out. There really was, for example, this white guy working for an outfit affiliated with the NAACP, who registered voters under names like Mary Poppins and Jeffrey Dahmer. And it’s true, he was paid in crack cocaine. Very bad, and a great story. And then there was the Colorado guy, who registered himself 35 times. Also true, also very bad.

[11:59] But the reason you are going to be hearing about these two examples, over and over in the official Republican talking points in the next few days, is that that’s the best they’ve got in their hundreds of pages.

[12:10] Strange[ly] enough, reading the very stories they sent often undercut[s] their main argument. For example, that Colorado guy? Here’s a line from the article the GOP sent me: “Just because you register someone 35 times doesn’t mean they vote 35 times.” Or here’s another one: “Elections officials of both parties, however, say that bad registrations do not necessarily translate into election day fraud. New identification laws, as well as signature checks, make ballot-box stuffing extremely difficult”

[12:42] Let me repeat: these are quotes from the official Republican vote-fraud press packet. Where there are real cases of registration fraud in this compendium, they usually involve poor people getting caught, not trying to fix the vote, but trying to squeeze a few extra bucks or, ok, a nice chunk of crack, out of these organizations that stupidly pay the temps a fee for each registration card turned in.

[13:07] But don’t take my word for it. Again, the GOP’s own clip file. Registration irregularities are “not an attempt to commit fraud but rather the result of greedy workers who get paid for every voter they sign up, or already registered voters who forget and register again.”

[13:25] Meanwhile, the incidents of vote suppression on the Republican side involve massive numbers and, soon enough, actual jail time for high-ranking officials connected directly to the party. Chuck McGee, the executive director of the New Hampshire GOP is scheduled to be sentenced. Sproul is awaiting trail.

[13:43] Then this Florida felony purge list, which almost knocked 23,000 African-Americans off the voting roles, while keep arguably the same number of Republican-leaning felons free to vote. Recently the Sarasota Herald-Tribune broke the story that Governor Jeb Bush, the President’s brother, ordered the state to proceed with the felony purge list even though the database company that put it all together informed him that it was so hopelessly flawed he should “pull the plug.”

[14:10] So, are they all the same? Is the crack-head faking a handful of registrations for Jeffrey Dahmer the same kind of thing as wiping 17,000 voters in Nevada, 23,000 voters in Florida, 30,000 voters in Ohio completely off the rolls?