Forum Post: Two Republicans Arrested for Attempted Double Voting Just "Testing" the System, They Say

Two Republicans Arrested for Attempted Double Voting Just "Testing" the System, They Say

Tuesday, 13 November 2012 14:06 By Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog | Report

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12724-two-republicans-arrested-for-attempted-double-voting-just-testing-the-system-they-say

Last Saturday, we told you about a rare case of polling place voter fraud, when a Republican voter attempted to vote twice in Nevada during Early Voting in the state. Appropriately enough, she was quickly arrested and taking into custody by the FBI. Nevada's system of preventing double-voting at the polls worked well and efficiently, it seems, despite the woman's deluded, disinformed, Fox "News"-fueled belief to the contrary.

Now, however, 56-year old Roxanne Rubin, the woman who was arrested when she showed up for work at the Riviera hotel-casino last Friday for her attempted voter fraud, is reportedly claiming that she was just "testing" the system.

And she's not the only one. On Election Day, another Republican, this one a party-trained poll watcher, was detained in New Mexico after claiming to have been "testing" the system by obtaining a second ballot.

Ironically, after years of false allegations of "Democratic voter fraud" by the GOP and their minions, it has been Republicans this year who have been found defrauding the system in state after state, in case after case. They are failing their own "test"...

Ryan Reilly at TPM points us to this followup story on Rubin's arrest, posted Monday by the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Roxanne Rubin was upset poll workers did not check her ID, so she tried to vote twice to prove a point, according to the Nevada secretary of state's office....In a sworn affidavit, criminal investigator Shelley Neiman wrote that Rubin was "willing to risk the penalty in order to expose what she perceived as a weakness in the voting process" and that Rubin "was unhappy with the process; specifically in that her identification was not checked."Neiman wrote that Rubin "wanted to make a point" by testing the system and trying to cast another vote.

Well, apparently Rubin made her point: The system works. And, hopefully, she'll go to jail to set an example to others who might try to defraud the system, as Rubin had feared.

As noted in the LVRJ article, "According to state law, when voters register, they provide their information, including a Nevada driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number if they don't have a license. ... That information is compared with the DMV and Social Security records. If it matches, voters are not asked for ID when they vote ... Poll workers can ask for ID when a signature does not match."

Meanwhile, in New Mexico on Tuesday, as Reilly notes, it happened again:

a Republican poll watcher was taken into police custody after also apparently trying to test the system. According to the Las Cruces Sun-News, the man voted, then obtained a second provisional ballot and announced he was simply “testing the system to see if people could get away with voting twice. The Sun-News offered these details:

[Grant County Clerk Robert ] Zamarripa said because the man had already voted, the ballot-on-demand system issued him a provisional ballot, which would be counted separate and by hand to determine whether he was both a qualified voter, and had not already voted. ... Zamarripa said the man "misused his credentials as a [Republican] challenger.""Every other challenger gave the presiding judge their credentials or their party gave the Clerk's office a list of credentialed challengers who would be working the polls that day," he said. This man only pulled out his credentials after he received his provisional ballot and announced that he had already voted. ... Zamarripa said in his experience, this is the first time something like this has happened during an election in Grant County. ... "Our office will do whatever it takes to make sure that individuals like this get the maximum that the law allows," he said. "Hopefully it will make a statement that will let other individuals know that it is not acceptable at all to do this in Grant County."

Apparently this is what happens when Republicans buy into their own anti-voter propaganda and make heroes of discredited, convicted federal criminals like GOP fraudster/propagandists like James O'Keefe, who was under criminal investigation himself for voter fraud charges related to his conspiracy to "test" the system during the New Hampshire Primary this year.

To prove their was "voter fraud" in NH, as "we explained in dismantling his scam at the time, he and his gang of merry con-artists actually committed it, rather than capture any actual voters actually, ya know, perpetrating it.

His stunt resulted in the conservative Republican Mayor of Manchester, at the time, becoming so outraged that he called for O'Keefe and his pals to be "arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law". No charges have been filed, to our knowledge, in the case, at this time, however.

As Josh Marshall observes today, "Once again, the top source of voter fraud in the United States today seems to be James O’Keefe wannabes 'testing' the system by committing voter fraud."

There is no word yet if the detained Republican poll challenger in New Mexico was working with the pretend "non-partisan" group calling themselves "True the Vote", a Republican-funded "voter fraud" fraudster outfit that had promised to deploy one million challengers to the polls on Tuesday in order to ferret out "Democratic voter fraud".

To date, we've not heard of any of those "million" GOP poll watchers catching even a single instance of "voter fraud", though on Tuesday, as we noted at the time, Franklin County, OH officials had rejected their applications to be poll watchers in that county after it was discovered that they had forged the signatures of volunteers on their poll watcher applications. We also noted that day that the Houston NAACP had announced their own volunteers were being "attacked" by True the Vote poll watchers for having given bottles of water to voters who had been forced to stand in line for hours to vote.

The BRAD BLOG initially reported on True the Vote, and its founder Catherine Engelbrecht's fraudulent "voter fraud" video used to launch the group's well-funded effort back in 2010.

In early October this year, as detailed by David Edwards at RAW STORY, video taken at a "Poll Challenger Training" headed up by Pat Morlen, the Vice Chair of the Sandoval County, NM Republican Party, revealed the GOP official training poll challengers to use illegal tactics to challenge voters with erroneous information about state ID requirements for voting.

"The trainer also falsely claims that voters who changed their address but stayed in the same voting district should receive a provisional ballot and that no assistance would be provided to non-English speaking voters," Edwards reported, describing the video at the time. "Morlen, who is now a tea party activist, later mocks disabled voters in New Mexico."

All of this comes on the heels of years of Republicans and their media echo chamber publicizing fraudulent claims of ACORN, the now-defunct, four-decade old community organizing association, having committed "voter fraud" on behalf of Democrats. In fact, they never did.

Meanwhile, criminal voter registration fraud investigations continue in Florida, in Virginia and in Colorado into the shady firm hired by the Republican National Committee this year to carry out its own voter registration effort across the country, after allegations of hundreds of fraudulent registration forms being submitted across the state of Florida and Democratic voter registrations forms reportedly destroyed by the company's workers in a number of states. Those instances followed on thousands of allegedly fraudulent voter registrationsturned in by the company hired by the Sacramento County, CA Republican Party to do voter registration earlier this year. That company, Momentum Political Services, company was allegedly headed up by a "professional con artist" who was paid a $50,000 "bounty" by the GOP to collect Republican registrations only. Even Fox "News" contributor and former Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich found his own campaign under criminal election fraud investigation earlier this year after he admitted, on camera, that his campaign had turned in more than a thousand fraudulent signatures in a failed bid to earn a spot on the GOP Presidential Primary ballot in his home state of Virginia.

Perhaps if Republicans want to ferret out "voter fraud", they ought to a) stop doing it themselves and b) start calling for accountability for actual voter fraud criminals, such as Mitt Romney, Ann Coulter and many, many other very high-profileRepublicans who appear to have defrauded the system over the past year alone.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

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Walmart Workers Gear Up for Black Friday Strike; California Workers Announce Second Strike

Tuesday, 13 November 2012 10:33 By Yana Kunichoff, Truthout | Report

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12702-walmart-workers-gear-up-for-black-friday-strike

Black Friday's shopping bonanza brings people out to line up in front of stores for hours before it begins. It has trampled people, but not profits for companies that reap a large chunk of their annual sales on the day after Thanksgiving.

At Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, the world's largest shopping day generates more than a quarter of annual sales.

Now, with the help of online organizing and Our Walmart, Walmart workers are gearing up for a walkout on Black Friday. The workers hope to highlight what they say is the unfairness of having to work for low wages, in poor conditions, while Walmart profits.

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The Mandate of Hell: How Not to Change the World

Tuesday, 13 November 2012 09:47 By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | News Analysis

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12710-the-mandate-of-hell-how-not-to-change-the-world