Will SEVEN MILLION people be prevented from voting this Tuesday? (C. Pierce)

[bullwinkle428]

"Frankly, what scares me most about the upcoming midterm elections is not the idea of a Republican Senate which, I admit, is a legitimate cause for abject terror. What scares me the most are the events at the actual polls. I will not be surprised in the least, in certain states with certain tight races, if some of our "open carry" strict constructionists decide that Election Day might be a good time to exercise their Second Amendment rights and do some educational outreach around various polling places. To keep away the threat of the New Black Panthers, or Ebola, or something, and to constitutionally educate some of Those voters away from the ballot box. I will not be surprised at that at all.

...

Greg Palast is one of those inconveniently stubborn journalists -- much like Glenn Greenwald and the late Gary Webb -- who gets his teeth into a story and shakes it bloody right there in the middle of the parlor, dreadfully inconveniencing the pampered swells of the elite political press, and revolting the serious thinkers who get to go on PBS and moan about the genuine crisis of American political civility. Palast has been on the voter-caging story ever since people like Pastor Whiting got screwed 14 years ago. And, this week, writing for the Al Jazeera America news site, Palast dropped a bomb into next week's elections that has left credibility shrapnel all over the democratic process, if anyone cares to look for it."

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America. At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election - a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states - Georgia, Virginia and Washington - have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.

The three states' lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim - ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too - 1 in 11 - are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities. If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week's electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate - and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Cage_Fight