While Bloggers Worry, Campaign Says GOP Suppression Efforts Are Failing

[babylonsister]

Obama Lawyers Defend ‘Vote Fraud’ Efforts
While Bloggers Worry, Campaign Says GOP Suppression Efforts Are Failing
By Jonathan E. Kaplan 11/3/08 2:20 PM


Flickr: nshepard

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Liberal bloggers talk about how Obama could do more to publicize voting problems — like technical glitches in voting machines and GOP efforts to hold down turnout — in the same way it has countered Republican-generated smears and robocalls.

“I remain not just exceedingly skeptical,” the voter protection blogger Brad Friedman wrote in his blog, Bradblog, last week, “but downright furious at the party’s brazen willingness to allow millions of votes to go either uncounted, incorrectly recorded or recorded in such a way that is 100 percent unverifiable by any human being,”

“They need to get over their tortured thinking that discussing these issues somehow depresses turnout,” Friedman wrote in an email, “There is zero evidence for that thinking.”

Obama’s chief election law attorney, Bob Bauer, disagrees with that argument. Bauer says that evidence from the 2004 election demonstrates that highlighting problems with voting machinery and voter suppression turns off Democratic voters.

“It’s never helpful if the environment is filled with hyperbole about false claims.” Bauer said in a phone interview Thursday, “Voters don’t want to hear it. We’re not going to fall for {the Republicans’} public-relations bait. But if they take a concrete action we will respond to it.”

Bauer maintains that the Obama campaign has moved quickly to respond to technical problems with voting equipment and quell any efforts to deceive voters.

For example, in northern Nevada, Bauer said, many Latino voters had received calls telling them that they could vote by phone. The Obama campaign responded to set the record straight.

When voting machines used in early voting started flipping Obama votes to McCain recently, lawyers from the campaign’s Machine Task Force were dispatched to West Virginia to make sure the machines were properly calibrated.

The Obama campaign, however, has not held a single press conference to highlight these issues.

Bauer and other lawyers close to the campaign, however, said that the campaign’s voter protection effort is more aggressive, more robust and started earlier than that of the Kerry campaign four years ago.

The Obama team has more than 100 paid staffers and full-time volunteers working on voter protection, according to a memorandum sent last week to members of Congress from the Democratic National Committee’s staff attorney, Justin Levitt.

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http://washingtonindependent.com/16281/obama-lawyers-defend-%E2%80%98vote-fraud%E2%80%99-efforts

[Lifelong Protester]

1. thanks for sharing this

I was beginning to think I was nuts.