I would write about this from the makeup file, since it happened while I was out of town, but I’ll give you this updated story from the New York Times (via the Tuscaloosa News) instead:
Federal and state authorities are looking into accusations of voting fraud in three largely black counties of Alabama, including Perry and Lowndes Counties, which played a historic role in the struggle for black voting rights in the 1960s.
In May, a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times. The affidavits were presented to state officials in Montgomery, the capital, and after the June 3 primary, the Alabama attorney general, Troy King, a Republican, seized voting records from the primary election in Bullock, Lowndes and Perry Counties.
The United States Department of Justice posted a team of observers to monitor the primary, and the Alabama secretary of state, Beth Chapman, a Republican, reported hearing from one of the federal observers that a candidate had “free rein” of a polling place, where campaigning is prohibited, passing out sample ballots and instructing voters how to vote.
This story is disquieting on many levels. Just as disturbing as the obvious concerns about voting fraud is the racial undertone permeating the story.
According to the Times:
Blacks hold a majority on the five-member Perry County Commission. And an influential political organization, the Perry County Civic League, founded during the civil rights movement by one of the movement’s leaders, Albert Turner Sr., plays a large role in filling other offices.
The “biracial citizens group” The Democracy Defense League is the organization that gathered the affidavits and drew attention to the irregularities after being “critical of voting abuses in the area for the last three years,“ the Timessaid.
Hence, the racial tension.
“The Republican Party has an unscripted mandate to target Democratic counties, and African-Americans particularly,” county commissioner Albert Turner Jr. told the Times.
But it sure seems more about numbers—particularly, the numbers of absentee ballots used in the election on June 3.
In that contest, 1,114 voters—fully 25 percent of the total electorate—cast absentee ballots. That’s a percentage that is six times the state average and a figure that Chapman called “astronomical.“ By way of comparison, only 365 absentee ballots were cast that day in Jefferson County, home to Birmingham and a population 60 times that of Perry County.
In addition, the DDL submitted affidavits alleging that some people voted six times in the same election, the Times said. One young man told DDL officials he had been paid by local officials to use an absentee ballot ever since he had been eligible to vote.
“The last time I voted, I was paid $30,” he said this week. “It’s pretty common. It ain’t nothing new.”
But not all Democrats in Perry County believe the investigation is racially or politically motivated. According to the Times:
The Perry County district attorney, Michael W. Jackson, a Democrat and the first black to be elected to the post, called early in June for a federal investigation into possible voting irregularities, particularly focusing on absentee ballots.
“Just the volume, the sheer number of it,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview. “For there to be that many, it’s suspicious. When you get the absentee ballots, it’s a lot easier to pull that off, forge their names, vote for them.”
He added, “It certainly needs to be looked at, because given the historic significance of Perry County, we want to make sure candidates and the public have a fair process.”
Read more first-person accounts of fraud in the rest of the Times story here.
And the most sinister aspect of these allegations is the despicable irony that all these things are alleged in an area there the modern civil rights movement was born. From the Times:
The incongruity is lost on no one here. It was here in downtown Marion on a night in 1965 that an Alabama trooper flung a young local activist against a cigarette machine and then shot him in the stomach. And that killing led directly to the Voting Rights Act enfranchising blacks throughout the South.
Just as Alabama is gearing up to prosecute the state trooper who acknowledges having fired on the activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 43 years ago, federal agents came to the state last month to observe whether voting is free of fraud.
What those who sell their votes fail—or simply refuse—to recognize is that by selling their votes, they are disenfranchising themselves all over again, the police dogs and sit-ins and Freedom Rides and marches and fire hoses notwithstanding.
Take some time to read the complete Times article. It’s an excellent overview of the situation, the investigation and the shockingly blasé attitudes about the integrity of the vote that prevail these areas, where the right to vote freely was once worth the precious human lives of many who died to secure it.
Since corporate newspaper management won’t listen to their employees about how their compulsive cuts are ravaging the industry, one guy thinks he has the solution: Talk to them in language they’ll understand—in other words, sue them.
A News & Observer subscriber is suing the newspaper for cutting staff and the size of the paper.
Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer, filed the suit last month in Wake Superior Court. He says he renewed his subscription in May just before the paper announced on June 16 the layoffs of 70 staff members and cuts in news pages.
The paper, he says, is now not worth what he signed up for and therefore the cuts breached the paper’s contract with him ...
In a phone interview today, Hempstead, 42, said he could cancel his subscription but filed the suit to make a point.
“I wanted to get the newspaper’s attention and the news industry’s attention,“ said Hempstead, who is a former reporter at the Fayetteville Observer, adding that he loves The News & Observer.
“I hate to see what companies that run newspapers are doing to the product,“ Hempstead said. “The idea that taking the most important product and reducing the amount of news and getting rid of staff to me seems pointless to how you should run a newspaper business.“
Hempstead told the N&O that he wants to “keep the paper from reducing news coverage and wants the newspaper industry to revisit its business model.“
But N&O management was too busy joking about the lawsuit to get the message.
“We’ve had some really good papers recently, and they’re worth more than the 36 cents a day that Mr. Hempstead is paying us,“ (executive editor John) Drescher said.
“In fact, he owes me money,“ Drescher continued. “So when he gets a lawyer, he can work with my lawyer and figure out how much he’s going to pay me for the excellent coverage he’s been getting recently.“
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is a national co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign.
She’s also been mentioned as a possible VP candidate for him.
I’d say they need to work on their communication skills.
Fiorina made some comments Monday about the frustration women often express “over the fact many health insurance plans cover Viagra but not birth control medication,“ according to CNN’s Political Ticker.
A pool reporter traveling with the Arizona senator yesterday asked him for his take on the issue.
“I certainly do not want to discuss that issue,“ McCain said bluntly.
... As if it wasn’t obvious.
But the reporter persisted, rephrasing her question and pressing him for his view on whether he thought that is a double standard.
It’s impossible not to giggle a bit at what happened next: An eight-second silence from McCain as he ponders whatever to say.
(See the complete exchange—a better version of the clip, minus the annoying MSNBC anchor—over at CNN.com.)
Talk about your pregnant pauses!
AWK-WARD!!!!
Eight seconds on a bull?
Try spending eight seconds with the national media on an issue that—ahem—straddles the twin tigers of gender equality and health insurance while simultaneously trying to attract women voters and avoid expanding government bureaucracy.
In politics, there’s regular stupid: Ill-informed decisions, poorly worded statements, public gaffes of all types and the occasional display of inappropriate and/or regrettable words or actions by otherwise relatively well-meaning politicians who just make careless mistakes.
And then there’s super-stupid: Displays of ignorance so outrageous, gaffes so outlandish, comments so offensive and actions so out of touch that it seems impossible that they are unintentional – but they are.
This story is an example of super-stupid.
From the UK’s Daily Mail:
Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions.
But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis.
The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S.
What could they have been thinking? Wolfing down an 18-course dinner after a six-course lunch – a “gastronomic extravaganza,” as the author said – when people are eating patties made out of dried mud? When people are lucky to get one meal of rice a day? When babies are starving? When millions are going days without eating a single meal at all?
More, including the complete menu for the meals and photos of the G-8 event, here ...
Barack Obama has been keeping close tabs on Georgia over the past few weeks. It’s one of the historically red states Obama’s campaign believes the junior senator from Illinois might be able to turn blue – or, at least, a nice, rosy shade of pink.
You’ll remember that Obama trounced Hillary Clinton, 67 percent to 31 percent, in Georgia’s Democratic primary on Super Tuesday (Feb. 5). He ran up 50-point margins in some counties.
Former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, a Macon native who made his name in the Senate on foreign affairs and military policy, has been mentioned in more than a few circles as a potential VP choice for Obama. (This is nothing new, writes Michael Crowley for The New Republic.)
(Speaking of Nunn, he’s already making time in the swing state of Colorado—and with another might-have-been-presidential-candidate. Check this out, from RealClearPolitics.com.)
And McCain leads Obama in the Peach State by a not-very-red 6.7 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics average.
But Jim Wooten of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution isn’t impressed. In a blog post ahead of Obama’s appearance at a Cobb County school on Tuesday, Wooten explained why he believes the big crowd sure to turn out at the rally won’t turn Georgia blue in November.
“Georgians are occasionally surprised by the leftward drift of politicians they elect, but they do not knowingly choose candidates with the ideological bent of Barack Obama,” he says.
Obama “cannot win Georgia. Nohow, no way.“
Maybe … maybe not. In each of the three times Georgia has gone blue since 1968, the Democratic nominee was a native Southerner. At the least, it’s looking like McCain will need to spend time and resources shoring up support there.
And while Georgia may stay red, what he’ll have to do to keep it is sure to be making McCain feel a bit blue.
