Katherine R

It has been absolutely clear since my first post that I would vote for the Democratic nominee for President. I would guess most of you also made up your own minds long ago—I would be a little upset with you if you hadn’t. But this is almost certainly the most important election in my life to date, and I find I can’t keep my mouth shut.

I’ve never been able to figure out George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure him out in the 2000 campaign. Here was this man who proclaimed his own compassion, who spoke of his Christian faith with all apparent sincerity—and presided over the Texas capital punishment system, a well-oiled execution assembly line that makes a mockery of equal protection of the law, the right to counsel, and due process of law, and which has probably killed at least one innocent person.

This is the quotation that explains the Bush administration for me, better than any other:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”–The Great Gatsby

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As Moe recently learned, it’s always a good idea to double check and make sure you’re really on the voting rolls. It’s common enough to be mistakenly deleted, and there are less innocent reasons as well. That kind’s less common, but more interesting.

For instance (via Marshall)

The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.

The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.

Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

“We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me,” said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else.

The landlord says Voters Outreach was evicted for non-payment of rent. Another source said the company has now moved on to Oregon where it is once again registering voters. It’s unknown how many registrations may have been tossed out, but another ex-employee told Eyewitness News she had the same suspicions when she worked there.

It’s going to take a while to sort all of this out, but the immediate concern for voters is to make sure you really are registered.

Call the Clark County Election Department at 455-VOTE orclick here to see if you are registered.

The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee. Similar complaints have been received in Reno where the registrar has asked the FBI to investigate.

You’ll see why these terms are highlighted in a minute….I decided to use my crack investigative skills (yeah, pretty much just Google) to work on this–it’s more fun than extraordinary rendition.

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