The crowd at NRO's 'The Corner' just suffered another hit with this one. I don't know if they consider her an intellectual, but she was still a member of the tribe. Here is the entire blog post from the Political Insider in the Atlanta Journal Consitution:

Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 07:57 PM

Barry Goldwater's granddaughter voted early in Fulton County on Tuesday -- for Barack Obama.

This isn't a surprise to those who follow Arizona politics. Here's a piece from May of this year posted on Democratic Underground.

Alison Goldwater Ross, 45, waited about an hour and a half to cast her vote at the Fulton County government center in Atlanta, for the Democratic presidential candidate.

"I'm avoiding the crowds on Election Day," Goldwater Ross told my AJC colleague, Mary Lou Pickel.

Barry Goldwater, recognized as the founder of modern Republican conservatism and the 1964 GOP candidate for president, served 30 years in the U.S. Senate. He died in 1998, at age 89.

The Goldwaters and the McCains have a history of antagonism.

"Coming from a political family, I had insight into a lot of things," Goldwater Ross said. Of McCain, she said, "I don't have respect for him."

After the last 8 years of listening to these people, I can't help but smirk every now and then. I'm losing track of how many members of their tribe, the intellectuals, the former high officials and just the average Not-Joe-Not-a-Plumber types that they have lost to the Obama side recently. Kathleen Parker, George Will, David Brooks, Ken Adelman, Colin Powell, The Chicago Tribune and many more that aren't on the top of my head at the moment.

Who's next, I wonder. Barbara Bush?

In another thread, bslev wished for a website where he could discuss violations of the VRA. I don't have a website, but I spent time last night tracking down Georgia's troubles with the Dept. of Justice and the Social Security Administration.

Karen Handel (R) is the Secretary of State in charge of elections. Her zealousness for guarding the citizens of Georgia from Voting Fraud has triggered over two million voter verifications to the SSA database since October 2007. Under HAVA (2002), the state and SSA have an agreement for checking new voter verifications if the voter can't produce a state issued ID. So it is understandable that the SSA sent a somewhat peevish letter to Ms. Handel on Oct. 3rd. This is the main substance of the letter:

Under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, we have an agreement with your State to assist in verifying newly-registered voters.  Consistent with this statute, part of this agreement requires us to verify the last 4 digits of the Social Security numbers of individuals who do not have an acceptable State-issued identification, such as a valid driver's license.

 

Since October 1, 2007, however, we have received nearly two million requests for verification from your State.  Such a volume appears to be much greater than one would expect, given that States of comparable or larger populations have a significantly lower number of verification requests.

 

I ask that you look into this matter to ensure that your election officials are verifying only those newly-registered voters who do not have suitable State-issued identification.  If your State's election officials are requesting verifications not covered by the verification agreement, we ask that you bring your procedures into conformance with your legal obligations.

Then on October 8th, the DOJ sent their letter to the GA Attorney General after consultation with the SSA and officials in the SOS office. The letter outlined the activities done by the state and determined that they come under Section 5 of the VRA, which requires either judicial review by the US District Court for the District of Columbia or administrative review by the US Attorney General

The activities outlined in the letter include:

...revisions to voter registration applications; a process of attempting to verify voter registration information against databases maintained by both the Georgia Department of Driver's Services and the federal Social Security Administration (SSA); generating and distributing reports of the results of those checks to county registrars for further action; and issuing a series of guidance memoranda from the Office of the Secretary of State to the counties concerning a number of aspects of the identity verification/voter registration processes.

Then the next day, Oct. 9, Jose Morales filed a lawsuit against Karen Handel for trying to repeatedly deny his right to vote. A US citizen since Nov. 2007, Morales registered to vote in September 2008 and received his first letter from the couinty where he lives two weeks later, saying he would not be able to vote unless he came to the Elections center with his proof of citizenship. The letter also warned that if he did not comply with this requirement, he would no longer be registered to vote.

Morales went to the office and showed the clerk his passport and received his voters registration card two weeks later on Oct 3.  And then five days later, he received another letter saying that he might not be a US citizen and he should contact the Elections office by October 15th or show up for a hearing on the same day, or his name would be struck from the voter rolls.

As of Friday, Oct. 10, Handel's office had asked counties to check the status of 2,675 individuals statewide whose driver's license records indicated they were not citizens, but who had registered to vote, according to Handel's office.

Karen Handel insists that she is only following HAVA and is fighting all attempts to stop her voter checking. She had told the GOP during the September convention that it was a myth that there was a surge of new voters for Barack Obama. However, there are 406,000 new voters in GA this year and a record amount of people taking advantage of early voting, and they have given Obama a 6 point advantage according to SurveyUSA. of The rest of the story can be found here along with links to related articles.
 

 

 

Maybe it really is true -- what goes around, comes around.

SACRAMENTO -- The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud. [LA Times.]

Mark Jacoby's firm, Young Political Majors (YPM) was hired by the California Republican Party to register voters. The only requirement to perform this job is a California law that says the signature gatherers must be eligible to vote in California. Apparently, Mr. Jacoby does not live in California, so he used an address where he used to live -- as a child.

But that's not what first brought him to the notice of the police. It seems there was a rather large fraud that was also involved:

Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.

YPM received  $7-$12 per head if the person registered as a Republican.

For reasons that are unclear and unexplained, it took seven squad cars and nine police officers to arrest Mr. Jacoby outside of a hotel in Ontario, CA.

Mr. Jacoby's attorney, Dan Goldfine, gave what is quite possibly my favorite line in this article when he said the arrest was part of a "long pattern of harassment against Mr. Jacoby for an entirely valid voter registration effort."

Mr. Jacoby was released on bail Sunday evening, but he might want to keep more bail money handy. Investigations into YPM have already started in such diverse areas as Florida and Massachusetts.  And these came after his recent stint as a defendent in an Arizona civil rights lawsuit.

The California Republican party played its part well when it announced that the charges against Mr. Jacoby are "politically motivated." It shouldn't surprise anyone to find that a Democrat is the culprit behind the motivation. They say that Secretary of State, Debra Bowen (D), is "using her office to play politics."