How the GOP will try to steal the 2016 election

Just in the last week of the election, the Republicans were caught using seventy different kinds of vote-rigging, to steal the election.

Not 70 instances of cheating. 70 different kinds of cheating. Count with me!

First, rig the entire process before the voters even start getting into the process:

• Stacking elections boards with supporters of vote-suppression efforts
• In Ohio, a Republican vote-suppression group, a group under criminal investigation, has managed to gets its employees hired as the actual poll workers
• Firing election officials who try to make it easier for voters to vote
• Failing to notify the public of rules changes

Next, get Democratic voters out of the process:

• Illegal vote purges in Ohio
• Invalidating voter registrations submitted on the last day of registration
• Purging black voters off the rolls
• Suing blacks in court to prove their registrations are valid
• Launching challenges at the courthouse for legal voters who happen to be black
• Voter data “lost” at the motor vehicle bureau
• Imposing illegal residence requirements on students
• Telling registered voters that they’re not registered
• Setting up registration verification rules which are certain to miss thousands of voters

Deceiving voters:

• Deceptive voting guides
• Robocalls telling people they can vote Wednesday – calls from the supervisor of elections
• Robo-call scare tactics; my favorite was Romney the Mormon telling voters that the Obama the Christian is the threat to Christianity
• GOP efforts to steal ballots by circulating “Victory Vans” and telling people they can drop off their ballots there
• Giving voters the wrong place and time to vote
• Running illegal half-hour anti-Obama “TV specials” packaged as straight news stories during the news hour
• Fake call centers taking “votes” over the phone

“Working the referees”

• Disproved charges that computers are stealing Republican votes
• Scary “voter fraud can send you to prison” signs

Making voting unpleasant, difficult, painful, impossible:

• Cuts in early voting
• Blocking parking lots at polling sites
• Towing the cars of voters
• Trying to block volunteers from handing out water to voters
• Posting political signs illegally, including gay-bashing signs
• Moving polling sites to churches with graphic anti-abortion posters
• Defying court orders to allow voters to vote
• Locking the doors on polling places when too many people want to vote
• A bomb scare shutting down a voting site
• Foot-dragging to get the electricity back on in the Democratic parts of Ohio
• Ridiculously long lines and inefficiency in Democratic areas in Florida

Bullying tactics at the polls:

• Tea Party groups drafting lists of black precincts to send their intimidation teams to; the lists were supposed to be secret
• Forging signatures to get unauthorized “poll watchers” into the polls
• Dressing up teaparty watchers to look like union members, to fake voters out
• Sending “poll watchers” to intimidate minority voters and minority areas
• Harassing voters right in the polling places
• Telling voters, on no authority, that they can’t vote
• Following and filming black voters as they fill out their election paperwork
• Poll workers refusing to tell voters where their correct precinct is
• Poll-workers caught switching Obama votes to Romney
• Poll workers filling out spaces where voters left slots blank on their paper ballots
• Stopping poll watchers from helping voters figure out the rules
• Judge visiting polling place and ordering poll watchers not to help voters
• Lodging false accusations of intimidation at black poll watchers , the sentiment being that any black person coming anywhere near a voting booth is a threat to Uhmurka
• Attempting to drive away neutral election monitors entirely

Trying to play the “Voter ID” game:

• Ads insisting you need ID when legally you don’t
• Posting signs illegally demanding ID
• Scary looking “poll watchers” demanding that voters show ID while still outside the polling places, in violation of court orders
• Poll workers demanding ID even when the law says otherwise
• Poll workers imposing harsher ID rules than the law allows
• Illegally turning away voters without ID
• Asking only blacks for IDs
• Asking only women for IDs

Making it harder for voters to vote some other way:

• Shutting down early voting
• Illegally changing the Ohio rules on provisional voting, in violation of the law and court decrees
• Giving poll workers broad leeway to demand that voters use only provisional ballots
• Forcing people to use provisional ballots even when they’re registered
• Forcing people with provisional ballots to return with IDs
• Illegally forcing voters to fill out the poll workers’ portion of provisional ballots, allowing for errors which permit the poll worker to throw out the ballot
• Absentee ballot requests not answered
• Throwing absentee vote applications in the trash

Cheating outright:

• Republicans trying to double-vote in Nevada
• Sending GOP crooks to the polls to prove that Democratic voter fraud happens by…committing voter fraud. And getting caught and arrested.

Throwing sand in the electoral machine:

• Mysteriously losing or running out of ballots in Democratic precincts
• Sending the wrong ballots to the wrong precincts
• “Printing errors” that make some Florida ballots unreadable
• Broken voting machines in Democratic precincts
• Machine rigged to turn Obama votes into Romney votes
• Mysterious disappearance of black votes in Fla due to a “computer glitch” which turned out to be, of course, “human error”
• Using unauthorized software in voting machines

Flunking out of the Electoral College:

• Once again, Republicans are trying to game the Electoral College, by seeking to change the rules in a large, blue state. The proposed change would split up the state’s electoral votes instead of giving them all to the winner of that state, and compounding the problem by allocating the electoral votes by congressional district, right after the Republicans gerrymandered the districts. They tried without success to impose these new rules in California and Pennsylvania, and now they are trying it in Ohio. Which is kind of funny, really: they wouldn’t be trying to split the Ohio electoral votes if they thought they had a shot at re-taking the state in 2016, would they?

The extraordinary element in Florida is the emergence of Rick Scott. The man is a felon – he got busted in court for defrauding Medicare so egregiously that he was fired from his own company, a firm which was forced to pay $2 billion in fines, the biggest fraud case in history. This crook is the guy the Republicans elected governor, the man they chose to control their elections. Now why would you want a crook running your elections, I wonder?

Since the GOP is discovering that they can’t win elections with their toxic policies, their lies, or their terrible candidates….expect them to game the system even more next time.