This Gil Cedillo is really a miserable little person. Over at Nuestra Voice you can hear him with LA radio DJ Mario Solis Marich answering questions about that ridiculous attack mailer on Emanuel Pleitez using Facebook photos to build a narrative of Pleitez as a scary drunken gang-lover who parties with white women. In the transcript, you'll notice Cedillo's immediate reaction to bringing up Pleitez' name:
SOLIS MARICH: There was some controversy over the past 2 weeks when your campaign decided to do a negative attack piece on newcomer Emanuel Pleitez. Many people who observe campaigns including myself took that as a sign that the young candidate was really eating into your base.
CEDILLO: Well, one we're not sure we'd call it negative unless he calls it negative, the fact that he posted these photos on his Facebook.
Two, we recognize what his roll is in this campaign, to suppress the vote and to try to take away votes and we think the electorate has the right to know all the information, information that he's made public, about the candidates. We put the record out there and let people decide if they want to elect someone who has 25 years of effective leadership or if they want to elect somebody who they may not have full confidence in.
So in other words, anyone who participates in a campaign to try and get elected is automatically "suppressing votes," presumably votes from Gil Cedillo. The backstory here is that Parke Skelton, Judy Chu's campaign manager, and Eric Hacopian, Pleitez' top strategist, have worked together on other campaigns, which is to be expected from two Democratic consultants in LA. Off of that thin reed Cedillo spins a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that Emanuel Pleitez swooped into the race to suppress votes from the naturally chosen "one" candidate who is supposed to win the seat. Now, if you were of a conspiratorial nature, you could say the exact same thing about Betty Tom Chu, the Republican Monterey Park City Councilwoman who entered the race late and will undoubtedly cause some ballot confusion given the closeness of names between her and Judy Chu. But it's this sense of entitlement on the part of Cedillo, this idea that he deserves that Congressional seat and no Hispanic should dare "suppress the vote" by, you know, running against him, that stands out here. This is typical sleazeball identity politics, the idea that any Hispanic must vote for a Hispanic, and multiple Hispanics in the field dilute the strength of the vote, and they should line up and wait their turn behind the self-anointed savior.
Now, here's the rest of the interview, where Cedillo becomes increasingly ridiculous:
I just jumped off a conference call with some members of the Democratic National Committee and CDP Chair Art Torres about the arrest of YPM founder Marc Jacoby on suspicion of voter registration fraud. As you may know, Jacoby's firm has been "slamming" voters in the Riverside County area, telling them that they were signing ballot initiatives but actually flipping their party affiliation to the Republican Party from the Democratic Party. While the substance of the call was to talk about hypocrisy in the GOP, raising the issue of ACORN in recent weeks while blinded to the fraud their own vendors participate in, Torres was pretty unsparing in his description of YPM. "The California GOP and the RNC need to terminate their relationship with YPM immediately," said Torres. "They shouldn't wait for a conviction to distance themselves from these shady practices." It was revealed yesterday that a joint finance committee of the RNC, McCain-Palin and the Yacht Party has been paying Nathan Sproul, who owns a separate voter registration group that has been accused of rampant fraud. Said Torres, "This is a consistent pattern of bad behavior."
Curiously, nobody seems to be talking about the bigger issue here, which is the fact that YPM was not only slamming voters, but changing their ballot status to absentee, so that when a voter goes to the polling place on Election Day, they are told that they signed up to vote by mail and cannot vote in the election without their absentee ballot. There are issues with slamming, related mainly to GOTV efforts (Democrats don't try to turn out Republicans), but the absentee situation is a pretext for real disenfranchisement. So I asked Chairman Torres about this, and he agreed. "This is designed to create confusion at the polls and force people into filling out provisional ballots. There are still hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots that haven't been counted from Ohio in 2004. This is about voter suppression, and we've seen it over and over again in California." He related it to the Dirty Tricks Initiative and the signature gathering fraud used to try and get that on the ballot.
The question, of course, is what we can do about the particular voters affected. YPM is out of business and hopefully their founder will be in jail. But there is no telling how many voters had their party ID switched or their ballot status switched. Hopefully the Secretary of State can come up with some way to verify anyone who passed through YPM's hands.
Over the weekend, we learned about YPM, the voter registration company hired by the state Republican Party which was illegally switching voters' party affiliations under false pretenses, and (this is the buried lede) changing their ballot status in a clear act of voter suppression:
Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.
Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.
Robert Cruickshank mentioned that the head of YPM has been arrested in this case and charged with voter registration fraud. In response, the Yacht Party has decided to attack Debra Bowen:
On the eve of California's voter registration deadline, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has decided to once again show her partisan colors and charge an individual for questions surrounding his own, personal voter registration stemming from 2006 and 2007.
The fact that these charges are being leveled against an individual operating in a highly-contested area of California, and the significant gap between recent allegations and the charges we've seen today suggests that this is politically motivated.
It's clear that Bowen, herself the recipient of an ACORN endorsement (still displayed on her campaign website), has elevated these issues to achieve maximum political benefit and deflect attention from the Democratic Presidential nominee's high-profiled problems and associations with the radical community activist group ACORN.
While we condemn voter fraud in all forms, it is evident that Debra Bowen is using her office to play politics with the public's perception of political parties. This is inappropriate at least, and an abuse of her office and a willing suspension of her duties at worst.
Now, let's make clear that in the original article, YPM founder Marc Jacoby cited Bowen's work - falsely - to prove his own innocence:
He also said that plainclothes investigators for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, have conducted multiple spot checks and told his firm it is doing nothing improper.
"Every time, they gave us a thumbs-up," Jacoby said. "People are not being tricked."
But Nicole Winger, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, said the agency "does not give an OK or seal of approval to voter registration groups."
That's an out-and-out lie, and it's completely within the purview of the Secretary of State to enforce the laws regarding voter registration. The Yacht Party is being completely disingenuous about Jacoby's illegality here ("personal voter registration" my ass), and they dredge up ACORN, which is not only unrelated to the YPM case, but a situation where paid registration gatherers were defrauding ACORN more than anything else. But it's not surprising to see the Yacht Party fan the fires of hate and use the ACORN scapegoat to answer for their own illegal activities.
And this is Yacht Party illegality. Steve Poizner paid for the YPM voter drive and put a bounty on new registrations.
This story is starting to hit traditional media. Debra Bowen did nothing but her job, and she needs to be supported. Whether you write a letter to the editor, call the Yacht Party offices (hey, here's contact information, imagine that) or just spread the word to your friends and neighbors, do something to call out Republican voter suppression today.
Remember good ol' Tan Nguyen? He was the candidate running against Loretta Sanchez in 2006 who sent out that mailer to the Hispanic community in the district claiming they would be deported if they tried to vote. So, OK, he was indicted yesterday.
A federal grand jury indicted a former Republican Congressional candidate on an obstruction-of-justice charge on Wednesday after an investigation into a letter his campaign sent to Hispanic voters. The man, Tan Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant who unsuccessfully ran in the 47th Congressional District in Orange County in 2006 against Representative Loretta Sanchez, is accused of misleading state investigators looking into the mailer.
Oddly, he wasn't indicted on the content of the mailer itself, which could be considered wire fraud, but maybe there will be time for that later.
We recently wrote about the Department of Veterans Affairs decision to open its facilities to voter registration drives after months of urging by voting rights groups and elected officials. This week, however, "VA voter suppression continues," as AlterNet's Steven Rosenfeld wrote Tuesday, with voter registration efforts being blocked in California and the VA general counsel criticizing the pending Veterans Voting Support Act (S. 3308), which would bolster federal protection of voter registration opportunities for all wounded veterans. With just three weeks left to register voters in most states, advocates say now is the time to support voter registration efforts in VA facilities and, most importantly, it needs to be explicitly protected from now on through federal law.
We spend a lot of time in these news updates showing how charges of voter fraud are used to discredit voter participation efforts and prime the pump for voter suppression efforts, such as the passage of voter ID bills, pushing for proof of citizenship, engaging in draconian voter purge efforts, and imposing sever restrictions on voter registration drives. We have also spent a lot of time carefully delineating the politics behind these efforts, starting with our March 2007 report The Politics Of Voter Fraud and continuing on in these diaries to name but two venues.
I'll be brief because I'm blogging this from my iPod. Barack Obama finished a good-sized rally where he kind of lost the crowd in the middle but ended well. It was pretty much the same stump speech we've heard; I'll elaborate later. But as we were leaving, we spied Obama campaign manager David Axelrod and asked him about Bill Clinton's very odd comment that he personally saw Culinary Union bosses threatening to stop workers from voting for Hillary.
Axelrod lost it. He said, "I don't believe it, and if Bill Clinton actually saw that, he can take it to the NLRB. This is the rankest form of voter intimidation I've ever seen." And with that, he stormed off.
It felt like being on Hardball for a second.
(for my money, if Clinton does claim he saw a union supervisor threatening to violate voter rights, then he should take it to the NLRB.)
(Finally, some pushback from the MSM. - promoted by SFBrianCL)
In a rare election day editorial, the Sacramento Bee blasted the voter suppression efforts that Washington, DC Republicans are using in an attempt to lower voter turnout against embattled GOP Secretary John Doolittle.
