GRITtv: October 23, 2008

A Perfect Storm This Election Season? Tis the season of dirty tricks. With ten days to go before the General Election and Barack Obama pulling into a double digit lead . . . could record turnout , new machines, new voting rules and high stakes -- lead to a perfect storm of confusion if not outright vote suppression on election day? John McCain, as if preparing the ground for a complaint, has already been calling foul . To add insult to irony, Republican operative Mark Jacoby, was arrested on October 19th for voter registration fraud after registering himself to vote at two homes where he did not live. He and fellow GOP operative Nathan Sproul - paid by the McCain camp - have been accused of destroying or falsifying voter registration forms deliberately and in Sproul’s case intimidating voters Are electoral justice activists up to the challenges this time? What do we all need to know? Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice is concerned by what is not in place, as well as the battles being fought over voter rolls. We should be fighting over issues, not blocking voters. Damon Hewitt, from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (and director of the organization’s Katrina Project) tells us what's going on in Louisiana. His campaign Prepared to Vote is concerned that the infrastructure is broken and people will not have access to the ballot. Ron Kuby, Host of Air America Radio’s Doing Time and a civil rights attorney thinks any time 100 million Americans try to do something - anything - something is going to go wrong. David Earnhardt, made a film called UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections about U.S. election fraud in 2004 and 2006. The film details, among other things, software-based vote "flipping." So it was kinda funny when his early voting was nearly thwarted by a paperless touch screen machine, this year in his homestate of Tennessee. When his wife hit the touchscreen for Obama, the light lit up next to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney... The first and last piece of advice from our panel: don't be afraid to advocate for yourself, and check your registration before election day. Links that can help: Election Protection's 866 Our Vote and Prepared to Vote a campaign of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund. There's state by state information on both sites. Yes! magazine has 12 Ways You Can Safeguard the Vote , and the National Association of Secretaries of State (the public officials charged with safeguarding your vote) offer Can I Vote? Rose Aguilar is a self-described liberal from the Bay Area who burst out of her bubble to meet and greet in the Red State West. A San Francisco radio host grown tired of media stereotypes, Aguilar packed up her van, picked up her boyfriend, and set out on a six-month road trip. She wrote about it in Red Highways: A Liberal's Journey into the Heartland. Aguilar is the host of Your Call on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco. Then, Andrew Tyndall. He's watched every single weekday network nightly newscast since the summer of 1987, and writes about it in The Tyndall Report . What's he think of the election coverage of '08? He thinks there's been nary a whisper about Iraq on the nightly network shows since just after Labor Day. And finds it odd that with all the coverage of Wall Street and world financial chaos, the finance stories and the election stories are on parallel, never intersecting paths.

Blip | October 23, 2008

Tags:. .obama. .forms. .digit. .case. .wrong