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A Republican candidate for supervisor in Pinal County, Arizona has with withdrawn following allegations that his former companion continued to cast absentee ballots five years after her death.

In a statement issued by his attorneys, John Enright said he was quitting “for several reasons, including an almost year-long battle with cancer,” but did not address the voter fraud allegations, according the The Arizona Republic.

Several weeks ago, the Pinal County Recorder’s Office received an anonymous letter that claimed that absentee ballots had been cast by Sheila Nassar as late as this this year, even though she had died on Feb. 3, 2007. Enright had lived with with Nassar until the time of her death.

In a YouTube video released on Saturday, Enright’s new wife, Sharon Keiser, sits beside him while he explains that he was “surprised” to learn of the voter fraud allegations surrounding Nassar, who he called his “life companion” and former high school girlfriend.

“What I can say is I look forward to learning more about these allegations,” the then-candidate insists in the video. “If they are indeed formal allegations, I will defend myself. I very much look forward to clearing my name.”

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
99% of the voter fraud is committed by the Democrats.

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
99% of the voter fraud is committed by the Democrats.

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Cites? Got any kind of studies or statistical analysis to support such a statement?


And just so we're all on the same page, is that a "fact", or is it a "claim"?

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

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Originally posted by Kwicko:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
99% of the voter fraud is committed by the Democrats.

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Cites? Got any kind of studies or statistical analysis to support such a statement?


And just so we're all on the same page, is that a "fact", or is it a "claim"?

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Crickets. Zero evidence. Pretty much what I expect from Rappy. No wonder he's such a big fan of Romney - he acts just like him! Make some wild-ass, completely baseless, unsupportable claim, and then run away when asked for any kind of evidence.



"I supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 and intellegence [sic] had very little to do with that decision." - Hero


"The groin cup and throat protector have about as much ballistic protection as the kneepads I wear when I'm doing a job that requires me to be on my knees." - Troll

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
Yeah, it's really easy to see who's gaming the system: just ask the GOP. In Florida, they say the aim was to suppress the black vote.

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This is an issue that would be cleared up if we could use photo IDs at the booth, correct?

Last time I checked, it's been strictly a Leftist partisan push against such practices.

I'm not talking about one incident here Kwick, or any more "symptoms" of the disease you can put out there to prove that point. Hell... I agree with you on that one.

Just saying that your argument here would be nullified if you had to have a picture ID to vote and the Democrats are the only ones behind stopping that from happening.

The blacks in Florida at the time, in this case were the sacrificial lambs. That is, until the Democrats still got their way of not carding for a vote AND they got to further make the Repugs look worse for this incident.



I still have to show a picture ID at a new liquor store today and I'm 32 years old. Why can't we just make that a law for voting too?

We'll just say that it's to ensure that nobody under 18 is voting illegally.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." ~Shepherd Book

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Although the United States has long prided itself on being a paragon of democracy, the ideal of one person, one vote – universal suffrage – was not achieved until nearly two hundred years after the nation’s founding. The right to vote was originally limited to adult white male property owners. Other sectors of the U.S. population achieved the franchise only slowly and fitfully. Universal suffrage did not become a clearly embraced American national value until the 1960s – and even since then there have been efforts to curtail rights and make voting more difficult. Some in the United States still regard voting as a “privilege” rather than a right.

The prolonged and diverse conflicts over voting throughout American history shed new light on our political institutions and values – and may also help us better understand the ongoing struggles about democratization so visible in other parts of the world.

Efforts to secure universal suffrage in the United States have been long and arduous:

• Several important social movements in U.S. history were decades-long struggles to gain voting rights for particular groups of citizens. Women’s suffrage activism was born from the pre-Civil War movement against slavery, and it took seventy years, until the Nineteenth Amendment, to complete the job. Movements for African-American suffrage took longer and suffered huge reversals. Many Native Americans were denied the vote until the 1950s.

• Class dynamics have also been central to fights over voting rights. From the outset, segments of our nation’s elites feared political participation by workers and the poor. Alarmed elites hindered major extensions of the franchise and have periodically sought to reduce voting by the less advantaged.

• The long-term trend has been towards greater inclusion, but progress has not been smooth or steady, and there have been recurrent setbacks. Rollbacks of voting rights happened, for example, to women in New Jersey; to African-Americans in many states at various times; and to dependent poor people. For non-elites, voting rights are neither certain nor fixed. Indeed, periodic restrictions on the franchise, coupled with active resistance to each major push forward in voting rights, tells us that there have always been significant numbers of Americans who do not accept voting in democratic elections as a universal right.

For much of U.S. history, suffrage requirements were not uniform across the United States, as the states were free to define their own electorates. In practice, this often meant that different states were able to discriminate against minorities of their own choosing – including, in various places, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Chinese immigrants, and non-English speaking people.

Struggles over voting rights and their exercise continue in the United States today – and contemporary efforts to extend or restrict voting resemble similar attempts from the past:

• Waves of immigrants are arriving in America today, and some localities want to extend certain voting rights to the newcomers even before they become citizens. This is not without precedent. From the early 19th century until the 1920s, non-citizens could vote in many states, where voting rights were extended to immigrants who had resided in the United States for three years and declared their intent to become citizens.
• “Voter suppression” refers to practices or laws that discourage or block participation by categories of people who cannot be formally denied the right to vote. Historically, such efforts occurred after expansions of voting rights, when many new voters were added to election rolls. Similarly, in our era, the extension of voting rights to African Americans in the 1960s has been followed by efforts in many states to discourage black voting – by making it hard to register or requiring picture IDs at the voting booth, and by suspending voting rights for former prisoners. Many scholars think that such steps are no coincidence.

History certainly underscores that the right to vote in the United States has always been contested, especially for less privileged citizens. Voting rights are far from automatic, and can never be taken for granted. http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/ssn_key_fin
dings_keyssar_on_right_to_vote_0.pdf]
As to how easy it is for YOU to acquire an ID and who needed one prior to now,

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Having a driver's license or photo identification card is commonplace for most Americans, but about 11 percent of adult citizens — more than 21 million people — lack a valid, government-issued photo ID, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
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The trend alarms voting advocates like Lawrence Norden, acting director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, who said photo ID laws hit older people, the poor, African Americans and students the hardest. "This is the first time in decades that we have seen a reversal in what has been a steady expansion of voting rights in the United States," Norden said. "There's no question that citizens over 65 will be particularly impacted. The older you get, the more likely you won't have an ID."

Nearly one in five citizens over 65 — about 8 million — lacks a current, government-issued photo ID, a 2006 Brennan Center study found. Most people prove their eligibility to vote with a driver's license, but people over 65 often give up their license and don't replace it with the state-issued ID that some states offer non-driving residents. People over 65 also are more likely to lack birth certificates because they were born before recording births was standard procedure. http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-01-2012
/voter-id-laws-impact-older-americans.html]
So how do you compare eliminating the right to vote for MILLIONS of people when there's, at most, "hundreds" of examples of voter fraud (if that, because there's no evidence the numbers are that high)?

Try this one on for size, and extrapolate it to all those elderly out there who don't HAVE a daughter to go to bat for them:

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Editor:

I live in Pennsylvania and I am very concerned about our voter ID law that is now in place.

Let me tell you my own personal experience with this new law.

On May 5, my mother's driver's license was set to expire.

Since she has long ago given up driving, I downloaded the form from the Pennsylvania Web site that would replace one's driver's license with a photo ID.

I mailed this form to Harrisburg, along with her driver's license.

The Web site claimed that it should take no longer than 15 days to receive her photo ID in the mail. Well, 15 days came and went. I called the number for "inquires." I sat on the phone for nearly 20 minutes listening to elevator music.

Eventually, a man came on the phone.

I explained my concerns regarding my mother's photo ID.

After insisting that he first talk to her to "verify" that I was indeed her daughter, he then pulled up her record and confirmed that they received her driver's license but that there was no request submitted for them to send her a photo ID.

He then told me that someone would call me back in three to four days.

Yup, you guessed it - no one called back. Again, I tried calling. This time I went directly to voice mail. I did not even bother to leave a message. Instead, my mother and I drove 25 miles, with all her original documentation, (birth certificate, SS card, etc.) and we then got her a Pennsylvania photo ID. My complaint here is that, if you are going to implement such a law, one should damn well have the resources to follow through with it. And yes, we will vote for Obama.

Delinda Jensen

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Then there are minorities:

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Many of these laws require photo IDs like drivers licenses. Although it may seem logical to require such forms of identification at the voting booth, the reality is that acquiring such forms of identification is costly to voters. In fact, proponents of these laws point to the state of Wisconsin as riddled with voter fraud. This claim is baseless; out of three million votes cast in 2004, there was found to be a fraud rate of .0002 percent, according to the Brennan Center.

Proponents of voter ID laws, like Alabama Congressman Artur Davis, claim that voting is no different from cashing checks or using a public library; all are activities that do and should require ID. Congressman Davis ignores that voting is a fundamental constitutional right. One doesn’t need an ID when practicing freedom of speech; why is the freedom to vote any different?

States like Texas that are challenging the Justice Department suspension of their laws are more concerned with politics than liberty. Texas could not prove to the Justice Department that its law did not violate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires all changes in voting practices to be neutral in their affect on minorities.

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•Even though the government-issued photo ID is free, the list of documents required to get the ID is too restrictive and the documents on it are often not free and are difficult to obtain for many Tennesseans. Expenses involved in acquiring a photo ID card, including travel time, transportation, lost wages, and costs for the back-up identification necessary to obtain a photo ID essentially constitute a poll tax, and will prevent some individuals from voting.

•Such requirements typically have a disparate impact on rural residents, minorities, seniors and limited-income and disabled people, who are less likely to have access to the documents required to obtain a photo ID. An Advancement Project study show that 11 percent of eligible voters don’t have updated, government-issued photo IDs: 25 percent of African Americans, 15 percent of those earning less than $35,000, 18 percent of citizens age 65 or older and 20 percent of voters age 18 to 29.

•This law is a solution in search of a problem. While supporters argue that it is necessary to require photo IDs in order to combat efforts to skew elections, studies clearly show that there is virtually no evidence of any organized voter fraud, nor evidence that photo ID laws would prevent fraud. Lawmakers should be making it easier, not harder, for people to vote.

•Even if voter fraud did exist, the law would fail to adequately address it as any individual willing to commit voter fraud will likely be just as willing to sign a false affidavit attesting to indigency or a religious objection.

•In the short time since its implementation, this bill has already made voting difficult for numerous voters. The news has captured some of these stories, and these are just the beginning:

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Al Star, a Nashville homeless man, says he got the runaround from the Department of Safety when he attempted a few days before Thanksgiving to apply for a free state identification to vote, eventually having to call an aide to U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper before receiving the ID.

Star, 59, says a clerk at the Department of Safety’s office in the Snodgrass building near the Capitol initially refused to issue him a free ID to replace his lost driver’s license, saying instead that he would have to pay $12 for a replacement. Star says he told the clerk that he no longer needed a driver’s license because he doesn’t own a car and had stated clearly on his application that he only wanted an ID to vote.

“She felt that I was homeless, which I am, and she didn’t want to help me with anything with the government,” he said. “She acted like, ‘Look at this, nobody’s going to help him out anyway, because he’s homeless.’”

Krissa Barclay, a Cooper aide who works in downtown Nashville, says she had to go up to the driver services center to convince the clerk to issue Star the ID. She told The Tennessean about Star’s case afterward.

The episode differs from recent case in Chattanooga in which a 96-year-old woman was initially denied a voter ID because her married name did not match the name on her birth certificate. http://blogs.tennessean.com/politics/2011/nashville-homeless-man-says-
he-got-voter-id-runaround/ people would have just paid the $8 fee to obtain a photo ID required to vote in Tennessee. Not Lee Campbell. The retired teacher and his wife fought for their right to a free photo ID and on Monday went to Capitol Hill to complain about what he called a “poll tax.”

Campbell, a Utah native who taught and served as a teacher and a guidance counselor for 42 years and has voted in every presidential election since 1964, testified before a panel sponsored by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee on Monday that he “experienced first-hand the harmful impact of all these voting changes that are springing up across America.”

Campbell said he had to “fight for my right to have a voter ID be given to me according to the law’s intent — FREE.”

“I traveled to my local DMV and I approached the worker at the information desk and stated that my wife was here and wanted to obtain the FREE voter ID,” Campbell said. “The person responded with a non verbal sigh, a sigh in effect indicated ‘oh no, not that.’ The worker then suggested why not just get a duplicate license for a fee of $8? Cognizant of the fact that a senior citizen friend, Mr. Steve Blankenship of Murfreesboro, in the previous month had PAID the $8 fee, I replied, ‘no, we want the FREE voter photo.’”

Campbell testified that the worker went up to three different employees and told him there would be no charge. But Campbell said the process delayed the line, which was already about 30 people deep. From Campbell’s testimony:

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I want to state right now that paying the $8 fee was not the question as we could easily afford that. The point was the state legislature in passing this law had emphasized that the photo was to be free. Otherwise, in my opinion the fee could be considered a poll tax.

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Campbell said he and his wife had to wait 58 minutes to get her photo ID. He said that he’s concluded that unless a person “stands their ground,” the drivers’ testing center is going to charge a fee for the photo.

He also testified that he ran into a former teaching colleague last week who is 80-years-old and requires a cane.

“This person stated that voting was out of the question in the future. The principle reason is waiting in a long line to get a photograph,” Campbell said.

“The person then stated that perhaps a relative would take said person to the Drivers’ Testing Center. Whether this person ever votes again is highly speculative,” he said. http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/tennessee_resident_t
estifies_its_tough_to_get_a_free_voter_id.php Virginia Lasater says she was unable to obtain a voter ID because she was physically unable to stand in a long line at a driver testing center.

Lasater told The Daily News Journal that she has voted and worked in campaigns for 70 years ( http://bit.ly/pQiphH). She recently moved to Murfreesboro and on Wednesday registered to vote at the local election commission.

A new law requires voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Since Lasater doesn't have a photo on her driver's license, she went to get one. But the testing center was packed and there were no chairs available.

Her son says a clerk told them there was nothing they could do. http://www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=9037359 Cooper is 96 but she can remember only one election when she's been eligible to vote but hasn't.

The retired domestic worker was born in a small North Georgia town before women had the right to vote. She began casting ballots in her 20s after moving to Chattanooga for work. She missed voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 because a move to Nashville prevented her from registering in time.

So when she learned last month at a community meeting that under a new state law she'd need a photo ID to vote next year, she talked with a volunteer about how to get to a state Driver Service Center to get her free ID. But when she got there Monday with an envelope full of documents, a clerk denied her request.

That morning, Cooper slipped a rent receipt, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card and her birth certificate into a Manila envelope. Typewritten on the birth certificate was her maiden name, Dorothy Alexander.

"But I didn't have my marriage certificate," Cooper said Tuesday afternoon, and that was the reason the clerk said she was denied a free voter ID at the Cherokee Boulevard Driver Service Center.

"It is department policy that in order to get a photo ID, a citizen must provide documentation that links their name to the documentation that links their name to the document they are using as primary proof of identity," Qualls said. "In this case, since Ms. Cooper's birth certificate (her primary proof of identity) and voter registration card were two different names, the examiner was unable to provide the free ID."

State Rep. Tommie Brown, D-Chattanooga, said Tuesday that Cooper's case is an example of how the law "erects barriers" for the elderly and poor people -- a disproportionate number of whom are minorities.

"What you do, you suppress the vote," Brown said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out."

The General Assembly passed the photo ID law earlier this year, with lawmakers saying it was needed to prevent voter fraud. The legislature allocated $438,000 to provide free photo IDs for registered voters who don't have a qualified ID.

"It makes no sense in these economic times that we are shifting our time and resources to this," Brown said. http://timesfreepress.com/news/2011/oct/05/marriage-certificate-requir
ed-bureaucrat-tells/

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http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6147/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5654

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These aren't isolated incidents; it's happening all over the country.

Does this REALLY seem right to you?? It IS a poll tax. Those were deemed illegal years ago. This is just a new way to come at it.