The voting thread

Another gem from Salon's War Room: Jimmy Carter said we all need to be vigilant about voter fraud in Florida again this year and scrutinize the process. Looks like that applies to the rest of the country, too. In Nevada, employees of a GOP-funded voter registration company say they watched their supervisors rip up Democrats' registration forms -- and that hundreds and maybe thousands of Democrats' forms have been trashed. From KLAS TV in Las Vegas -- and isn't it heartening to see a local TV I-team actually report on something other than exposes of local strip clubs or the latest household item that can kill you?: "Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats." "'We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assistant to get those from me,' said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee. Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law." "So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken. We attempted to speak to Voters Outreach but found that its office has been rented out to someone else." Perhaps Ralph Nader knows where Voters Outreach went, because, as Josh Marshall points out, it appears the same company worked for him in Arizona. Then there's Oregon. State officials are looking into allegations that a paid canvasser might have destroyed voter registration forms there, too. Yet another local TV station doing its job, KGW-TV, interviewed a paid canvasser who said he was instructed to only accept Republican registration forms. Oregon's Secretary of State Bill Bradbury is beside himself over the allegations: "I have never in my five years as secretary of state ever seen an allegation like the one that came up tonight -- ever," Bradbury said. "I mean, frankly, it just totally offends me that someone would take someone else's registration and throw it out." Also in Oregon, college students say they may have been snookered into changing their party affiliation to Republican by a group of petitioners who asked them to sign a petition "to lower auto costs for young people." "When students signed the petition, they were handed voter registration cards and told to fill out only the name and address section, in order to 'verify' their signature on the petition. According to one of the petitioners, the group's intent is to register everyone who filled out the voter registration card, with 'Republican' selected under the party affiliation. Many students who had signed the petition where surprised or outraged to learn that they may have inadvertently registered to vote as a Republican." "... It's sick," said student Jodi Kansager, who initially signed the petition, but then became suspicious when she was handed a voter registration card and asked to only fill out two lines. "I look at it and I'm like, 'dude, this is a voter registration card!'" In South Dakota, former congressman Bill Janklow (yes, that Bill Janklow), comments on the resignation of six people connected to the state GOP over improper absentee ballot applications (a nephew of the GOP senate candidate was signing up college students even though he isn't an official notary). Janklow, according to local TV station KELO "says the national GOP is encouraging campaign workers to cheat."