-- by Dave
Warning, voters! According to Sharron Angle, Harry Reid is plotting to steal the Nevada election!:
Harry Reid intends to steal this election if he can't win it outright. As a result, we need to deploy literally dozens of election law attorneys and poll watchers to combat these tactics at a cost of nearly $80,000. That's over and above our current budget. We need to raise $80,000 and we need to do it RIGHT NOW, because even as I am writing this, Harry Reid and his Machine are trying to steal this election. I'm sorry that we have to come to you yet again and ask for you to reach deep and contribute, but we must.
Understand, EVERYTHING we have worked for in the last year could be destroyed by dirty tricks and criminal acts in the next 8 days. As Sharron's first line of defense on these matters I am absolutely committed to making sure this won't happen.
Of course, the Secretary of State subsequently issued a statement noting that that the Angle campaign "fails to cite any evidence of 'vote buying' in the State of Nevada other than reports to their election hotline about representatives of unions." It added, somewhat pointedly:
The statutes involved in this matter carry criminal penalties, and complaints should contain specific information, not conjecture and rumor used in support of a plea for financial contributions, as the foundation of the violation.
In other words: These are serious allegations. If you're going to make them, you need to at least have a smidgen of evidence other than your paranoias.
And these folks -- boy, are they paranoid. Indeed, one would have to call them "conspiracist loons". Consider the organization that Angle is now using to spread the word for volunteers to take part in Nevada "poll-watching":
In 2008, Angle's We the People Nevada PAC contributed $92,000 to the Nevada Action Coalition. The Coalition emerged this month as a player in alleging ballot hijinks by Democrats.
Coalition members recently advertised a "voter fraud" meeting and accused Reid of wanting to rig the race.
"Want to make sure Harry and his buddies don't steal this election?" an Oct. 9 web post read. "Then come to the training next Tuesday. We need lots of watchers, cause you know the dark side has secret plans for this election."
"Want to make sure Harry and his buddies don't steal this election?" an Oct. 9 web post read. "Then come to the training next Tuesday. We need lots of watchers, cause you know the dark side has secret plans for this election."
Last week, the group posted a second warning to members:"I recieved (sic) a call...about a 'funny' voter machine at Tropicana & Hualapi. Seems when she voted for a Republican candidate the machine 'helped' by changing her vote to a Democrat candidate.
Moral of this Story...Report ANY voter irregularity to the Poll Watcher Hot Line. We need to report all suspicious activity as you know Harry's men are out to steal this election."
Well, just who is the Nevada Action Coalition? Funny you should ask:
NAC bills itself as "a group of ordinary American citizens who work to expose and stop the corrupt political elites that are giving away or selling our sovereignty for their own gains." They endorsed Angle and Republicans down the ballot.
The Coalition claims that the government wants to merge the United States with "the corruption, socialism, poverty and population of Mexico and Canada" and designate a section of Kansas City as sovereign Mexican territory, according to its website. It also asserts that Muslim leaders designated a yellow badge for Jews to wear, which was later copied by Hitler in Nazi Germany.
Indeed, you can read the NAC's page devoted to the North American Union conspiracy theory here. The NAC also promotes the utterly specious (and fundamentally racist) "Aztlan invasion" conspiracy theory, as you can see here.
The Nevada race is taking on an especially ugly facet: Angle is clearly doubling down on her openly bigoted anti-Latino campaign appeal, as evidenced by her latest campaign ploy: a fake 'Monopoly' game that bashes Latinos.
She really is an extremist who is happy to empower her fellow extremists. Moreover, this is almost guaranteed to make the scene at Nevada polling stations on Tuesday extremely ugly. Hopefully, election officials -- and especially Latino voters and their Democratic defenders -- will be properly prepared to deal with the ugliness.
Part of Angle's paranoia and desperation, no doubt, is fueled by her certain knowledge that the openly bigoted nature of her Latino-bashing will wind up backfiring and doubly energizing the state's Latino voters -- who in 2008 constituted 12 percent of the state's voters. As Reuters noted awhile back, those Latino voters almost certainly hold the election's outcome in their hands.
Of course, they're not showing up in the Nevada polls much, because all of those polls are land-line phone polls -- a technique that notably reduces the participation of Latinos and other minorities, who increasingly rely solely on cell phones, and thus undercounts them. Indeed, it seems likely that Latinos and Asians are being seriously undercounted in this year's polls generally.
Polls may show Angle leading now, but they are seriously flawed polls that do not take into account a likely Latino wave of support for Harry Reid. Which means that on the morning after Election Day, Republicans and Sharron Angle may well be sitting there wondering what went wrong -- and looking for Democrats to blame.
That, of course, is what this current game is really all about: It's setting up the excuse -- and the scapegoat -- ahead of time. Watch for cries of "Fraud!" to abound on Fox News next Wednesday -- especially if their planned takeover falls short.
[Jon Ralston knocked the "fraud" story down this morning.]
[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
No comments:
Post a Comment