The Texas state and county's system for culling deceased voters from the roll seems painfully primitive and clearly is not working..

Go and watch employees clip obituaries from the newspaper and sort through probate records for names matching those on the roll. Hammerlein says while fraud is a concern, for his office, disenfranchising voters is a bigger one. Right! That's why we actually see thousands upon thousands of dead voters every election! Enough dead voters can win you an election.

 

Don't forget the New York state study of a small sample of dead voters, I think it was about 10-20 thousand, where 90% were listed as Democrats.

 

Think about 90% of dead voters listed as Democrats, nationwide. Think about Obama's much loved ACORN, now convicted or discovered faking registrations in a total of 25 states! Obama could actually steal electoral votes this way.

"We do all we can, but you know we'd rather err on the side of leaving people on the roll instead of taking them off inadvertently," he said.

But could that cautious "better safe than sorry" standard sway an election some say will be a close one?

Texas Watchdog found 4,462 registered voters who appear to be deceased in one county.

"We've never had any evidence there's a concerted attempt at fraud," Hammerlein told Local 2. Ha-ha!

But there is evidence the state agency in charge of ensuring only eligible voters can vote is not.

The State Auditor's Office conducted an audit of the voter registration system at the Secretary of State's Office last November.

Auditors identified 49,049 registered voters state-wide who may have been ineligible to vote. Approximately 23,576 may have been deceased and another 23,114 were possible felons. And they found more than 2,359 duplicate records.

 

When we elect a president, a first lady comes along with him.

 

Michelle Obama has been startlingly ABSENT the election wars for weeks and weeks.

 

Why?

 

Because she has a chip the size of Mt. Rushmore on her shoulder. What chip? Resentment and even hate toward the whites she says never accepted her, including the supposed white liberal professors at the university she attended. She even wrote of this. She has even spoke of this early on the Obama campaign.

 

This woman harbors hate toward whites and she has been filling Obama's head with this for years and years. Much like her and Obama's preacher, Jeremiah Wright, who went so far as saying whites should be killed.

 

I don't want racism to be a tag that accompanies Obama on all his activities.

 

‘You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages.

Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.

Militant ACORN
At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.

 

I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.

In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.”

ACORN’s Inside Strategy
Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” ACORN has long employed Washington-based lobbyists who understand very well how the legislative game is played. ACORN’s national lobbyists may encourage and benefit from the militant tactics of their base, but in the halls of congress they play the game with smooth sophistication. The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy.

Critics of the notion that CRA had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995. While the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act did call on banks to increase lending in poor and minority neighborhoods, its exact requirements were vague, and therefore open to a good deal of regulatory interpretation. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” (and Obama idol), Saul Alinsky.

At first, ACORN’s anti-bank actions were relatively few in number. However, under a provision of the 1989 savings and loan bailout pushed by liberal Democratic legislators, like Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy, lenders were required to compile public records of mortgage applicants by race, gender, and income. Although the statistics produced by these studies were presented in highly misleading ways, groups like ACORN were able to use them to embarrass banks into lowering credit standards. At the same time, a wave of banking mergers in the early 1990's provided an opening for ACORN to use CRA to force lending changes. Any merger could be blocked under CRA, and once ACORN began systematically filing protests over minority lending, a formerly toothless set of regulations began to bite.

ACORN’s efforts to undermine credit standards in the late 1980s taught it a valuable lesson. However much pressure ACORN put on banks to lower credit standards, tough requirements in the “secondary market” run by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac served as a barrier to change. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy up mortgages en masse, bundle them, and sell them to investors on the world market. Back then, Fannie and Freddie refused to buy loans that failed to meet high credit standards. If, for example, a local bank buckled to ACORN pressure and agreed to offer poor or minority applicants a 5-percent down-payment rate, instead of the normal 10-20 percent, Fannie and Freddie would refuse to buy up those mortgages. That would leave all the risk of these shaky loans with the local bank. So again and again, local banks would tell ACORN that, because of standards imposed by Fannie and Freddie, they could lower their credit standards by only a little.

 

So the eighties taught ACORN that a high-pressure, Alinskyite outside strategy wouldn’t be enough. Their Washington lobbyists would have to bring inside pressure on the government to undercut credit standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Only then would local banks consider making loans available to customers with bad credit histories, low wages, virtually nothing in the bank, and even bankruptcies on record.

Democrats and ACORN
As early as 1987, ACORN began pressuring Fannie and Freddie to review their standards, with modest results. By 1989, ACORN had lured Fannie Mae into the first of many “pilot projects” designed to help local banks lower credit standards. But it was all small potatoes until the serious pressure began in early 1991. At that point, Democratic Senator Allan Dixon convened a Senate subcommittee hearing at which an ACORN representative gave key testimony. It’s probably not a coincidence that Dixon, like Obama, was an Illinois Democrat, since Chicago has long been a stronghold of ACORN influence.

Dixon gave credibility to ACORN’s accusations of loan bias, although these claims of racism were disputed by Missouri Republican, Christopher Bond. ACORN’s spokesman strenuously complained that his organization’s efforts to relax local credit standards were being blocked by requirements set by the secondary market. Dixon responded by pressing Fannie and Freddie to do more to relax those standards — and by promising to introduce legislation that would ensure it. At this early stage, Fannie and Freddie walked a fine line between promising to do more, while protesting any wholesale reduction of credit requirements.

By July of 1991, ACORN’s legislative campaign began to bear fruit. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “Housing activists have been pushing hard to improve housing for the poor by extracting greater financial support from the country’s two highly profitable secondary mortgage-market companies. Thanks to the help of sympathetic lawmakers, it appeared...that they may succeed.” The Tribune went on to explain that House Democrat Henry Gonzales had announced that Fannie and Freddie had agreed to commit $3.5 billion to low-income housing in 1992 and 1993, in addition to a just-announced $10 billion “affordable housing loan program” by Fannie Mae. The article emphasizes ACORN pressure and notes that Fannie and Freddie had been fighting against the plan as recently as a week before agreement was reached. Fannie and Freddie gave in only to stave off even more restrictive legislation floated by congressional Democrats.

A mere month later, ACORN Housing Corporation president, George Butts made news by complaining to a House Banking subcommittee that ACORN’s efforts to pressure banks using CRA were still being hamstrung by Fannie and Freddie. Butts also demanded still more data on the race, gender, and income of loan applicants. Many news reports over the ensuing months point to ACORN as the key source of pressure on congress for a further reduction of credit standards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As a result of this pressure, ACORN was eventually permitted to redraft many of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s loan guideline.

Clinton and ACORN
ACORN’s progress through 1992 depended on its Democratic allies. Whatever ACORN managed to squeeze out of the George H. W. Bush administration came under congressional pressure. With the advent of the Clinton administration, however, ACORN’s fortunes took a positive turn. Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisnersos pledged to meet monthly with ACORN representatives. For ACORN, those meetings bore fruit.

Another factor working in ACORN’s favor was that its increasing success with local banks turned those banks into allies in the battle with Fannie and Freddie. Precisely because ACORN’s local pressure tactics were working, banks themselves now wanted Fannie and Freddie to loosen their standards still further, so as to buy up still more of the high-risk loans they’d made at ACORN’s insistence. So by the 1993, a grand alliance of ACORN, national Democrats, and local bankers looking for someone to lessen the risks imposed on them by CRA and ACORN were uniting to pressure Fannie and Freddie to loosen credit standards still further.

At this point, both ACORN and the Clinton administration were working together to impose large numerical targets or “set asides” (really a sort of poor and minority loan quota system) on Fannie and Freddie. ACORN called for at least half of Fannie and Freddie loans to go to low-income customers. At first the Clinton administration offered a set-aside of 30 percent. But eventually ACORN got what it wanted. In early 1994, the Clinton administration floated plans for committing $1 trillion in loans to low- and moderate-income home-buyers, which would amount to about half of Fannie Mae’s business by the end of the decade. Wall Street Analysts attributed Fannie Mae’s willingness to go along with the change to the need to protect itself against still more severe “congressional attack.” News reports also highlighted praise for the change from ACORN’s head lobbyist, Deepak Bhargava.

This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis. During these years, Obama’s Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.

Finally, in June of 1995, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary Cisneros announced the administration’s comprehensive new strategy for raising home-ownership in America to an all-time high. Representatives from ACORN were guests of honor at the ceremony. In his remarks, Clinton emphasized that: “Out homeownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent. It will not require legislation.” Clinton meant that informal partnerships between Fannie and Freddie and groups like ACORN would make mortgages available to customers “who have historically been excluded from homeownership.”

Disaster
In the end of course, Clinton’s plan cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable amount of money. And it was just around the time of his 1995 announcement that the Chicago papers started encouraging bad-credit customers with “dog-food” wages, little money in the bank, and even histories of bankruptcy to apply for home loans with the help of ACORN. At both the local and national levels, then, ACORN served as the critical catalyst, levering pressure created by the Community Reinvestment Act and pull with Democratic politicians to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into a pattern of high-risk loans.

Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we’ve been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.

 

 

Mr. Obama, your stepchild and organizing love, ACORN, has now been caught filing thousands of fraudulent registrations in Indiana. This follows reports over the last two days of Nevada, Missouri and Washington and Illinois - all ACORN - all fraud registrations. Are all 58 states having fraud registrations now, Obama?

 

The only way Obama can possibly win is to cheat, lie, buy his way and have the major media coverup his past associations with terrorism and socialism.

 

Fraud claims riddle huge voter registration

CROWN POINT | New voter registrations closed Monday in Lake County with possible record-breaking numbers and simmering allegations of fraud and racial discrimination.

Elections board Director Sally LaSota said more than 12,000 voter registration forms are waiting to be processed from recent days before the county knows how many potential voters are ready to cast ballots in the Nov. 4 general election.

"It may be a record," she said.

Porter County has processed at least 3,500 voter applications since the spring primary in May, officials there said.

However, the large influx has brought new controversies.

LaSota said Monday representatives of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, a grassroots activist group conducting registration drives, dropped off 2,000 new voter applications last week in Lake County.

"About 1,100 are no good," she said.

LaSota said the flawed forms are incomplete or contain unreadable handwriting -- similar to hundreds of other forms ACORN produced prior to this week. She said some ACORN vote canvassers apparently pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures.

Charles Jackson, communications director for ACORN, said Monday its administrators screened out the 1,100 registration forms in question and warned county officials the documents were suspect. He said ACORN left the final decision to discard the forms to county officials.

He said ACORN has fired and reported to law enforcement any employees suspected of vote fraud.

"We consider it stealing from ACORN," Jackson said.

Lake County Republican Chairman John Curley said Monday the ACORN registration drive is the main reason he opposes the opening of early voting centers in Gary, Hammond and East Chicago.

He filed a lawsuit last week in state and federal courts to stop the three branch offices from opening Monday. County officials agreed last week to delay opening the early locations until U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Van Bokkelen rules on the matter later this week.

Curley said opening too many early voting locations would strain the county election staff's efforts to stop people from using fraudulent registrations.

Jay Kenworth, a spokesman for the Indiana Republican Party said Monday, "We are obviously deeply disturbed by the news of these fraudulent registrations."

An attorney for the Indiana State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, filed papers in federal court alleging Curley's opposition to early voting was an unconstitutional to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters of the county.

Registration details

Today is the last official day to register in Illinois to vote on Nov. 4. There will be a grace period from Wednesday through Oct. 21 at the Chicago Board of Election office at 69 W. Washington St. in Chicago. Ballots can be cast at the same time. If you live in Chicago, check your registration status at http://chicagoelections.com. If you live in suburban Cook or Will counties, find links to those sites on the chicagoelections home page.

 

by

BY BILL DOLAN
bdolan@nwitimes.com
219.662.5328 | Tuesday, October 07, 2008

with some editorial changes

 

Just a day ago ACORN was caught filing false registrations in Nevada. Today it's Missouri. How many more states are suffering large numbers of fake registrations?

 

And, here is the revealing point, it seems always to be ACORN, a group who praises Obama and had him as their lawyer in Chicago. A group who had money guided to them by Obama. A group who supported Obama during his organizer phase where he forced banks to loan money for mortgages to people who could not pay.

 

Missouri officials suspect fake voter registration

After most of the previous 12 months covering Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency, it was interesting, instructive and, well, relaxing to follow John McCain for the last few days. The differences between the two are striking.

Obama is the big time orator, McCain is the guy who struggles with a teleprompter or even note cards strategically placed nearby. Obama's crowds are larger, more enthusiastic. McCain's events are smaller, but to my eye, better choreographed. And now with the addition of Sarah Palin to some of his events, McCain can boast of crowds that match Obama's in energy.

There is an urgency to the McCain campaign now that I don't think was there before. Due to the fact that he is running second, no doubt, but it may also be because McCain has a finishing kick. Whatever the case, he is sharper on the stump than he was before. (Though I would suspect a candidate running behind would want to schedule two or three appearances per day, instead of the one McCain usually does.)

It is true that McCain enjoys taking questions from the audience in town hall-style settings. That doesn't mean he is the master of that kind of forum, it just means he's good at it. He likes to converse with voters. Obama does it well too, but seldom achieves that intangible bond with the people that all politicians crave -- or fake.

Behind the scenes, where the public is not allowed, there are other differences.

Obama's campaign schedule is fuller, more hectic and seemingly improvisational. The Obama aides who deal with the national reporters on the campaign plane are often overwhelmed, overworked and un-informed about where, when, why or how the candidate is moving about. Baggage calls are preposterously early with the explanation that it's all for security reasons.

If so, I would love to have someone from Obama's campaign explain why the entire press corps, the Secret Service, and the local police idled for two hours in a Miami hotel parking lot recently because there was nothing to do and nowhere to go. It was not an isolated case.

The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric" is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn't be accomodated as in the days of yore. Even if it's true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.

The other day in Albuquerque, N.M., the reporters were given almost no time to file their reports after McCain spoke. It was an important, aggressive speech, lambasting Obama's past associations. When we asked for more time to write up his remarks and prepare our reports, the campaign readily agreed to it. They understood.

Similar requests are often denied or ignored by the Obama campaign aides, apparently terrified that the candidate may have to wait 20 minutes to allow reporters to chronicle what he's just said. It's made all the more maddening when we are rushed to our buses only to sit and wait for 30 minutes or more because nobody seems to know when Obama is actually on the move.

Maybe none of this means much. Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama's that is focused solely on victory doesn't have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters.

But in politics, everything that goes around comes around.

Palin Hacker Indicted - Son of Prominent DEMOCRAT politician

Tennessee man, 20, charged with accessing Republican's Yahoo! account

OCTOBER 8--A Tennessee man has been indicted for hacking into the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. David Kernell, 20, was charged with illegally accessing Palin's Yahoo! account "by researching and correctly answering a series of personal security questions," according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Knoxville. A copy of the indictment can be found below. After accessing Palin's account, Kernell, pictured at right, allegedly changed its password to "popcorn" and made screenshots of the account's directory as well as certain messages, photos, and "other personal information." Those screenshots eventually were widely distributed online. If convicted of the felony charge, Kernell, an economics major at the University of Tennessee, faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Kernell, whose father is a Democratic state representative in Tennessee, turned himself in this morning to law enforcement authorities and is scheduled to be arraigned later today.

 

Well, all you Obamite chanting teens who are shouting out pledges of loyalty for Obama. It's been done before guys, try Nazi Germany. try Stalinist Russia, try Pol Pot's Cambodia, try Sadaam's Iraq and more. Read the personal commitment to black leaders line (number 11)carefully!

 

BUT, just to help you...

 

HERE is THE CREED, as taught to Obama and his family for 20 YEARS at Rev. Wright's church in Chicago. This is the exact creed Obama had hidden the day Rev. Wright resigned as Obama's relgious adviser.

 

OBAMA's CREED

 

Obama's Creed as Rev. Wright Wrote - Can't Hide it Barack

 

At a moment in history like this, with foreign dangers and domestic crises, Obama showed himself unequal to the task. He says the words, but his heart is empty, his passion missing and his facts selective and biased.

 

How could America trust this great country to a Chicago south-side goon whose greatest friends include people like Jerimiah Wright (the white man hater), Akers (the unrepentant Weaterman bomber), Raines (the architect of the Freddie Mac-Fannie Mae collapse), ACORN (the proven criminal voting registration group) and on and on. A man whose knowledge of service to his country excludes any miltary but includes racist organizing.

 

We need a steady hand. A man who loves America. Not a man like Obama whose wife said she'd been ashamed of America until her husband was running for president. We need a man of real courage, real service, time in the enemies hands but surviving. Not a man like Obama whose foreign policy experience is attending a madrassa school in Indonesia, which lists his religion as Muslim, by the way.

 

Obama is an empty suit, full of hot air, but dangerous as a flamethrower aim at the heart of every American.

 

Here we go again!

 

Vote Today in Ohio is one

ACORN is the other

 

OHIO is a well known battleground state. OBAMA is using his close ally, Vote Today Ohio (a known pro-Obama group) to register people and have them vote instantly, according to a loophole is state law the current DEMOCRAT secretary of state chooses not to close.

 

Ohio could be won or lost by a few votes. Do you want OBAMA to win by carting people who have no interest in voting to a poll and get them voting ahead of the election?

 

In Nevanda, ACORN, an organization already convicted of voter fraud in numerous states, is now being found to be supplying false registrations in Nevada.

 

Remember this is the very group OBAMA worked closely with in Chicago and the one who has endorsed his candidacy even though they are supposed to be neutral.

 

It is well established their motives are to register Democratic voters, not Republicans. In fact in examining their registrations they are nearly 100% for Democrats. Convicted felons and dead people plus totally ficticious names like Mickey Mouse have been found.

 

CLEVELAND - Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

The huge effort by a pro-Obama group, Vote Today Ohio, takes advantage of a quirk in the state's elections laws that allows people to register and cast ballots at the same time without having to prove residency.

Republicans have argued that the window could lead to widespread voter fraud because officials wouldn't have an opportunity to verify registration information before ballots were cast.

Among the volunteers were Yori Stadlin and Vivian Lehrer of the Upper West Side, who got married last week and decided to spend their honeymoon shepherding voters to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

Early today, Stadlin's van picked up William Woods, 59, at the soup kitchen of the Bishop Cosgrove Center.

"I never voted before," Woods said, because of a felony conviction that previously barred him from the polls. "Without this service, I would have had no way to get here."

 

N.Y. Times whitewashes Obama-Ayers connection
Fails to report key connections, ignores incriminating documents given to paper

---

Posted: October 04, 2008
11:00 pm Eastern

By Aaron Klein
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

 

OBAMA is DESPERATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He's using every dirty play there is. In states where 10,000 votes my be the difference, having 50,000 ex cons vote for you may take it.

 

RICHMOND, Va. - Undaunted by the heat, James Bailey spent his late-summer afternoons walking Virginia's bleakest neighborhoods on the hunt for ex-cons — each a potential voter who might cast the decisive ballot in this hotly contested state.

 

Finding them isn't the hard part. It's getting them to admit that a past mistake has kept them from the ballot box.

"People are really, really reluctant to say, 'I lost my rights to vote,'" Bailey said of his quest, which continued in the run-up to Monday's registration deadline in Virginia for the November election.

Nationally, there are roughly 4 million released felons whose convictions have cost them the right to vote at least temporarily, if not permanently. To return to the ballot box, felons must negotiate suffrage laws that vary from state to state, in many cases working with election officials who can be both unfamiliar with the law and hostile to former convicts seeking to register.

Such challenges matter little to Bailey and others trying to return former criminals to voter rolls, an effort they consider crucial in light of the results of the past two presidential elections: A shift of a few hundred votes in Florida in 2000 would have changed the outcome of the presidential race, and the results in 2004 came down to a margin of 119,000 votes in Ohio.

The nonprofit groups and individual activists making the push on felons' behalf agree the effort is broader this year than in previous elections, even if they aren't necessarily making a coordinated push. They expect that effort to benefit Barack Obama more than John McCain, given that the population of former felons is disproportionately black.

Obama has co-sponsored a Senate measure that would allow all ex-felons to vote, but his campaign isn't directly targeting ex-felons for registration. His campaign does include relevant info on its Web site and educates volunteers so they can explain state laws to those who may not realize they have the right to vote, said spokesman Kevin Griffis.

"All we're trying to do is make sure that, if someone is eligible, that they know their rights and that if they want to vote, they can take part," Griffis said Tuesday. "I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. Even people who may have been guilty of a misdemeanor feel like the felony laws apply to them and say they can't vote."

McCain has said states should decide whether felons have voting rights. But he personally believes ex-felons should forfeit certain rights when they commit a serious crime and that the right to vote should be restored only on a case-by-case basis — much like Virginia's process.

Roughly 13 percent of black men nationwide have lost the right to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's School of Law, which advocates the reform of felon voting rights. Black ministers, civic leaders and activists believe they are a rich source of votes for Obama.

"Of course I would go with Barack," said Deshawn Tatem, a dreadlocked drug dealer-turned-activist from Chesapeake, Va. But he's never cast a ballot. "Right at 18, I caught the felony."

Tatem has never made the time to fill out an application to restore his voter rights, a request that would have to be approved by the governor. That means there's no way he'll be able to vote in November.

In Florida, where a new rule means more than 115,000 former felons who completed their sentences are now able to vote, civil rights attorney Reggie Mitchell said he's nonpartisan when he calls felons at home to give them information about registering to vote. But he also acknowledges the obvious.

Blacks represent "about 40 percent of the people who've gotten their rights lost and restored," Mitchell said. "With an African-American running, and such a critical mass, this could have a tremendous impact."

Kenneth Glasgow served 14 years on robbery and drug charges in Alabama. Now a pastor, Glasgow launched a voter registration drive inside the prisons in Alabama, where state law allows voting by felons convicted of lesser crimes such as possession of small amounts of drugs, battery or attempted burglary — even while still serving a sentence.

Glasgow, a Democrat, estimates as many as 70,000 felons in Alabama might be eligible to vote but haven't registered. Bringing them to the polls, he said, has the potential to alter the state's political landscape.

"It's not a black-white thing," Glasgow said. "It's that people will see Republicans standing against having people's rights restored while the Democrats aren't."

The state Department of Corrections halted Glasgow's registration drive after two days because of complaints from the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party that registering inmates without adequate monitoring could lead to voter fraud. Fewer than 80 inmates filled out registration forms. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed suit challenging the prison commissioner's decision to stop the registration drive.

Only two states — Maine and Vermont — place no limits on voting due to a criminal conviction; even prison inmates can cast a ballot. Kentucky and Virginia are the only two states that permanently bar felons from voting, although the governors of those states can restore voting rights to individuals.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear streamlined the process in March, and has since restored the rights of more than 740 released convicts. Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine promised to fast-track applications for voter restoration that his office received by Aug. 1, adding three people to his staff to process applications before Monday's registration deadline.

Applications in Virginia jumped from 76 for all of July 2007 to 138 in a single week this summer. Kaine, the governor for nearly three years, had restored the rights of 2,633 felons as of Monday, according to his spokesman, Gordon Hickey.

Laws in the other 46 states are varied, some of them a relic of the Jim Crow era, according to the Brennan Center. Eight states permanently bar felons convicted of certain crimes from voting, while the others restore the right after a sentence is completed, including parole, or as soon as an inmate is released from prison.

Faulkner Fox, who leads organizing efforts for the group "Durham for Obama" in North Carolina, said volunteers there frequently explain to shocked ex-felons that they can register to vote.

The confusion isn't limited to felons. Researchers at the Brennan Center and the American Civil Liberties Union interviewed election officials in 23 states from 2003 to this year. In a report released Wednesday, the groups said many officials in those states didn't understand voter eligibility rules for felons or how they can register to vote.

Among the problems: officials telling those convicted of misdemeanors they had lost the right to vote, failing to distinguish between probation and parole, and illegally demanding documentation. The researchers also found election officials who said they wouldn't help a felon register, which concerns civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"We still find election officials at the polls in too many cases only ask African-American males if (they) have a felony offense," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington bureau.

The confusion works both ways. In some cases, the researchers found election officials willing to register felons who were not yet eligible to cast a ballot under that state's law — a potential case of criminal voter fraud.

The ACLU, the NAACP and others support a nationwide standard that would restore voting rights to all inmates once they leave prison.

"Once a single local election official misinforms a citizen that he is not eligible to vote because of a past conviction, it is unlikely that citizen will ever follow up or make a second inquiry," the ACLU and Brennan Center report said. "The citizen will mistakenly believe that he is ineligible to vote for years, decades, or maybe the rest of his life."

But getting the information right, and then registering felons, isn't a guarantee of results. Tatem, the former felon from Virginia, isn't sure how much of a difference people like him will make.

"If they got their rights tomorrow, most of them probably still wouldn't vote," he said. "When you've been caged for so long, you can leave that cage open and some folk won't go through."