10/15/08 – Greg Palast – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest today is Greg Pallast.
He's an investigative reporter, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and the book Armed Madhouse.
He's got a new one out, it's a comic book, done with Ted Rall, Lloyd Dangle, Lucas Kettner and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It's called Steal Back Your Vote.
Welcome to the show, Greg.
Hey, they've already stole it, they've got to steal it back, what can I say?
Yeah, so let's talk about this.
First of all, my vague understanding is that the Republicans are much better at all this election fraud than the Democrats, so since I believe that will be the focus of most of what we're talking about today, I'd like to go ahead and give you the opportunity to prove to these people just how non-partisan you are in your criticism of American politicians, though admittedly I believe, Greg, you lean a little bit left.
You're sure no fan of the Democrats, you've done plenty of investigative reporting about, oh, I don't know, for example, the Clintons.
Yeah, the Clintons, the Clinton conspiracy, yeah.
Well, yeah, I'm certainly no friend of the Democratic Party or Barack Obama or the rest of the gang.
In fact, and you know, look, one of my major sources of busting open the story of how the election's being stolen is by one of John McCain's most enthusiastic supporters, former prosecutor David Iglesias, which is a good Republican, enthusiastic supporter of John McCain, who says that his party's gone on a rampage to illegally knock out hundreds of thousands of legal voters, and that it's gone to the point where, I mean, he considers them renegades who've taken control of his party through a kind of electoral and political coup d'etat with Karl Rove and the rest of the gang there.
And in fact...
Well, that's how I know that name, isn't it?
With Bobby Kennedy, and besides the comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, we are today coming out with a story in Rolling Stone on the theft of the election.
Now, Bobby's obviously Democratic, you know, Kennedy true blue and through.
This guy Iglesias, wasn't he one of the U.S. attorneys that got fired over this stuff?
Yeah, but listen, he's given me a new charge, which he's willing to say on camera, in my BBC reports, which you can also see at gregpalast.com or stealbackyourvote.org, Iglesias said that he was given a hundred names by the GOP, basically, and more of this ACORN stuff, you know, people registered by ACORN, when he was prosecutor, to go find fraudulent voters.
Here's the ACORN list, here's a hundred of their fraudulent voters.
Wait, wait, rewind a second, tell us about ACORN, we know that the right, this is a big talking point in the King campaign right now, is ACORN this, ACORN that, they're responsible for the housing crisis and for a bunch of voting fraud and all kinds of stuff, who's ACORN?
ACORN is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, basically, they are a, they've always been kind of a Clinton Democratic Party front.
I mean, if they, you know, I know these people, they're nice people, but they are a front, no question.
Okay.
Using George Soros' money to register a million people.
Oh, like in, like in Serbia and Georgia.
Yeah.
So, no question, I mean, they are, they are affiliates of the Democratic Party, they help make Clinton president.
Now, however, it's one thing to say that they're, that they're partisan.
It's another to say that they're registering fraudulent voters.
They've registered over a million voters, and the truth is, is that, yeah, they've paid people with Soros' money, mostly, to register folks, and so they get a couple bucks for each name.
So, some people have padded those, those rolls with their paycheck by putting in phony names, like Mickey Mouse and Mary Poppins.
However, I can tell you that we don't have a single case of a fraudulent ACORN-registered voter voting.
Mickey Mouse has not shown up to vote, there's no rodents in the polls that are voting.
So what Mickey Mouse did was he donated some money.
Is that right?
You know, and, you know, after all, remember, Eisner's a Republican, but the, who's the head of the Mickey Mouse empire.
Oh, sure.
The thing is that they haven't shown up to vote, and we even went further.
So we went to David Iglesias, the former U.S. prosecutor, Republican, John Ashcroft protege, and he said, look, they gave me, they being a guy named Pat Rogers, who's the head of the anti-ACORN, anti-fraud Republican operation, got a hundred names.
He went all over the mesas of New Mexico with the FBI, and out of a hundred, over a hundred names, he didn't find a single fraudulent voter, not one.
And here's the, here's the deep evil, and I put it in Steal Back Your Vote, the comic book, but also the Rolling Stone article.
He said that he was fired because he refused to prosecute people anyway.
They wanted to literally prosecute innocent voters.
In other words, you take some, like, like they had one woman, a waitress in, outside of Albuquerque, whose signature, she had two different signatures on her registration form.
Two registration forms, two signatures.
So it looked like she's letting someone use her name to vote a second time.
As it turns out, she put in a second form because the first was not confirmed, which is legal, but then she signed one form on a table and one form in her hand.
They wanted him to prosecute people like her, charge her with a federal crime of voter fraud, which is like hard time, five years in prison.
And then they would, of course, facing that, would plead guilty to some, you know, Class B misdemeanor, pay a hundred dollar fine and go away.
And then they, and then therefore they could get, they could run out and say, look, confessed fraudulent voters registered by a court.
He refused to arrest innocent people and he said for that reason he was fired by Karl Rove.
All right.
Now let me stop you right there.
That's clearly quite a bit removed from the American ideal that you would have one political party in power that would use their justice department to criminalize people for, you know, trying to support the other party to make it, to use criminal law to make it almost impossible for, you know, the only competition to be able to effectively compete.
My question is so, however, how unprecedented is this in American history?
Clearly in my lifetime, I don't think Reagan did this against Mondale or something, but going back further, is this really that out of the ordinary, Greg?
Well, we did prevent black people from voting for a hundred years after the civil war.
So, you know, we've had Jim Crow, which is a democratic party operation.
We've had Jose Crow for a long time.
And it wasn't until 1946 that native Americans even officially got the right to vote in America.
So, you know, and the voting rights act of 65, we have a long history of not allowing people to vote.
In fact, registration of voters was created to prevent Catholics from voting.
The new immigrants coming in.
Really?
I didn't know that.
They became citizens.
I mean, why do we even have registration of voters?
It's a bogus concept right at the front of it, because we don't have, in the state of South Dakota where there is no registration, like they say, we don't have dead people walking in to vote.
We don't have people voting twice.
We don't have any of that stuff that's supposed to, terrible things are supposed to happen.
But we've all accepted registration as so important.
And the Republicans have now added this scare that there are 5 million, I mean, 5 million illegal aliens and others voting, registered and voting for the Democrats.
And they cannot find them.
So why are they doing it?
If there's no such crime, I mean, literally, there are 24 people who were convicted over a four year period of federal voting fraud, 24 people in four years.
Come on, that's six people a year.
The answer is because the hysteria, and this is what we talk about in Steal Back Your Vote in the comic book, the hysteria has created this cover to allow the Republicans to put in anti-fraud measures, anti-fraud measures, including massive purging of voter rolls, new ID requirements, which are bogus, you know, this idea that you have to be verified that you are who you are.
You know, if it's Scott Horton Jr. somewhere in some government record, but Scott Horton on the voter rolls, you just, your vote is toast.
If they don't like your ID because it's a student ID and not a regular government ID, your vote is toast.
And in Indiana, we had a congresswoman who was denied the right to vote because her congressional ID does not have an expiration date on it, which is kind of interesting, so she couldn't vote.
You have this endless game, and they know who's whacked by these, especially new voters.
You know, that if you mail in your ballot, one thing to say in Steal Back Your Vote, one of the pieces of advice is don't go postal.
Most new voters don't realize that if you vote now for the first time, if you mail in your ballot, you've got to include a photocopy of your government ID that matches your name.
If you don't, your vote is gone.
You've got to include that in a special envelope that's separate from your ballot envelope.
Oh, really?
You have to send in two?
Now, wait a minute.
Does that count in Oregon?
I have a friend in Oregon who says that all their voting is by mail there.
Oregon is a very unusual situation where the Secretary of State said to our team that she has nightmares that other states will go to mail in.
And the reason is Oregon has a kind of social contract that every vote gets counted.
So, for example, if you mail in your ballot in Oregon without the proper internal ID form, they will contact you.
They'll call you, they'll send you a note, and they'll contact you before the election saying you need to correct this.
There's no other state that does that.
So, in other words, in Texas, you've got a great gotcha where you mail in your ballot without your proper ID, you will probably get a letter a week after the election telling you your ballot was discarded because.
Or you may not get a note at all and you may never know it.
But the last thing they're going to do is tell you, hey, you made a mistake, come in and fix it.
They don't want your vote.
They don't want you to vote.
They've already stolen your vote by these methods, and that's why we say deal it back.
All right.
Now, how much of this is because of the Help America Vote Act that was passed as a reaction to the crisis of the year 2000?
Well, Help America Vote, we have George Bush helping us vote.
And you know, good luck.
Yeah.
It's not a natural disaster.
Let's not talk about the disaster, fiasco, whatever.
It was the theft of Florida in 2000 by the Republican Party, by Jeb Bush and Katharine Harris and her predecessor.
And supposedly to prevent that from happening again, they passed this law, Help America Vote.
In fact, what it did was it fluoridated the entire United States.
It took Katharine Harris' method of computerizing the voter rolls and purging them of suspect voters, in her case, fake felons, who were just black people, guilty of voting all black, guilty of anything.
And having every state do that.
So the state of Colorado, for example, has purged one in five voters off the voter roll.
And when we ask the state of Colorado to explain what the hell they've done, we have...
You know, it's like there is no answer from them.
They refuse to talk to me.
I even flew to Denver.
They wouldn't let me in their office to even talk to them, or Rolling Stone or BBC television.
They won't explain why they removed one in five voters, which is ten times what the other states have done.
And that's the number one swing state in America, Colorado.
That is, the election is going to be decided, and it's going to be stolen in Colorado, stolen in Nevada, stolen in New Mexico, and stolen once again in Florida.
There are your four states.
Write it down.
Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, and which one?
Nevada.
Nevada.
Well, talk to me about New Mexico, because I remember that this got quite a bit of coverage in your book, Armed Madhouse, about how basically if you're an American Indian or if you're a Mexican, you're out of there.
And in fact, you talked about how Bill Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, a former presidential candidate in last year's primary season, or earlier this year's too, that he actually cooperated with the Republicans in purging all these Democrats, or at least helped cover it up, because they were a different faction of Democrats that threatened his power within that party.
And they're still doing it.
Well, Richardson was just sued a couple weeks ago by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Democrats...
If Obama loses the election because New Mexico is stolen, it will have been stolen by Democrats.
Part of our story in Rolling Stone magazine, and that, you know, I mean, which was not played up, because neither Rolling Stone nor my good co-author were all that excited about bringing out the fact that it was Democrats stealing the vote there.
But that's what's happening.
I went to the Acoma Native Pueblo, and 300 Native Americans tried to register.
Their registrations had disappeared.
Then they were given...
So they went to vote, they were given these bogus provisional ballots, but provisional ballots require an official envelope.
They weren't given the envelope.
So their ballots were thrown out, because they didn't have the envelope, by the same officials who wouldn't give them the envelope.
And they were all Democrats that threw out the Native American votes.
And the Native Americans voted as strongly Democratic as African-Americans.
So it's Democrats who are wiping out Democrats.
It doesn't matter that, except that, of course, on the national ticket, it's Obama that gets it in the neck.
And people say, why would Democrats steal Democratic votes?
Ask Mayor Daley.
Mayor Daley didn't steal votes from Republicans.
He stole votes from other Democrats.
There are no Republicans in the city of Chicago.
I mean, vote theft, like all politics, is local.
And it's class war.
It's class war.
And that's what's happening here.
You have the plutocrats and the permanent elite making sure that no one else is allowed in the system to take away their ability to ring the cash register.
And it doesn't matter.
I mean, the Republican and Democrat is not an issue in election theft.
The thing is, is that in this election, unlike, say, 19, you know, in prior years when the Democrats kept out all black voters, this year they want black voters.
So this year, it's the Democratic Party, which is most at the national ticket, which is going to take the hit from this complete Republican con game, utter fraud.
Wow.
It's really incredible.
You know, when I was a kid, I had a really great social studies teacher in fifth grade.
And he taught us about how when he was a kid, it was Jim Crow, colored bathrooms and colored water fountains and no rights to vote and white primaries.
And he taught us about the white primaries.
Well, oh, you're free.
You can vote in the election.
But the thing is, this is a one party Democratic state and you the Democratic Party itself is privately owned and they have their own rules.
And so you're not allowed in.
And so basically all the elections were decided in the primary.
The general election didn't matter at all.
Yeah, I mean, understand that, again, the cause of the place, there are parts of Texas which are all Democratic and therefore the Democrats have reasons to knock out the Democrats that would take away their their their power.
And so this is one of the big issues is that it again, it is about the right to vote of the underclass in America.
And that's who's getting it in the neck.
That's who's being harmed by these new rules to prevent voter fraud.
As an expert, Lorraine Menenti from Columbia University said, voter fraud, the cry voter fraud is itself a fraud.
I spoke to Tova Wang, who is the advisor to the the US Election Assistance Commission who wrote a report basically, and as she put it, in summary, the chance of a voter committing fraud is less than the chance of a voter being hit by lightning.
And her report was turned on its head to say that there was a massive wave of potential voting criminals.
They kept her name on it and then went to court to to try to get a gag order to stop her from saying they changed the conclusion and the evidence in my report.
And who did that?
Remember, I told you that the Colorado Secretary of State knocked off one in five voters.
Well, the chairwoman, Bush appointed this, the Catherine Harris of Colorado named Danetta Davidson appointed her chairwoman of the US Election Assistance Commission, where she could become, you know, show everyone, all the states how to purge.
In fact, he was going to call her the purging general.
But Karl Rove didn't like that.
That's a joke from the comic book.
You'll back your vote.
Yeah.
And it is a good comic book.
I got to say, I love Ted Roll.
It's too bad.
I don't think that George Bush himself is depicted in here in his pink general's uniform.
But that's my favorite character.
Well, now.
So give me some more.
Give me some more examples of this.
You talk about in this comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, the League of Women Voters and how the Help America Vote Act says, oh, if you have the slightest mistake here, the slightest mistake there, the fine is incredible.
We're not talking about deliberate fraud.
We're talking about the slightest mistakes on the voter rolls that basically the game is to bankrupt anybody who's actually trying to go out there and do voter drives and recruit new people to come to the polls.
That's right.
So what happened was that like, well, that came in with the state like Florida, which made it brutally expensive to make any little mistake.
And you got these fines, even criminal charges brought against you if you brought in a form too late.
You know, like, so some lady had to go to her cousin's wedding and didn't bring it in in 48 hours.
So they filled out the forms wrong and you get fined, you know, originally it was like $50,000.
Now they brought it down to $5,000.
The result was that the League of Women Voters got out of the vote registration game in some places because it's too risky for their individuals.
That's why ACORN ended up as the kind of sole mass voter registration organization.
It used to be the League of Women Voters and other groups like that, but they can't afford that.
So he said, at least, so Soros said, go do whatever you do and I'll write the check.
But you know, so unfortunately that's the result.
The result is that we lose the kind of nonpartisan group.
And so in fact, you know, in a way I still say, you know, good for ACORN because at least they stepped in to try to overturn a virtual criminalizing of voter registration.
Wow.
Well, it really is amazing.
I guess, especially the U.S. attorneys all being fired, that angle on this, that's the kind of thing that, I don't know, I guess in any normal year that would be a huge scandal, but it's just been buried under there's so much other news about torture and aggressive wars and maybe more wars to come and now a new Cold War with Russia and the U.S. attorney scandal.
Which one was that again?
Yeah, exactly.
So we got, we got plenty of scandals to choose from, but I think the U.S. attorney scandal to me was the keystone.
If you understand it, it's misunderstood.
It's not about politicizing the office of U.S. attorney.
I mean, my God, Rudy Giuliani was U.S. attorney.
It's the most political office out.
So no one's, that's meaningless to say, oh, the Republicans try to politicize the office.
What was dangerous and not reported, what Iglesias was saying, that these U.S. attorneys, almost all of them Republicans, simply refused to go along with a criminal scheme to illegally, illegally charge voters with voter fraud.
And for example, when they fired Bud Cummins of Arkansas and put in Carl Rove's protege, Tim Griffin, as U.S. attorney, but that was about it, everyone said, oh, that's what they can go after Hillary Clinton if she becomes the presidential candidate.
Absolutely not.
That's not what it was about.
That's not what it was about at all.
It was about going after Acorn, which is based in Little Rock.
See, so it was about setting up to basically destroy any attempt at the voter registration.
All right.
Now, I'm not the expert in electoral politics, and frankly, I don't think we should have any.
But anyway, what I understand now is that...
Well, obviously, you and Carl Rove have something in common.
He doesn't believe in electoral politics, either.
Well, it's a pretty vague agreement there, you know, semantics.
But here's the thing, though.
My understanding, Greg, and I don't know how well you keep up with this stuff either, but my understanding is that basically right now, Obama has 250, according to the polls, the opinion polls, 250 electoral votes locked up.
He needs 273 or something like that.
And that McCain has to win every single one of the swing states to win this election.
Obama needs one of them.
And that every one of those swing states is now leaning toward Obama, some of them pretty heavily even toward the line of not even being considered swing states anymore.
So could it really be that there would be enough criminality and fraud and purged voters and people turned away and handed these bogus provisional ballots and all these things that it could really make a difference in this election, as apparently it did in the last couple?
First, it makes a difference in our democracy.
I mean, one thing I will say is that they can't steal all the votes all the time.
So as we saw in 2006, where there was actually massive vote suppression, illegal vote suppression, but Democrats took control of Congress.
Whether you like that outcome or not, at least, you know, it does say that vote suppression can be overcome.
Overwhelmed.
The other thing is that more than the presidency on the ticket, you've got a pretty stiff race in Texas, which is an electoral cesspool in terms of vote suppression.
And so we're very concerned.
I should also say that despite all, Obama should not have to worry about Colorado or New Mexico or Nevada because of the changed demographics of those states.
But he's having to fight it out.
Again, I'm not an Obama supporter, but I don't think he should lose it.
I feel like David Iglesias, who's a big fan of John McCain, but he says, but not on the other hand.
I don't want McCain stealing my state or, you know, he doesn't believe McCain's doing it.
But, you know, he's accusing Pat Rogers, the Republican Party counsel, he's accusing Karl Rove of stealing New Mexico for John McCain.
He says, you know, I want McCain to win it, but fair and square.
Yeah, well, that's kind of rare to have that sort of integrity in a Republican nowadays.
Or in a Democrat.
Come on.
Integrity is not a word that gets a lot of work out in.
I guess the word gets worked out, but not the not the moral muscle.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I look a lower level operative like that.
I could expect to have some kind of integrity from either party, but not not that they would stay for long.
Yeah, well, you know, the thing is, there are good people around the Secretary of State of California.
I'm very impressed with her.
Deborah Bowen.
And well, wait, isn't she the one who's purged more than anybody out there in California?
Well, what happened was, though, her predecessor purged 40 40 percent, 42 percent of the new registrants.
You're talking like 100000 people were purged when I say purged.
They weren't even allowed on the voter rolls, let alone purged like 42 percent of new registrants in California because he used something called, again, under the Help America Vote Act that if your name doesn't match perfectly some crazy government record, we're not putting your name on.
And that meant people with names like Mohammed, who's, you know, where the clerks, these government offices write down their names four different ways.
People with hyphenated names.
I mean, it's overwhelmingly, as we point out in the comic book, is Vietnamese Islamic names, hyphenated Hispanic names, you know, names that that the clerks, these offices aren't used to.
And so they they screwed up.
And then the voter loses their vote, which is brand new before the government used to apologize for making the mistake.
Now they say you cannot vote because we made a mistake.
Yeah.
And little things like he's trying to straighten it out.
But, you know, she's not going to be able to straighten out by November 4th.
Yeah.
Well, you know, this even made The Washington Post, I think, last week that across the country these states have purged tens of thousands of people, at least, and that the federal government is even coming in now and saying, hey, you can't do that.
You're past the deadline for doing that and these kinds of things.
Well, yes.
What they're doing is that they're not supposed to purge anyone within 90 days.
But but Colorado, which they were showing, had purged tens of thousands of people at the last minute.
They did this in 04, by the way.
They purged 70,000 people, Colorado, days before the election, which is, again, illegal.
They said it was an emergency.
As far as I can tell, the emergency is that, you know, the Republicans are neck and neck.
That seems like a pulse.
So, you know, the Democrats have literally put in at least 100,000 new names into Colorado and New Mexico, wiping out Republicans on registration.
The thing is what the Democrats aren't looking at, the national Democrats running these drives aren't looking at is that they're purging at the same rate.
So there's no net gain to the Democrats and they're not aware of it.
They don't know about it.
In fact, there's a Democratic governor in Colorado, despite the Republican secretary of state, the Democrat governor didn't even know about the mass purging.
So that now he's holding hearings.
But the hearings are going to begin on November 19th.
Oh, great.
You know, I mean, it's like, like, huh?
So there you go.
So, like I say, they stole it, steal it back.
I don't care who you vote for.
I just want your vote to count.
You know, go to StealBackYourVote.org, the six ways of stealing the election, the seven ways you can steal it back.
Well, now, hold on a second.
I want to ask you to address these computerized voting machines here.
I know this is part of the Vote America Act, and you've emphasized throughout the years that don't get too distracted by these computerized things.
That's not really where the game is.
The game is purging the rolls.
Yeah.
I don't want people to get the wrong idea that I've suddenly endorsed computerized voting because it's three and computerized voting is disastrous.
But though most of the shenanigans of computers, by the way, do not happen as people imagine Hollywood style where, you know, some genius hacks in and, you know, changes the vote by hacking in.
Most of the mess up, most of the disaster in computer voting, most of the election theft is very simple.
You unplug it.
The machine, you make sure the machine glitches, doesn't work, doesn't happen, screws up, doesn't record, doesn't save to the memory stick, don't save all the votes.
So when you hit the save, just like if you were writing something, you know, it's like any computer program, right?
So it just happens to be very, very easy to make something go glitch in precincts you don't like.
No one has to know your vote.
Well, if you tell me your zip code, I'm telling you your vote.
I know how you voted.
You know, that's how it works.
You vote like like the guy next door.
Right.
And they have they've broken this down to a science even better than how they pay juries now.
Yeah.
So, you know, so they know they know where the machines break down.
They have to always break down the same same hood in in New Mexico.
We did a statistical analysis, found out that Hispanics tend to have their votes lost due to computer error six times as often as as white.
Now, that because they're stupid, no, or that they don't know how to use computers.
No, it's just that they're given crap machines, just like they're given crap schools and crap hospital.
You know, I mean, in fact, one thing I found interesting is that the voters that most got crushed in New Mexico were poor white in in the rural areas, like the really dirt poor ranchers.
So it's really more class than than even race.
It's just that it's easier for us to notice and profile the race issue.
Well, and I think the computerized thing really jumps out at people because they may never have heard of the the preemptive purging of the rolls and all that kind of stuff.
But just on its face, you've got to figure if there's a box full of paper ballots, even if, you know, people want to fight about it and argue, hanging chads and all these things, at least there's something that exists there in time and space that people can look at.
But how do you do it?
How do you do a recount on a computer and hit enter again and say, well, there's the number.
Yeah, I know.
Like the state of Florida requires that all votes be subject to recount on a computer.
It means that you just rerun the mistake.
You know, or rerun the or rerun the fix when you know there's a perfect solution to this that's been around for a long time.
In fact, back in, I think, 2003, I interviewed an expert from Rice University who had gone with a couple others, I think, from MIT and what have you.
And they'd gone through and looked at the code for I don't know if it was the bold or one of the competitors.
One of them had released the code and they said, you know, they looked right at it with their computer genius eyeballs.
They could see all the holes in the code just looking right at it on the page.
Why do we need a computer to vote?
I mean, it's not we're not talking launching the space shuttle here.
We're talking about, you know, picking the school board.
Right.
Well, you know, people who are, you know, into fancy technology and whatever, what are you going to do?
You can't talk them out of it.
But there's a perfect solution, which this guy, I forget his name, I'm sorry, from Rice University pointed out that they have a thing in Brazil where you do the computerized vote and then it fills out a ballot for you and shows it to you through a little window.
And if you agree that it filled out your ballot correctly, you hit one button, it drops it in the box.
If you don't agree, it drops it in the shredder right in front of your eyes and it lets you start over again.
And so that way you can have your instant results for all your media people who must know right now.
But you can also go back and double check.
Well, yeah.
I mean, in Venezuela, they also have the printing computer about there's no reason we all have printers.
There's no reason why I can't both tally electronically and print out a ballot that drops into a box.
I mean, it's just not that, you know, here's my ballot and then, you know, people, when they say a receipt, you don't want to walk out with your receipt.
There's nothing you can do with that.
But what you do is print.
You like the way it prints.
You stick it in the box.
Anyone challenges it, you can crack the box and compare it to the electronic total.
Of course, that raises the question, like, then why even bother with the electronic total?
Of course.
You know, so there are ways, by the way, not one of the problems you've run into is that like in New Mexico, where they did Bill Richardson moved to a printed ballot.
And he runs around saying, look, I saved our election system by having a printed ballot.
Well, Mr. Richardson, how come one in nine Democrats are missing from the voter rolls in the primary?
And you know what?
I have an answer to that.
Maybe because Bill Richardson was running for president and the people whose names were missing from the voter rolls weren't exactly Richardson voters.
You know, and you know, let's let's call it the way it is.
Bill Richardson was trying to steal that election because he did so badly that he couldn't get away with it.
Wow.
All right.
And you know what?
The problem is that now Obama is going to have to face the purged voter roll that Richardson left him.
Well, that's what's going on here.
In a way, it serves him right for being a member of the same primary.
Let me ask you, let me ask you to go through the seven steps here real quick.
OK, number one, I've got to go to to fight the dragon.
Oh, you say you got no time.
Well, I'll just go through.
Let's go through seven steps quickly, real quick.
The best thing to do, of course, is get to feel back your vote guide.
It's nonpartisan.
You can bring it to the polls and rip out that one page is physical copies.
You can get in bulk.
We're sending a whole bunch to Houston, by the way, physical copies you can get in bulk or just if you donate at least a penny, you can download it.
But number one, don't go postal, don't mail in your ballot.
You know that there's too many ways for them to play games.
We've discussed that second register and register.
You don't know if you're registered.
You think you're registered.
You want to check it out and know what name you're registered on, where you're supposed to be voting.
Third, vote early and vote often.
What we mean by that is don't wait for Election Day because you've really got to if there's a problem with your vote, you don't want to know.
Well, there's a line of 90 after you've waited two hours, there's a line of 90 people behind you.
You want to know by going in and voting early in person, then let's see, what else do we have there?
I probably have the comic in front of you.
Let me go take a look at the comic book.
Well, I have it right here, and this goes along with vote early in case there's a problem.
That is refuse a provisional ballot, bring your ID, make sure that some young punk Republican Party goofball isn't going to be able to stand there and challenge your right to vote that day.
Right.
Yeah, they're going to tell you take that provisional ballot, don't accept it.
Call the 800 number that we have.
You want an adjudication that you have a right to a ballot ballot, not a bogus blowing ballot.
And then we have something called Occupy Ohio and Invade Nevada.
Number five, what that means is that participate.
You vote early, take care of your vote, and then help someone else vote by working that day as a poll worker, as a poll watcher, as someone helping get out the vote, as someone helping people get the information.
Number six, we have we call it data voter.
Yeah.
Bring a sexy party with you.
You know, I mean, Jesse Jackson says arrive with five.
But one of the things we throw in there is bring ID.
And I know that I'm going to have a lot of voting rights attorneys saying you don't need ID in every case.
I know that.
But you know what?
If the little lady in the rhinestone glasses behind the desk says you need ID or I'm not letting you vote, I'm going to give you a provisional ballot.
You want to argue with her?
I wouldn't.
You better bring every ID you can think of and including government ID.
And it has to match your voter name.
It shouldn't have to match your address.
But I would suggest you do that anyway.
This is basic protection.
And finally, number seven is make the democracy demand.
The most important day is not November 4th, Tuesday, but Wednesday, the 5th.
If they're not demand that they count all the ballots, go stay with us at feel back your vote.
Dot org.
If they're not counting the ballots, we'll be there to, you know, while the rest of me is covering the count, we're going to cover the no count.
So go to feel back your vote that orgy election day and the day after to see what's happened.
And you know, if all you're concerned about is whether Obama does or doesn't get elected or or suddenly Ron Paul write and put him over the top, wouldn't that be great?
What would happen is, well, let's put this way, you know, it's like I'm much more concerned that the process of democracy survived here.
I mean, that might sound corny, but that that's that's about all the if we don't have it.
Well, you already see what happens with the price of not having an elected government is is the city of New Orleans drowned and and, you know, thousands are dead in Iraq.
And that's the price of an unelected government.
Yeah.
And particularly as we move into an era of economic catastrophe and more and more blowback from our foreign occupations and so forth, we really don't want to have a dictatorship here, do we?
It's kind of frightening, as I've said before.
Right now we have an unelected junta in charge and you see the result.
They don't do too well.
You know, like Musharraf or any of these unelected dictators, their arrogance is deadly costly because they don't they feel that they do not have to face the electorate.
That's the danger.
Not that the electorate's all that bright, but compared to the unelected leadership, I'll take the the American public.
Yeah.
All right, everybody.
That's Greg Pallas echoing Thomas Jefferson there.
OK.
OK.
OK.
Greg Pallas dot com.
Steal back your vote.
Or you find it's the new comic book.
Steal back your vote.