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http://www.democracynow.org./2012/8/30/daughter_of_billionaire_gop_donor_sheldon

Democracy Now Display full version a daily independent global news hour With Amy Goodman & Juan González

Daughter of Billionaire GOP Donor Sheldon Adelson Pushes Democracy Now! Staff, Seizes Camera at RNC

When Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke attempted to interview billionaire casino magnate and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson inside the Republican National Convention, a woman identified as Adelson’s daughter grabbed our video camera, tried to take it into a private suite and then threw the camera to the ground. While Adelson’s daughter first accused Burke of hitting her, she later came out of the suite to apologize. The incident was caught on tape, shortly after Burke questioned another billionaire GOP donor, David Koch, as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele. Burke files a report and joins us to describe what happened. [includes rush transcript]

Filed under  RNC 2012, Election 2012, Mike Burke

Guest:

Mike Burke, senior producer, Democracy Now!

Related

Amy Goodman Questions Top GOP Donor David Koch: Does Concentration of Wealth Subvert Democracy? Aug 31, 2012 | Story Federal Court Strikes Down Texas Voter ID Law in Ruling That Could Help Decide 2012 Election Aug 31, 2012 | Story Near Where RNC Attendees Harassed a CNN Camerawoman, Alabama Delegate Discusses Black Support of GOP Aug 31, 2012 | Story The Romney-Koch Handshake: Network TV Misses Revealing Moment Between Nominee & Billionaire at RNC Aug 31, 2012 | Story Top GOP Strategist Karl Rove Loses Cool Under Questioning from "Boss Rove" Author Craig Unger Aug 31, 2012 | Story

Editors Picks

As Senate GOP Blocks DISCLOSE Act, Top Donor Sheldon Adelson Probed for Bribery and Mob Ties Jul 18, 2012 | Story Dark Money: Inside the Final Frontier of Unlimited Political Spending (Part 2) Jun 27, 2012 | Story

Rush Transcript: This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, "Breaking With Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency." We’re broadcasting fromPBS station WEDU here in Tampa, Florida, as we cover the Republican convention, inside and out. We are doing two hours of daily coverage from the Republican convention. You can go to our website at democracynow.org if your station is just playing one.

We begin today’s shows in the suites. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke filed this report.

ADELSON HANDLER: Respect their privacy. Probably shouldn’t have had—

HANY MASSOUD: We weren’t recording her. We were doing an interview.

ADELSON DAUGHTER: You’re recording right now.

ADELSON HANDLER: They’re in here for a private event, and you stuck—do me a favor.

HANY MASSOUD: Who are you guys? Who are you guys?

ADELSON HANDLER: Do me a favor. Do me a favor.

ADELSON DAUGHTER: Are you recording me now?

ADELSON HANDLER: Do me a favor. Do me a favor.

MIKE BURKE: ...has taken the stage. We’ve been spending the last several hours walking along the corporate suites inside the convention hall on the lookout for Republican politicians and campaign backers. Earlier in the evening, we ran into David Koch, founder of the Koch Industries.

Just on Paul Ryan as VP?

DAVID KOCH: I like Paul Ryan. He’s a superstar.

MIKE BURKE: What do hope to hear in his speech tonight?

DAVID KOCH: Well, good things about correcting the budget deficit and reducing our national debt and keeping us as a country from going bankrupt.

MIKE BURKE: And how has Citizens United affected this year’s campaign?

DAVID KOCH: Pardon me. I’ve got to go in.

MIKE BURKE: And how much money are you going to spend on this election, Mr. Koch? How much money?

Approaching us now is Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Steele, can I ask you a quick question?

MICHAEL STEELE: Yes, sir.

MIKE BURKE: What impact has Citizens United had on this election campaign and the relationship between like these shadowy groups and the Republican National Committee?

MICHAEL STEELE: Well, not just the Republican National Committee, but the Democratic National Committee, as well. Both committees have benefited from the Citizens United ruling, yeah. I mean, there’s—you know, there’s more money coming to one side or the other, but there’s still cash flowing out there. I think—you know, look, my view of it is money is property, and as long as you are properly disclosing, which is the problem with the—with the law that is the—you know, the underlying law in the Citizens United case—you know, if you get that in place, then all of a sudden you know who the donors are, you know what their addresses and their businesses are, and it becomes a different dynamic.

MIKE BURKE: We ran into Newt Gingrich on the fourth floor and asked him about the impact of Citizens United.

NEWT GINGRICH: Oh, I don’t think much of it. I personally prefer a reform that allows everybody to give their money directly to the candidate, as long as they reported it every night on the internet so the candidates are responsible. I think that would be a better system. But I’m not particularly frightened by the current system.

MIKE BURKE: But what about a system that we currently have where someone like Sheldon [Adelson] can spend maybe over $100 million on this campaign?

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, you just saw in Indiana, in Nebraska and in Texas, the candidate with the most money lost—and in Missouri. So, I don’t—I don’t think money is the be all and end all. I think that it’s a factor, but I think there are a lot of other things that get involved.

MIKE BURKE: And we’ve just spotted Sheldon Adelson being pushed in a wheelchair down the hall. Karl Rove is right behind him. We’re going to try to follow them to see how far we can get.

Mr. Adelson, your thoughts on the Romney-Ryan ticket?

SHELDON ADELSON: No comment.

MIKE BURKE: We’re trying to follow Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelson as they go down the hallway here in the suites.

Mr. Adelson, how much money are you going to spend on this election?

ADELSON HANDLER: Guys, guys, hey!

ADELSON DAUGHTER: Get off me!

ADELSON HANDLER: Hey! Hey!

ADELSON DAUGHTER: Get off me! I’ll hit you!

HANY MASSOUD: He’s just walking.

MIKE BURKE: I did not touch her. She ran back into me. She just grabbed our camera! This woman grabbed our camera.

AMY GOODMAN: Loud noise was the sound of Democracy Now!'s video camera hitting the ground. Just moments after our senior producer Mike Burke attempted to question the billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a woman identified to the Democracy Now! team as Adelson's daughter grabbed the video camera from the cameraman, Hany Massoud, then attempted to take the camera into a private suite. She then dropped the camera on the ground. Our senior producer Mike Burke joins us to describe what happened. Mike, explain.

MIKE BURKE: Well, we were up on the fifth floor of the Tampa Bay Times Forum. This is the site of the Republican National Convention. And Hany Massoud, our cameraperson, and I—we spent most of the day walking along the hallways where the corporate suites are, you know, trying to find politicians and campaign donors and various other people to speak with. Near the end of the evening, we were walking down the hall, where we see Sheldon Adelson, who of course has played a critical role in this year’s election. He’s already donated tens of millions of dollars, first to Newt Gingrich’s campaign, then to Mitt Romney’s campaign. And so, we attempted to ask him a question, and we got two questions in.

And then what happened, it just—it really shocked me. A woman that was standing right behind Sheldon Adelson, who we later learned that apparently was his daughter, she stopped and then forcibly pushed herself back into me, where I lost my footing. And then, from there, she went over to Hany Massoud, our cameraperson, and actually grabbed the camera. And we were—she was only about two or three feet away from the suite where they were going to be watching the convention speeches. And she attempted to go into the suite, into the door, with the camera. Hany said something along the lines of, you know, "What you doing? This is our camera." And then, at that point, she drops the camera on the ground, and you heard that sound. She goes into the suite, and there’s some commotion outside. We actually have some audiotape—I mean, it’s videotape, but it’s from Hany’s camera. And at that point, we weren’t sure if Hany’s camera was broken or not. And we actually still aren’t sure. I mean, it was—it forcibly fell on the ground. But we have some tape. I think it’s important to hear. It’s a little bit unclear at times who is speaking, but there’s two times in this tape where Sheldon Adelson’s daughter comes out from the suite and actually apologizes to us. And this, of course, is after several—

AMY GOODMAN: This is after she body-slams you, steps back into you?

MIKE BURKE: "Body slam" might be a bit—that might be a bit too much, but she definitely, you know, stopped and then went back with force.

AMY GOODMAN: Into your body?

MIKE BURKE: Right, in an attempt so that I could not ask a question of Sheldon Adelson, who, of course—I mean, regular viewers of Democracy Now!might know, he—very infrequently does he speak to the press. So, for us, it was a very rare chance to speak to such an influential figure. So, I think—another voice we hear on this tape is a top aide of Sheldon Adelson. His name is Andy Abboud. He works for the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. This is one of the casinos that Sheldon Adelson owns. He basically came out said, you know, "We’ll take care of it. We’ll take care of it. Everything will be fine." And—

AMY GOODMAN: And who identified this woman as Adelson’s daughter? You certainly didn’t know that was the case.

MIKE BURKE: No, I believe that was Andy, but it was either Andy or someone else.

AMY GOODMAN: Their person that came out of the suite.

MIKE BURKE: Yeah, and there was a very large entourage that ended up responding to this incident. And there was actually a third incident that happened, where another one of his aides ended up grabbing my cell phone and attempting to take my cell phone, because once Hany’s camera was on the ground and we weren’t sure if it was working, I attempted to take out my Android and—because I wanted to record what was happening. He immediately grabbed my hand and grabbed onto the phone and refused to let go. And he held on for about probably 20 seconds or so. You can hear that, as well, in this tape. So, I think we should take a listen.

ADELSON HANDLER: ...their privacy. Probably shouldn’t have had—

HANY MASSOUD: We weren’t recording her. We were doing an interview.

ADELSON DAUGHTER: You’re recording right now.

ADELSON HANDLER: They’re in here for a private event, and you stuck—do me a favor.

HANY MASSOUD: Who are you guys? Who are you guys?

ADELSON HANDLER: Do me a favor. Do me a favor.

ADELSON DAUGHTER: Are you recording me now?

ADELSON HANDLER: Do me a favor. Do me a favor.

HANY MASSOUD: Mike. 571.

ADELSON HANDLER: Do me a favor. Do me a favor.

MIKE BURKE: Sir, you just stole my camera!

ADELSON HANDLER: Do me a favor. Do me a favor, OK? When you run into someone in the hallway—

MIKE BURKE: That’s my camera.

HANY MASSOUD: It’s on camera. It’s on camera. Are you joking? Are you joking?

ADELSON DAUGHTER: I am sorry. I don’t know who. I thought you were hitting me.

HANY MASSOUD: OK, that’s fine. That’s fine. Well, it’s on camera. It’s on camera. We’re not worried about it. We’re not worried about it. I mean, she grabs my camera and tries to run off with it. So how am I supposed to respond to that? That’s exactly my point. It’s on camera. I’m not even near her. I’m behind her. I’m behind her.

MIKE BURKE: I’ve been working on this job for 12 years. I’ve never seen somebody grab a camera like this.

HANY MASSOUD: Is there a spokesperson?

ADELSON HANDLER: She’s his daughter.

HANY MASSOUD: See, I didn’t know that. So that’s why she’s more emotional, you see?

ADELSON HANDLER: That’s his daughter. And they’re giving—and they gave [inaudible]—

HANY MASSOUD: So, she took it personal. She took it personal.

ADELSON HANDLER: She did. Well, it is personal, because they’re private citizens.

HANY MASSOUD: Which I also understand. Until she grabbed the camera, it wasn’t a big deal.

ADELSON HANDLER: I know. I understand.

HANY MASSOUD: That’s what I’m saying. We’re used to handlers bumping us and things like that, and we respect their jobs.

ADELSON HANDLER: Yeah, I’ve got it.

HANY MASSOUD: We respect their jobs.

ADELSON HANDLER: So, but just—the best thing is to back off. Contact me. We’ll fix it.

AMY GOODMAN: There you have this bit of commotion here. Mike, what happened next?

MIKE BURKE: Well, one interesting thing I forgot to mention is, Karl Rove was actually standing by when almost all of this happened. He was walking down the hall with Sheldon Adelson and was going to the same suite as Sheldon. So, he actually witnessed at least the beginning part of this, and I’m not sure how much after that.

Also interestingly, a few minutes later we decided to leave outside his suite. And we were walking down the hallway, and all of a sudden we see Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, former presidential candidate, who is close personal friends with Sheldon Adelson. Sheldon Adelson gave the Gingrich campaign tens of millions of dollars, really helped keep Gingrich in the race earlier this year. So we were able to—once we saw Newt Gingrich, we decided to, you know, follow him and just see where he was going. We weren’t sure if he was going to go into Adelson’s suite or not.

AMY GOODMAN: Into suite 571.

MIKE BURKE: And it turned out, he went into 571, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Sheldon Adelson’s suite. And to explain what these suites are, the corporate suites overlook the arena. And so, you walk in a door as if you’re just walking into an office, but the other side of it looks out. It’s a skybox that looks out onto the arena. And these are where the large corporate donors have their parties and their suites for the evening. Some of these large donors also can sit out on the higher—on the higher bleachers of the arena, and they sit with their wine, and they watch the proceedings below.

MIKE BURKE: We tried to get into several of these suites last night, and every single time we were turned away. But we’ll keep trying.

AMY GOODMAN: Mike, maybe we can talk more about who Sheldon Adelson is.

MIKE BURKE: Sure. I mean, there was a reason we were trying to speak to him. You know, he’s pledged to spend as much as $100 million on this year’s campaign in, you know, an attempt to defeat President Obama. And this is really one of the most significant figures post-Citizens United, where you can now spend unlimited amounts of money, you know, whether it’s the super PACs or the 501(c)(4)s. And, oh, on Democracy Now! , we’ve interviewed one investigative journalist named Peter Stone, who’s—he now is a freelancer with the Huffington Post, several times. And I want to go back to a clip of Peter when he was on Democracy Now! in July, really outlining who Sheldon Adelson is.

PETER STONE: He was the leading supporter of Newt Gingrich’s effort, the outside group that was backing Gingrich. He had longstanding ties to Gingrich and was hoping he would get the nomination. When Gingrich withdrew, he threw his support, initially, reluctantly, to Romney. He felt that Romney was not as decisive as Gingrich and might not be quite as good on certain issues of particular importance to Adelson. Number one on his agenda is strong support for the Israeli government, and particularly the conservative wing of Israeli political parties. He has close ties to Netanyahu, and he is generally considered a hawk on Middle East issues. He opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And Gingrich had been, you know, far more outspoken. Romney is strong on these issues, too. And, you know, he is now backing Romney.

His overriding concern is to defeat President Obama. He thinks Obama is weak on Israeli issues, Middle East issues. He also has publicly castigated him for his economic policies, described them, I think, to Forbes as socialist-style economic policies, which he’s worried about, you know, continuing for another four years. So he’s dedicated to defeating Obama. He’s also throwing a lot of money, tens of millions of dollars, into other groups, outside groups, that are playing big in trying to help Republicans win the Senate and keep the House. I reported in Huffington Post a few weeks ago that he has given an estimated $70 million or committed estimated $70 million thus far this cycle. We know about $30 million of that is public at this stage. I learned that he has given at least $10 million to a Karl Rove group that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, Crossroads GPS, and pledged another $10 million for Rove’s operation. Likewise, he has given $10 million recently to a Koch entity, one of the groups backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. So, he is definitely committed to helping get Obama out of the White House and trying to help Republicans make major gains in the fall in the congressional front.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigative reporter Peter Stone, describing the casino billionaire magnate Sheldon Adelson, who is playing such a significant role in this post-Citizens United election, promising to spend some $100 million in this election. Mike Burke?

MIKE BURKE: Amy, it’s fascinating. When we were outside the suite—this is after the camera—after Sheldon Adelson’s daughter took our camera and threw it on the ground, we spent several minutes right outside the suite. And one gentleman—I didn’t get his name, but his—he was kind of urging us just to leave. And he made a comment saying, "He is funding all of this," as if that’s a reason why we should not be questioning him and why we should not be up in the suites.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will continue to be in the corporate suites, covering the streets, and also being on the convention floor. This is a media event that thousands—it’s estimated 15,000—journalists are covering. And it’s very important not to cover—just cover, but to uncover what is taking place, both here in Tampa at the Republican National Convention and also as we move on to Charlotte next week for the Democratic convention. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke, Mike, thanks so much.

MIKE BURKE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we continue to follow the money. We will be joined by Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi. Stay with us.

http://www.democracynow.org./blog/2012/7/30/matt_taibbi_explains_wall_streets_license_to_steal_offshore_tax_havens_and_private_equity_firms

Matt Taibbi Explains Wall Street’s "License to Steal," Offshore Tax Havens and Private Equity Firms

In part two of our interview with Matt Taibbi, he describes recent Wall Street scandals — including a decade-long Wall Street scandal that drained money from every county and state in the United States — and notes not a single bank executive has faced individual consequences. He also explains how Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, and others have used private equity to raise money to conduct corporate raids. "It’s just a scheme to take a cash-rich company and move all that cash to a few actors — typically it’s the executives of the target company and the executives in the private equity firm — and then you force everybody else to pay," Taibbi says. "The workers pay by either losing their jobs or taking reductions in salary, and the guys at the top win." Click here to watch part one of this interview.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Matt Taibbi is our guest, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece is "The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia: How America’s Biggest Banks Took Part in a Nationwide Bid-Rigging Conspiracy—Until They Were Caught on Tape." He’s author of Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

OK, explain what this scam Wall Street learned from the Mafia, how America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging scheme.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, this is actually somewhat similar to the Libor situation, because what we’re dealing with is a kind of a cartel-style corruption scheme. In Libor, it was 16 banks acting in concert to rig the international interest rates. What this one was was a number of the world’s biggest banks colluding to artificially suppress the amount of money that cities and towns earned on their municipal bond service. So this is—it’s very complicated inside baseball stuff, but when a town or city wants to borrow money, it goes to Wall Street. It issues a bond. Let’s say it borrows $50 million. It doesn’t spend all that money right away, so it doesn’t build the school right away, it doesn’t build the baseball field. It keeps that money in an account somewhere, and banks are supposed to compete with each other at auction for how much that money is going to earn. That money is going to be invested, and they’re supposed to out bids against each other for how much they’re going to pay the towns and the cities on that investment income. And what they’ve been doing is they’ve been getting together secretly and parceling out business. So the banks—one bank will say, you get to do the bond service for the school in this town, you get to do the bond service for the—you know, the hospital over here, a third gets to do the bridge or the highway in another state. And essentially, this was every state—every county in every state in the United States was affected by this scandal over a period of about 10 years. We just recently had a trial for a few of the participants here in New York, but it extends far beyond those individual defendants

AMY GOODMAN: Give names. Give examples.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, the particular—the particular defendants in that trial, which was two months ago here in New York City, they were three guys who worked for a subsidiary of GE Capital, but GE was really the fifth big bank to be caught up in this scandal. JPMorgan Chase has already paid a $228 million settlement. Bank of America, UBS, Wachovia, which is now Wells Fargo, they’ve all paid settlements in excess of $100 million. This all came out last year, although surprisingly there was no real coverage about it. It was also—this is actually the scandal that helped submarine the appointment of the—I’m blanking—the New Mexico governor who was nominated by Barack Obama.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Bill Richardson.

MATT TAIBBI: Bill Richardson, excuse me, yes. His commerce secretary appointment was submarined by this scandal indirectly, because he was taking money from a middleman company called CDR, which was arranging these rigged auctions. So this—the conspiracy extends to probably a dozen or two dozen of the biggest banks in the world. And we have criminal cases now that are just wrapping up for 18 of the defendants in this conspirace, but it extends beyond that.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about JPMorgan Chase and JB—Jamie Dimon, not to mix their names together.

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: The appearance before the Senate Banking Committee, the kinds of questions that were asked, or instead, the kinds of advice that was asked for by senators on both sides of the aisle—

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —who were receiving millions of dollars from him?

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right. So, Jamie Dimon gets summoned before the Congress, and he’s there to answer questions about how it could possibly happen that a bank could suddenly have a $3 or $4 billion loss overnight. And the reason we ask these questions is that—because there’s an implicit federal guarantee. This is a—you know, a commercial bank like Chase is FDIC guaranteed. And so, when it gambles and it risks enormous sums of money, it’s essentially all of our problem because if JPMorgan Chase were to go under for any reason, then all of us would have to pay for it. Jamie Dimon and a lot of people on Wall Street don’t really see it that way. And so, when he was hauled up before Congress to answer questions about how this loss could possibly happen after everything that happened in 2008, why wasn’t there better risk assessment, how could there not be controls that prevented this sort of thing from happening, he really acted very put out that he even had to answer any questions. And most of the questions actually weren’t that tough, to begin with. They ended up really more asking him advice on how to better regulate the economy. It was a comical kind of situation where there’s sort of a widespread misunderstanding of what the dangers are here.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And to get back to this point of the level of scandal that we have seen continually exposed, one after another, with the banks continuing just to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and billions of dollars in settlements, then just keep on—keep on keeping on. You know, there seems to be no sense of total outrage or shame, or at least among government officials, there’s no sense of the outrage that is felt among the public—

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —about these banks continuing to rig the financial system.

MATT TAIBBI: Right. Yeah, no, this is—I think this is the key thing that people don’t understand, is that in the law enforcement community there’s an incredible amount of enthusiasm, for some reason, among people in law enforcement for doing things like catching undocumented aliens. You know, I was down in Georgia last week. I heard about a case where a guy was deported for fishing without a license. You know, it’s incredibly easy to start a criminal case everywhere outside of Wall Street, but in Wall Street, we’ve had one scandal after another involving enormous sums of money, you know, not just billions of dollars but, with the Libor thing, trillions of dollars, and not a single person has had to have any individual consequence. So you talk about all those settlements. Those are all paid by the company and by the shareholders. Not a single person since 2008 has gone to—has been indicted, has gone to jail, has spent a day in jail, or has paid any kind of money out of his own pocket. And until there’s any individual consequence, it’s really a license to steal. I think the Libor thing is really going to be a litmus test for all regulators, because if you can’t go to jail for rigging an $800 trillion market, what can you go to jail for?

AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think should be tried first, jailed first?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, all the traders and all of these—the Libor submitters all have to be indicted, clearly. But it has to go higher than that, because this can’t happen without the consent of the senior executives in the companies, so they all have to go, too. And I think the British acted appropriately in immediately, you know, making sure that the Barclays chief stepped down. But that’s just for starters. I think, you know, we have to do that. We have to remove all the executives who are responsible for this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, all the sports fans now who go to these stadiums, renamed after banks—

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —including now the new New York Nets in the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn—

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right, exactly. And then—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —are facing having to walk into these stadiums for these thieves, being named after them.

MATT TAIBBI: Exactly, and then think about another—here’s another sports thing. The Justice Department assigned 93 agents to the Rogers Clemens case. Think about that. Ninety-three guys assigned to the case of injecting Roger Clemens with steroids. How many people are investigating the mortgage-backed—or who are on the mortgage-backed task force that Obama allegedly started a few months ago? It’s less than that, from what I understand. So here you have this massive criminal conspiracy that involves all the biggest companies in America, and we’re spending less resources investigating that than we do on a single baseball player—who’s retired, incidentally.

AMY GOODMAN: On the stadium issue, speaking about sports—

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —right, President Obama going to speak in Bank of America Stadium—whoops! I mean Panthers Stadium.

MATT TAIBBI: Right, Panthers Stadium, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Bank of America bought the rights in 2004.

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And now, as the Democrats do their fundraising, they’ve stopped calling it "Bank of America Stadium."

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: And they’re calling it Panthers Stadium, which is interesting in itself, but—for lots of reasons, but your response?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, first of all, I did a big exposé on Bank of America a few months ago, and so I hope I had a tiny, tiny part in this. I think the Occupy movement has done a lot of work with Bank of America, and I think that has a much bigger part to do with this.

AMY GOODMAN: Recap what you found in what you—your investigation.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, Bank of America, they were a—they’re sort of a poster child for everything that’s wrong with "too big to fail," but most importantly, in 2008, they were really the most aggressive actor in the whole—in the sort of scheme to sell toxic, explosive mortgage-backed securities to public funds like pension funds and unions. And that was really just a gigantic fraud scheme. And Bank of America, along with its subsidiaries, Countrywide and the investment bank—my god, I’m losing my mind—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Merrill Lynch.

MATT TAIBBI: Merrill Lynch, exactly—they were all probably the most aggressive in their respective fields in pushing those toxic mortgage-backed securities. So, it would be, I think, bad for the Democrats to associate themselves with that company, heading into the campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, speaking about the elections, explain Bain, private equity. I think the reason so many get away with so much, or so few, you know, at the top get away with so much, people just cannot understand it. It’s like going to a surgeon, and he starts explaining what he’s going to do to you. In fact, it affects all of us, or in that case, it affects you, right? The surgeon. But you have no idea what he or she just said.

MATT TAIBBI: Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I know, private equity is difficult to understand. I think what’s funny is, it’s really not that much different from what we saw in the 1980s when we—when corporate raiders and leverage buyout specialists like, you know, Carl Icahn became these sort of Gordon Gekko-style public villains. That’s really all that public equity—private equity is. It’s just that the mechanism has changed. Back in the '80s, what these guys were doing is they were using junk bonds to create the financing they needed to take over companies. Nowadays they're using securitization and what are called CLOs, collateralized loan obligations. It’s the same mechanism that banks used to create mortgage privatizations.

And so, what they’re doing is, you take a company like Bain. It has a small amount of cash. Let’s say it wants to acquire a company for $500 million. It might have $40 million. It will go to a big bank, like a Goldman or a JPMorgan Chase, and it will say, "We want to raise $300 million so that we can go in and buy a majority of the shares in this company." The big bank will go out. It will issue a securitized bond, like the mortgage bonds that they were issuing, and raise a whole bunch of money. The Bain-like company then goes and buys a majority of the shares, and when they do that, when they take over the company, the critical thing is, all that debt, all that borrowed money, that when they borrowed all that money to take over the company, the company now, the taken-over company, now assumes that debt. So, when you take over the company, they now have this additional burden that they have to meet. And in order to meet that burden, they often have to streamline themselves and lay off people. The private equity firm will also typically charge a reorganization fee to the target company. So they’ll say, "We’ve come over. We’ve taken over your company. And in order to restructure, you have to pay us x amount of money." So now the target company has two new obligations that it has to meet: it has to pay the reorganization fee, and it has to pay all that debt service, which is why they have to lay off people, because they don’t have as much money as they did before.

AMY GOODMAN: And the biggest crime around how this all affects everyday people?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, the biggest crime is that you’re taking functioning, healthy companies, and you’re larding them with debt, forcing them to lay people off. And it’s just a scheme to take a cash-rich company and move all that cash to a few actors—typically it’s the executives of the target company and the executives in the private equity firm—and then they—you force everybody else to pay. The workers pay by either losing their jobs or taking reductions in salary, and the guys at the top win. And that’s kind of the direction—that’s really what Mitt Romney represents. He represents this economics that sees massive compensation heading upward and tightening of the belt everywhere else. And we’ve seen this trend develop over two decades or so here in America, and a lot of it has to do with financial maneuvers like this.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Taibbi, I want to thank you very much for being with us, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece is "The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia: How America’s Biggest Banks Took Part in a Nationwide Bid-Rigging Conspiracy—Until They Were Caught on Tape." His latest book, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

GUEST

Matt Taibbi, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth article is called "The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia: How America’s Biggest Banks Took Part in a Nationwide Bid-Rigging Conspiracy — Until They Were Caught on Tape." He’s author of the book Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

Filed under  Web Exclusive, Wall Street, Economy, U.S. Economy, Mitt Romney, Election 2012, Matt Taibbi

Realted

Amy Goodman’s Fireside Chat with Workers Set to Lose Their Jobs After Decades at Bain-Owned Plant Sep 20, 2012 | Web Exclusive “Bainport, a Taste of the Romney Economy”: Bain Plant Workers Fight Outsourcing Their Jobs to China Sep 20, 2012 | Story DN! Exclusive: Live from Illinois Where Workers Demand Romney Visit Before Bain Sends Jobs to China Sep 20, 2012 | Story "Romney’s 1 Percent Nation Under God." By Amy Goodman Feb 02, 2012 | Columns & Articles Bipartisan "Super Committee" Turns to Cutting Deficit with "Extraordinary" Powers Aug 12, 2011 | Story

Tusday 6th November 2012

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/6/in_key_florida_battleground_tea_party

In Key Florida Battleground, Tea Party-Linked "True the Vote" Challenges Voters at the Polls

Election Day 2012 has arrived, and the battle over voter suppression has reached a fever pitch in battleground states. We go to Virginia, where volunteers with the tea party-linked group True the Vote are challenging voters at the polls. We speak with Brentin Mock, the lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. Mock also describes voter suppression efforts in Florida, where True the Vote has also targeted alleged felon voters who will be asked to submit a provisional ballot if they attempt to vote today. [includes rush transcript]

Filed under  Election 2012, 2012 Election, Voting, Brentin Mock, Myrna Pérez

Guests:

Brentin Mock, lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. His latest article is called "Tea Party Group Blocks Florida Voters, Stops Water Handouts at Polls."

Myrna Pérez, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. She’s part of the Election Protection Coalition’s voter support hotline. Their number is 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Related

Election (Suppression) Day 2012: From ID to Intimidation, How to Protect Your Rights at the Polls Nov 06, 2012 | Story

In Landmark Ruling, "Dark Money" Group Tied to Citizens United Ordered to Reveal Its Donors Nov 06, 2012 | Story In Ohio, African-American Turnout Threatened by Reduced Early Voting and Faulty Ballots Nov 06, 2012 | Story In Tight Race, 11th-Hour Voter ID Laws, Suppression Could Decide Ohio and Other Swing States Nov 05, 2012 | Story As Missouri Senate Race Tightens, New Details Emerge on Todd Akin’s Anti-Abortion Past Nov 01, 2012 | Story

Links

Voting Rights Watch 2012 - The Nation Voting Rights Watch 2012 - Colorlines.com LIVE Election Night 2012 Coverage with Democracy Now! LIVE Election Night 2012 Coverage with Democracy Now!

Editors Picks

As ID Laws Risk Disenfranchisement, Intimidation Fears Grow with Tea Party Group’s "Poll Watcher" Aug 28, 2012 | Story

Rush Transcript

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: It’s been a long time coming, but today is the day when people across the country head to the polls to cast their ballots in what remains a tight presidential race. As they do so, voting rights advocates are closely watching, monitoring confusion over whether they’re required to show photo ID. In fact, many of the most stringent new voting restrictions at the state level have been blocked or weakened by courts, including a key swing state, like Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, in the battleground state of Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted has issued a new, last-minute directive that would disqualify ballots not accompanied by a form accurately documenting the type of identification used. Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich was asked about whether this could lead to a greater number of provisional ballots, which could delay election results. This was his response Monday on CBS News.

GOV. JOHN KASICH: A lot of people got ballots to vote early. And if you don’t turn those in, you know, and then you show up to vote, then—that you become a provisional, you know, ballot operator. And so, it is possible, if it’s very, very close, that, you know, we won’t know the results of this for a while. But, you know, again, I’m just not a fortune teller, you know? I can’t predict that. The provisional ballots could be numerous, but, you know, we’ll see. We still have today, and then people can drop that absentee ballot into the ballot box on Election Day.

AMY GOODMAN: Over the weekend, Democrats called attention to other voting challenges by filing a lawsuit to force Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott to extend early voting. Last year, Scott and the Republican state legislature reduced early voting times. Now voters are seeing waits of more than six hours at the polls. Still, the 2012 election is also expected to set a record for early voting. Thirty million Americans have already cast their ballot through early voting across 34 states.

To talk more about about what’s happening at the polls, what voters can expect, and who they can call if they encounter problems, we’re joined now by two guests: Myrna Pérez is senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, part of the Election Protection Coaliton’s voter support hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE.

In the battleground state of Virginia, we’re joined via Democracy Now! video stream by Brentin Mock, lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. His latest article is called "Tea Party Group Blocks Florida Voters, Stops Water Handouts at Polls."

Welcome, both, to Democracy Now! Explain the title of your piece, Brentin.

BRENTIN MOCK: Sure. I mean, if it sounds a little ridiculous, that’s because it is. I mean, let’s take the second part of it, where poll watchers are basically trying to stop water from being handed out. You just talked about the really long lines in—throughout Florida, whether we’re talking about Miami or Tampa. I was just in Tampa, and the lines were literally out the—you know, going stretching around blocks in many of the black neighborhoods. And so, what you had were Republican poll watchers who were standing by, looking for, I guess, voter fraud activity or something of that sort. When you had Election Protection volunteers going to hand out water to the people who were standing in lines, Republican poll watchers intervened, said this was illegal, said that the NAACP and SEIU volunteers were bribing black voters with water to vote for Obama, with the flimsiest of evidence. In fact, no evidence was even offered of this. Basically, you just had volunteers who were trying to hand out water to people who were standing in really long lines.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, explain the lines.

BRENTIN MOCK: Well, so there’s early voting going on right now in Florida. And at least in Tampa, there have been 15 different polling places where you can go to early vote, from last Saturday running all the way into this past current Saturday. And so, about three of those polling sites are predominantly African American, are in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. And, you know, starting with the Sunday previous, where there was a Souls to the Polls campaign, you had churches sending dozens of buses and vans full of people out to these locations to have people vote. And, you know, as a result, the lines have been, you know, backed up, you know, for going—you know, stretching back blocks. And it’s been really hot in Florida. You have a lot of elderly people, a lot of disabled people in these lines. You know, unfortunately, to the credit of the advocates and the volunteers, they have been out densely trying to do whatever they can to help accommodate the voters, not—again, not to bribe them into voting for anyone, but just making sure that, you know, they have water, that some of them have chairs to sit down in if the line is too long. I spoke with people who had been in line as long as five, six, seven hours.

AMY GOODMAN: True the Vote, who is funding it?

BRENTIN MOCK: I think people are still trying to connect the dots on, you know, where the major funding is coming from. We know in Florida, specifically, True the Vote has had a number of—has held a number of meetings and trainings with Americans for Prosperity. We know that Americans for Prosperity was founded and majorly funded by the Koch brothers. We haven’t been able to connect direct dots between the Koch brothers and True the Vote, but we do know that True the Vote has collected money from the Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin. That was a group that was responsible for putting up the voter intimidation billboards in Wisconsin and Ohio. We know that they have, you know, collected money from a lot of tea party groups throughout not just in Texas, where they’re—you know, where they were born out of, but also from a number of different other group—tea party groups around the country. So the money is coming in from a lot of places. We haven’t been able to, you know, find the grand puppeteer yet, though.

AMY GOODMAN: And do people identify themselves as True the Vote at the polls?

BRENTIN MOCK: No. So, there’s a really tricky thing going on right now. I mean, True the Vote itself, you know, as an organization, is born out of the King Street Patriots tea party group in Houston, Texas. But they have these affiliates all throughout the country. So, in Florida, you have Tampa Vote Fair, which is now—you know, it’s a tea—it’s a True the Vote-trained volunteer group. And then, here in Virginia, where I’m at right now, you have the Virginia Voters Alliance, again trained by True the Vote, but we also have learned from the head of the Virginia Voters Alliance himself that True the Vote instructed them not to use True the Vote’s name because of all of the legal—all of the lawsuits that True the Vote was having in Texas right now. So they basically said, you know, "Don’t—don’t use our name, not in your title or anything, so that we can have some kind of safe distance between each other."

But I also think, you know, based off of certain lawsuits that exist right now, that True the Vote might be telling these tea party groups not to use their name, so—mainly because if any of these groups they have trained go out and they do do intimidation or if they do engage in anything that’s unlawful, that True the Vote can kind of wipe their hands of it and say, "Hey, that’s not one of our groups. You know, you don’t see our name on there anywhere." You know, so—and there’s—I’m not pulling that out of my head. I mean, there are some actual legal lawsuits that True the Vote is involved in in Ohio and also in Wisconsin, where they have literally said in their legal complaints that—that they have no ties to these groups and they’re not responsible or liable for what these groups do when they go out to the polls, even though these groups have been trained by True the Vote.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, an affiliated group with True the Vote, you write about, has challenged 75 people in Tampa, an official challenge, where the person has to sign—what is it? Under oath, that they know the person is not eligible to vote.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right, right. And I’ve been making this point a lot. A lot of reporters who have picked up on True the Vote over the past few months, they, you know, understandably and rightfully, have reported on what they suspect True the Vote will do at the polls, you know, based off of what True the Vote has said they would do at the polls.

But that’s really not the most dangerous part. The most dangerous part is what True the Vote does before people even get to the polls. And what—and through that, it’s the filing of challenges. And in states like Florida, you can file—a citizen or a poll watcher can file a legal challenge, you know, at the county elections office, which is what happened in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is the seat. And so, Kimberly Kelley, who’s the head of Tampa Vote Fair, a True the Vote-trained group, filed 77 challenges against people in the Hillsborough County area, over half of those in Tampa.

And these people, when their vote—when their voting status is challenged, they don’t know this. They won’t know this until they show up at the polls and, you know, the person tells them, you know, "Your vote has been challenged." And at that point, that person will not be able to—will not be able to file a regular ballot. They will have no choice but to file a provisional ballot. This is completely unfair to a voter to not know that their vote has been challenged, you know, and you can understand the kind of frustration and confusion that this is going to cause, you know, if someone waits five, six hours in line, finally gets their right to vote, gets up to the front of the line, then they’re told, "Well, actually, you can’t go to the booth; you have to file this provisional ballot, because some person that you don’t know has challenged you."

AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about Virginia in a moment after break, but I want to bring in Myrna Pérez, who has been following the issue of voting rights and suppression with the Brennan Center. Stick with Florida.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Sure. Florida is an interesting case, because you had one of the most restrictive laws being passed by the state legislature that did a number of things. It put restrictions on third-party registration groups, which are groups that go into our traditionally disenfranchised and disadvantaged communities, groups like the League of Women Voters, who make—you know, their bread-and-butter activities is including people in our democracy. And the restrictions that were passed made it so onerous that they had to close down shop for a little bit. That’s also the same law that brought us the early voting reductions.

Fortunately, like as was the case with other laws around the country, the advocates and the voters fought back. And the courts definitely blocked and blunted a lot of the provisional—a lot of the aspects of this law that made it very difficult for voters.

Now, we’re still seeing some aftermath. One of the things that’s obvious is that while the early voting restrictions are better than they were before, there clearly is a demand and a need for more early voting time. And one of the things that I like about the Florida story is that it speaks to a narrative of voters standing up for themselves. Here was a very suppressive piece of legislation, people trying to shut them out, and they responded in enormous numbers, being willing to wait in line, understanding that advocates have their back, and are there trying to exercise their fundamental right to vote in the face of a legislature that passed laws trying to stifle it. So I think we need to—we need to take away, you know, the very powerful and very beautiful thing that is happening, which is people realizing that, you know, our right to vote is fundamental, it is something that we should not be scared to exercise, and when it is challenged, we need to demand it.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you getting many calls on your voter protection hotline from Florida?

MYRNA PÉREZ: I am not in the call center that deals with Florida, but one of the things that we do know—and I do think that the viewership should know—is that if a voter has a problem, they should call 866-OUR-VOTE. It is a national nonpartisan hotline where there are trained legal volunteers who are able to answer questions that range from "I don’t know where my polling location is?" "Am I still registered on the books?" or "Someone is asking me to present an identification."

This is the day where, as Americans, we all come together, and our vote matters the same. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, you know, young or old, rich or not, like—and we need to make sure that we exercise that right and take advantage of the opportunity being given to us. It’s our civic obligation.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue our discussion after break. Brentin Mock is with us. He is the lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012. And Myrna Pérez, who is with the Brennan Center and is particularly involved with the voter protection hotline for people to call throughout today. This isDemocracy Now! Back in a minute.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/6/on_election_day_2012_fears_of

Election (Suppression) Day 2012: From ID to Intimidation, How to Protect Your Rights at the Polls

It has been a long time coming, but Americans across the country head to the polls today to cast their ballots. As they do so, voting rights advocates will be watching closely to monitor confusion over whether they are required to show a photo identification and fulfill other requirements that could lead to disenfranchisement. To discuss what is happening at the polls, what voters can expect, and what to do if they encounter problems, we are joined by two guests: Myrna Pérez, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and a member of the Election Protection Coalition voter support hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE; and Brentin Mock, the lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. [includes rush transcript]

Filed under  2012 Election, Election 2012, Voting, Myrna Pérez, Brentin Mock

Guests:

Myrna Pérez, senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. She’s part of the Election Protection Coalition’s voter support hotline. Their number is 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Brentin Mock, lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. His latest article is called "Tea Party Group Blocks Florida Voters, Stops Water Handouts at Polls

Related

In Key Florida Battleground, Tea Party-Linked "True the Vote" Challenges Voters at the Polls Nov 06, 2012 | Story In Landmark Ruling, "Dark Money" Group Tied to Citizens United Ordered to Reveal Its Donors Nov 06, 2012 | Story In Ohio, African-American Turnout Threatened by Reduced Early Voting and Faulty Ballots Nov 06, 2012 | Story In Tight Race, 11th-Hour Voter ID Laws, Suppression Could Decide Ohio and Other Swing States Nov 05, 2012 | Story As Missouri Senate Race Tightens, New Details Emerge on Todd Akin’s Anti-Abortion Past Nov 01, 2012 | Story

Links

The Brennan Center for Justice Election Protection Website The Brennan Center for Justice Election Protection Website LIVE Election Night 2012 Coverage with Democracy Now!

Rush Transcript: This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: This is Election Day 2012. Let’s go to a comment from a former top adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona’s 2008 presidential campaign. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Steve Schmidt dismissed concerns of ineligible voters casting ballots and said Republican-backed voter ID laws are based on mythology.

STEVE SCHMIDT: Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, is you want everybody who’s eligible to vote to vote. And that’s how you want to win elections. And so, I think that all of this stuff that has transpired over the last two years is in search of a solution to a problem—voting fraud—that doesn’t really exist when you look deeply at the question. But it’s now part of a—

CHUCK TODD: Have you ever felt like you lost an election on voter fraud?

STEVE SCHMIDT: It’s part of the—part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there’s widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there’s not. But both sides are lawyered up to the nth degree, and they’ll all posture back and forth on it, but it probably won’t come down to the lawyers.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that’s Steve Schmidt, who was the senior adviser to Senator John McCain when he was running for president.

Again, we are joined by Myrna Pérez. She is senior counsel at the Brennan Center in the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law. And we’re also joined by Brentin Mock. Brentin Mock is the lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, which is a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com.

Myrna Pérez, Steve Schmidt’s comment. He is a top Republican strategist, though I’m beginning to wonder if he’s going to switch his party affiliation, listening to him these days.

MYRNA PÉREZ: It’s certainly the case that there is no dispute that our election system needs to be free and fair and full of integrity. The dispute is over what means people are going to take in order to ensure that and how many people are going to be disenfranchised in the process. And the evidence documents that the kinds of restrictive laws that are being passed do not do anything to make—or do very little, if anything at all, to make our elections more secure. But what they do do is make it very difficult for eligible Americans to participate and to vote.

And the question that we, as Americans, have to ask ourselves is, how many barriers are we going to put in front of the ballot box between eligible Americans and their fundamental right? And we need to make sure that we are not the victims of manipulation by partisans who want to rig the rules of the game such that they can be making the decisions as to who gets to participate and who doesn’t.

One of the examples that I like to use is the Texas photo identification requirement that is not going to be in place. The list of acceptable ID was created with such like target precision that there was a decision made that if you had a University of Texas ID, you couldn’t use that to vote, but if you had a concealed gun license, you could. That’s a specific kind of targeting of certain voters to make sure that some people have a voice, and those voices that politicians don’t want to hear from—

AMY GOODMAN: But wouldn’t that be struck down by a court immediately?

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, the court—the court did block the implementation of this, so it’s not going to be in place. But I think the—

AMY GOODMAN: But that’s not striking it down; it’s just delaying implementation.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right now it cannot be implemented. It was challenged under the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, of the preclearance provision. And it had—did not—the state did not meet its burden that it was not going to make minority and poor voters worse off. So that is not a law that people have to worry about in Texas.

But you raise a very, very important point. There was so much back-and-forth of this, right up to the wire, that there’s great confusion in Texas over what the ID requirements are. We’re already getting reports that people during early voting are being asked for identification that is not required. The voter registration cards that the state sends out are misleading and suggest that the photo identification law, this stringent law that is not in place, is actually in place.

And we see examples of like that, of the voter confusion happening in a number of instances, also in Pennsylvania. Even though the law will not be in place, we saw two websites in the county, you know, still have the old information when the law was active. And that’s why it’s really important, when voters are unsure or hear something that does not feel right, they need to call 866-OUR-VOTE, where we have up-to-date information, and we’ll be able to help them out.

AMY GOODMAN: Brentin Mock, let’s go to Virginia. Now, Virginia is going to tell us a lot. Democracy Now! begins our broadcast tonight at 7:00 until 1:00 in the morning. That’s Eastern time. We’ll be broadcasting at democracynow.org online, and many public radio and television stations around the country will be running our election special. Seven o’clock is when we start. Seven o’clock is when the polls in Virginia close. Brentin Mock, talk about what’s happening in Virginia, a key swing state.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right, and Virginia mirrors Florida in a lot of different ways, particularly with its felony disenfranchisement law. You know, Virginia joins Florida as one of the states that permanently—permanently disenfranchises anyone who has a felony conviction in their background. And you—that person has to appeal directly to the governor to have their voting rights restored. Also like Florida, there is up to a five-year wait for you to even be able to apply to have your voting rights restored if you have that felony conviction.

But unlike Florida, Virginia didn’t have a early voting period. So, right now in Florida, which we understand—we already know is a much larger state than Virginia, but Virginia is not Rhode Island, by any means. I mean, there are a lot of people in this state who are going to be lined up to vote today. In fact, they’re probably already there at the polls. And we saw five-, six-, seven-hour line waits during—in Florida during early voting periods there. I can imagine what the lines look like here in Virginia, where there’s been absolutely no early voting.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Fairfax County elections board and the man they have spearheading their, well, voting rights laws and how they’re implemented.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right. So, Fairfax County, which is a very important county in this campaign—in this presidential race, so important that Mitt Romney is having his post-election—I hate to call it "party." He’s going to have his post-election event tonight here in Fairfax County. That’s how important it is to the Republican Party.

AMY GOODMAN: Place it for us geographically in Virginia and why it’s so significant.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right, and—well, I’m sorry, what was the question?

AMY GOODMAN: Place it for us, Fairfax County, within Virginia, geographically, and why it’s so significant.

BRENTIN MOCK: In Virginia, right. I mean, it’s a swing county. For the most part, it’s—you know, how Fairfax goes is basically how Virginia will go. And Virginia itself is a swing state. It was important to Obama winning the election in 2008. And Romney, basically, for him to be able to win this year, he’s going to need Virginia and—but, you know, Fairfax is really going to be the weathervane of how Virginia goes.

And here in the election board, the Board of Elections, sits Hans von Spakovsky, who is—who has been the architect of a number of different voter suppression laws. He is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank. [inaudible] He’s a huge proponent of voter ID laws. He’s been a huge promoter of the purging programs that we saw happening in Florida with Governor Rick Scott. In fact, Talking Points Memo reported earlier this year that when Governor Scott was being—Florida’s Governor Rick Scott was being sued because of his purging program, that he began to call on people to help really promote this, to really spin it in the media to make it sound like the purging was a good thing. And one of the—excuse me, one of the main people that he called was Hans von Spakovsky. And so, now Hans von Spakovsky is sitting in the Fairfax County Board of Elections with a huge amount of discretion over which votes will be counted and which will not.

AMY GOODMAN: And his significance, why he should have so much power?

BRENTIN MOCK: I don’t think he should. I mean, I think, you know, a lot of very smart election law experts believe that, you know, these kinds of election boards should be taken out of partisan hands and put into completely independent, nonpartisan, you know, operators.

But right now, we know for a fact that Hans von Spakovsky is by no means a nonpartisan person. He is a very conservative blogger who works with one of the most conservative organizations out there, with the Heritage Foundation. He’s one of the top advisers to True the Vote—one of their most trusted advisers, actually. And he has shared the stage, you know, not only with True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, but also with some of the secretaries of states in some of the other battleground states throughout—throughout the nation, such as Colorado’s Secretary of State Scott Gessler. He shared plenty of thoughts and ideas on stage with South Carolina’s attorney general when they were fighting against the Department of Justice to have their voter ID law implemented. I mean, this is a person who, at least for the last 20, 30 years, has done everything in his power to try to restrict voting rights for citizens.

And Jane Mayer in The New Yorker wrote an excellent profile of Hans von Spakovsky to really detail not only the pure partisanship that he engages in, but also the drumming up of the voter-fraud mythology. He has been one of the main trumpeters of this idea that voter fraud exists. And, you know, she categorically debunked basically every single example that he provided where he tried to say that voter fraud had helped swing an elections.

AMY GOODMAN: Myrna Pérez, can you talk about what’s happening in New York and New Jersey? We have this crisis, Superstorm Sandy. In New York, 40,000 residents are displaced. Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey is saying that people will be able to email in their votes. Governor Cuomo has just issued an executive order you can vote anywhere, but that means you can’t vote down ballot. And you can explain what that means. You can vote for president, but not if, you know—if the place you’re going to vote has a state senator you would want to vote for, whatever, where you were living, you can’t then vote in someone else’s district for the state senator there.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right. Well, I mean, I think there are a couple of takeaways. One is, this was an extraordinary circumstance. We had a terrible, terrible storm. Many people were displaced. Many rescue workers can’t be where they’re supposed to be, because they were trying to keep people safe and to put lights on and to make sure that people were found and have the basic necessities. And we saw two governors take creative and unusual measures to try and make sure that people’s fundamental right to vote could still be exercised.

In New York, the governor made it such that certain—certain counties and people, that live in certain areas that were federally declared to be emergency zones, could vote by affidavit ballot anywhere they were at. And, yes, it is the case that they will not be able to vote for what sometimes people call "down-ticket races," and that’s a very practical reason. The ballots are—the ballots are created for the location that they’re at. And I think while there may be some lacking to that, what we do need to take away is that somebody was trying to account for the very unique situation that we’re in and trying to provide a means for voters to be able to participate and to not be shut out.

Now, in New Jersey, they did two things. One of them is getting more press than the other. One of them is the email. That is a—that is something that, in my view, is something that we shouldn’t look at right now as a long-term solution, because there are still technological kinks that need to get locked out, and as—worked out. And as a practical matter, if you don’t have power or you don’t have electricity, the fact that you can email or fax your ballot in is of cold comfort and not likely to be much good to you. But, like New York, there is a provision for people to be able to vote if they are somewhere else, as long as they’re in the state and as long as they’re registered. It is going to have to be provisional. What I do want to tell—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, interesting on email is that, I mean, if they’re talking about any long-term solution, like people say, "Oh, why don’t we do that all over?" it goes to issues of privacy. People know who’s voting for who.

MYRNA PÉREZ: And it also goes to issues of technological security, and we need to make sure there’s not glitches in computers and that people can have—I mean, it’s something that certainly reformers and advocates—and some advocates look at as a possibility. But, you know, I don’t think we’re there yet as a permanent solution. Maybe one day the facts will change. But we cannot underestimate the importance, though, of the provisional balloting option, because that will not rely on electricity. It will allow people to vote from—

AMY GOODMAN: And that is?

MYRNA PÉREZ: That is, if they are displaced and they are registered to vote, they can cast a provisional ballot where—where that’s closest to them. And like in New York, it will be counted as an operation of state law.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s interesting in New York and New Jersey is they’re not considered swing states. They’re both believed to be voting for Obama. And if many fewer people vote, it sort of goes to this whole question of the Electoral College, the possibility that President Obama could win the Electoral College, which would mean winning the presidency, but not win the popular vote. And this would further that, that there would be fewer people voting.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, I think, as Americans, we should focus less on the horse race than about the voters. I mean, if there are fewer people voting because of a natural disaster, it is appropriate, I think, for the governors to take measures to make sure that more people can vote. And in my view, it doesn’t matter whether or not the elections are close or they’re not. People have a fundamental right to vote. The vote means something to people. Our democracy is more robust, the more people participate. And that’s what these two—these two measures are designed to do, to try and make it such that more people can participate notwithstanding this horrible natural disaster that’s happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Final comments, Brentin, for what people should understand about what’s happening right now? And we hope to have both of you back on tonight at some point during our special broadcast to report on what you’ve found throughout the day.

BRENTIN MOCK: Well, what I would like to do is just, you know, give my highest salute to the voters themselves. Sometimes reporters, such as myself, we’re doing what we’re supposed to do—we’re supposed to report on and expose people who are trying to suppress the vote—but at the same time, voters are not stupid, Americans are not stupid. They are resilient. We have technology at our hands. And people, you know, have been showing in—at these elections, that they are not going to let any obstacles come between them and the vote.

I mean, it’s true, we should not have seven-, eight-hour lines of voting. But the positive thing is that people are actually waiting seven or eight hours to vote, and they’re not letting anything—not True the Vote, not bomb scares, not people not disallowing water to be handed out to them—to stop them from going out to vote. And it’s a true testament not only to the voters, but also to groups like the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been putting out the information proactively and aggressively long before election time came, and also to the Election Protection teams who have been out there willing to help anyone who needed anything. But right now, what we’re seeing is democracy in action.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Myrna, on immigrants, a final comment for people who are afraid, you know, that they are absolutely allowed to vote, but what if they could be investigated? Their fear that someone in their family could be deported, the whole questioning of immigrants and their rights to vote?

MYRNA PÉREZ: OK. If someone is an eligible American and they are registered to vote and they have not been disenfranchised because of a criminal conviction or a mental adjudication, they have the right to vote. If someone is attempting to suppress that, there are people that will help you. Call 866-OUR-VOTE, report it. We will—we will do our best to counter the information. We will make sure that the election officials know about what’s going on. We will put media scrutiny on the issue. Every eligible American that is registered should participate.

AMY GOODMAN: And on the issue of prisoners in the states and ex-convicts, felons, the varying laws across the country.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember speaking to a friend a while ago. When I said, "Are you going out to vote today?" he said, "I can’t." And he talked about the state he was in, and he said he’s never been able to vote. And I looked it up, and he was actually able to vote.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: And people do not know, because these laws vary from state to state.

MYRNA PÉREZ: That’s exactly right. The first time I was on your show, it was about that. We are a patchwork when it comes to how our state laws disenfranchise persons with criminal convictions. We have some states, like Maine and Vermont, where you never lose your right to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: You can vote from prison.

MYRNA PÉREZ: You can vote even from prison. You can vote from prison. And one of the problems that happens when you have this patchwork is that there’s misinformation. People don’t understand, you know, what the rules are in their state. And one—

AMY GOODMAN: The states where you never, ever can vote again?

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, when there’s bright lines, that tends to be easier. Maine and Vermont, they tend to have not trouble, because they know that, you know. Kentucky and Virginia, they tend to know—they tend to be OK, because they know where the bright lines are. What you have—when you have the most problems are states like New York, where you can vote if you are on probation, but not if you’re on parole.

And one of the things that is really important is that people not disenfranchise themselves because they don’t understand the state law, because what frequently happens is somebody will have bad information, and then they’ll tell their cousin, and then they’ll tell their girlfriend, and then they’ll tell their girlfriend’s best friend, and then you have these entire communities being misinformed about what their rights are.

AMY GOODMAN: So what do you do?

MYRNA PÉREZ: You can call 866-OUR-VOTE, and we can let you know what the state law is. But you should do that before election time. You should look up what your state rules are. If you are eligible to vote, you should register to vote. There are people that can walk you through the process.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have to re-register if you were imprisoned? And—

MYRNA PÉREZ: It depends. It depends on the state. That’s a—

AMY GOODMAN: So you should just call.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Yeah, it’s a complicated issue that has to deal with what their list maintenance procedure is, and there’s no one right side.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Myrna Pérez is senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, part of the Election Protection Coalition’s voter support hotline. Their number, 866-OUR-VOTE. And thank you so much to Brentin Mock, lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. We’ll link to your latestarticle, and we hope to speak to you both tonight to get the latest at the end of this historic day. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Election Day 2012. Let’s go to a comment from a former top adviser to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona’s 2008 presidential campaign. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Steve Schmidt dismissed concerns of ineligible voters casting ballots and said Republican-backed voter ID laws are based on mythology.

STEVE SCHMIDT: Whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, is you want everybody who’s eligible to vote to vote. And that’s how you want to win elections. And so, I think that all of this stuff that has transpired over the last two years is in search of a solution to a problem—voting fraud—that doesn’t really exist when you look deeply at the question. But it’s now part of a—

CHUCK TODD: Have you ever felt like you lost an election on voter fraud?

STEVE SCHMIDT: It’s part of the—part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there’s widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there’s not. But both sides are lawyered up to the nth degree, and they’ll all posture back and forth on it, but it probably won’t come down to the lawyers.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that’s Steve Schmidt, who was the senior adviser to Senator John McCain when he was running for president.

Again, we are joined by Myrna Pérez. She is senior counsel at the Brennan Center in the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law. And we’re also joined by Brentin Mock. Brentin Mock is the lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, which is a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com.

Myrna Pérez, Steve Schmidt’s comment. He is a top Republican strategist, though I’m beginning to wonder if he’s going to switch his party affiliation, listening to him these days.

MYRNA PÉREZ: It’s certainly the case that there is no dispute that our election system needs to be free and fair and full of integrity. The dispute is over what means people are going to take in order to ensure that and how many people are going to be disenfranchised in the process. And the evidence documents that the kinds of restrictive laws that are being passed do not do anything to make—or do very little, if anything at all, to make our elections more secure. But what they do do is make it very difficult for eligible Americans to participate and to vote.

And the question that we, as Americans, have to ask ourselves is, how many barriers are we going to put in front of the ballot box between eligible Americans and their fundamental right? And we need to make sure that we are not the victims of manipulation by partisans who want to rig the rules of the game such that they can be making the decisions as to who gets to participate and who doesn’t.

One of the examples that I like to use is the Texas photo identification requirement that is not going to be in place. The list of acceptable ID was created with such like target precision that there was a decision made that if you had a University of Texas ID, you couldn’t use that to vote, but if you had a concealed gun license, you could. That’s a specific kind of targeting of certain voters to make sure that some people have a voice, and those voices that politicians don’t want to hear from—

AMY GOODMAN: But wouldn’t that be struck down by a court immediately?

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, the court—the court did block the implementation of this, so it’s not going to be in place. But I think the—

AMY GOODMAN: But that’s not striking it down; it’s just delaying implementation.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right now it cannot be implemented. It was challenged under the Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, of the preclearance provision. And it had—did not—the state did not meet its burden that it was not going to make minority and poor voters worse off. So that is not a law that people have to worry about in Texas.

But you raise a very, very important point. There was so much back-and-forth of this, right up to the wire, that there’s great confusion in Texas over what the ID requirements are. We’re already getting reports that people during early voting are being asked for identification that is not required. The voter registration cards that the state sends out are misleading and suggest that the photo identification law, this stringent law that is not in place, is actually in place.

And we see examples of like that, of the voter confusion happening in a number of instances, also in Pennsylvania. Even though the law will not be in place, we saw two websites in the county, you know, still have the old information when the law was active. And that’s why it’s really important, when voters are unsure or hear something that does not feel right, they need to call 866-OUR-VOTE, where we have up-to-date information, and we’ll be able to help them out.

AMY GOODMAN: Brentin Mock, let’s go to Virginia. Now, Virginia is going to tell us a lot. Democracy Now! begins our broadcast tonight at 7:00 until 1:00 in the morning. That’s Eastern time. We’ll be broadcasting at democracynow.org online, and many public radio and television stations around the country will be running our election special. Seven o’clock is when we start. Seven o’clock is when the polls in Virginia close. Brentin Mock, talk about what’s happening in Virginia, a key swing state.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right, and Virginia mirrors Florida in a lot of different ways, particularly with its felony disenfranchisement law. You know, Virginia joins Florida as one of the states that permanently—permanently disenfranchises anyone who has a felony conviction in their background. And you—that person has to appeal directly to the governor to have their voting rights restored. Also like Florida, there is up to a five-year wait for you to even be able to apply to have your voting rights restored if you have that felony conviction.

But unlike Florida, Virginia didn’t have a early voting period. So, right now in Florida, which we understand—we already know is a much larger state than Virginia, but Virginia is not Rhode Island, by any means. I mean, there are a lot of people in this state who are going to be lined up to vote today. In fact, they’re probably already there at the polls. And we saw five-, six-, seven-hour line waits during—in Florida during early voting periods there. I can imagine what the lines look like here in Virginia, where there’s been absolutely no early voting.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Fairfax County elections board and the man they have spearheading their, well, voting rights laws and how they’re implemented.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right. So, Fairfax County, which is a very important county in this campaign—in this presidential race, so important that Mitt Romney is having his post-election—I hate to call it "party." He’s going to have his post-election event tonight here in Fairfax County. That’s how important it is to the Republican Party.

AMY GOODMAN: Place it for us geographically in Virginia and why it’s so significant.

BRENTIN MOCK: Right, and—well, I’m sorry, what was the question?

AMY GOODMAN: Place it for us, Fairfax County, within Virginia, geographically, and why it’s so significant.

BRENTIN MOCK: In Virginia, right. I mean, it’s a swing county. For the most part, it’s—you know, how Fairfax goes is basically how Virginia will go. And Virginia itself is a swing state. It was important to Obama winning the election in 2008. And Romney, basically, for him to be able to win this year, he’s going to need Virginia and—but, you know, Fairfax is really going to be the weathervane of how Virginia goes.

And here in the election board, the Board of Elections, sits Hans von Spakovsky, who is—who has been the architect of a number of different voter suppression laws. He is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank. [inaudible] He’s a huge proponent of voter ID laws. He’s been a huge promoter of the purging programs that we saw happening in Florida with Governor Rick Scott. In fact, Talking Points Memo reported earlier this year that when Governor Scott was being—Florida’s Governor Rick Scott was being sued because of his purging program, that he began to call on people to help really promote this, to really spin it in the media to make it sound like the purging was a good thing. And one of the—excuse me, one of the main people that he called was Hans von Spakovsky. And so, now Hans von Spakovsky is sitting in the Fairfax County Board of Elections with a huge amount of discretion over which votes will be counted and which will not.

AMY GOODMAN: And his significance, why he should have so much power?

BRENTIN MOCK: I don’t think he should. I mean, I think, you know, a lot of very smart election law experts believe that, you know, these kinds of election boards should be taken out of partisan hands and put into completely independent, nonpartisan, you know, operators.

But right now, we know for a fact that Hans von Spakovsky is by no means a nonpartisan person. He is a very conservative blogger who works with one of the most conservative organizations out there, with the Heritage Foundation. He’s one of the top advisers to True the Vote—one of their most trusted advisers, actually. And he has shared the stage, you know, not only with True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, but also with some of the secretaries of states in some of the other battleground states throughout—throughout the nation, such as Colorado’s Secretary of State Scott Gessler. He shared plenty of thoughts and ideas on stage with South Carolina’s attorney general when they were fighting against the Department of Justice to have their voter ID law implemented. I mean, this is a person who, at least for the last 20, 30 years, has done everything in his power to try to restrict voting rights for citizens.

And Jane Mayer in The New Yorker wrote an excellent profile of Hans von Spakovsky to really detail not only the pure partisanship that he engages in, but also the drumming up of the voter-fraud mythology. He has been one of the main trumpeters of this idea that voter fraud exists. And, you know, she categorically debunked basically every single example that he provided where he tried to say that voter fraud had helped swing an elections.

AMY GOODMAN: Myrna Pérez, can you talk about what’s happening in New York and New Jersey? We have this crisis, Superstorm Sandy. In New York, 40,000 residents are displaced. Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey is saying that people will be able to email in their votes. Governor Cuomo has just issued an executive order you can vote anywhere, but that means you can’t vote down ballot. And you can explain what that means. You can vote for president, but not if, you know—if the place you’re going to vote has a state senator you would want to vote for, whatever, where you were living, you can’t then vote in someone else’s district for the state senator there.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right. Well, I mean, I think there are a couple of takeaways. One is, this was an extraordinary circumstance. We had a terrible, terrible storm. Many people were displaced. Many rescue workers can’t be where they’re supposed to be, because they were trying to keep people safe and to put lights on and to make sure that people were found and have the basic necessities. And we saw two governors take creative and unusual measures to try and make sure that people’s fundamental right to vote could still be exercised.

In New York, the governor made it such that certain—certain counties and people, that live in certain areas that were federally declared to be emergency zones, could vote by affidavit ballot anywhere they were at. And, yes, it is the case that they will not be able to vote for what sometimes people call "down-ticket races," and that’s a very practical reason. The ballots are—the ballots are created for the location that they’re at. And I think while there may be some lacking to that, what we do need to take away is that somebody was trying to account for the very unique situation that we’re in and trying to provide a means for voters to be able to participate and to not be shut out.

Now, in New Jersey, they did two things. One of them is getting more press than the other. One of them is the email. That is a—that is something that, in my view, is something that we shouldn’t look at right now as a long-term solution, because there are still technological kinks that need to get locked out, and as—worked out. And as a practical matter, if you don’t have power or you don’t have electricity, the fact that you can email or fax your ballot in is of cold comfort and not likely to be much good to you. But, like New York, there is a provision for people to be able to vote if they are somewhere else, as long as they’re in the state and as long as they’re registered. It is going to have to be provisional. What I do want to tell—

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, interesting on email is that, I mean, if they’re talking about any long-term solution, like people say, "Oh, why don’t we do that all over?" it goes to issues of privacy. People know who’s voting for who.

MYRNA PÉREZ: And it also goes to issues of technological security, and we need to make sure there’s not glitches in computers and that people can have—I mean, it’s something that certainly reformers and advocates—and some advocates look at as a possibility. But, you know, I don’t think we’re there yet as a permanent solution. Maybe one day the facts will change. But we cannot underestimate the importance, though, of the provisional balloting option, because that will not rely on electricity. It will allow people to vote from—

AMY GOODMAN: And that is?

MYRNA PÉREZ: That is, if they are displaced and they are registered to vote, they can cast a provisional ballot where—where that’s closest to them. And like in New York, it will be counted as an operation of state law.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s interesting in New York and New Jersey is they’re not considered swing states. They’re both believed to be voting for Obama. And if many fewer people vote, it sort of goes to this whole question of the Electoral College, the possibility that President Obama could win the Electoral College, which would mean winning the presidency, but not win the popular vote. And this would further that, that there would be fewer people voting.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, I think, as Americans, we should focus less on the horse race than about the voters. I mean, if there are fewer people voting because of a natural disaster, it is appropriate, I think, for the governors to take measures to make sure that more people can vote. And in my view, it doesn’t matter whether or not the elections are close or they’re not. People have a fundamental right to vote. The vote means something to people. Our democracy is more robust, the more people participate. And that’s what these two—these two measures are designed to do, to try and make it such that more people can participate notwithstanding this horrible natural disaster that’s happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Final comments, Brentin, for what people should understand about what’s happening right now? And we hope to have both of you back on tonight at some point during our special broadcast to report on what you’ve found throughout the day.

BRENTIN MOCK: Well, what I would like to do is just, you know, give my highest salute to the voters themselves. Sometimes reporters, such as myself, we’re doing what we’re supposed to do—we’re supposed to report on and expose people who are trying to suppress the vote—but at the same time, voters are not stupid, Americans are not stupid. They are resilient. We have technology at our hands. And people, you know, have been showing in—at these elections, that they are not going to let any obstacles come between them and the vote.

I mean, it’s true, we should not have seven-, eight-hour lines of voting. But the positive thing is that people are actually waiting seven or eight hours to vote, and they’re not letting anything—not True the Vote, not bomb scares, not people not disallowing water to be handed out to them—to stop them from going out to vote. And it’s a true testament not only to the voters, but also to groups like the Brennan Center for Justice, which has been putting out the information proactively and aggressively long before election time came, and also to the Election Protection teams who have been out there willing to help anyone who needed anything. But right now, what we’re seeing is democracy in action.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Myrna, on immigrants, a final comment for people who are afraid, you know, that they are absolutely allowed to vote, but what if they could be investigated? Their fear that someone in their family could be deported, the whole questioning of immigrants and their rights to vote?

MYRNA PÉREZ: OK. If someone is an eligible American and they are registered to vote and they have not been disenfranchised because of a criminal conviction or a mental adjudication, they have the right to vote. If someone is attempting to suppress that, there are people that will help you. Call 866-OUR-VOTE, report it. We will—we will do our best to counter the information. We will make sure that the election officials know about what’s going on. We will put media scrutiny on the issue. Every eligible American that is registered should participate.

AMY GOODMAN: And on the issue of prisoners in the states and ex-convicts, felons, the varying laws across the country.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember speaking to a friend a while ago. When I said, "Are you going out to vote today?" he said, "I can’t." And he talked about the state he was in, and he said he’s never been able to vote. And I looked it up, and he was actually able to vote.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: And people do not know, because these laws vary from state to state.

MYRNA PÉREZ: That’s exactly right. The first time I was on your show, it was about that. We are a patchwork when it comes to how our state laws disenfranchise persons with criminal convictions. We have some states, like Maine and Vermont, where you never lose your right to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: You can vote from prison.

MYRNA PÉREZ: You can vote even from prison. You can vote from prison. And one of the problems that happens when you have this patchwork is that there’s misinformation. People don’t understand, you know, what the rules are in their state. And one—

AMY GOODMAN: The states where you never, ever can vote again?

MYRNA PÉREZ: Well, when there’s bright lines, that tends to be easier. Maine and Vermont, they tend to have not trouble, because they know that, you know. Kentucky and Virginia, they tend to know—they tend to be OK, because they know where the bright lines are. What you have—when you have the most problems are states like New York, where you can vote if you are on probation, but not if you’re on parole.

And one of the things that is really important is that people not disenfranchise themselves because they don’t understand the state law, because what frequently happens is somebody will have bad information, and then they’ll tell their cousin, and then they’ll tell their girlfriend, and then they’ll tell their girlfriend’s best friend, and then you have these entire communities being misinformed about what their rights are.

AMY GOODMAN: So what do you do?

MYRNA PÉREZ: You can call 866-OUR-VOTE, and we can let you know what the state law is. But you should do that before election time. You should look up what your state rules are. If you are eligible to vote, you should register to vote. There are people that can walk you through the process.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have to re-register if you were imprisoned? And—

MYRNA PÉREZ: It depends. It depends on the state. That’s a—

AMY GOODMAN: So you should just call.

MYRNA PÉREZ: Yeah, it’s a complicated issue that has to deal with what their list maintenance procedure is, and there’s no one right side.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Myrna Pérez is senior counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, part of the Election Protection Coalition’s voter support hotline. Their number, 866-OUR-VOTE. And thank you so much to Brentin Mock, lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, a collaboration between The Nation magazine and Colorlines.com. We’ll link to your latestarticle, and we hope to speak to you both tonight to get the latest at the end of this historic day. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

Headlines

• Election Day Outcome Rests on Battleground Vote
• Obama: "You’ve Seen Me Fight" for Change
• Romney: Obama Has Failed to Deliver on Promise of Change
• NY, NJ Widen Voting Options in Post-Sandy Recovery
• HUD Halts Some Foreclosures in Storm-Hit Areas

Stories

In Key Florida Battleground, Tea Party-Linked "True the Vote" Challenges Voters at the Polls

Election (Suppression) Day 2012: From ID to Intimidation, How to Protect Your Rights at the Polls

In Ohio, African-American Turnout Threatened by Reduced Early Voting and Faulty Ballots

http://www.democracynow.org./2012/11/6/in_ohio_african_american_turnout_threatened

In Ohio, African-American Turnout Threatened by Reduced Early Voting and Faulty Ballots

As in all recent elections, Ohio again is a crucial state to win for either presidential candidate. And once again, Ohio is at the center of charges of systematic suppression of the African-American vote. In a report for Democracy Now!, investigative reporter Greg Palast discovers that some early voters in the Buckeye State have received the wrong ballots. Palast is the author of "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps." [includes rush transcript]

Filed under  Election 2012, 2012 Election, Greg Palast

Guest: Greg Palast, Greg Palast is an investigative reporter who has tracked Romney’s "vulture" fund partners for five years for BBC Television’sNewsnight. He is the author of the recently released New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.

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• In Key Florida Battleground, Tea Party-Linked "True the Vote" Challenges Voters at the Polls Nov 06, 2012 | Story
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• Rep. John Lewis, Civil Rights Icon, on the Struggle to Win–and Now Protect–Voting Rights in U.S. Sep 03, 2012 | Story
• Greg Palast on Vote Rigging and Suppression Ahead of the 2008 Election Oct 09, 2008 | Story

Rush Transcript: This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution

AMY GOODMAN: As in all recent elections, Ohio is a crucial state to win for either presidential candidate. Once again, Ohio is at the center of charges of systematic suppression of the African-American vote. Investigative reporter Greg Palast discovered that some early voters in the Buckeye State received the wrong ballots. He filed this report for Democracy Now!

GREG PALAST: Hallelujah! Finally, it’s Election Day in Ohio. Union workers and rural evangelicals are on the road driving to the polls. Ohio will probably pick our president today, Tuesday, but Democrats hope the election was decided on Sunday.

This is Greg Palast reporting. Here, in the economically wounded heart of Dayton, Ohio, I’m going to church, because Sunday is "Souls to the Polls" day.

Today is Souls to the Polls day?

GIRL: Yes.

GREG PALAST: Souls to the Polls day, when thousands of African Americans in Ohio will go from Sunday church to vote early. While most other Ohioans will vote on Tuesday, the clear majority of black folk in Ohio will vote early. This is the Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist Church, and they will load into the church van to take their singing souls to the polls. Terra Williams, a church member and leader of the Souls to the Polls movement, explains why African Americans vote on Sunday.

TERRA WILLIAMS: Well, because typically on Election Day, everyone works. Particularly, most African Americans are probably working two or three jobs, and it’s harder for them to get off that particular day. So, early voting hours for our community was very essential, especially weekend voting hours, because that gives us a time to get out and vote. Most of—most individuals are off on the weekends. And so, for us, in our community, it’s easier for us to vote early on the weekends.

GREG PALAST: We drive behind the church group to downtown Dayton, to the early voting station. And here’s what we found: a line of nearly 1,000 voters snaking out of the state building and out into the parking lot. What happened? The Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted cut black church day voting from four Sundays to just one, and just for four hours, and at just one polling place for all of Dayton, all of Montgomery County.

So, do you think that this is a good way to do it, where they just have one polling place for early voting?

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 1: Well, that’s probably not a good way, but that’s the way it is now. So, we work with it.

GREG PALAST: You know, it could be an hour or two in line. Are you up to it?

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 1: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

GREG PALAST: Can I ask who you’re going to vote for?

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 1: No.

GREG PALAST: After hours of wait, voters were herded into this auditorium, where they were treated to a slide show. The government crowed that on Tuesday, the day when most whites vote, there will be 176 polling locations. Finally, 10 by 10, groups of voters were sent to get their ballots. But wait, these weren’t ballots. These were applications for absentee ballots. What’s going on here? Absentee ballots are not at all the same as a regular ballot. In U.S. elections, between one and three million absentee ballots are rejected by voting officials, effectively thrown in the garbage. Voting on an absentee ballot is like playing bingo with your vote.

ELECTION OFFICIAL: Number 175. Number 175 and under can head up the steps. Stay to the left as you exit, 175 and under.

GREG PALAST: But to reassure voters—or to fool them—this big notice was projected on the giant screen. "Early voting equals absentee voting." Oh, no, it doesn’t. Not according to voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis, professor at Columbus State University. I show the professor the absentee ballot form handed out at early voting and ask if this was legitimate or a common practice.

ROBERT FITRAKIS: Absolutely uncommon. And I would suspect it’s either done out of incompetence for convenience or to defraud people of their vote. As you can see, on this form, you have to fill it out. And the secretary of state, Jon Husted, has come up with the notion that if you leave anything blank, even though it’s irrelevant, your absentee ballot can be tossed.

GREG PALAST: So, in other words, these voters could lose their votes.

ROBERT FITRAKIS: Absolutely. Jon Husted, as the Republican secretary of state, really has decided that he’s going to deliver for the Republican Party, that the only way they can win is by throwing as many people as they can off the registration rolls and making it as inconvenient and difficult as possible to vote, particularly during early voting. It’s outrageous! It’s a systematic attempt to eliminate the hardcore base of the Democratic Party. And they’re getting away with it.

GREG PALAST: When you say the "hardcore base," is there a racial element?

ROBERT FITRAKIS: Oh, absolutely. It’s the new Jim Crow.

GREG PALAST: Back at the early voting station, we asked our souls from Missionary Baptist how they did at the polls.

UNIDENTIFIED: How did your voting go, guys?

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 2: It went great. Thank you very much.

UNIDENTIFIED: Thank you to you, too.

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 2: Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED: Did it all went—did it all go smooth for you guys?

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 2: Yes, it did.

UNIDENTIFIED: Beautiful.

DAYTON EARLY VOTER 2: All right. Bye. Bye-bye.

GREG PALAST: I didn’t have the heart to tell them, those ballots may never get counted. This is Greg Palast in Ohio at early voting—or early voting suppression—for Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Greg Palast, author of the New York Times bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. He will be joining us live from Ohio tonight for our special election broadcast from 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. You can tune in on television, radio, watch a live video stream online at democracynow.org. Democracy Now! will be looking at claims of voter intimidation and harassment. If you have photos and video, we’ll be following the hashtag #dnvote, #dnvote. Check our website for details, democracynow.org.