While Whining About Voter Fraud, Trump Urges Supporters to Commit Voter Fraud..

Despite a rash of recent polls showing the presidential race narrowing significantly, Republican nominee Donald Trump is not letting up with his message that the election might be rigged, telling supporters not to trust mail-in ballots and vote again if they are suspicious of their vote not being counted.

To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

Peter Pomerantsev: Arkady, I wanted to ask you: What is Putin up to? Why is he hacking the DNC? What’s his aim, if he’s doing it? Is he doing it?

Arkady Ostrovsky: There is little doubt in my mind that the Russian state is behind it—just like it was behind doping its athletes at the Sochi winter Olympics in 2014. Certainly the U.S. is now accusing [the Russians] of doing it formally.

It’s part of information warfare aimed at undermining the West. The Russians, the Soviets have been doing it for a very long time. It was called “active measures.” Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB when Putin joined the organization, had [a] special academy course in active measures, which Putin might have actually even attended. The idea is you undermine the integrity, the confidence, of your adversary. So I don’t think there is anything particularly new in it.

We had wrongly assumed that Russia’s confrontation with the West was about ideology. But it has always been about the threat that a Western system of governance, based on the rule of law and human values, posed to the Soviet and current Russian system, where the rule of law is subjected to the powers of the state. In the 1990s when Russia embraced democracy, the West ceased to be a threat. After the reactionary restoration of the 2000s, the West once again poses a threat.

Turtleneck wrote:Nevada GOP chairman complained that a "certain group" was allowed to vote late. In reality, voting precincts closed on time but allowed those already in line at time of close to vote. Allowing those already in line is allowable by Nevada state law. But, the real concern is that a "certain group" got to vote and the certain people of that certain group should not be voting.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/donald-trump-michael-mcdonald-nevada/

The far bigger worry for many civil rights attorneys is the new vote-suppression message fomented in recent weeks by Trump himself, with his oft-repeated claims that the election system is “rigged” and that his supporters should go out and “watch the polls.” His admonishment that his supporters must themselves monitor minority precincts seems a recipe for voter anxiety at best and actual conflict at worst. Trump’s increasingly vocal warning that people are “going to walk in and they’re going to vote 10 times maybe” implicitly deputizes his followers to do something about all that supposed fraud.

“The attorneys for the Republican Party were challenging the credentials of pretty much every young voter who showed up,” recalls Pat Clark, a Pittsburgh activist and registered Democrat who was working for an election-protection group that day. The GOP attorneys were acting as poll watchers. A common practice in many states, partisan poll watching helps parties get out the vote and keep an eye out for irregularities. But in Pennsylvania, laws governing how observers can challenge voters are unusually broad, and that makes them susceptible to abuse. Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/2016-election-pennsylvania-polls-voters-trump-clinton-214297#ixzz4PGu3yKFj Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook]“The attorneys for the Republican Party were challenging the credentials of pretty much every young voter who showed up,” recalls Pat Clark, a Pittsburgh activist and registered Democrat who was working for an election-protection group that day. The GOP attorneys were acting as poll watchers. A common practice in many states, partisan poll watching helps parties get out the vote and keep an eye out for irregularities. But in Pennsylvania, laws governing how observers can challenge voters are unusually broad, and that makes them susceptible to abuse.

Donald Trump's campaign and the Republican National Committee have paid at least $1.8 million to a political operative whose roster of companies include several that have been repeatedly investigated for voter registration fraud, even as Trump has complained that the election is rigged against him.

Three employees of Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm owned by conservative operative Nathan Sproul, pleaded guilty in Florida four years ago to felony charges related to altering and destroying scores of voter registration forms. There were no formal actions against the firm.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/05/trump-gop-paying-consultant-dogged-by-voter-fraud-charges.html

Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin plans to muster thousands of poll watchers across all 50 states. His partners at the alt-right website “the Right Stuff” are touting plans to set up hidden cameras at polling places in Philadelphia and hand out liquor and marijuana in the city’s “ghetto” on Election Day to induce residents to stay home. The National Socialist Movement, various factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the white nationalist American Freedom Party all are deploying members to watch polls, either “informally” or, they say, through the Trump campaign.

Death Roe wrote:So Bob is a misogynistic asshole. Figured.

Hillary sucks, by the way.