By Wade Rathke

New Orleans -- With the election almost over (races in Minnesota and some other places still linger and runoffs await), it is safe to say the people are clear about some things and one of them is that they would prefer more democracy thank you, rather than less. States that actually made an effort to make the very act of voting less of a burden, like taking bad medicine, and encouraged early voting found citizens hopped happily into the lines, and the lines were less both then and later.

As early voting gets underway, the need to make voter registration automatic is more important than ever.

John McCain and the Republicans are screaming about ACORN's voter registration efforts because a small percentage of the 1.3 million forms they submitted are invalid (and flagged as such by ACORN so they are not processed).

California just arrested a Republican operative who defrauded thousands of voters into re-registering as Republicans by signing petitions against child molesters.

Enthusiastic support for Barack Obama is sending new registrations through the roof and overwhelming county officials in California and across the country.

In 2000, Republicans stole the Florida election by disenfranchising as many Democratic voters as they could through various methods, most famously the phony felon purge of as many as 100,000 Democratic voters.

When Bush's appointees took over the Justice Department, they took their voter disenfranchisement strategies "national," most famously by pushing photo ID requirements through Republican-controlled state legislatures.

In April, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court ruled in favor of photo ID requirements, even though there was no evidence of voters registering under false identities. The Court ruled that any possible voter disenfranchisement was theoretical, and therefore not necessary for them to consider.

Only a few days later in the Indiana primary, the "theoretical" voter disenfranchisement proved all too real, as a dozen nuns over 80 years of age who had no drivers' licenses were prevented from voting.

First the bad news:

Matthew Damschroder, Franklin County elections director, estimated that as many as 5,000 of the 100,000 absentee ballots expected to be submitted have ID problems and would not be counted.

Now the good part:

Thousands of Ohioans got a reprieve from having their absentee votes thrown out when a federal judge last night halted state voter-identification requirements.

The Columbus Dispatch is reporting this morning that a Federal Judge suspended Ohio's new voter ID laws for early, absentee voters. It also appears that Blackwell, solidly behind Ted Strickland for governor of Ohio, doesn't want any more controversy swirling around him. Blackwell, for the time being, has declined to appeal the case.

Participate in LA's Election Day Rapid Response Team (Video the Vote)

We are having a meeting Sunday Oct. 29 in Echo Park to discuss and train everyone on what exactly we will be doing on Election Day. We will have attorneys to guide us through what we will need to do. We will also be organizing film crews to follow the attorneys as they take testimony from voters all over the city. If you own a camera or are an attorney please come out to help us secure our elections! Finally, I want to invite any one planning to be a poll worker or poll watcher to come to the meeting. You must at least have our dispatch line number on election day so that we can respond to any incidents at your polling place. If you plan to participate in this action please save this link for I will update it as Election Day approaches.

Tell The DNC To WAKE UP And Immediately Seek An Injunction To Reverse The Purge Of Democratic Voters

ACTION PAGE: http://www.peaceteam.net/pnum540.php

You had to know this was coming. The further they fall in the polls the more massive the voter fraud and preemptive vote suppression the other side will attempt. The key word here is "attempt". We're not supposed to let them get away with it without a fight. That fight must start NOW!

Reports are breaking that the pathologically partisan Ohio secretary of state has been secretly using the master database of voters to systematically purge hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the registered rolls. Their latest version of an old scam would be to put a discriminatory burden on voters in heavily Democratic precincts to meet a special hurdle of verification of their address, a guilty until proven innocent routine. And the allegation is that they have been doing this without any public notice that such a massive operation was underway, and timed in such a way that voters would have no recourse to re-register.

On Monday, former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker unveiled their 87-point plan entitled Building Confidence in U.S. Elections.

While most of the plan is positive - such as banning partisan election supervisors like Florida's Katherine Harris and Ohio's Ken Blackwell - the proposal has one fatal flaw: requiring a photo ID for all voters.

The idea came from James Baker, who engineered the Stolen Election of 2000. It represents the paranoia of Republicans who believe ineligible voters routinely visit polling places to impersonate eligible (or dead) voters and to cast fraudulent votes. In reality, there are virtually no documented cases of such on-site voting fraud in modern times - and certainly no election outcomes that were changed.

The Carter-Baker Commission Report entitled Building Confidence in U.S. Elections was published on 9/19/05. The most controversial proposal would require photo ID's for all voters, which Democrats denounced as a "poll tax." 

The inevitable result of the photo ID requirement will be "Katrina Democracy" - people with cars (and therefore photo ID's) will get to vote, while people without cars (and photo ID's) will be "left behind" to suffer without political power and drown in their powerlessness, just like the poor citizens of New Orleans. For this reason, Rep. John Conyers declared it "dead on arrival."