Can't Take Your Eyes Off the Bastards for a Second

Both the Courier and the Herald are reporting that the Kentucky Democratic Party will deploy election observers to polling places throughout the state on November 6.

Joe Gerth at the Courier writes:

Democrats are planning to put "challengers" in precincts throughout Kentucky on election day -- but not to fulfill their traditional role of rooting out ineligible voters.

Instead, the party will use an army of lawyers and other monitors in an effort to make sure voting isn't being suppressed and to report any problems at the polls.

Suppressing the vote through polling-place intimidation is exactly the illegal stunt republiscum tried to pull in Louisville in 2003. They got caught because they were so stupid, they assigned white challengers from the suburbs to urban precincts with heavy minority registration.

Which makes it all the more hilarious that republiscum fuhrer Richardson is now getting on his high horse about Democratic poll observers.

Jefferson County Republican Chairman Jack Richardson, who was criticized in 2003 after ordering GOP challengers into western Louisville precincts in an effort to stop suspected vote fraud, said the Democrats are operating under a double standard.

"I wonder if the (American Civil Liberties Union) will file suit against them?" he asked.

The ACLU challenged the 2003 Republican effort in court but ultimately lost its attempt to block the party from using challengers.

(SNIP)

Robert Kellar, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said challengers will not question the bona fides of any voter and will merely serve as observers and note-takers.

He said the challengers would be placed strategically around the state, largely in Democratic districts where the party has focused its get-out-the-vote efforts.

There's some heavy history the dems are swimming upstream against here. For a hundred years after Reconstruction, Democrats in the south used every type of intimidation to keep African-Americans away from the polls - from poll taxes and literacy tests to castration, hanging and burning alive.

It's now the repugs who are the racist intimidators, of course, but that doesn't erase the past. Let's hope KDP Chair Jonathan Miller treads carefully in this.

On a brighter note, this kind of polling-place observation by Democrats is precisely what is needed to put a stop to the endless whining by repugs about "voter fraud."

To make a very long explanation short and simple, there is no such thing as widespread "voter fraud" - people pretending to be somebody else in order to vote in a precinct not their own. Republiscum claim Democrats send armies of illegal voters to the polls to vote fraudulently. They use that lie to justify "security" tactics that intimidate poor and minority voters from voting.

There is, however, extremely widespread election fraud practiced almost exclusively by repugs. This ranges from "purging" voter rolls of everyone who is not white, rich and registered republican, to giving white, republican precincts more than enough voting machines and minority, Democratic precincts nowhere near enough machines, to getting your BFF the CEO of Diebold the contract for programming electronic voting machines.

The point is that Democrats have been playing electoral tiddlywinks while the repugs are playing three-dimensional chess, and it's far past time to fight back.

Putting Democratic observers at polling places vulnerable to repug dirty tricks is an excellent first step.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.