If you want to prevent certain people from voting, you’ve got a lot of options. Some are legal; some are not. Most of us are familiar with the proliferating tactic of requiring photo IDs that may be hard to get for certain parts of the population [mostly low-income and most often Democratic voters].  Alongside that strategy is the one we saw most recently, in the 2016 Arizona Democratic primary. That’s where the director of elections, in an supposedly cost-cutting move, reduced the number of polling places in Maricopa County, from 600 to 20.

But there are a lot more tactics to choose from. Here’s a brief roundup, gleaned from Wikipedia, of some other dirty-tricks, voter-suppression tactics in play in recent years.

In the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal, Republican officials attempted to reduce the number of Democratic voters by paying professional telemarketers in Idaho to make repeated hang-up calls to the telephone numbers used by the Democratic Party’s ride-to-the-polls phone lines on election day. By tying up the lines, voters seeking rides from the Democratic Party would have more difficulty reaching the party to ask for transportation to and from their polling places

In the 2004 presidential election,

Allegations surfaced in several states that a private group, Voters Outreach of America, which had been empowered by the individual states, had collected and submitted Republican voter registration forms while inappropriately discarding voter registration forms where the new voter had chosen to register with the Democratic Party. Such people would believe they had registered to vote, and would only discover on election day that they were not registered and could not cast a ballot.

In 2006,

Four employees of the John Kerry campaign were convicted of slashing the tires of 25 vans rented by the Wisconsin state Republican Party which were to be used for driving Republican voters and monitors to the polls. At the campaign workers’ sentencing, Judge Michael B. Brennan told the defendants, “Voter suppression has no place in our country. Your crime took away that right to vote for some citizens.”

In the Virginia Senate election

• Democratic voters received calls incorrectly informing them voting will lead to arrest.
• Widespread calls fraudulently claiming to be “[Democratic Senate candidate Jim] Webb Volunteers,” falsely telling voters their voting location had changed.
• Fliers paid for by the Republican Party, stating “SKIP THIS ELECTION” that allegedly attempted to suppress African-American turnout.

 

In 2008,

In Michigan, the Republican party used a “caging scheme,” in which the party planned to use home foreclosure lists to challenge voters still using their foreclosed home as a primary address at the polls. The Obama campaign sued, and a Federal Appeals court ordered the reinstatement of 5,500 voters wrongly purged from the voter rolls.

In Montana, the Republican Lieutenant Governor accused the Montana Republican Party of engaging in a similar voter caging scheme, to purge 6,000 voters from three counties that trend Democratic. The purges included war veterans and active duty soldiers.

In Wisconsin, the Republican Party attempted to have all 60,000 voters in the heavily Democratic city of Milwaukee who had registered since January 1, 2006, deleted from the voter rolls. The requests were rejected by the Milwaukee Election Commission.

In 2010,

In the Maryland gubernatorial election , the campaign of Republican candidate Bob Ehrlich hired a consultant who advised that “the first and most desired outcome is voter suppression”, in the form of having “African-American voters stay home.” To that end, the Republicans placed thousands of Election Day robocalls to Democratic voters, telling them that the Democratic candidate, Martin O’Malley, had won, although in fact the polls were still open for some two more hours. The Republicans’ call, worded to seem as if it came from Democrats, told the voters, “Relax. Everything’s fine. The only thing left is to watch it on TV tonight.” The calls reached 112,000 voters in majority-African American areas.

And these are just the most egregious examples that received press attention. No doubt, there are many more schemes at play. I personally witnessed an example  while serving as an election judge in the 2012 presidential election. The judge sitting next to me kept insisting that voters [who had already been checked in at the ID station] had to show HER their photo ID [which is not required in my state]. Then, she called her party supervisor [Republican] to complain that “they’re letting people vote here without photo ID.”  [Her supervisor, to his credit, explained that photo ID was not required.]  But she continued to do her best to suppress as many voters as possible.

How many other small-bore attempts like that one are happening? Apparently, for some people intent on cheating people out of their right to vote, there are no tactics too petty or sneaky.

Vigilance.

The post 50 ways to cheat your voters appeared first on Occasional Planet.

How low can you go? Ask Republican members of the California legislature. According to Crooks & Liars, Republican members of the California legislature have, for the past two weeks, been “sending out mailings on what appears to be the state’s dime to their constituents about health insurance. Only, they don’t direct those people to CoveredCA.com to sign up. Instead, they send them to their own astroturf version with the url CoveringHealthCareCA.com.”

On their version, there are links to negative articles and twisted messages intended to sour people on signing up for health insurance before they ever land at the official health exchange site.

For seniors, this message:

Seniors on Medicare may not see changes immediately to their benefits or coverage. Down the line, however, the erosion and accessibility of care may become a problem.

To pay for other components of the Affordable Care Act such as expanding Medicaid and creating state health exchanges, Medicare providers will see rate cuts nearing $200 billion over the next decade. These cuts could potentially result in the exodus of doctors from the Medicare system and force Medicare recipients to find new providers, possibly facing longer wait times for care as that pool of doctors shrinks.

Likewise, the tab for “young adults” says this:

Young adults will end up paying for much of federal health care reform by subsidizing the cost of sicker people, or by paying a tax penalty if they do not obtain health insurance under the provisions of the individual mandate, which requires all Californians to have coverage beginning in 2014.

If you click on the “Don’t have health insurance” tab on the front page, you’re taken to a page that puts all the focus on the penalty and none on the benefits. In fact, they have a “penalty calculator” on that page, rather than a premium calculator.

And of course, they also manage to twist what is actually available on the exchange:

Covered California: Covered California offers four qualified health plans similar to those available on the private market today. These plans comply with the Affordable Care Act.

Not so much, Assembly Republicans. There are four levels of coverage, but inside those levels, there are many, many plans available. So many it takes some time to figure out which one works the best.

What we have here are elected officials intentionally trying to make California’s health exchange fail, and using taxpayer dollars to misinform taxpayers, using the standard fear and loathing tactics as their linchpin. While I expect nothing less from Republicans in general, it does gall me that they’re using “official mailings” to misdirect constituents and Assembly resources to register and build the website.

Just more proof Republicans don’t give a damn about anything but their own bad selves.

We’re not talking about the scam sites that have popped up since the October 1 launch of healthcare.gov. Those sites, which look like healthcare.gov, have been created by scammers trying to obtain personal information from unsuspecting people thinking they’re at the government site. The California Attorney General has already ordered dozens of these completely phony sites taken down.  Elsewhere, as many as 700 of these phony cyber-squatter sites–whose only purpose is to glean information for identity theft–have been identified. They’re bad, and the scammers should face legal penalties, but it’s even worse to see elected officials trying to bamboozle their constituents with this strategy of deception, deceit and dishonesty.

The post Dirty tricks: California GOP’ers set up fake health-exchange site appeared first on Occasional Planet.