I was on the conference call with the Obama campaign that addressed this issue:
The General Counsel of the Obama campaign is currently holding a media conference call to "Announce Major Action Taken Today To Address Illegal Conduct and Improprieties in the Sham "Anti-Fraud" Campaign Orchestrated By McCain-Palin and the RNC."
I have the letter they sent out. I'll post it soon. They are taking it very seriously. Digby has been asking to hear from David Iglesias about the phony election fraud charges that the McCain campaign has been pushing. They are trying to demand an FBI investigation of Voter Fraud against ACORN. This is actually all about registration and not actual voting. Digby says:
The US Attorney scandals and this ACORN nonsense are pieces of the same story.
If you remember the Attorney firing scandal revolved around the fact that people like David Iglesias would not go after phony voter fraud cases pushed by Republicans.
He spoke out on it.
David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election.
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.
Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.
And he added that it "stands to reason" that the investigation was launched in response to GOP complaints. In recent weeks, national Republican figures -- including John McCain at last night's debate -- have sought to make an issue out of ACORN's voter-registration activities.
Whenever Republicans bring up anything about Voter fraud it's always targeted to disenfranchise voters and not protect our voting rights.
Just look at Indiana's Voter disenfranchisement Act just passed. The point of that law was to purge the voting rolls and also to scare people from voting. There are many other states looking to pass similar laws like Indiana. Voting is a right. It's not a privilege. It's something "the people" have had to fight for the entire time America was born.
National women’s suffrage, however, did not exist until 1920. During the beginning of the twentieth century, as women's suffrage gained in popularity, suffragists were subject to arrests and many were jailed. Finally, President Woodrow Wilson urged Congress to pass what became, when it was ratified in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment.
And it took until the 1965 Voting Rights Act before African Americans were given that right also.
The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. § 1973–1973aa-6)[1] outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States. Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibited states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."[2] Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise.[3]
