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Jackson Ripley, 12-Year-Old Coloradan Boy, Writes Letter To Romney Saying His 'Plan For America Isn't What We Need'


Jackson Ripley, 12, is pictured here with his younger sister Kennedy, 7, in a photo provided by his mother Lindsay. Kennedy was diagnosed with hemangioma when she was just 4 weeks old. She's had pre-existing conditions ever since.

By Andrea Rael
Posted: 09/18/2012 9:20 am Updated: 09/19/2012 11:27 pm

Although Gov. Mitt Romney has largely confounded the media [ http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/10/160898409/mitt-romneys-shifting-stance-on-health-care ] while trying to sway voters over to his increasingly difficult to pinpoint health care plan [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/09/mitt-romney-obamacare-_n_1868385.html ], his comments are not evading one 12-year-old Coloradan.

Last week Jackson Ripley was watching political news coverage with his mom about pre-existing health care when he suddenly got up and decided it was time to write a letter to Romney.

The letter begins (Editor note: all text from letter remains unedited):

Dear Governor Romney, I’d like to say congratulations on winning the republican nomination. But, I wish you stayed in Massachusetts. You’re plan for America isn’t what we need, and would hurt us more than it would help.

Jackson goes on to call out Romney on his health care stance and whether he actually will or won't repeal Obamacare [id.], especially with regard to patients with pre-existing conditions, citing contradicting statements from Romney on "Meet the Press" and the "Tonight Show." Jackson also has strong words for Romney and his stance on gay and women's rights:

You’re domestic plans (birth control, gay rights etc.) are horrible! Women should get to manage their own health, and if you wonder why you’re not appealing to many women voters, rethink your birth control and women’s’ rights plans. And people should be able to marry whom they want.

Jackson's strong political beliefs appear to have, in part, grown naturally from his family's life experiences beginning with his little sister Kennedy who has had pre-existing conditions since she was just 4 weeks old.

Shortly after Kennedy was born, she developed a hemangioma [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002430/ ] -- an abnormal, raised tumor of blood vessels -- on her face. According to her mother, Lindsay Ripley, only 10 percent of children are born with a hemangioma and less than one percent of the cases are life-threatening, like Kennedy's.

The tumor grew so large that at just nine months old, Kennedy was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

"She was very ill and in and out of the hospital for the first two years of her life. During which she had several procedures, surgeries, MRI's, CT's and hospitalized many, many times, making her our million dollar baby when she was around a year old," Lindsay Ripley told The Huffington Post.

In 2009, the flailing economy left Lindsay's husband John Ripley briefly without a job, and the family no longer had health insurance. John Ripley was employed again just three months later, but the smaller size of the company translated into a burgeoning reality that the family would have to shop for insurance elsewhere.

And everywhere they shopped they were accepted, except for Kennedy.

"Next to my daughter's name in big black bold letters was the word DENIED. The reason: Dollar amount previously spent, number of hospitalizations within five years and the pre-existing condition, congestive heart failure. I knew they were going to deny Kennedy, but I wasn’t prepared for how angry and sick it would make me feel," Lindsay Ripley said. "Like the insurance companies were saying my daughter was trash, she didn’t matter, wasn’t worth the same the health care and coverage the rest of us enjoy. Our only option was to purchase Kennedy an expensive policy through an insurance company exclusively for people with pre-existing conditions. Although they accepted Kennedy and took our money each month, they refused to cover her pre-existing condition, or anything caused by it, which was almost everything."

Jackson Ripley explained some of his reasoning behind the letter:

My inspiration for the letter was basically my frustration. It was painful (and sometimes a little funny) to see all the people that blindly supporting [sic] Mitt Romney, and I felt like I should bring that to people's attention. I already knew that his plans for America would tear us apart, and would bring more harm than good to families like mine, so I had to make a stand. What he would do was unfair, and I wanted to say something about that.

Lindsay Ripley shared Jackson's letter among some friends and family before sharing it with The Huffington Post and mailing it to Romney. She said that in 2010, the same year the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, Kennedy was added back onto the family policy but that she's since been diagnosed with a vascular malformation and will very likely require treatment for the rest of her life.

I think partly due to his sister's illness, at an early age Jackson began to notice injustices in the world that many children never see. Writing has always been a great outlet for Jackson, so three years ago when he was upset about the war in Iraq, we said, "write a letter to the president." And Jackson did. A year later when Jackson saw a homeless man in Cherry Creek and became very upset, we said "write a letter." After buying the man a Cinnabon, Jackson wrote to then-Mayor John Hickenlooper and thanked him for his efforts to end homelessness in Denver. When Jackson came home from school last week, I had the news on and they were discussing the fate of health care and preexisting condition coverage if Governor Romney were to become president. Jackson watched the segment with me. When it was over, Jackson stood up and said, "Excuse me mom, I have to go write a very strongly-worded letter!" So John and I no longer say "write a letter" because he does it on his own.

Jackson's full letter to Gov. Romney below (spelling/grammar is unchanged from original letter):

Dear Governor Romney,

I’d like to say congratulations on winning the republican nomination. But, I wish you stayed in Massachusetts. You’re plan for America isn’t what we need, and would hurt us more than it would help.

First, repealing Obama care and other health plans he’s put in place have helped families across America, including mine. I live in a middle class family, and two years ago my little sister; Kennedy was denied insurance because of her pre-existing condition. This was a huge emotional stress and financial burden on my entire family. Under Obama Care, insurance companies can no longer deny Kennedy and kids like her, the coverage they need and deserve. Because of Obama care my little sister was able to have the several surgeries she needed that helped save her life. Once the President was elected he put Obama Care into action, just like he promised and made it so that you could get insurance with pre-existing conditions. This has made a direct impact on my family. My family is with out a doubt better off now, than we were four years ago!

It is to my understanding that you stated that you were going to repeal Obama Care, including the part I have mentioned, which will take away the insurance we have and need for my sister Kennedy. Why do you think she doesn’t deserve health care? Also, when you were interviewed on “Meet the Press”, you stated that you would NOT repeal this part of Obama Care, but then your campaign backpedalled and on the “Tonight show with Jay Leno”, you said that you WOULD repeal this.

Also, you’re domestic plans (birth control, gay rights etc.) are horrible! Women should get to manage their own health, and if you wonder why you’re not appealing to many women voters, rethink your birth control and women’s’ rights plans. And people should be able to marry whom they want. We built this country so people could have freedom, and not have religious beliefs control them to that length. This country was in no way built on any religion, so we should not create laws that repress the American people in a religious way and hurt our most vulnerable.

Sincerely,

Jackson Ripley, age 12

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/jackson-ripley-12-year-ol_n_1892456.html [with embedded video report, and comments]


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Matt Taibbi: Mitt Romney's 'Insane' Comments Reveal Delusions Of The Super Rich


Matt Taibbi bashed Mitt Romney on Tuesday.

By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 09/18/2012 6:14 pm Updated: 09/18/2012 6:14 pm

Matt Taibbi says that Mitt Romney's recently leaked remarks [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser (at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79652529 {and preceding} and following)] about low-income Americans were "insane."

"I think he really genuinely believes that the only reason that his particular message isn't resonating is that people want something for free and he's not offering it to them," Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "It's crazy."

In a video leaked on Monday, Romney is seen [id.] at a May fundraiser saying that 47 percent of Americans "will vote for the president no matter what," "are dependent upon government," and "pay no income tax." These claims are largely inaccurate [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/fact-check-mitt-romney-47-percent_n_1893537.html ].

Taibbi, who famously labeled Goldman Sachs a "vampire squid" and recently lambasted Romney in a Rolling Stone article [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829 ({linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79045647 and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79190498 {and preceding} and following)], said the top one percent on Wall Street looks down on the poor because it's the only way they can psychologically excuse their "mass fraud and theft."

"It's all based upon this idea that 'poor people deserve to be poor because they don't work hard enough and I deserve the money that I make because I do work hard,'" Taibbi said. "It's just a pervasive belief ... the psychological underpinning of almost everything they do. If they didn't have this way to excuse their dismissal of the poor, then they wouldn't be able to do a lot of the things that they do."

He noted that "everybody pays taxes in one form or another, whether sales tax or payroll tax," and that income taxes comprise a small percentage of Romney's own recent taxes.

Taibbi added that Romney, who comes from a privileged background, disregarded another "tax" that many poor people have to pay: "a kind of qualitative tax which nobody talks about -- this sucky hard work tax."

"If you're low-income enough to not be paying income tax, you're doing a shitty job that nobody else wants to do in this country," Taibbi said. "You're cleaning toilets. You're driving buses at the night shift. You're bussing tables. You're doing all these things that Mitt Romney is never going to do."

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/matt-taibbi-mitt-romney_n_1894781.html [with comments]


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The Forbes 400: The Richest People In America

9/19/2012
The combined net worth of the 2012 class of the 400 richest Americans is $1.7 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion a year ago. The average net worth of a Forbes 400 member is a staggering $4.2 billion, up from $3.8 billion, and the highest ever, as two-thirds of the individuals added to their fortunes in the past year. Another factor: the gap between the very rich and the merely rich is widening. Only two in the top 20 are poorer, and as a group they are worth $73 billion more than a year ago.
The country’s three richest entrepreneurs drove much of those gains, continuing to add billions to their net worth, even as they give money away. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison, who hold onto their respective spots at numbers 1, 2 and 3, were up $7 billion, $7 billion and $8 billion, respectively. Ellison’s $8 billion jump was the biggest dollar gain of anyone on the list this year. Pals Gates and Buffett are also the most generous people on the planet, having given $28 billion and $17.5 billion to date, respectively, including $1.5 billion that Buffett gave away since the last rich list.
Forbes launched its definitive ranking of the nation’s super rich in 1982. Back then the price of admission into this most exclusive of clubs was a mere $75 million of net worth. Even after adjusting for inflation, this year’s entry fee ($1.1 billion) is roughly six times what it was 30 years ago . There were just 13 billionaires at the time and the total worth of the 400 club was a mere $93 billion.
[...]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2012/09/19/the-forbes-400-the-richest-people-in-america/ [no comments yet]


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What Mitt Romney Doesn’t Get About Responsibility

By Ezra Klein
Sep 18, 2012 3:36 PM CT

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Mitt Romney [ http://topics.bloomberg.com/mitt-romney/ ] told a room full of donors.

“All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

All this can be written off as just a bit of self-flattery. Imagine you’re Romney, the Republican presidential nominee: For the past year you’ve been unable to grab a clear lead in the polls against an incompetent who has been unable to get unemployment below 8 percent or reach a reasonable debt- reduction deal with Congress. Which would you prefer to believe? That you’re not good enough, not smart enough and doggone it, people just don’t like you? Or that the incumbent Democrat has effectively bought off half the country with food stamps and free health care?

What Romney said next is harder to explain.

“These are people who pay no income tax,” he continued, “47 percent of Americans pay no income tax.”

Let’s do away with the ridiculous myth that 47 percent of Americans are tax-evading moochers. Of the 46 percent of Americans who were expected to pay [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/1001547-Why-No-Income-Tax.pdf ] no federal income tax in 2011, more than 60 percent of them were working and contributing payroll taxes -- which means they paid a higher effective tax rate on their income than Romney does -- and an additional 20 percent were elderly. So more than 80 percent were either working or past retirement age.

Even Worse

Still, for my money, the worst of Romney’s comments were these: “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

When he said this, Romney didn’t just write off half the country behind closed doors. He also confirmed the worst suspicions about who he is: an entitled rich guy with no understanding of how people who aren’t rich actually live.

The thing about not having much money is you have to take much more responsibility for your life. You can’t pay people to watch your kids or clean your house or fix your meals. You can’t necessarily afford a car or a washing machine or a home in a good school district. That’s what money buys you: goods and services that make your life easier.

That’s what money has bought Romney, too. He’s a guy who sold his dad’s stock to pay for college, who built an elevator to ensure easier access to his multiple cars and who was able to support his wife’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s great! That’s the dream.

The problem is that he doesn’t seem to realize how difficult it is to focus on college when you’re also working full time, how much planning it takes to reliably commute to work without a car, or the agonizing choices faced by families in which both parents work and a child falls ill. The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.

In their book “Poor Economics,” the poverty researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo try to explain why the poor around the world so often make decisions that befuddle the rich.

Getting By

Their answer, in part, is this: The poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by. They’re not dumber or lazier or more interested in being dependent on the government. They’re just cognitively exhausted [ http://books.google.com/books?id=Tj0TF0IHIyAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false ]:

“Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in -- we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own -- we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. ... And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so.”

Banerjee and Duflo’s argument has been increasingly confirmed by the nascent science of “decision fatigue.” Study after study [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all ] shows that the more we need to worry about in a day, the harder we have to work to make good decisions.

As economist Jed Friedman wrote in an online post [ http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fruit-salad-chocolate-cake-cognitive-control-and-poverty ] for the World Bank, “The repeated trade-offs confronting the poor in daily decision making -- i.e. ‘should I purchase a bit more food or a bit more fertilizer?’ -- occupy cognitive resources that would instead lay fallow for the wealthy when confronted with the same decision. The rich can afford both a bit more food and a bit more fertilizer, no decision is necessary.”

The point here isn’t that Romney is unfamiliar with cutting-edge work in cognitive psychology. It’s that he misses even the intuitive message of this work, the part most of us know without reading any studies: It’s really, really hard to be poor. That’s because the poorer you are, the more personal responsibility you have to take.

Romney, apparently, thinks it’s folks like him who’ve really had it hard. “I have inherited nothing,” the son of a former auto executive and governor told the room of donors [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/17/mitt-romney-video_n_1829455.html ]. “Everything Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.” This is a man blind to his own privilege.

Which is his right. But that sentiment informs his policy platform [ http://www.mittromney.com/sites/default/files/shared/BelieveInAmerica-PlanForJobsAndEconomicGrowth-Full.pdf ] -- which calls for sharply cutting social services for the poor to pay for huge tax cuts for the rich -- and it suggests he’s trying to make policy with a worldview that’s completely backward.

(Ezra Klein is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Ezra Klein in Washington at [e-mail].
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Timothy Lavin at [e-mail].

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Related

Medicaid to Lose $1.26 Trillion Under Romney Block Grant
Sep 11, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-11/medicaid-to-lose-1-26-trillion-under-romney-block-grant.html

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©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-18/what-mitt-romney-doesn-t-get-about-responsibility.html [with comments]


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Challenged on Medicare, G.O.P. Loses Ground


A plan to overhaul Medicare by Paul D. Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, is drawing heavy fire from Democrats.
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times


The Democratic ticket is using former President Bill Clinton on the stump to attack the Republicans' approach on Medicare.
Angel Valentin for The New York Times

By JACKIE CALMES
Published: September 15, 2012

ORLANDO, Fla. — Maria Rubin is one of the coveted independent voters in this swing state — so independent that she will not say whether she is voting for President Obama [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/candidates/barack-obama ] or Mitt Romney [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney ]. She does share her age (63) and, more quickly, her opinion on Medicare [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html ]: “I’m not in favor of changing it, or eliminating it.”

Her attitude speaks directly to one of the biggest challenges facing the Republican ticket this year: countering the Democrats’ longstanding advantage as the party more trusted to deal with Medicare.

In the 2010 Congressional races, successful Republicans believed that they had finally found a way to do that, by linking the program’s future to Mr. Obama’s unpopular health insurance overhaul and accusing Democrats of cutting Medicare to pay for it. This summer Mr. Romney resumed the offensive, eventually joined by his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/candidates/paul-ryan ].

Initially, polls suggested that the Republican strategy was working. Democrats fretted that Mr. Romney would win the retiree-heavy Florida and increase his support nationwide among older voters, who lean Republican anyway. David Winston, a Republican pollster, wrote a month ago of “a structural shift in the issue” that left the parties in “a dead heat” and Mr. Obama unable to mount an effective response.

But in recent weeks Mr. Obama and his campaign have hit back hard, and enlisted former President Bill Clinton as well, to make the case that the Romney-Ryan approach to Medicare would leave older Americans vulnerable to rising health care costs. Now their counterattack seems to be paying off.

The latest New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted over the last week, found that Mr. Obama held an advantage over Mr. Romney on the question of who would do a better job of handling Medicare. That is consistent with other recent polls and is a shift from just last month, before the parties’ national conventions, when the two men were statistically tied on the issue.

At the heart of the conflict is the proposal backed by Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan to change the way Medicare works in an effort to drive down health care costs and keep the program solvent as the population ages. Under their plan, retirees would get a fixed annual payment from the government that they could use to buy traditional Medicare coverage or a private health insurance policy. Supporters say the change would hold expenses down by introducing more competition into the system.

Critics say the fixed payments might not keep up with rising insurance costs and could leave older Americans facing cutbacks in care or paying more out of their own pockets. Democrats contend that Medicare’s rising costs can be held down within the existing system.

In the Times/CBS poll, more than three-quarters of voters favored keeping Medicare the way it is rather than switching to a system like the one backed by Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan. From the White House on down, Democrats are calling the Republican approach a “voucher” plan, suggesting that it borders on privatizing the system; Republicans prefer the term “premium support.”

As that poll result reflects, the Democratic message is resonating with voters like Ms. Rubin, who joined other independent and Democratic voters last week to hear Mr. Clinton make his pitch for Mr. Obama’s re-election in the packed ballroom of a resort hotel here.

“I don’t trust anybody who says ‘voucher,’ ” said Gary Fieldsend, 62, a recently retired employee at a Navy shipyard who was vacationing here with his wife Pamela, 64. The Fieldsends, from New Hampshire, another swing state, describe themselves as Democratic-leaning independents, and both said they were voting for Mr. Obama.

“I think it’s very important that we keep it under control on cost,” Mr. Fieldsend said. “But you have to cover people. Even if you’ve got millions of baby boomers, you’ve got to find a way to do it.”

Given the political risks, Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, this year changed his 2011 budget passed by the House from a plan that would have made private insurance the only option available to beneficiaries to one that offered a choice between traditional Medicare or private coverage.

Democrats focused heavily on Medicare at their convention and have kept up the assault since then. Last weekend in Kissimmee, Fla., Mr. Obama spoke of Republican plans for “voucherizing Medicare,” while Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. says Republicans will institute “vouchercare.” Mr. Obama will address AARP’s annual convention this week by satellite; Mr. Ryan will appear in person.

And soon, strategists say, Democrats will buttress their Medicare message by charging that a Romney-Ryan administration could also seek to alter Social Security [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html ], the other popular entitlement program. They will point out Mr. Ryan’s support in 2005 for President George W. Bush’s proposal to allow workers to divert Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts, a plan that flopped even though Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

It is a paradox of recent politics that despite Democrats’ usual advantage on Medicare, voters 65 and older are the age group least supportive of Mr. Obama and his party. His challenge is to depress Mr. Romney’s support among older voters by raising doubts about Republicans on Medicare.

“It’s pretty clear that Medicare is the one issue that could dislodge the Republicans’ headlock on those voters,” said Andrew Kohut, the president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

“The Republicans brought it back to life,” Mr. Kohut added — first by House Republicans’ approval this year and last of the Ryan budgets, which died in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and most of all by Mr. Romney’s elevation of Mr. Ryan to the presidential ticket.

Medicare is an especially resonant issue in Florida, and Mr. Ryan has appeared in the state with his mother, a Medicare beneficiary, to emphasize the message that Republicans are trying to preserve the program, not end or curtail it.

So it was no accident that Mr. Clinton’s first post-convention trip as a surrogate for Mr. Obama was to Florida. Or that he was preceded here last weekend by Mr. Obama, who made four stops in the state and will return again this week.

Mr. Clinton brought up Medicare Advantage, a private insurance option for Medicare beneficiaries that is used by 2.1 million Floridians. Begun late in the Clinton administration as an experiment to cut costs through market competition, Medicare Advantage has instead proved more costly than regular Medicare.

The 2010 health care law [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ] reduced Medicare subsidies to insurance companies to help save $716 billion over 10 years, which added eight years to the program’s financial life. But Republicans have been on the attack since, charging Democrats with robbing Medicare beneficiaries to pay for “Obamacare.”

Mr. Clinton pointed out that a record number of insurance companies and beneficiaries now participate in Medicare Advantage, and that premiums are lower. “So if the president was trying to wreck Medicare Advantage, he did a poor job of it because it’s in the best shape it’s ever been in,” Mr. Clinton said.

Then he repeated one of the biggest applause lines of his nationally televised address at the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C. Noting that Mr. Ryan is attacking the $716 billion in savings although his budgets also included them, Mr. Clinton quipped, “You got to give it to Congressman Ryan — it takes real brass to attack somebody for doing something he did.”

For now, the Romney campaign has stopped running advertisements attacking Mr. Obama on Medicare. But House Republicans are continuing to press the issue.

A commercial in Iowa, for example, accuses Representative Leonard L. Boswell, a Democrat, of taking $716 billion “from current recipients of Medicare to take care of a government takeover of health care that benefits other people.”

Democrats are striking back. Representative Bruce Braley of Iowa last weekend became the first Democratic Congressional candidate to run an ad featuring Mr. Clinton’s folksy convention put-down of Republicans. It features Mr. Clinton saying: “Democrats didn’t weaken Medicare. They strengthened Medicare.”

Instead of Mr. Clinton, the Obama campaign is using a similar testimonial from AARP in its ads for the president.

“We were going to talk about Medicare whether they brought it up or not,” said Joel Benenson, a pollster for the Obama campaign. Republicans, he said, “were trying to get ahead of an issue that was a big problem for them. And it is a big problem for them, especially after they put Paul Ryan, the author of the voucher scheme, on their ticket.”

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Related in Opinion

Op-Ed Contributor: Beyond Obamacare (September 17, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/health-care-reform-beyond-obamacare.html

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© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/us/politics/in-poll-obama-opens-medicare-edge-over-romney.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/us/politics/in-poll-obama-opens-medicare-edge-over-romney.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]


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Romney Camp Decides: The Economy Isn't Enough



“It’s not enough just to criticize,” says Ryan. Agrees an aide: “We have to bring more to the table.”

Zeke Miller
BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Sep 16, 2012 12:57pm EDT

OLDSMAR, Fla. — Mitt Romney’s campaign for president appears to have quietly abandoned its guiding assumption, that the election would center on the struggling economy, and has visibly begun to feel for a new message.

Romney and — particularly — his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, have spent a week road-testing alternatives, going positive and going negative, swinging at the president on everything from faith to foreign policy. The new efforts mark a shift from a summer of fruitless discipline and a convention in which attempts to present a friendly, moderate tone trumped any policy substance. And campaign planners said their moves mark a new campaign consensus.

“No one in Boston thinks this can only be about the economy anymore,” one top aide said last week. “The economy narrows the gap and puts us in contention, but we have to bring more to the table.”

The core factor in the search for a new message, aides say privately, was the August jobs report. The anemic job growth was widely viewed as bad news for Obama even as the unemployment rate dropped due to people leaving the workforce. But the national shrug confirmed Romney campaign concerns that the most visible economic indicator would remain muddled through Election Day.

Ryan himself has emerged as a central player in this calculation, making the case internally for a clearer conservative policy message. One high level Republican with ties to the campaign told BuzzFeed that Ryan was chaffing at Boston constraining him from talking about and defending his policy ideas from Democratic attacks. Ryan wanted to be "unleashed," the Republican said.

And Ryan’s latest campaign swing offers the clearest indication that he’s gotten his wish. On Friday at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., Ryan offered a new gambit on offense, attacking Obama on social issues and income inequality in one fell swoop.“’We’re all in this together’ – it has a nice ring,” Ryan said, quoting a frequent Obama line. “For everyone who loves this country, it is not only true but obvious,” he said. “Yet how hollow it sounds coming from a politician who has never once lifted a hand to defend the most helpless and innocent of all human beings, the child waiting to be born.”On Saturday at a rally at R.E. Olds Park Amphitheatre here, Ryan laid into the Federal Reserve for “undermining the credibility of our money” and “debasing our currency,” with the latest round of stimulative monetary policy.

“We are offering more specific solutions than anybody who typically run runs for president,” Ryan declared at a Roanoke, Va. fundraiser Friday night. “We have offered more solutions on how to balance the budget, how to save Medicare, how to have an energy policy that makes us energy independent by 2020 in North America, how to fix our education and job training system, how to cut spending, how to get better trade agreements so we can make and grow more things in America and sell them overseas, how to clean up this tax system, fix the regulatory juggernaut that is coming our way so we can get back to growth and prosperity.”

“We have specific ideas and specific bold solutions because we feel we have an obligation to give you the choice of what kind of country you want to have, what kind of economy you want to have,” Ryan added.”

And in a phone call with conservative media on Thursday, Ryan outlined his thinking that the election will be about ideas, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/paul-ryan-talks-to-conservative-media/2012/09/13/029898ca-fdc1-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_blog.html ]:

The call revealed some of the Romney-Ryan ticket’s thinking. First, it plainly understands the need to go around and over the heads of the mainstream media and to buck up the base. Second, it doesn't buy the liberal spin that it’s running a referendum election; Ryan has always argued for and talked about two visions and giving the voters a clear choice.

Ryan’s message points have come so far in hints, not whitepapers. The form of his “specific bold solutions” remains very much in doubt. Indeed, Romney aides say they plan no new major policy roll-outs before the debates. But they said they but intend to focus more on contrasts between Democratic plans and their existing policy positions.

Republicans assiduously avoided any sort of policy detail in their convention, keeping their focus directly on introducing Mitt Romney the man to America, and implicitly on the president’s economic failures. But already a press to talk specifics is apparent.

Romney devoted the weekend after the last jobs report to talking about religion in the public sphere, Ryan has brought abortion into the campaign. They have taken Obama to task for allegedly cutting more than $700 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. (The claim is complicated by Ryan's own support for the cuts in his budget, but that hasn't slowed a barrage of Republican attacks.) The ongoing protests in the Muslim world, and the murder of four U.S. diplomats, has led both Republicans to sharply criticize Obama’s foreign policy agenda.

And while Romney’s initial reaction may have been premature, aides insist that the lingering anti-American protests provide an opening for the GOP ticket to attack Obama and argue for a leading role for America in the world.

“It’s not enough just to criticize,” Ryan told a crowd of over 3,000 in rural Virginia on Friday. We owe you solutions, we owe you ideas — and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Copyright © 2012 BuzzFeed, Inc.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/romney-camp-decides-the-economy-isnt-enough [with comments]


===


Some Republicans Try Out a New Campaign Theme: Bipartisanship


Representative Jon Runyan of New Jersey.
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times


Representative Nan Hayworth of New York.
Scott Eells/Bloomberg News


Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana.
Aj Mast/Associated Press


Representative Bobby Schilling, an Illinois Republican, is highlighting his work with a Democratic congressman from Iowa.
Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and JONATHAN WEISMAN
Published: September 15, 2012

WASHINGTON — A woman who appears in an advertisement [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by6dRsHzuCc ] supporting Representative Jon Runyan, a New Jersey Republican, boasts about how he works “with both parties.”

Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana, whose Senate campaign has been most notable for his derision of legislative compromise as feckless, now says he would “work with anyone.”

While out and about on the campaign trail, Representative Bobby Schilling, Republican of Illinois, talks so much about all the great things he has done with Representative Dave Loebsack, a Democrat from nearby Iowa, that one would think the two were related.

Partisan obstreperousness, the force that propelled Congressional Republicans to widespread victory in 2010, is suddenly for many of them as out of style as monocles. In campaign advertisements, some lawmakers who once dug in against Democrats now promote the wonders of bipartisanship. And legislatively, Republicans in tough races are seeking to soften their edges by moderating their votes, tossing their teacups and otherwise projecting a conciliatory image to voters.

The Republican quest for bipartisanship — at least nominally — is not hard to explain. A New York Times/CBS News poll [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/15/us/politics/New-York-Times-CBS-Poll-Results.html ] conducted last week and released this weekend showed that 44 percent of Americans see Republicans at fault for gridlock in Washington, compared with 29 percent who blame President Obama and the Democrats. Nineteen percent said both were to blame. That imbalance has persisted at almost exactly those proportions since last year.

Democrats have noted Republicans’ efforts to present themselves as agreeable, and say they will try to beat them back.

“They’re going to redefine, and we are going to remind. That’s what this is about,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They were swept in on a Tea Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html ] tsunami. The wave has receded, and they are left high and dry with their voting records.”

With less than two months until Election Day, some House races may turn on whether the incumbent Republicans can shake the Tea Party label that Democrats are eager to press to them like flypaper.

Representative Nan Hayworth, a Republican freshman from New York, has taken to pointing out that she has voted for bills supported by Mr. Obama “a third of the time.” As she zoomed through the Rotunda the other day in her signature spike heels, on her way to visit with Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice president, Ms. Hayworth was asked if she was shifting to the center.

“Nope,” she said, never breaking stride. “I’ve been doing that from the start.”

Ms. Hayworth has a point: the conservative Club for Growth ranked her as the 172nd most conservative House Republican, about in the middle of the pack. But House Majority PAC, a Democratic political action committee, started an advertising campaign on Wednesday explicitly tying her to the Tea Party.

“Some tea parties are nice,” the advertisement’s narrator says [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXA-9ETtKaU ]. “But Nan Hayworth’s Washington Tea Party would roll back decades of progress for women.”

On election night in 2010, as Tea Party conservatives were being swept into office, Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland, a 10-term Republican, declared: “The Tea Party came to where I was. I’ve always been there.”

But then came Maryland’s redistricting and an influx of Democratic voters to Mr. Bartlett’s once-reliable Republican corner of the state. Now much of his advertising emphasizes his support for higher education, including contributions to college funds out of his own pocket.

“Roscoe has never been afraid to buck his own party,” a radio ad intones. “Roscoe Bartlett, an independent voice for Maryland.”

Mr. Mourdock, who defeated the longtime Senator Richard G. Lugar in the Republican primary in Indiana, in part by casting Mr. Lugar’s willingness to reach across the aisle as a personality flaw, is now working overtime to soften that position. In one of his campaign’s advertisements, the Indiana lieutenant governor, Becky Skillman, says [ http://www.courierpress.com/videos/detail/mourdock-ad-featuring-skillman/ ] Mr. Mourdock will “work with Republicans and Democrats.”

This message “has great appeal among independent voters,” said Brose McVey, Mr. Mourdock’s deputy campaign manager.

“Hoosier voters aren’t buying what Mr. Mourdock is selling,” said Representative Joe Donnelly, his opponent. “In fact, when asked this week, he could not name one Democrat he would work with if elected to the U.S. Senate.”

For Republicans in particularly tough races, compromise is their central campaign theme. Representative Robert Dold of Illinois has made three ads that emphasize his independence. “I took on my own party to support funding for Metra,” he says in one [ http://www.doldforcongress.com/pages/tv_spot__3__working_together_to_create_jobs/408.php ], referring to a commuter rail system.

At least four Republicans have drafted their mothers to help smooth their rough edges. Representative Rick Berg of North Dakota, for instance, looks as if he has just finished a pancake breakfast prepared by his mother in one soft-spoken testament [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgXGmmc4d1o ] by her.

“I’m Rick Berg.” “And Rick’s mom.” “And we approve this message.”

Some of the moderation has extended to legislation. Several Republican lawmakers, like Representative Kristi Noem of South Dakota, made the unusual choice of signing a petition sponsored by Democrats to force a vote on the House Agriculture Committee’s farm bill [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/farm_bill_us/index.html ].

Last week, Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia voted against a short-term budget agreement, not because it cut too little, as some Republicans argued, but because it did not provide money for work in his district on two aircraft carriers.

Even the most ardent conservatives appear to be trying to tone down their image. Last week, the Republican Study Committee, a group of right-leaning House members who often vote against their leadership’s spending measures as being too expansive, held a “poverty summit” meeting with black and Hispanic pastors to hear ideas about easing poverty — not the kind of policy initiative the group is known for.

Representative Steve Southerland II of Florida, a Tea Party freshman, introduced himself there as “an individual whose heart hurts because individuals do not have the opportunity to improve their plight.” (The group’s proposed budget seeks to cut over $2 trillion from programs for the poor over six years.)

Some Democrats in Republican-leaning states are playing the same game. In one ad [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hZH5G1e26Y ], Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, a Democrat running for the Senate, is standing in a farm field saying she is not the candidate for voters looking for a partisan on either side. She also trumpets her support for the proposed Keystone [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/k/keystone_pipeline/index.html ] pipeline expansion, which many Democrats oppose.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri has her own new advertisement in which she boasts about her rating as the senator considered dead center in the divided Senate, 50th out of 100.

For candidates with long political histories, the record can be inconvenient. During a recent debate, George Allen, the Republican nominee for a Senate seat from Virginia, talked about working with Hillary Rodham Clinton when he was previously in the Senate. His opponent, Tim Kaine, pointed out that Mr. Allen was then fond of saying, “I’d rather be drinking beer with George Bush than nibbling cheese and drinking wine with Hillary Clinton at her mansion.”

For every moment of conciliation that Mr. Allen seeks to highlight, there are remarks like those he made during the 1994 Virginia Republican Convention, when he said of Democrats, “Let’s enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining throats.”

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/us/politics/some-republicans-try-out-a-new-campaign-theme-bipartisanship.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/us/politics/some-republicans-try-out-a-new-campaign-theme-bipartisanship.html?pagewanted=all ]


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Lugar sitting out Indiana Senate battle, not campaigning for GOP’s Mourdock

By Associated Press, Published: September 17, 2012

INDIANAPOLIS — Sen. Richard Lugar says he will not campaign for the man who vanquished him in May’s Republican primary.

Lugar told conservative Indiana blogger Abdul Hakim-Shabazz in an interview posted Monday that he would not actively support Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock on the campaign trail. The six-term senator had previously left the question unanswered. But he raised eyebrows in July when he introduced Mourdock to Senate Republicans at a weekly lunch.

Mourdock is in a tight race with Democrat Joe Donnelly for Indiana’s open Senate seat. Senate Republicans and Democrats are going on air in Indiana Tuesday with new ads and outside groups are spending heavily on both sides.

Polls have shown a surprisingly close race for what would have been a safe Republican seat had Lugar won re-election.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lugar-sitting-out-indiana-senate-battle-not-campaigning-for-gops-mourdock/2012/09/17/47aa3fe0-0109-11e2-bbf0-e33b4ee2f0e8_story.html [(apparently) no comments yet (or their comments server isn't responding as I put this together)]


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Presidential Candidate Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) - Message for Values Voter Summit 2012

Published on Sep 14, 2012 by FRCAction

Presidential Candidate Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) - Message for Values Voter Summit 2012. Watch the Summit online at http://www.valuesvotersummit.org or go to http://www.youtube.com/frcaction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QHJyjpLoNA


--


Mitt Romney tells Values Voter Summit that 'culture matters'

Audience members pray before the start of the Values Voters Summit in Washington.
September 14, 2012
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-values-voter-20120914,0,5036054.story [with comments]


===


Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) at Values Voter Summit 2012

Published on Sep 14, 2012 by FRCAction

Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) at Values Voter Summit 2012, introduction by Dr. Bill Bennett. Watch the Summit online at http://www.valuesvotersummit.org or go to http://www.youtube.com/frcaction

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyQ5C3SFgFc


===


Looking, Very Closely, for Voter Fraud


Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of True the Vote, said she was apolitical until “something clicked” four years ago.
Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times


"Vote fraud deniers is what I call them," said Anita Moncrief, right, a True the Vote senior adviser, referring to groups that oppose the organization's work.
Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times


Teresa Sharp's right to vote, as well as her family's, was challenged by the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, which later apologized.
Mark Lyons for The New York Times

Conservative Groups Focus on Registration in Swing States

By STEPHANIE SAUL
Published: September 16, 2012

It might as well be Harry Potter [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry_potter/index.html ]’s invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.

The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.

“Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time,” Ms. Engelbrecht said. “Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so.”

Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people “who did not appear to be from this country.”

Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. “It’s so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate,” said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. “Pick your minority group,” he said.

The buses are part of the election fraud gospel according to True the Vote, which is mobilizing a small army of volunteers to combat what it sees as a force out to subvert elections. Ms. Engelbrecht’s July speech in Montana was titled “Voter Fraud: The Plot to Undermine American Democracy.”

True the Vote’s plan is to scrutinize the validity of voter registration rolls and voters who appear at the polls. Among those in their cross hairs: noncitizens who are registered to vote, those without proper identification, others who may be registered twice, and dead people. In Ohio and Indiana, True the Vote recently filed lawsuits to force officials to clean up voter rolls.

Efforts to tighten voter requirements have become a major issue in the presidential election. Over the last few years, many states have passed voter identification laws, and many of those are being challenged in court.

Now, a network of conservative groups is waging an aggressive campaign on the ground. In a report this month, the liberal-leaning organizations Common Cause and Demos cited True the Vote as the central player in this effort, which it called a threat to the fundamental right to vote.

“It is not about party or politics; it is about principle,” Ms. Engelbrecht said [ http://video1.nytimes.com/video/2012/09/16/18222_1_voter-id-tea-party_wg_16x9_xl_bb_mm.mp4#media/vid3 ].

While she portrays True the Vote as nonpartisan, it grew out of a Tea Party group, King Street Patriots, that she founded in Texas. An examination shows that it has worked closely with a variety of well-financed organizations, many unabashed in their desire to defeat President Obama.

A polished and provocative video, circulating among Tea Party activists, seeks to raise a “cavalry” to march on swing states and identifies True the Vote as a participant in the effort, called Code Red USA.

In the past year, Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, and other Republican-leaning independent groups have sponsored meetings featuring Ms. Engelbrecht and other True the Vote speakers. A spokesman for Americans for Prosperity said that the group had hosted events including True the Vote speakers but that election integrity was not a focus of his group.

Election integrity has become a focus for other activists, including James E. O’Keefe III, a video producer known for his undercover stings of the now defunct community organizing group Acorn. He recently aimed his camera on North Carolina voters in what turned out to be a botched attempt to show that foreigners had registered.

Voter registration has occupied a contentious corner of American history for decades. The perception that voting is ripe for fraud stems in part from the condition of voter rolls in many jurisdictions. The Pew Center on the States issued a report in February finding that more than 1.8 million dead people remained on voter rolls and that about 2.8 million people were registered in more than one state. Another 12 million registrations contained flawed addresses, it said.

Even so, there have been few cases of widespread fraud, according to the Justice Department. A bipartisan commission in 2005 found little evidence of extensive fraud, even while recommending the use of voter identification.

While there have been some recent criminal cases involving local elections, the Justice Department said in a statement that the record has not shown that significant “voter impersonation fraud — the type of fraud that many states claim their voter ID laws are aimed to prevent — actually exists.”

But Ms. Engelbrecht said, “Anyone who tells you that election integrity efforts are a solution looking for a problem is way misinformed.”

True the Vote is now using proprietary software to accelerate the process of challenging voter registrations. It says its databases will ultimately contain all voter rolls in the country. Using computers, volunteers can check those rolls against driver’s license records, property records and other databases, turning the process into an assembly line production.

But when True the Vote vetted petition signatures in Wisconsin’s recall election, the state’s Government Accountability Board reported that the process was “at best flawed.” The group raised questions about thousands of signatures that the board deemed valid.

Roots of a Cause

Ms. Engelbrecht, who at 42 is younger than most of the Tea Party members she addresses around the country, said that until four years ago she was apolitical, a churchgoing mother of two who ran a successful oil field machinery business with her husband in Fort Bend County, Tex.

“Then in 2008, I don’t know, something clicked,” she said. “I saw our country headed in a direction that, for whatever reason — it didn’t hit me until 2008 — this really threatens the future of our children.”

The epiphany prompted Ms. Engelbrecht to work as a poll watcher in the 2009 local elections along with others in the King Street Patriots, the Tea Party group she founded. It was supposed to be a one-day assignment, but it crystallized the concerns of Ms. Engelbrecht and her fellow volunteers, who said they saw shenanigans including outright fraud. The group felt duty bound to continue its activities.

In Houston, the group targeted the Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat who is black. Ms. Engelbrecht said the group settled on Ms. Lee’s district because thousands of addresses there housed six or more registered voters, which it took as an indication of inaccurate registrations. The methodology, which the group still uses, could disproportionately affect lower income families.

Volunteers spent five months analyzing 3,800 registrations in Ms. Lee’s district, discovering more than 500 voters that the group said were problematic. More than 200 voters were registered at vacant lots, prompting Ms. Engelbrecht to later remark that those voters had a “Lord of the Rings Middle Earth sort of thing going on.”

The reality was far less interesting.

“They had one particular case I remember very well,” said Douglas Ray, the Harris County assistant attorney who represents the election registrar. “They had identified an address where eight or 10 people were registered to vote. There was no building there.” Mr. Ray found out that the building had been torn down and that the people simply moved.

As a result of the organization’s work in 2010, 400 to 500 voters were put on “suspense,” forcing them to provide additional information verifying their addresses. By the fall 2010 election, volunteers again appeared to focus on minority neighborhoods, this time as election observers, Mr. Ray said.

“The first day of early voting, at many of the 37 locations, primarily in minority neighborhoods, dozens of poll watchers showed up sent by King Street Patriots,” Mr. Ray said.

The influx of white election observers in black neighborhoods caused friction with voters and poll workers, bringing back memories of a time when racial intimidation at the polls was commonplace in the South, said Gerald M. Birnberg, a lawyer and former chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party. True the Vote has strongly denied that it has engaged in voter suppression.

“Whether that was the intention or just born of some innate paranoia is largely irrelevant,” Mr. Birnberg said. “That’s how it was perceived by people at the polls.”

Working in Wisconsin

The boiling political caldron of Wisconsin was the next stop for True the Vote. It teamed up with two Tea Party organizations to review nearly one million signatures on petitions demanding the recall of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. The partnership called itself Verify the Recall.

“We have been hearing reports of duplicate signatures, questionable practices and downright fraud in the gubernatorial recall effort,” Verify the Recall said in a pitch to volunteers. “The integrity of Wisconsin’s elections and associated processes are at stake; free and honest elections — the cornerstone of our political process — are being threatened.”

True the Vote began working in Wisconsin in 2011, the same year it received a $35,000 grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and is a major backer of conservative causes, including Americans for Prosperity. The foundation’s president and chief executive, Michael Grebe, was Mr. Walker’s campaign chairman for his 2010 campaign and for the recall election, which he won.

Mr. Grebe said in an interview that the grant was for activities unrelated to the recall. He said the donation was ultimately returned because it was given on the premise that True the Vote would be granted tax-exempt status by the I.R.S., which Ms. Engelbrecht said has not happened despite several attempts.

Ms. Engelbrecht has said her goal was not to stop the recall election, which had been backed by labor unions, but to prove to those behind it “that unions cannot strong-arm America.” She said thousands of volunteers helped enter petition signatures into a database, which was then analyzed by the group’s software. Of the one million signatures, True the Vote said 63,038 were ineligible, 212,628 required further investigation and 584,489 were valid.

The accountability board concluded that about 900,000 signatures were valid and, in a memorandum reviewing True the Vote’s work, criticized its methods.

For example: Mary Lee Smith signed her name Mary L. Smith and was deemed ineligible by the group.

Signatures deemed “out of state” included 13 from Milwaukee and three from Madison.

The group’s software would not recognize abbreviations, so Wisconsin addresses like Stevens Point were flagged if “Pt.” was used on the petition.

Signatures were struck for lack of a ZIP code.

While the board commended the group for encouraging “a strong level of civic engagement,” it found that True the Vote’s results “were significantly less accurate, complete and reliable than the review and analysis completed by the G.A.B.”

On Election Day, poll watchers appeared to have slowed voting to a crawl at Lawrence University in Appleton, where some students were attempting to register and vote on the same day.

Charlene Peterson, the city clerk in Appleton, said three election observers, including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that she gave them two warnings.

“They were making challenges of certain kinds and just kind of in physical contact with some of the poll workers, leaning over them, checking and looking,” said John Lepinski, a poll watcher and former Democratic Party chairman for Outagamie County.

He said that as a result of the scrutiny, the line to register moved slowly. Finally, he said, some students gave up and left.

Ms. Engelbrecht said the True the Vote observer at Lawrence University believed that students were being permitted to register and vote without proper identification.

In Racine, conservative poll watchers also alleged fraud, including a claim that a busload of union members from Michigan had come to Wisconsin to vote illegally. The Racine County Sheriff’s Department determined that the accusation had been based on an anonymous call to a radio station.

“There is no evidence this bus convoy existed or ever arrived in Racine County,” the Sheriff’s Office said.

As for the buses her organization saw in Wisconsin, Ms. Engelbrecht could not provide details. “It was reported to us that this had occurred,” she said. “I know these sightings were also being reported on the radio.”

The Code Red Cavalry

Driving down the Interstate in Florida, you may see an R.V. wrapped with a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

These eye-catching vehicles are mobile command centers for registering and energizing voters. They are part of a citizen effort to “defeat Obama, hold the House and win the Senate in November,” Fred Solomon, a retired Alabama businessman, said in an e-mail to fellow Tea Party supporters.

Mr. Solomon is a coordinator for Code Red USA, the plan to flood swing states with conservative volunteers. “Partnering with True the Vote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group, we will train and put election observers in polling places in the swing states to reduce voter fraud,” Mr. Solomon said in his e-mail.

Code Red USA is financed by the Madison Project, a political action committee whose chairman is former Representative Jim Ryun, a Kansas Republican who was regarded as among the most conservative members of Congress. The provocative video promoting Code Red [ http://video1.nytimes.com/video/2012/09/16/18221_1_voter-id-code-red_wg_16x9_xl_bb_mm.mp4#media/vid2 ] accuses Democrats of “a clear intent to commit massive voter fraud.”

Despite Mr. Solomon’s e-mail and the video, which identifies True the Vote as a participant, Ms. Engelbrecht said her group has no role in the effort.

Nevertheless, Mr. Solomon and many other conservative activists have followed Ms. Engelbrecht’s lead.

Mr. Solomon said he was a volunteer poll watcher in Wisconsin and is concerned that voter fraud is rampant around the country. “We just don’t understand why dead people are voting,” he said.

Finding that someone voted in the name of a dead person is the holy grail of the voter integrity movement, said Jay DeLancy, a retired Air Force officer in North Carolina who embraced the cause after attending a True the Vote meeting last year. Mr. DeLancy, who runs the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, said the group recently submitted the names of 30,000 people who he said were dead yet remained on voter rolls in the state.

Earlier this year, he challenged more than 500 registered voters who he said were not American citizens. After reviewing the challenges, election officials refuted most of them, but confirmed that three were noncitizens who had registered improperly. One had voted.

Mr. DeLancy said he was convinced that the elections agency overlooked many noncitizen voters.

“They want me to look stupid and to look like I’m wasting taxpayer money,” Mr. DeLancy said.

He said he split from True the Vote partly because the group raised concerns about focusing on immigrants. “They’re not wanting to be branded some kind of anti-immigrant activist group,” Mr. DeLancy said.

Mr. DeLancy said he made challenges after comparing voting rolls with citizenship information in jury duty records.

The strategy was used by Mr. O’Keefe, who is known for undercover video stings. Shortly after the North Carolina primary in May, Mr. O’Keefe posted a video aimed at proving noncitizens were registered to vote [ http://video1.nytimes.com/video/2012/09/16/18220_1_voter-id-veritas_wg_16x9_xl_bb_mm.mp4#media/vid1 ].

A narrator says: “William Romero is registered to vote in North Carolina. Here is a copy of his voter registration form, where it says he was born in Colombia, South America. He is not, however, a United States citizen.”

The video cuts to a young man, dressed in green lederhosen, walking into Mr. Romero’s polling place and giving Mr. Romero’s name and address. When he is asked to sign his name certifying that he is William Romero, the man, whose right hand was bandaged, says he is unable to sign and leaves.

The video later shows what appears to be the same man in green lederhosen impersonating a registered voter named Zbigniew Gorzkowski.

Not only were Mr. Romero and Mr. Gorzkowski citizens, but the State Board of Elections concluded that Mr. O’Keefe’s operatives may have broken several laws, and turned over evidence to prosecutors. “Further, the videos made false or unfounded allegations that only hurt the elections process,” North Carolina election officials said in a report.

Mr. O’Keefe, who did not respond to requests for an interview, is on probation for unlawfully entering a federal building in New Orleans in an aborted sting targeting Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.

Mr. Romero could not be reached for comment. Mr. Gorzkowski, a naturalized United States citizen who operates a deli in North Carolina, said the video was extremely embarrassing, especially after a Polish newspaper ran an article suggesting that he was at the center of a voting scandal in the United States.

‘Never Had Any Problem’

Late last month, Ms. Engelbrecht was in Columbus, Ohio, for a True the Vote workshop. About 90 people signed up for the event at a suburban Holiday Inn, where they listened to speeches and discussed how to challenge questionable voters, including 51,000 “nonexistent” people in just one county that True the Vote’s Ohio volunteers say are registered to vote.

During the meeting, Anita MonCrief, True the Vote’s senior adviser, unleashed her vitriol at what she said was a coalition of voter registration groups, accusing them of “doing voter fraud since at least the early ’90s,” she said.

“And these groups target minority areas. Why? Because it’s so much easier to go work in those areas where they say people have been forgotten or they don’t have a voice. Then, when anybody pays a little bit of attention to the fact that there’s a high level of fraud coming out of the African-American communities, they say: ‘Oh, you’re a racist. You don’t want black people to vote,’ ” said Ms. MonCrief, who is black. “Vote fraud deniers is what I call them.”

After the event, the volunteers, known as the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, submitted challenges of 380 registered voters in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati. One of the voters, Teresa Sharp, received a notice from her local Board of Elections stating that her family’s right to vote had been challenged and ordering her to attend a hearing on Sept. 10.

“I’ve always voted,” said Ms. Sharp, who had even been a poll worker. “Never had any problem.”

At the hearing, she said she asked, “Why are you all harassing me?” She said she believed it was because “either they don’t want Obama in there or the fact that I’m black.”

Amy Searcy, the director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said there was no discernible racial pattern in the challenges. Of the 380 challenges, about 35 voters will have to prove that their addresses are current if they appear at the polls. A vast majority of the objections were thrown out.

In the case of Ms. Sharp, a representative of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project withdrew the challenge and apologized to the family.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]


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(linked in):

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