News & Comment

Voters haven’t had a clue who is behind American Tradition Partnership — the Colorado-based group pushing to rewrite Montana’s campaign finance laws — and that’s just the way the secretive nonprofit wants it. A 2010 fundraising pitch to its donors promised that “no politician, no bureaucrat, and no radical environmentalist will ever know you helped,” and “the only thing we plan on reporting is our success to contributors like you.” For three election cycles, ATP has plastered the state with mailers attacking "radical environmental groups" and moderate Republicans. While ATP’s funders are still mostly a mystery, the Center for Public Integrity has identified what records indicate is the secretive organization’s founding donor — an anti-union owner of Colorado’s largest furniture chain — and discovered a long list of affiliations with national tea party groups funded by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers. read more »

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va. But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself. read more »

We've had a number of disturbing reports these last couple of weeks about employers instructing their workers to vote for Romney or risk losing their jobs. read more »

On Wednesday, October 10, eight lawyers from five different law firms in northern Virginia assembled in a DLA Piper conference room here for voter protection training from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law It was the first of fifteen training sessions before election day in this crucial battleground state. The Election Protection coalition plans to recruit 10,000 volunteers to assist at the polls during early voting and on election day in twenty states, particularly in high-turnout minority voting areas and historically disenfranchised communities. It will staff thirty-two call centers in English and Spanish through its 866-Our-Vote hotline. This election will be the coalition’s largest and most important effort yet, as the group tries to mitigate the chaos caused by voter suppression laws passed in more than a dozen states since the 2010 election. read more »

Democrats are frustrated: Why can’t Republican voters see that Republicans pass voter ID laws to suppress voting, not fraud? Democrats know who tends to lack ID.  They know that the threat of in-person voter fraud is wildly exaggerated.  Besides, Republican officials could hardly have been clearer about the real purpose behind these laws and courts keep striking them down as unconstitutional.  How can Republican voters go on believing that the latest wave of voter ID laws is about fraud and that it’s the opposition to the laws that’s being partisan? To help frustrated non-Republicans, I offer up my own experience as a case study.  I was a Republican for most of my life, and during those years I had no doubt that such laws were indeed truly about fraud.  Please join me on a tour of my old outlook on voter ID laws and what caused it to change. read more »

If anyone can testify to the problem of giving really rich people a chance to tilt the political playing field, it’s Sen. Sherrod Brown. A proud labor-populist, Brown seems to invite the hostility of wealthy conservatives and deep-pocketed interest groups. The amount they have spent to defeat him went somewhere over $20 million this week. Brown can live with that. His uncompromising advocacy on behalf of workers, toughness on trade, and progressive policies on a broad range of other issues have allowed Brown to build a formidable organization across Ohio, and a large cadre of small donors. I spoke with Brown a few days after President Obama’s unfortunate first debate, and the contrast between Brown’s approach and the president’s was striking—even though Brown, a loyal Obama supporter, did not bring it up himself. Letting down his guard just wouldn’t occur to Brown. read more »

The following 1 percent wonders are doing just fine under Obama, but since their worldview is largely restricted to an obsession with their marginal tax rate, they can’t refrain from denouncing the president and thinking of new ways to thwart his re-election bid. The Romney men desperately want to see the first financier president, a man after their own cold hearts. read more »

Well, it's over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it's not so much the result that matters – it's the quiet. What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. read more »

Do you remember that moment in the first Austin Powers movie when Dr. Evil, back in action after being cryogenically frozen for 30 years, gets his hands on a nuclear warhead? “If you want it back,” he snarls to a group of world leaders who have gathered in a secret United Nations bunker, “you will have to pay me” — here he pauses for dramatic effect — “one million dollars!” The assembled leaders burst into laughter because it was such a pathetically small sum. Campaign finance these days reminds me a lot of that scene. read more »

Republicans and their media backers have long criticized mass voter-registration drives, often pushed by progressive—if not necessarily partisan—groups. The 2008 ACORN voter registration non-scandal has been a cultural touchstone for the right. But what's alleged against GOP consultant Nathan Sproul and Srategic Allied Consulting is is far more serious. Sproul's companies have been accused of everything from refusing to register Democratic voters to shredding the voter-registration forms of Democrats. Yet Sproul continued to get lucrative contracts from the GOP. And the conservative media has had precious little to say about it. read more »