GOP Intimidation of Ron Paul Delegates

March 15, 2012

LCR Blog

By Ryan W. McMaken

“The Republican elite are afraid of Ron Paul. Why would they be intimidating his delegates if they weren’t so scared of his message?” –KTRN

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March 13, 2012
GOP Intimidation of Ron Paul Delegates
Posted by Ryan W. McMaken on March 13, 2012 12:28 AM

In some places, such as Maine and Minnesota, Ron Paul is likely to outperform the straw polls in terms of proportion of delegates won. As Lew Rockwell has noted, here and here, Ron Paul activists are sometimes able to take control of the local machines.

Sometimes, however, the opposite apparently happens. As The Washington Times reported on March 10th, Paul actually underperformed his vote tally in Wyoming with local caucuses over the weekend.

If you’ve ever been a Ron Paul delegate, you know that the GOP central committees will employ every trick in the book to avoid having to seat Ron Paul delegates. They will freely ignore their own bylaws, apply rules in such a manner as to only exclude Paul delegates, and will liberally employ intimidation tactics through verbal abuse, and even physical manhandling of delegates.

In the end, if everything else fails, they’ll attempt to get you to switch your vote by begging you to be a “team player” and by claiming that Romney is electable and that your dissent will keep Obama in power.

They did it in 2008, and some Ron Paul delegates switched their vote to the “electable” John McCain at the national convention, as I noted here.

I described my own delegate experience in 2008 here. Trust me, they’ll do everything they can to intimidate, harass, or just plain exclude you.

The video shows what is probably a fairly typical experience for many delegates:

Click here for the full report.

Maine Caucuses: Counties Ron Paul Won Were Ignored, Omitted From Final Count

February 16, 2012

Info Wars

By Steve Watson

“Here is even more proof of major vote fraud in Maine.  They don’t want Ron Paul to win – but he will.”  –KTRN

As we previously reported, much to the ire of the Ron Paul campaign, Washington County – where Ron Paul was incredibly strong – had its caucus delayed by a week due to a warning of snow that never materialized.

In addition, some other towns had scheduled their caucuses differently to the rest of the State and will vote in the days and weeks to come.

Despite these facts, and despite Mitt Romney’s lead being just 194 votes after 84 percent of the voting had taken place, GOP representatives in Maine and the mainstream media declared that Romney was the outright winner, much to the disbelief of many onlookers, especially Ron Paul supporters.

Now it has emerged that Romney’s “victory” in Maine is even more in doubt.

Local reporters in Maine have pounced on the revelations that the vote for most Waldo County towns was entered as “0”, as if no one had turned out to vote.

Rachel Maddow expanded on the reports in a feature on MSNBC yesterday, pointing out that when one town in Waldo attempted to call in its results, State officials said they already had results from the town showing Romney had won, when in reality that wasn’t the case and in fact Ron Paul had won.

In Waterville, Maine, Ron Paul also registered a victory, however, Waterville’s results were also recorded as a “0″ on the final State Tally.

In addition, having said originally that their delayed votes would be added to the State total, Washington County is now being told by State party officials that its result will no longer count at all. This is most likely in anticipation of the fact that Ron Paul supporters could ensure that a huge turnout in the county would hand the Congressman the victory, forcing the Maine Republican Party to backtrack and change the result, as officials were forced to do in Iowa last month.

Click here for the full report.

Vote Fraud Endemic In United States

January 26, 2012

Disinformation.Org

By Brad Friedman

“It makes you wonder if our votes even count.”  –KTRN

The voting systems in use for the nation’s first three all-important electoral contests in the 2012 primary — from Iowa to New Hampshire to Saturday’s South Carolina Primary — go from pretty great to intolerably horrible. And then comes Florida, which deserves its very own special category, thereafter.

The “First-in-the-Nation” caucuses in Iowa allowed voters to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, counted by hand in front of the public at the caucus site, with results announced to everyone right then and there before being called in to GOP headquarters and before ballots were move anywhere. The wonderfully transparent system allowed for Republican voters by the Iowa GOP (which they hypocritically fight against allowing for everybody else in other states, and even in their own during general elections) is just about as close as we general get in this country to Democracy’s Gold Standard. It’s also what allowed reporting errors to be discovered and confirmed by the public after an election with some 122,000 votes counted transparently within an hour or so of polls closing, leading to almost nobody charging “fraud” even though just 34 votes are said to separate first and second place in the certified results of the impossibly, and historically, close election.

As of the “First-in-the-Nation” primary in New Hampshire, however, election transparency for voters and their ability to oversee their own elections began to disappear. While a lucky 10% of voters enjoyed hand-marked, publicly hand-counted paper ballots, the rest of the state’s voters were allowed to vote on hand-marked paper ballots, but forced to tolerate secret tabulation on oft-failed, easily-manipulated Diebold optical-scan systems programmed by a company (LHS) with a history of criminal behavior and convictions. The results from those 90% of Granite State voters may have been tallied accurately by the Diebold op-scanners or, as seen in the disastrous 2008 Presidential Primary, not. Since NH doesn’t bother to actually check to see if their machines tallied the hand-marked paper ballots correctly, we’re unlikely to ever know if they did — barring a recount request where, by then, the secure chain of custody of the paper ballots would be uncertain (to put it mildly.)

Click here for the full report.