Obama Legacy: Obama Disenfranchised Voters in Illinois to win State Senate Seat

Few voters may be aware of Obama’s legacy of disenfranchising voters in Illinois in order to win his first election as Illinois State Senator. This comes on the heels of the New York Times attempt to “explain” away the newest revelations that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (Democrat) had hidden from the public that almost one third of the new voter registrations, or 200,000, have “discrepancies”.

The MSM is spinning the Brunner incident as an attempt by the Ohio Secretary of State to keep newly registered voters from being “disenfranchised”. The New York Times headline: Court Ruling May Impede Thousands of Ohio Voters. The opening salvo:

“More than 200,000 registered Ohio voters may be blocked from casting regular ballots on Election Day because of a federal appeals court decision on Tuesday requiring the disclosure of lists of voters whose names did not match those on government databases, state election officials and voting experts said.”
-New York Times

Here’s a quote from Brunner:

“Federal government red tape, misstated technical information or glitches in databases should not be the basis for voters having to cast provisional ballots,” said Ms. Brunner, adding that she plans to require that notifications are sent to all voters whose records have discrepancies.”

Here’s a quote from the Times defending Brunner’s decision to defend her efforts to punt through the system the questionable 200,000 registrations:

“Wendy Weiser, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school, said many voters were flagged erroneously because the databases used to check voter registrations were prone to errors. Most nonmatches are the result of typographical errors by government officials and computer errors, she said, not voter ineligibility.”

Ohio is a key battle ground state while ACORN has been in the news after it was revealed that ACORN employees had pressured two men into filling out several voter registration forms claiming they, the ACORN workers, had quotas to fill which effected their salaries. One witness was offered money and cigarettes for filling out multiple voter registration forms. The conservative think tank, the Buckeye Institute, has filed a federal lawsuit under the RICO ACT, alleging ACORN has a pattern of “racketeering” similar to the mob.

Brunner’s office had been sued by Republicans who claimed Brunner was not following federal election law by crosschecking the newly registered voters info against a government database. Brunner’s office fought the suit until Tuesday’s decision by the Court Appeal of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court in Cincinnati ruled that Brunner must put a plan into place by Friday in order to check the voter registration info against Social Security records or drivers’ license records.

It wasn’t until after Tuesday’s court decision that the public learned that Brunner had “hidden” the info that her office had discovered the 200,000 new voter registration forms that contained “errors”.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who disenfranchised voters after all?

While Brunner and the MSM are crying “foul” claiming the newly registered voters are getting the shaft and being “disenfranchised” by the court’s decision, Obama hasn’t revealed to voters the circumstances surrounding his “win” as state representative in Illinois in 1996. According to CNN, Obama, during his 1996 run for Illinois state, “effectively used the rules to eliminate his Democratic opposition”:

As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

“That was Chicago politics,” said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. “Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.”

That’s right, Obama sued his way onto the Illinois State Senate Democratic ticket. Obama ran unopposed in the primary only after he called into question the “signatures” of voters on the petition drives and his opposition were removed from the ballots. A far cry from making sure voters had their say as Obama wound up on the Democratic primary ticket by effectively disenfranchising the voters whose signatures he contested.

By LBG

Image – Obama TIME

Tags: 2008 Presidential Election, ACORN, Democrats, Illinois State Senate, Illinois State Senator, New York Times, NEWS, Obama, Ohio Secretary of State, voter disenfranchised, voter fraud, voter registration