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This Friday, netroots favorite Sen. Russ Feingold sent a letter to our state’s Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen asking him to reconsider his plan to send prosecutors and special agents from the Division of Criminal Investigation to polling places around the state on Election Day.
Feingold also asks for Van Hollen to "provide detailed information about how Department of Justice employees will be deployed, including the locations to which they will be deployed, how those locations were chosen, and a detailed description or copies of the instructions these employees will be given."
As I described in a previous post here, there are a variety of new tools available to help us combat this blatant voter intimidation effort. I am organizing an effort through the Voter Suppression wiki to pressure Van Hollen to release this information beforehand so we can make sure to document what is occurring at these polling locations. I would also like to shine a spotlight on Feingold’s request to "ensure that criminal law enforcement personnel are not deployed at polling stations" as Van Hollen himself said they would not only on Sept. 23.
Now, what better way to expose this blatant corrupt and bigoted effort than by utilizing the "spotlight" function available at the bottom of every FDL post? "The Spotlight Project enables the progressive blogging community (bloggers, commenters, and lurkers) to quickly and easily forward blog posts, along with their own comments, to nearly anyone in the media."
This effort is by definition what their purpose is for, and if we get enough help from the progressive blogosphere to provide pressure on WI newspapers (especially our largest paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) we can help Feingold get the answers he needs.
It is imperative for the Wisconsin voter suppression prevention efforts to know where these "prosecutors and special agents" will be stationed as well as preventing "criminal law enforcement personnel" from being deployed to these presumably minority polling locations as well. As Feingold says, "it is widely acknowledged that the presence of criminal law enforcement personnel at polling stations may discourage and intimidate legitimate voters"
With that in mind, please, help us help Russ Feingold’s effort to prevent voter suppression! Spotlight this story so we can best prepare to show up at these polling locations with cameras and voting rights information. There will be a multitude of new minority voters inspired to vote this year, and what a tragic way for them to join the electoral process first by being intimidated by armed representatives of the state?
6 Comments
I love russ, he gets it, I am hoping there is a quite high cabinet position for this fine lawmaker
I am thinking attorney general might be perfect
Well, as a Wisconsinite I will say we certainly could use him here, but it would be great to have him as AG for the country. He justified not running for president by saying there was too much need for him to be in the Senate though, and I have also heard that he is hoping to take over the Senate Judiciary Chairmanship after Pat Leahy when the time comes.
It would definitely send a message to appoint him AG…but I don’t think we should afford to get our hopes up in that department. Especially considering the great things we can support Feingold on that he is doing already!
Keep Feingold where he is…put Whitehouse in Justice. He’d clean that place up and with true feeling as a former US Attorney who has seen DoJ turned into a theocratic shithouse.
Yeah, he’s great. Under Leahy’s tutelage he’ll just get better and better.
Great post, Harry, thank you.
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OT, when the neocon Milwaukee County Executive, Scott Walker, lost about $50 million from the County pension, the wingnut J.B. Van Hollen found no evidence of criminal wrong doing.