By Brad Friedman on 6/26/2008, 9:05am PT  

Blogged by Brad from somewhere near Portland...

Here's a chuckler. From Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic...

John McCain's election strategists plan to tone down the Republicans' traditionally aggressive and public campaign against potential voter fraud, several Republicans familiar with the situation say.

The strategists and consultants all would speak only on the condition that their names and affiliations not be used because they were not permitted to divulge the information, they did not want to disclose internal deliberations, and because the issue is still being discussed within the party.

Sources with direct knowledge of the coordinated Republican effort this year say that high-ranking Republicans, including some within McCain's campaign, are convinced that GOP efforts in 2004 were damaging.

"Spreading 10,000 lawyers around the country and announcing a challenge to 40,000 new registrants in Ohio was counterproductive," a Republican familiar with the situation said.

And if you believe the GOP has any intention of scaling back any such thing in 2008, we've got a swell bridge, beautifully located near Manhattan, to sell ya.

But just to drive home the point that we're equal opportunity disbelievers, there's this old standby from the Obama camp, later in the article...

"We would, of course, welcome an end to traditional Republican vote suppression activity, but we will believe it when we see it," said Robert Bauer, the Obama campaign's general counsel. "We will have a strong, comprehensive program to promote and protect the vote and need really no more from the McCain campaign and their allies than actions fully consistent with true respect for the voter and the voting process."

So if, as Bauer claims, the Obama campaign intends to "have a strong, comprehensive program to promote and protect the vote," why didn't they bother to "protect the vote" by asking for a full hand-count of all ballots in New Hampshire after the anomalous Primary results were reported by Diebold's known-hackable voting machines? They could have done so for the bargain price of just $2,000 at the time, but chose not to.

We'd also ask why Obama's camp didn't bother to demand that some 12,000+ perfectly-countable ballots cast in the Democratic Primary on Super Tuesday in L.A. County actually be counted at all. Or don't those folks deserve to have their votes "protected"?

Of course, this item was originally supposed to about the Republicans' bullshit. Don't blame us if there's just too much bullshit to go around...

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Article Categories: Election Irregularities, Election 2008, Barack Obama, Voter Registration, John McCain, Vote Caging/Intimidation/Suppression, RNC, Republicans