Barack Obama’s presidential campaign accused rival John McCain of using a false crusade against voter fraud to suppress legitimate votes in a growing spat over ballots ahead of the Nov. 4 poll.
The Obama campaign’s top lawyer, Bob Bauer, accused Republicans on Friday of recklessly “plotting” to suppress legitimate votes and to “sow confusion and harass voters and complicate the process for millions of Americans.”
An estimated 9 million new voters have registered for the hotly contested presidential election, and the Obama campaign says Democratic registrations are outpacing Republican ones by four to one.
The McCain campaign contends that an untold number of those registration forms are false and warned that illegally cast ballots could alter the results of the election and undermine the public’s faith in democracy.
Republicans have launched a slew of lawsuits aimed at preventing false ballots from being cast, the most high-profile an attempt to challenge as many as 200,000 of the more than 600,000 new registrations submitted in the battleground state of Ohio.
That challenge was blocked by a Supreme Court ruling on Friday.
Republicans point to investigations into whether liberal-leaning community organization ACORN had submitted false voter registrations as proof of “rampant” and widespread fraud which McCain said on Wednesday could be “destroying the fabric of democracy.”
But Bauer told reporters the fact that senior officials from the Justice Department leaked news of an FBI investigation into ACORN a day after McCain lobbed that attack shows that “an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics” may have returned.
He said the matter should be turned over to a special prosecutor currently investigating allegations that US attorneys were fired by the Bush administration for failing to bring indictments of voter fraud and public corruption in the leadup to the 2006 election.
The McCain campaign dismissed Bauer’s accusations as an “absurd” attempt to “criminalize political discourse.”
“In case Senator Obama’s lawyer did not notice, we are in the midst of a political campaign, not a coronation, and the alleged criminal activity he calls ‘recent partisan Republican activities’ are what the rest of us call campaign speeches and debates,” spokesman Ben Porritt said in a statement.
Gallup’s latest national tracking poll of registered voters had Obama at 50 percent to 43 percent for McCain. Polls of battleground states by CNN and Time on Wednesday showed Obama up five points among registered voters in Colorado, by eight in Florida, by three in Missouri and by a yawning 10 points in Virginia.
Obama was set to address a rally in St. Louis, Missouri, yesterday afternoon after spending the night at home in Chicago.
McCain had events scheduled in North Carolina and Virginia yesterday, while his running mate, Sarah Palin, was set to fly to New York to appear on the comedy show Saturday Night Live, which has seen its popularity spike with a series of sketches mimicking the Alaska governor.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
Myanmar yesterday published a parliamentary bill proposing the death sentence for those who detain or violently coerce people into working in online scam centers. Internet fraud factories have flourished in Myanmar, part of Southeast Asia’s scam economy, targeting Internet users worldwide with romance and cryptocurrency investment cons. The multibillion-dollar black market attracts many willing employees, but repatriated foreigners have also reported being trafficked to sites in Myanmar and tortured by scam center operators. The draft legislation would allow capital punishment for “violence, torture, unlawful arrest and detention, or cruel treatment against another person for the purpose of forcing them to commit online scams.” The
RSS