George Soros Eyes Secretaries of States To Possibly Tilt Elections in 2010 and 2012.

 

Matthew Vadum writes and article that ALL Americans should pay attention to!

Soros Eyes Secretaries

December 4, 2009

History’s most notorious Georgian-turned-Russian, the politically astute Joseph Stalin once remarked, “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

The lesson has not been lost on the increasingly notorious Hungarian-cum-American George Soros.

A group backed by Soros is gearing up to steal the 2012 election for President Obama and congressional Democrats by installing left-wing Democrats as secretaries of state across the nation. From such posts, secretaries of state can help tilt the electoral playing field.

This is, of course, the same Soros, the same hyperpolitical left-wing philanthropist who makes no secret of his intention to destroy capitalism. In an interview with Der Spiegel last year, Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.”

The vehicle for this planned hijacking of democracy is a below-the-radar non-federal “527” group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn’t have to disclose them publicly until well after the election.

It was revealed during a panel discussion at the Democratic Party’s convention last year that the Democracy Alliance, a financial clearinghouse created by Soros and Progressive insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, approved the Secretary of State Project as a grantee. The Democracy Alliance aspires to create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups — a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement. It has brokered more than $100 million in grants to liberal nonprofits, including ACORN.

The latest fundraising appeal from the SoS Project warns:

In the 2000 and 2004 elections, we saw the results of extreme Republican tactics to intimidate voters and steal the presidential election — the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush. Today, we watch as Republicans go to even greater extremes — even carrying guns to town hall meetings. If they are willing to go to such extremes now, how far will they go on November 6, 2012 to steal the election from President Barack Obama? [emphasis added]

At the top of the SoS Project’s slate of candidates for state-level secretary of state positions in 2010 is Minnesota’s radically left-wing Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer whose cavalier attitude toward electoral fraud and whose shamelessly partisan conduct during the recount process cleared the way for Al Franken to steal last year’s U.S. Senate election from then-Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). Ritchie was first elected Minnesota secretary of state in 2006. Franken and Obama, by the way, were endorsed last year by ACORN Votes, ACORN’s federal political action committee.

In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN PAC endorsed Ritchie, a longtime ACORN ally, and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie’s campaign included liberal philanthropists Soros, Drummond Pike, and Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone that breeds Marxist agitators. One article on Ritchie’s 2006 campaign website brags about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that state’s minimum wage.

The 2010 slate also includes California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, whom the group describes as “one of the most progressive Secretaries of State in the nation.” Bowen was endorsed in her previous run by California ACORN PAC.

SoS Project is also endorsing Jocelyn Benson, candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, whom it lauds as an “[e]lection law scholar and community organizer.”

Benson is a candidate ACORN would love. The bio SoS Project provides credits Benson with running a 2004 “voter protection campaign in 21 states, deploying 17,000 trained election law lawyers.” Last year in Michigan, she helped to lead the fight to stop the Republican secretary of state “from disenfranchising voters who were victims of home foreclosures.”

Assuming the desperately mismanaged Michigan continues to exist through Election Day next year, count on the desperately evil ACORN endorsing Benson.

To the Secretary of State Project, Republican secretaries of state are always Snidely Whiplashes trying to undermine progressive Dudley Do-Rights. SoS claims to advance “election protection” but only backs Democrats, religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).

Harris in particular is presented as the poster child for GOP election-stealing and vote suppression as the left tries to keep alive its fantasy that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida with the creative collaboration of Bull Connor, the Ku Klux Klan, Diebold, Blackwater, and the CIA.

The secretary of state candidates the group endorses all sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues that we routinely hear from ACORN: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating fascist.

The group was co-founded in July 2006 by James Rucker, formerly director of grassroots mobilization for MoveOn.org Political Action and Moveon.org Civic Action. Rucker is also a co-founder of Color of Change, a race-baiting left-wing hate group.

Its website claims, “A modest political investment in electing clean candidates to critical Secretary of State offices is an efficient way to protect the election.” Indeed. Political observers know that a relatively small amount of money can help swing a little-watched race for a state office few people understand or care about.

Continue reading HERE.

ADD THIS from Discover the networks:

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupprofile.asp?grpid=7487

[Excerpted]

To establish “election protection” against similar disappointments in subsequent political races, SoSP in 2006 targeted its funding efforts on the Secretary of State races in seven swing states — Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan. Democrats emerged victorious in five of those seven elections — all except Colorado and Michigan. As USA Today reported at the time: “The political battle for control of the federal government has opened up a new front: the obscure but vital state offices that determine who votes and how those votes are counted.”

In a 2008, pre-Election Day article assessing SoSP’s overall strategy, Politico.com reported:

“In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states. The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states … With a Democrat now in charge of the[se] offices, which oversee and administer their state’s elections, the party is better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests —such as increasing voter registration and boosting turnout — rather than Republican priorities such as stamping out voter fraud. Perhaps more important, in those five states Democrats are now in a more advantageous position when it comes to the interpretation and administration of election law — a development that could benefit Barack Obama if any of those states are closely contested on Election Day.”

In addition to the aforementioned Michael Kieschnick, SoSP was co-founded by James Rucker (a former director of MoveOn.org Political Action and Moveon.org Civic Action) and Becky Bond (a young woman who today is affiliated with Working Assets, US PIRG, and the New Organizing Institute). Said Bond: “Any serious commitment to wrestling control of the country from the Republican Party must include removing their political operatives from deciding who can vote and whose votes will count.”

According to political analyst Matthew Vadum, SOSP’s founders and foot soldiers

“religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 … and in Ohio in 2004…. The secretary of state candidates [whom] the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist.”

SoSP raised a total of $500,000 for the 2006 Secretary of State candidates whom it supported. Because few Americans realize the importance of the Secretary of State’s duties, races for that office tend to draw fewer (and smaller) donations than do the more prominent races. Consequently, even a modest injection of cash from a small handful of generous donors can make an enormous difference in the comparative financial resources of rival campaigns, and thereby tip the scales decidedly in favor of the better-funded candidate.

When Jennifer Brunner defeated incumbent Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio in 2006, twelve of the eighteen individuals who contributed the maximum $10,000 to Brunner’s campaign resided in states other than Ohio. (One of those donors, incidentally, was Teresa Heinz Kerry.) Said Brunner, “I received significant support from the SoS Project, which helped me toward the election.”

Brunner went on to make her influence felt in the 2008 election cycle, when she ruled that Ohio residents should be permitted, during the designated early-voting period extending from late September to early October, to register and vote on the very same day. Citing the potential for voter fraud under such an arrangement, Republicans objected. But on September 29 of that year — the day before early voting was scheduled to commence — the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Brunner’s decision.

In a separate matter, Brunner sought to effectively invalidate a million absentee-ballot applications that Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign had issued. Each of those applications had been inadvertently printed with an extra, unnecessary checkbox, and Brunner maintained that if a registrant failed to check the box — even if he or she signed the form — the application could be rejected. On October 2, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned Brunner’s directive on grounds that it served “no vital purpose or public interest.”

Brunner’s most noteworthy claim to fame took place in October 2008, when she refused to provide county election boards approximately 200,000 voter-registration forms in which the name did not match the driver’s license or Social Security number.

Another 2006 beneficiary of SoSP support was Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer with close ties to ACORN, who defeated a two-term incumbent Republican in the race for Minnesota Secretary of State. Ritchie acknowledged his debt to SoSP when he said, “I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grass-roots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top.” Other contributors to Ritchie’s campaign included George Soros, Drummond Pike, Deborah Rappaport (wife of venture capitalist Andrew Rappaport), and Heather Booth.

Like Jennifer Brunner, Ritchie went on to play a significant role in a key state election two years later. In 2008 the conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority exhorted Ritchie to conduct “a thorough review and verification of all voter-registration records,” citing some 261,000 duplicative registrations and 63,000 voters listing invalid or nonexistent addresses. But Ritchie dismissed these pleas as efforts “to create a cloud over an election so people don’t accept the outcome.”[ Brunner is now running for the US Senate for Ohio in 2010]

In 2008, SOSP supported Democratic Secretary of State candidates in Missouri, Montana, Oregon and West Virginia; all four Democrats won. Again SoSP realized a high return on a relatively small financial investment. As of September, the group had raised $280,000 for the campaigns it was targeting — not a large sum by any means, but enough to have a profound effect on the lightly funded Secretary of State races.

Among the more notable contributors to SoSP are Democracy Alliance members George Soros, Rob Stein, Gail Furman, and Susie Tompkins Buell.

ACT BLUE is Secretary of State Project.  LOOK at their endorsements for the Secretary of State races in 2010.

Defending the seats of progressive Secretaries of State:

Mark Ritchie, Secretary of State in Minnesota (hmm….Minnesota; the Al Fraken and Norm Coleman issue)

Debra Bowen, Secretary of State in California. Described by ACT BLUE: Debra Bowen is one of the most progressive Secretaries of State in the nation.

 

Open Seats:

Jocelyn Benson, candidate for Secretary of State in Michigan

Michael Mauro

IA-Sec State

 

Mary Herrera

NM-Sec State

 

Ross Miller

NV-Sec State

 

Marilyn Brown

OH-Sec State

 

Doug LaFollette

WI-Sec State

http://www.actblue.com/page/saveourelections

 

In 2010, the voters need to PAY ATTENTION to the Secretary of State elections in YOUR STATE.

The Secretary of State is the ONE that signs the verification of electoral votes or majority votes in YOUR STATE.

Protect your vote.