Reply #2: Could this new fearmongering be tied to WH vote suppression plans

[AirAmFan]

for November? What particular skills does Soaries bring to his job? Is he one of the NJ pastors Geraldo regular Ed Rollins bragged about having "paid off", in "Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms"?

I find it very frightening that apparently Soaries, Ridge, and Ashcroft are planning how to "protect" polling places on Election Day. How many people are inside a polling place at the same time? Wouldn't terrorists find 100x as many people concentrated in the same square footage in other places? I don't think it's terrorists we have to worry about interfering with voting in November. I think it's Republicans.

Having been Whitman's Secretary of State, Soaries must know how suppressing African-American votes succeeded in squeezing 911 Commission chair Tom Keane into Morven (the Governor's mansion) during the Reagan era. Maybe Rove is coaching him on how to take Keane's "Republican Ballot Security Task Force" concept nationwide, at tazpayer expense.

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From http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/23/mcdonald-1.html

'Americans might like to think that discrimination against minority voters ended with the civil-rights movement, but it's been going on in many parts of the country ever since. And BALLOT-SECURITY programs have been the usual vehicle. A notorious "anti-fraud" initiative was implemented before the 1981 gubernatorial election in New Jersey. The Republican National Committee formed a National Ballot Security Force.... On election day, the security force dispatched armed off-duty police officers wearing official-looking armbands to heavily black (and Democratic) precincts in Newark, Camden and Trenton. The Republicans also posted signs warning that the polls were being patrolled by security-force members and offering a $1,000 reward for anyone giving information leading to the arrest and conviction of election-law violators....

The Democratic National Committee filed suit against the New Jersey and national Republican parties, and it was eventually settled. The defendants agreed not to post security forces at polling places or allow any other election tactics that targeted minorities or deterred them from voting. Despite the agreement in the New Jersey case, the Republicans resorted to similar maneuvers in Louisiana in the 1986 U.S. senatorial campaign involving Democrat John Breaux and Republican Henson Moore. ... Republicans ... launched still another ballot-security program in North Carolina in 1990, during the heated U.S. Senate contest between Republican Jesse Helms and Democrat Harvey Gantt.... After the election -- which Helms won -- the Justice Department sued the North Carolina Republican Party and the Helms for Senate Committee. The defendants, without admitting any wrongdoing, entered into a consent decree in which they agreed not to undertake similar ballot-security programs in the future
without court approval. Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc.'