-Caveat Lector- http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html
Feeding frenzy over DSA plan to register voters (10/18) By Bryan Keefer The frenzy caused by a link on the Drudge Report to a fundraising appeal by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has escalated considerably. DSA posted the pitch as a pop-up ad on Wednesday, October 9, according to DSA national director Frank Llewellyn. As originally worded, it stated: DSA's national electoral project this year is the Minnesota Senate Election. Together with YDS, DSA's Youth Section, we are mobilizing to bring young people to Minnesota. Minnesota is one of the few states that allow same day voter registration. We will therefore focus our energy on registering young people. Wellstone will need a high percentage of young people to register and vote for him if he is to stave off the campaign that Bush, the Republicans and the Greens are waging against him. He is the Right's Number One electoral target. Because we are focusing on issue based voter registration this electoral work can be supported by tax- deductible contributions. The DSA FUND is soliciting tax-deductible contributions to support this project. Contributions are needed to underwrite the costs of transportation as well as providing a stipend for expenses; housing is being donated. The pitch as worded is somewhat confusing, but the sentence "We will therefore focus our energy on registering young people" implies that their object is to register young voters at the polls the day of the election, a perfectly legal get-out-the-vote measure. The phrase "issue based voter registration" also clearly establishes the purposes of the project. Read in context, the pitch is not advocating sending out-of-state students into Minnesota to vote for Wellstone, which would be illegal. On October 14, as reported by the Minnesota Star-Tribune, the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, a conservative advocacy organization, posted a press release attacking DSA's appeal as "one of the most transparent attempts to steal an election since the Daley machine ran Chicago politics." The release quoted from the DSA web site, saying that "The program is intended to 'bring young people to Minnesota' because 'Minnesota is one of the few states that allow same day voter registration.'" Yet the release omitted the sentence following the words it quoted, which provides crucial context: "We will therefore focus our energy on registering young people." The Taxpayer's League release then uses the out-of- context quotes to claim that "This is a transparent attempt to steal this election by using Minnesota's liberal election laws to register out-of-state students to vote for Wellstone." On October 15, DSA altered the text of the letter on their web page. According to Llewellyn, after discussing the letter with an official in the Minnesota Secretary of State's office, they changed the sentence "We will therefore focus our energy on registering young people" in the original to "We will therefore focus our energy on registering young Minnesotans" (which is how the release appeared when I quoted it in my previous post). On October 16, Matt Drudge provided a link to the DSA pitch near the top of his web site, the Drudge Report, with the headline "Socialists Sending People to MN to illegally vote for Wellstone" (for an archived copy of the page, click here). That same day, Rush Limbaugh read from an article printed Tuesday in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, then suggested [Windows Media Audio] on his radio show that: [DSA has] been caught. "We are mobilizing to bring young people to Minnesota" is what it says on the web site. It doesn't say "We are mobilizing to bring out the young people who live in Minnesota to vote" it doesn't say that . . . And then it says, "By the way, did you know Minnesota is one of the few states that allows same-day voter registration? You can go in there and register and vote and split the same day, you can go home, you don't even have to spend the night in Minnesota and freeze if you don't want to, you can go in there and vote and leave." Brit Hume repeated the accusation on Fox News that evening without any additional context, claiming that "The Democratic Socialists of America, which bill themselves as the largest socialist organization in the country, is raising tax-deductible money to send young people to the state of Minnesota, where they can take advantage of same-day registration to vote for the liberal incumbent Paul Wellstone . . .". And a Manchester Union- Leader editorial published on the17th claimed that "The Democratic Socialists of America, otherwise known simply as socialists, have organized a campaign to steal the U.S. Senate election in Minnesota." DSA pulled the ad off of their site on Wednesday, according to Llewellyn, because of abuse of the donation system and it had already generated enough donations. An editorial from the Wall Street Journal today repeated the allegations of attempted fraud, claiming that "The Democratic Socialists of America recently posted an ad on their Web site inviting tax-deductible contributions to 'bring young people to Minnesota' to vote in the close U.S. Senate race there." The piece does go on to raise legitimate questions about the legality of DSA's activities, quoting Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer expressing concerns about potential voter fraud, and calling the DSA ad "clearly advocacy". Minnesota Secretary of State's office spokesperson Kent Kaiser repeated his department's stance on the ad today, but noted that it is legal to encourage people to vote and even to take them to the polls, as long as it does not cross the boundary into advocacy. While it is legitimate to ask whether the DSA's advertisement constituted illegal advocacy, the ad was clearly intended to promote the registration of young voters likely to vote for Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, which is perfectly legal. Even the loose wording of the original statement does not excuse the false reports of planned voter fraud propagated by Drudge, Limbaugh, Hume and others. Related links: -Drudge falsely accuses socialists of illegal voting activity (Bryan Keefer, 10/16/02) http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2002_10_13_archive.html#85569950 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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