The BBC looks into voter suppression in Michigan

It, of course, isn’t something that our mainstream press would talk about here in the United States, but the BBC TV program Newsnight recently ran an investigative report by Greg Palast on the likelihood that our upcoming election is going to be stolen. The report includes the following quote from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“A lot of Europeans wonder: Why are Americans so crazy, they keep reelecting this guy?” Well the answer is, we don’t! They keep stealing these elections! And they stole it in 2000, they stole it in 2004, and they’re all set up to steal it again!” – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on BBC Television Newsnight.

In the report, first broadcast in Britain and later in the U.S., Palast travels from swing state to swing state, looking into claims of citizens being illegally purged from voter rolls, voter intimidation, voter suppression, and voter registration fraud. And, as you might expect, his tour brought him to Michigan, where he looks into the Michigan Messenger report that Republicans are planning to challenge voters in likely Democratic districts who had lost their homes though foreclosure. The Michigan Republican Party, in their defense, denies the claim that they will be challenging based on foreclosure lists, and they have filed a defamation lawsuit against the Michigan Messenger. Palast doesn’t seem to say one way or the other what he believes to be the case, but he does point out the curious fact that a mortgage firm handling many Michigan foreclosures, called Trott and Trott, happens to share an address with a GOP office. The principal of the company, it seems, is an influential Republican donor by the name of David Trott….

Here’s a clip from the BBC report:

[Part 2 can be seen here… The section involving Trott and Trott begins at the end of Part 1 and continues at the beginning of Part 2.]

Palast, you might be interested to know, while finding much to be suspicious of on the Republican side of the equation, did not find much of concern on the Democratic side. He did, of course, look into recent allegations concerning voter registration fraud being perpetrated by ACORN, but determined that while some Acorn employees may have falsified voter registrations (as they were compensated by the number of people they registered), it’s unlikely that any would translate into illegally cast votes. In the interest of evenhandedness, here are links to both the McCain campaign’s video on ACORN, and ACORN’s response.