States charge what they want for access to voter registration lists. That means only candidates with big money and the two major parties benefit, for the most part.
Some states will give more data to candidates than to outside groups. Delaware will provide phone numbers to candidates but not to nonprofit organizations doing nonpartisan voter mobilization.
In some states, the voter file is not even available to the general public. States such as South Carolina and Maryland permit access only to residents who are registered voters. States including Kentucky and North Dakota grant access only to campaigns, parties and other political organizations. ...WaPo
Maybe it's "unintentional" or something like that. Funny, though, how the states themselves seem to be as eager to spoil elections as the Supreme Court. Makes you wonder who is actually standing up for freedom and democracy. (Excuse us for using old-fashioned terminology like that...).
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It's not just the states. Presidents can play awfully dirty, too, as reelection moves closer. Check out the latest transcriptions of Nixon's tapes and his conversations with staffers, Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman.
By March, H. & E. are subtly lobbying Nixon to pin all wrongdoing on his former law partner and attorney general, John Mitchell, who had left government to manage the president’s re-election campaign. And Nixon, approving the betrayal, consoles himself with the knowledge that any perjury would be difficult to prove.
With federal prosecutors and a Senate committee on their heels, the triumvirate first thinks that John Dean, the White House counsel, can sanitize all the evidence against them. But by April it dawns on them that Dean himself is vulnerable to prosecution and is either shaving the truth or directly conspiring against them. As the country ultimately learned, Dean made good his private threats to take down H. & E. and the president to save himself.
Facing Dean’s defection, H. & E. threaten to hide in the boss’s embrace. How do you threaten a president? To wit:
H. to Nixon: The better off I come out of this, the better off you come out of it vis-à-vis me. . . . Anything I do to my interest is to your interest.
E. to Nixon: If matters are not handled adroitly . . . you could get a resolution of impeachment. . . . So I think we have to think about that.
Other nuggets of Watergate-speak:
H.: Can’t the truth stop at the truth? . . . or does the innuendo go so — come then so hard on top of it that you can’t turn it off? ...NYT
The boys stood on the burning deck...
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And then there's outright, well-planned, election fraud on the part of one party. Check out the infamous "voter vault."
