Bain Capital-Owned Clear Channel Helping GOP Voter Suppression Tactics

Signs like these popping up in Black & Latino Communities

For a party that spends as much time as it does trumpeting patriotic values and chiding the Obama administration for not doing enough to support Democracy in Syria and Libya, Republicans are employing a variety of reprehensible tactics to suppress voter participation.

With the cooperation of media giant Clear Channel (owned by Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital) an "anonymous family foundation" is posting billboards in primarily  black and Latino neighborhoods in Wisconsin and Ohio to intentionally intimidate and mislead voters who would tend to vote Democratic. What's next? Asking voters to recite Shakespeare from memory in order to vote like they used to do in the Reconstruction-era South? 

What's got civic-minded Republicans all riled up? Apparently nothing. As Natasha Kahn and Corbin Carson reported on the Minnesota Post Website back in August, a careful analysis shows that voter fraud is virtually non-existent in Minnesota, and despite millions of tax-payer dollars spent on questionable anti-voter fraud initiatives in Pennsylvania, no actual cases of voter fraud have been found.

But facts and data aren't stopping people like Colin Small, an employee of a company hired by the GOP called PinPoint. As reported by Stephanie Saul in the New York Times last Friday, Small a voter registration supervisor in Harrisonburg, Virginia was charged with 13 counts of destruction of voter registration applications. Specifically, Small was caught when he parked behind a building and dumped a trash bag containing an envelope with 13 completed voter registration forms into a dumpster.

According the to the Times article, a suspicious local retailer spotted Small and went to retrieve the bag and found the registration applications. Fortunately they were turned in and will be processed accordingly. Guess which party the trashed applications were for?

If that's not enough, last week it leaked out that Mitt Romeny is sinking even lower by sneaking around the country asking CEO's to instruct their employees to vote for Romney. People like Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software solutions, who sent an e-mail to all of his employees "requesting" that they contribute to the Romney campaign and vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket.

The most pathetic thing about all this is that even Romney knows he just can't sell his platform to mainstream Americans, or convince them he's the better candidate.