Muslims get out the vote, cheatin' style

Muslim get-out-the-vote unit "pushes deadline".

What the headline should have read was "another leftist group tries to get away with cheating," but this was the Palm Beach Post - the daily rag to the stupidest block of voters in the southeast.

Theresa LePore vowed to close the Palm Beach County elections office at 5 p.m. Monday, the final day to register to vote in the Nov. 2 election, but a young man who arrived about 15 minutes after the deadline managed to drop off 550 applications on behalf of a group of Muslims determined to oust President Bush.

It really doesn't matter if he showed up 1 minute after the office closed, or two weeks after the office closed. He was too late - even if all the registrations he had were actually valid (which is probably a stretch).

LePore said he showed up, carrying a box of applications, about 15 minutes after she locked the door to her office at 5 p.m. She said she told him her office was closed but he could mail the forms as long as they were postmarked by midnight that night.

But, she said, he wasn't satisfied and managed to slip inside the lobby when someone left.

"He started hollering about disenfranchising people," said LePore, who took the box after he thrust it at her.

"Then he started saying, 'You're all alike,' or something to that effect, and 'It's better in New York,' " she said. "And I said, 'Why don't you go back to New York?'"

What he meant, I'm sure, was that "if you're a leftist special-interest group, they let you cheat in New York, because it accomplishes their goals."

Florida is one of five battleground states Muslims have targeted for get-out-the-vote efforts, foundation Executive Director Mahdi Bray said Thursday. VIP recruiters in Florida registered about 7,000 new Muslim voters he hopes will go to the polls on Election Day and vote for Kerry, he said.

Florida has about 120,000 Arab American voters, of whom about 15 percent are Muslim, according to pollster James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. The other states VIP has targeted are Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, which has 235,000 Arab American voters, the largest in the country.

Which is exactly why I don't trust Zogby's polling.

"This administration's policy of preemptive war has destabilized the region," Bray said Thursday. "Many of us who know the region know that this can of worms this administration has opened, this mistaken policy, will haunt the Muslim world for years to come."

Although critical of Bush's decision to invade Iraq, Bray said that, like his peers he is pleased that Saddam Hussein was arrested.

"He's a dictator. He's a thug," he said. "But what we've done to deal with this thug and this dictator is unconscionable."

What we've done to deal with this thug is "unconscionable"? No, what is unconscionable is that there are Hussein apologists out there like Bray who need to to have the teeth slapped out of their mouths for making such idiotic comments.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood and Gov. Jeb Bush had criticized the 527 advocacy groups' voter registration efforts even before recent reports about irregularities with the applications surfaced throughout the state.

Law enforcement officials are investigating complaints, including unauthorized party affiliation changes, bogus voter registrations and forged absentee ballot requests, in St. Petersburg, Tallahassee and Miami-Dade County. A state department spokeswoman confirmed the U.S. Department of Justice is investigation allegations of voter fraud in Florida.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, pushing the minimum-wage ballot initiative, is under investigation in Miami-Dade County, for possible violations including registering former felons to vote. ACORN workers are cooperating in that investigation, which the group blames on a "disgruntled ex-employee," and another in St. Petersburg, in which the group is accused of changing the former mayor's party affiliation without his knowledge, said spokesman Brian Kettenring.

The dim-o-crats have been working hard this fall, trying to cheat and intimidate their way to victory. Let's hope, for all of our sakes, that it doesn't work.