The Bocker.com

Full disclosure, this story came from someone I know working on a Democratic Primary campaign team in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and is true as far as I know it.  He told me that during last week’s Early Vote period, in which people can both register and vote during the full week preceding May 6th’s primary, he and other campaign workers were sent out to various locales to pick up voters.  Nothing unusual about that.

After my friend returned to the poll from his round of pickups, he saw another campaign worked also had returned to polls with a van full of voters.  This worker though arrived back at the polls with roughly a dozen mentally-challenged people from a community for the mentally-impaired.

Some of the challenged lacked the ability to speak, yet campaign workers had these people registered and captured votes for their candidate.  One man from the community actually urinated in his pants during the voting/registration process.  Based on my friends observations, he felt that there was no way that these people could be making the decision to vote on their own, and were being lead to vote for my friend’s candidate. Once they were done voting, they worker drove the group back to their community and that was the end of it.

Basically, a campaign worker went to a community for the mentally retarded, hoarded a dozen people that could be taken advantage of into a van, and got them to vote for her candidate.

Now, if any of the mentally challenged had shown up to the polls under their own will, their vote should count the same as anyone else.  It sounded more like these people were quasi-kidnapped and led to vote for one candidate.

So even as Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton talk about changing things and moving away from old politics, their campaigns both seem rife with the same questionable ethics that have long marred elections.  I think this is why I can only care about politics so much; the policitian’s facade of morality and values seems to always mask corruption, unethical behavior and bullshit.