Voter Purges and Deja vu.... Election 2008 has the potential to turn into Florida all over again

From The Great Falls Tribune, Great Falls, Montana:

Army 1st Lt. Kevin Furey of Helena is furious.

That's because Furey, a former Democratic state representative from Missoula, found out Friday that his right to vote was challenged by the Montana Republican Party.
Furey got the news just days before he will ship off to Kuwait and then Iraq for his second tour of duty.
"It is ironic that at the same time I am about to return to Iraq to help build a democracy that my own right to vote is being challenged at home for partisan purposes. These challenges are a blatant and offensive attempt to suppress the rights of voters," Furey said in a telephone interview from Chicago, where he was on leave visiting his ailing grandmother.
Furey joins perhaps millions of Americans who may find themselves fighting for their right to vote in the Nov. 4 presidential election because of an increasing number of legal battles across the country regarding voting rights.
On Tuesday, the Montana Republican Party jumped into the fray when it challenged the eligibility of 6,000 registered voters in six counties that historically are Democratic strongholds.

Today, Lieutenant Furey released the following statement:

"It is ironic that at the same time I am about to return to Iraq to help build a democracy that my own right to vote is being challenged at home for partisan purposes. These challenges are a blatant and offensive attempt to suppress the rights of voters."

From TheMissoulian:

Republicans..... continue their efforts to fight what they see as possible voter fraud with questions about cleaning the voter rolls.Two days before the state Republican Party withdrew its challenges of several thousand registered voters in the state based on address discrepancies, Montana's former U.S. senator, Conrad Burns, e-mailed every county elections official in the state asking for the last time the county had “purged” its list of registered voters.

From CBS News:
“It appears as though Georgia is going out of its way to look to purge voters. They are going beyond what’s allowed for by federal law,” Jon Greenbaum, an attorney with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights told CBS News. “

And from the Free Press:

"The GOP continues to resist attempts to subpoena Michael Connell, a shady Republican computer operative who programmed the 2000 Bush-Cheney web site. Connell was also hired by former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in 2004 to tabulate the Ohio vote count. Under Connell, Ohio's vote totals were shunted to a computer bank in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that housed the servers of the Republican National Committee. In the early hours of the morning after election day, vote totals mysteriously began shifting from Kerry to Bush, swinging the 2004 election. Connell's cyber-security industry colleague Stephen Spoonamore, a Republican and former McCain supporter, has said that Connell may be able to shed light on vote count rigging in the 2008 vote count as well. Attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit have thus far been unable to secure Connell's sworn testimony.

As the moment of truth arrives, McCain-Palin attacks based on race, alleged "terrorist" ties and more are sure to increasingly dominate the GOP campaign. But far more insidious will be an all-out assault on voter registration in the name of "voter fraud," and on finding new ways to undermine the national vote, most importantly on electronic voting machines of the kind programmed by Michael Connell......

If those supporting the democratic process are not exceedingly vigilant, the GOP could use these tactics to once again take the White House."