r t is counting down to the third party debate just a few hours from now green party candidate jill stein and libertarian gary johnson will square off right here in our t.v. studios talking about foreign policy we will bring you a preview. and bringing in the star power president obama and mitt romney are walking the proverbial red carpet with their celebrity endorsements in tow but while these two candidates soak up the spotlight california's poor is left in the shadows that story ahead. plus do you know where your voting ballot is the media and pundits are playing up of fear mongering when it comes to voter fraud and voter suppression but not really citing any example in particular our team found one case that will tell you where it happened and who's behind it.

is monday november fifth five pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you watching our team. y.b. election eve everyone coming up very shortly in our to america's studios here in washington d.c. the final debate before the election it's a third party debate tonight featuring libertarian gary johnson the former governor of new mexico and dr jill stein representing the green party now you might remember this debate was scheduled for last tuesday october thirtieth but was moved to tonight due to superstorm sandy so here we are one night before the presidential election and we want to remind you that for most of you across the united states when you go to the polls tomorrow there will be more than two names on the ballot in addition to the two i just named will be part of tonight's debate you might also see on the ballot virgil goode a former u.s.

congressman from virginia now with the constitution party also rocky anderson of the justice party who's a for the former mayor of salt lake city utah tonight though we are down to the two candidates that was based on an online vote taken after that first third party debate back on october twenty third and in preparation i want to talk more about the significance of tonight's debate and i know third party candidates in general with our correspondent liz wahl along with our tease abby martin host of the bridge of breaking the sat i spoke to them just a little earlier about the importance of people knowing that there are other candidates out there. yeah absolutely i mean it's is sad that people don't know that i mean a lot of people i talk to there's like well you know it doesn't matter and they're just watching these you know total dog and pony show billion dollar campaign glitz and glamor of the presidential commission on debates which we already know is funded entirely by corporations that totally exclude third party voices on the top and you know on top of that the corporate controlled media everything you see on t.v. just completely excludes these extremely important voices that need to be heard and

are totally old people well i think i want to talk to me just and that sort of doesn't matter attitude i certainly and liz i know that you've spoken to many people about this too that so many people in this country really think they have to vote for one of these two candidates and history has dictated that it's probably going to be either obama or romney but talk a little about what people have told you in your interviews your vast amount of interviews during this campaign season about sort of the attitude concerning the third party i mean i think there is this perception that voting for the third party is a wasted vote but i think especially with the way things are going in the country now that people are in there isn't as much enthusiasm behind president obama as there was back in two thousand and eight a lot of people disillusioned with the way things had played out during his presidency and a lot of not even on the republican side they're not all gung ho about mitt romney

so i think now more than ever there is there seems to be space for other ideas. aside from the republican and democratic ticket especially we saw the passion behind ron paul who of course you know is running under the republicans take it but really does differentiate himself from the republican mainstream in terms of his foreign policy he's not interventionist approach and we saw a lot of passion and a lot of enthusiasm behind him so we see that there is a hunger in this country for for a different for an alternative. well when our ron paul was still in the race it was interesting just how much energy and support the people who backed him had i think it's important what you brought up as you said it's not just about other candidates about other it's about other ideas and that's one of the most frustrating thing i think for a lot of these candidates who did not get invited to the debates during the primaries it is not only that their face wasn't shown and that their name wouldn't

get out there but that their ideas would not get out there as well so i want to play something really quick this is from that october twenty third debate we're talking about from libertarian candidate gary johnson speaking about the political system as it is in place today. whether or not romney gets elected or obama gets elected three things are going to happen we're going to find ourselves with a continued police state in this country we're going to find ourselves continuing to militarily intervene in the world which result has resulted in hundreds of millions of enemies to this country that wouldn't otherwise exist there's a reason why we shouldn't be using drones it's because we don't just take out the target we take out a lot of innocent civilians in these countries. and then lastly we are going to find ourselves in a continued state of unsustainable spending and borrowing to the point that we are

going to experience a monetary collapse unless we fix this. so too much spending and borrowing that is a topic that you know all the candidates seem to have spoken on but drones i remember when a question was asked about drones in the final about foreign policy debate between obama and romney people on twitter are like i can't believe you're asking about drones this is so insignificant but in fact abbi the topic i drove in the opposite of insignificant what i mean is the leading cause of anti american sentiment the middle east we have the foreign minister of pakistan coming out saying that is the number one cause and also the suicide bombings within pakistan after drone warfare started in the country has escalated three hundred percent so when you say that it's insignificant rate i'm saying people on. there are two girls about drones but i mean it just shows you and you know mitt romney kind of saying oh yeah i totally agree with obama's polls on drones i think it's a great idea well it's actually not they have

a ninety percent failure rate and it's really not surgically precise it also is just terrorizing people on a daily basis and that's just in pakistan i mean this is going over warfare going on across the middle east and also opening up drones to u.s. skies soon in a year and it's a shame that this wasn't discussed more in the other debate and that it's interesting that that clip that we just played gary johnson where he said no matter whether it's romney or obama that the outcome is going to be the same and i think that exemplifies the need or the desire that is there for a third party option we saw in the last debate focused on foreign policy every single candidate i believe brought up drones so it's a lot of third party debate in the last third party debate and then they are the main debate and it was brought up once and we had it governor romney basically hail obama's drone campaign so we see that they definitely do agree with it and it seems to be a bipartisan issue where that is something that is going to continue despite the

controversy surrounding it and very little discussion about it especially also in terms of foreign policy we see that. me and obama agree on iran. romney seems to want to slap more sanctions on iran and that's been though that's been obama's signature the way he has dealt with with iran is continuing to slap these things on the country that are now crippling the country. yeah it's romney says he's going to be more strict on un sanctions but it's how much more they seem to already know much more crippling really be and i love you for like you know obama romney was attacking iran whereas obama won't go that i mean all we know is that they both kind of you know are putting a really hard line against iran we both know that you know they are trying to compete with netanyahu and who could be more favorable to israel so i don't really see i don't put anything out of the possibility for obama so interesting regarding iran too because it's seems like people like to play this up as the biggest bully

man. facing us right now with the biggest threat right now is iran has been that way for and it was reiterated by one of the moderate yeah really but it's really been like this for decades and i think a lot of people forget that we talk about as you just mentioned the keep the two candidates two main candidates obama and romney really agreeing on a lot especially foreign policy related but i should say and for those of people that are tea viewers who actually have been following these third party debate it might be a little confusing me how we're having one tonight very soon we have the one on october twenty third these are both put on by the free and equal elections foundation but last night ralph nader everybody remembers good old ralph nader he actually moderated debate here in d.c. and busboys and poets and he has the candidates on all four of them were at this debate yes in a series of yes or no question things like military spending the war in afghanistan the size of the defense defense budget the strength of corporate power in washington. and all four candidates pretty much agreed on all of that so you do

think it's hard for some people who do plan on voting third. ready to choose which third party no it is i think that when you're looking at third party candidates and they all agree on things pretty much as you form with the rest of american citizens who are just like i don't want to be spending over fifty percent of our tax dollars on the military i don't want to have endless war in afghanistan till twenty twenty four i don't want to and those drone warfare is that when these third party candidates they all agree on the things that we can all agree to and that's the biggest difference they all have radically different platforms when it comes to you know energy policy and and just their outlook on how to restructure government but in terms of those questions civil liberties protecting all these things i think that is where people can really relate to them because we sure as hell can't relate to around that particular room particularly with the libertarian party i think that really does. represent a growing segment of the american population this fiscally conservative socially liberal a lot of people especially young people go along with that ideal yet we don't

really see it on either side only the foundation of the libertarian party is smaller smaller government and you do see some of these ideas that ron paul's been talking about since the one nine hundred eighty s. sort of become adopted by the republican party this year even in their party platform for example they lamented an audit of the fed which is something that ron paul has been calling for a long time that was unheard of a few years ago so it's really interesting i don't want to leave jill stein out i want to make sure that you know we play something from her. i know that under president obama one of the most significant things that's happened not because of president obama he was against it but the supreme court ruled on the citizens united case case that's of course put very simply money corporations are people who kind of thing i want to just play something joel stein said about this and about how citizens united has affected our system. we are calling for getting money out of politics through public financing we're calling for opening up the airway.

of all qualified candidates we are called. only for. money is not and that corporations are not able to take back. live you and i have been all over this on certainly you know anchoring the news here at r t this has been one of our biggest focal points in this campaign season because first of all it's a very important issue but second of all because the mainstream media has largely ignored it the day that the case was ruled on i think back in two thousand and ten it was discussed but really the impact there are so many different directions that you could go with the impact of this case and how even the impact of it today i mean a record spending on campaigning i think they're both in the ballpark of three hundred fifty million dollars and that doesn't take into account a lot of the other spending that was pumped into these to the campaigns and

a lot of negative negative campaigning we're seeing unprecedented so absolutely and we just heard out of the words of dual sign i think of that are interesting she said you know corporations are not people romney actually did say the opposite that corporations are people. so it's interesting to hear from a presidential candidate to say otherwise you know i don't know are you going to miss campaign season oh my god it's over i'm not going to miss and i'm going to a little bit all beyond the odds of how i was all what are they going to be talking about on the news when a fourteen come on is right around with. we're going to definitely get to monday morning quarterbacking why did this happen and you know why did obama win why did obama lose you know it was an election the post-election analysis of the voting fraud you know. it's going to be interesting i think it's exciting i think you know marty of course going to be doing quite a bit of election coverage tomorrow from four pm eastern until midnight or until

there's a winner so our t.v. correspondent live wall abby martin host of breaking the so. live at nine pm tonight the free and equal foundation second round of third party debates it will be happening right here in our t.v. studio so make sure to tune in and find out for yourself with these third party candidates stand for. it will be a record setting election when you factor in how much money was spent and remember this is the time that the u.s. is dealing with a near record number of people living in poverty as well still both the obama and romney camps will each raise one billion dollars when you factor in money where used by super pacs and party committees even big celebrity names are now coming out to support those top contenders but in the midst of the money and the mixed messages some argue that both campaigns have completely ignored one of the biggest problems in this country the growing gap between the rich and the poor artie's remodel indo has the story. let's hope for the most solemn president

obama's billion dollar reelection campaign has been financially supported by a powerful celebrity line of thinking that the economy from the middle out hollywood has been a reliable source for campaign cash but just steps away from these high price of events impoverished residents are struggling to survive i have lived on the street before and i live in a cardboard box u.s. navy veteran wesley walker knows firsthand what it's like to be homeless he now advocates on their behalf walker worries problems like gentrification hunger are being ignored in the political debate. the one of those who come to say they should forget about the security staff. and everything like that and with a joke campaign observers doubt either the candidates will visit skid row anytime soon the poor don't make big campaign contributions and the poor end result end up being rendered invisible because both parties are owned by big money the city of

los angeles has played host to several of the president's star studded fundraisers but the golden state has been good to both the obama and the romney campaigns each of which have raised millions of dollars here in california this is a campaign fundamentally about how to help the middle class in america i want to give middle class families and folks who are striving to get in the middle class some relief the high jobless rate and sluggish recovery have only led to a wider wealth gap in the u.s. according to the census bureau more than forty six million americans live in poverty the poverty rate in california is nearly seventeen percent the stark difference between the haves and the have nots is clearly displayed in los angeles where high price condos sit next to old to lap a dated rental units gentrification started you can get a unit for maybe three to five hundred dollars a month and for people who is on s.s.i. disability to make eight hundred dollars

a month this is what we can poor. in this city where twenty five thousand dollars chair plates sell fast at campaign fund raisers neighborhood food banks are in desperate need of donations ok and rock. says rocks arsed pledge their allegiance to top political contenders income inequality keeps growing you might have read me the brush of campaign ads is what two billion dollars and fund raising is in america i'm mitt romney and i approve this message i'm barack obama and i approve this message because no matter who we get in office the the ball keep ended up on the other side of the court right so the system needs to be changed right so that we can get off just after the election is settled those who are left out of the political spending frenzy are left to wonder when their voice will be here in los angeles ramon lindo r t. still ahead here on our team you know that rhetoric coming out about voter fraud and voter suppression turns out it might have a little merit after all we're going to bring you one case where the ballots were

thrown out the registration cards actually were thrown in the garbage and the perpetrator was caught. governor romney and i we both agree we agree we have to bring the tax rates down i felt the same as the president did governor romney i'm glad. you agree with let's come back to something the president i agree on and there to you agree that the voters have a choice perhaps you wondered who to vote for when romney and obama agree on so many things now when you do have other options come november sixth tune in to see the second round of debates between the major third party candidates right here on our t.v. . it's

part of american power to continue. things are so bad. by the time revolution. turns out that we were drinking starbucks as a surprise that. well one of the topics that's come in the conversation quite a bit this campaign season there's been accusations of extreme voter fraud. it's our duty to ensure that watches are fair. beyond reproach accurately reflecting the will of the people. that's where voter id is all about when the

group through the vote check the numbers they couldn't believe just how rampant the fraud really was what republicans are all about the burning voter fraud huge fears of voter fraud in the presidential election tonight the north carolina republican party is the latest to fire a company under investigation on charges of voter fraud you might think voter fraud is a massive problem given all the attention it's getting this year we had in south carolina that if you had to show a picture id to buy sudafed if you had to show a picture id to set foot on an airplane then you should have to show the picture id to protect the lot of the most valuable. well many of these claims have proven to be virtually nonexistent it turns out there has been some voter fraud and it hasn't been rampant but it also hasn't been by sneaky liberals voting multiple times or by undocumented immigrants illegally

registering to vote the latest case involves this man twenty three year old collin small charged with tossing completed registration forms into a trash bin in harrisonburg virginia but instead of appearing before a grand jury prosecutors decided they wanted to wait a little longer to get some more information from him so they found out small is actually working for a long time g.o.p. operative in a fan nathan sproule who ran strategic allied consulting firm where small was working and it turns out that sproule who had three million dollars in contracts from the republican party before they were forced to cut ties with him was allegedly registering dead people altering and faking registrations of others and encouraging this behavior of throwing out registrations of people who said they were democrats so all these things republicans have been alleging they've actually been doing at least in the case of this firm strategic allied consulting now under serious criminal investigation much of their work registering voters took place in

colorado nevada virginia and florida all expected to be very close contest much of this has been unfolding over the last month or so but we want to talk about some of the latest aspects of this case with corbin carson a journalist with news twenty one and corbin i took a look at your web site voting rights news twenty one dot com and right on the first page you say the exhaustive search finds very little voter fraud how exhaustive was your search and what exactly did you find. well as part of news twenty one investigation into voting rights this year we wanted to add hard data to the highly partisan debate about voter fraud whether it is affecting elections and if the new voter id laws could be stopped by the fraud we found so over the course of our eight month investigation we sent out thousands of public records requests to secretaries of state all the attorney generals and in some cases we had to go county by county and as you know there's over three thousand counties in the

united states and what we found was over the course of twelve years was ten cases of voter in person ation which is the only type of fraud that can be potentially stopped by the new voter id laws he said ten cases that's correct ten cases put doesn't like perspective well with one hundred forty six million votes cast during that time that would represent one in about fifteen million votes wow so and this is a huge problem in our country according to to quite a few people let's talk a bit about this case we just spoke of in the introduction registration cards being dumped how big of a crime is this when one of the other things that we notice other than that voter in person nation was small was we did we didn't realize that there was a terminology problem that a lot of crimes that were happening in happening in elections were being termed

voter fraud so what we did with all the data that we had coming in and was we separated the cases in two different categories one of which is registration fraud and what we found was that registration and absentee ballot fraud made up just under forty percent of the cases that were reported to us. talk a little bit about the irony here that this case a servant of group and yet it's conservative groups you know they were doing what they were accusing others of doing. news twenty one is a nonpartisan organization so. i wouldn't presume to suggest what the data actually means what we wanted to do was just add the hard data to the discussion so that the different i guess you could call them pundits on either side could argue it out on their own one of the many other tactics and i don't know to what extent this figured into your research. barrage of voter id laws or new laws basically a lot of these did get overturned by the courts but

a lot of these laws in states like texas and pennsylvania some of them affected people who would serve time in prison and serve their time they've gotten out of prison got jobs that were taxpaying citizens talk a little bit about all of these tactics and how they might figure into this election. our entire investigation was a really wide range of voting rights with those twenty one so we did have investigations and disenfranchisement felon voting and that sort of thing but i heard your viewers to look on our web site go through our data not only did not only did we put the results of the data up there we also included every report that we received from every state every case is on there over five thousand documents you can look in your state in your area and see exactly what kind of voter fraud was reported by your local officials but more and to answer your question again i wouldn't presume to add any. tactics one way or the other i just we just really

felt that hard data was needed for this and for this discussion what was what was in the same question that surprised me the most in this research. well from speaking with election officials and election experts one of the things that we heard a lot over the course of this eight eight month investigation was that the election system itself is broken every every single county handles their election their own particular way so one of the common threads that we heard from people we talked to was that maybe some sort of uniformity or some sort of standard could be applied to make the election system run a little more efficiently yeah that is really interesting i mean so what do you suggest that i mean what you know what do you think people should take from this data that you've gathered. what should people take from the data gathered you know . again i after doing so many interviews it's kind i hesitate to add any

opinion one way or the other the data is what it is we found ten cases of voter impersonating fraud we did see a little bit more issues with the absentee ballot and registration in the beginning of the election. cycle you know we're just trying to help out the election process from where we stand how did you guys come up with this project i mean what was sort of the impetus behind it. well each year news twenty one which is funded by the carnegie knight corporation carnegie and knight corporation each year they take a one investigative project to do an in-depth investigation on this year it was voting rights and as you know working in the media we don't normally get a lot of time to turn the story and so to have the luxury of eight months and you know a wide team of investigators we had twenty four journalism students or a student organization from the best journalism schools around the country that helped out these different projects it was it was it was really wonderful to be

able to work and go so far in depth in the situation and our project has been widely accepted by the media it's been in the now you know new york times and nothing can post except well no matter what i know you guys are nonpartisan but no matter what this has been a hugely significant issue during this election season and a very important project that you guys worked on carbon carlson carson excuse me journalist at news twenty one in arizona thanks so much thank you ma'am and that's going to do it for us for now that's one of the stories we covered go to youtube dot com plus our team america our check out our web site r t dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at christine for that now. governor romney and i we both agree we agree we had to bring the tax rates down i felt the same as the president did governor romney i'm glad. you agree but let's get back to something the president i agree on and you tube you agree that the voters have a choice perhaps when you wonder who to vote for when romney and obama agree on so

many things remember you do have other options come november sixth tune in to see the second round of debates between the major third party candidates right here on our t.v. . here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a drone. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about what country music stars are through you know what that is my other terrorist cells doesn't want to be listening to feature race and the only poll the christers point you. can see through to the surface is the snow the closer you need distracts us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that sells of sensationalistic garbage because that breaking news i'm happy martin and we're going to bring.