Mike’s second column for the Big Issue has been posted on their website HERE, in this column he talks about his grandfather, read below.

MIKE SHINODA: MY GRANDFATHER WAS A REPUBLICAN VOTE-RIGGER!


Mike Shinoda – Linkin Park frontman and Big Issue columnist – gets personal on the issue of the US election


Big Issue columnist and Linkin Park frontman Mike Shinoda has confessed that his grandfather was involved in a Republican vote-rigging scheme.


Shinoda said that his grandfather committed what would now be termed “voter fraud” in the early twentieth century by bribing undecided people to vote Republican in his home state of West Virginia.


The Linkin Park star is currently writing a column for the Big Issue and files monthly dispatches about Romney and Obama’s race to the White House.


His band recently became the first rock group in history to have achieved one billion views on YouTube – twice as much as One Direction.


He wrote: “My grandpa wasn’t in politics, but he played for his team. As a young man in the early 1900s, he was paid by local Republicans to drive around town, find people who weren’t planning to vote and bribe them with money or liquor to vote Republican.


“To be clear, nobody in my family condones that kind of behaviour today.”


He added: “Today this kind of behaviour falls in the hot-topic category of ‘voter fraud’.”


Shinoda also revealed how his grandfather put him off smoking at the age of 10 by making him smoke a cheroot stuffed with homegrown tobacco and discussed the “team“ mentality inherent in American politics.


“There are a bunch of other guys, but like Mac versus PC, the two big names run everything and no one else is in the big league,” he continued.


Shinoda’s election dispatch appears in this week’s Big Issue, which leads with an article exploring what a Romney victory would mean for global politics. The magazine is on sale until October 14

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