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America Not Ready to Vote, Says Survey
October 16, 2008 1:35 PM
by Josh Katz
As a highly anticipated Election Day nears, many polling places won’t be able to cope with voting machine breakdowns and other potential problems.
Many States Unprepared for Election Day Problems
The Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause and Verified Voting have released a 190-page report that concludes that “Most states have not adopted laws and procedures that would allow them to effectively address all of the most common election system meltdowns.”
“Is America Ready to Vote? State Preparations for Voting Machine Problems in 2008,” analyzed the performance of all 50 states and the District of Columbia on a five-score scale ranging from “inadequate” to “excellent.” The states were judged on “polling place contingency plans,” “ballot reconciliation,” “paper records,” and “post election audits.”
This year’s tight election races could heighten voting difficulties for a number of states, in addition to the usual suspects of Florida and Ohio, according to Politico. Some experts warn that Colorado, Virginia and Georgia may become possible trouble spots on Election Day. Even though federal and state governments have taken steps since the controversial election of 2000 to prevent a similar occurrence, county election boards are still in charge of most state voting, and their “competence and equipment vary wildly,” Politico writes.
New machines could be problematic in states like Florida, but delays may also be an issue. “To me it's the possibility of the long lines that's the issue,” said Susan McManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
“Is America Ready to Vote?” indicates that the most prepared states overall for the 2008 election are Alaska, California, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina and Oregon. They all received marks of “generally good,” “good,” or “excellent” in most categories. The report gave ten states the worst general overall ratings: Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia. In at least three of the four categories, these states received ratings of “inadequate” or “needs improvement.”
Read the rest at Finding Dulcinea: http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/politics/September-October-08/Many-States-Unprepared-for-Election-Day-Problems.html
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Voter Registration Flashpoints
As we head into the final stretch of the election season, alarming reports of dysfunctional voter registration, purges of the rolls, and possible voter suppression are surfacing weekly, if not daily. The National Campaign for Fair Elections' hotline (866.OUR.VOTE / 866.687.8683) is already receiving roughly a thousand calls a day; while the majority of these are requests for information, some concern problems with registration. The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of voters may have been illegally purged from the rolls in swing states. Other news sources speculate there are 600,000 voters at risk of disenfranchisement in Ohio alone. What goes unreported upon amid all this turmoil is how effective the response has been, and what can still be done.
Take Montana. On October 8th, US District Court Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing ruling denouncing the state Republican Party's effort to challenge the registration of 6,000 voters: "The timing of the challenges is so transparent it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery." The Montana Republican Party and its leaders, he wrote, "are abusing the process."
The real danger is that the process itself is flawed. "We have an election system that's exquisitely designed for low rates of participation," says Tova Wang, Vice President of Research for Common Cause. "We're expecting increased turnout and we have a system that's not designed to handle it." While these problems are endemic throughout our fractured electoral system, three states--Virginia, Florida, and Ohio--present both the challenges we face and the measures we might take to solve them. All three are closely contested, and an Obama victory will require every one.
Read the rest at the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/374010/voter_registration_flashpoints?rel=hpbox
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Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats," while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories1," and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale2."
But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad3 never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote4 — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations5. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states6, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations7. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes8, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots9. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast10.
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."
But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 200412 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes13. (See
Read the rest at Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
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