Will the Republican party attempt to rig the election?

[TomPaine]

clusterflux> My wife had problems voting at the 2000 election. Her folks and her lived on the same old farm plot back then but in different houses. They share a mail box, but for ease both houses have different numbers even though they are owned by the same family, and various generations of the family have lived between the two houses. The voting card got sent through with the other house address on, when she got the voting booth even though she had proof of address etc. it took ages to convince them to let her vote.
Total cock up and bullshittery going on.

TomPaine

 

[clusterflux]

I figured I would check up on the changes to the law concerning voting and it clarified a few things. Here is a link to Colorado election rules
My favorite is 2.7, seems my problem stems from being a U.S. citizen and providing my social security number. I will still check with a lawyer because it seems like checking my SS# and property tax records would be way easier than mailing a letter with a self addressed stamped envelope. I work right by the clerks office so maybe I'll just stop in and give them their envelope and provide them with what they require. Being a patriot in a Democracy... I just always thought this meant you would want everyone possible to vote, excluding only those who had lost the right.

 

[MightyAphrodite]

The majority of Americans are liberal. Most don't vote, so when more people register the republicans know they are in trouble.

i hope the liberals learned something by NOT voting in 2004...and have registered (think they are in crazy figures now...) and VOTE ffs.

ive already voted by absentee ballot.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I've noticed a fair bit of talk about this. I wondered what people thought? There was much evidence of it going on during the last election and the stakes in this one seem higher than previously. Is the right wing fundamentalist brigade ready to do gods duty and make sure they are the chosen ones, even if God's will is to fiddle the voting? Another attack on US soil? An assassination maybe?

And in this way, you earn your name: 'barking mad'.

 

[Barking_Mad]

In retrospect i made an mistake (or as they would say in the US a "mis-step") by suggesting that only the Republican party would do it. Maybe the Dems took the view of "Don't get mad, get even".

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Maybe they can get in international observers, like they do for elections in Haiti, etc.

 

[Meltingpot]

Maybe they can get in international observers, like they do for elections in Haiti, etc.

That would be a start wouldn't it? Never be allowed though, there's one law for the US and another for everyone else.

 

[dilute micro]

You were above saying it's going to happen. The media matters (who in my experience are very precise) summary ends with "or that actual instances of illegal votes being cast as a result of registration fraud are extremely rare."Nothing really, you just seem to be pushing the republican line, again

No I was only kidding and you must not have been able to tell. But I do think there will be fraud. And since I'm not bound to a party line I feel at ease to say what I think. I couldn't care less about worrying about the party line of the good guys or bad guys.

 

[two sheds]

Take a careful look again at what your link said - "...require third parties registering prospective voters to submit all forms they receive, or that actual instances of illegal votes being cast as a result of registration fraud are extremely rare."

It's not saying much and anything we don't already know. And investigations into fraud are rare too so finding it is rare. Is it just a republican claim? I mean ACORN's employees do have a rap sheet. How hard it is to write Mickey Mouse or pro football players names on registrations, or just go through a phone book?

You were kidding so much that you defended it when I picked you up on it.

You're off again aren't you. I'm surprised you've not told us to go off and study American colonial history before posting on the thread yet.

 

[goebfwai]

Seemingly, both Obama and McCain have both retained huge legal teams already so they can fight over votes if it proves to be as close a run finish as the Gore-Bush race.

 

[TomUS]

I'd seen the republican claims, but http://mediamatters.org/items/200810170005 seems to be saying they're not true.

Summary: The New York Times quoted Sen. John McCain's assertion during the third presidential debate that ACORN was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country," but ignored key facts, including that the statutes of most of the states in which ACORN allegedly submitted false or duplicate voter registration applications this year require third parties registering prospective voters to submit all forms they receive, or that actual instances of illegal votes being cast as a result of registration fraud are extremely rare.

Exactly. it's a smokescreen put out by the Repubs. Fox news is going on & on about it. A couple of the federal prosecuters the Bush gang fired a while back were fired because they wouldn't pursue charges against ACORN....because there was nothing there.

In addition to being another Repub distraction/smear tactic, it's designed to provide the Repubs an excuse if they lose. They can then claim Obama isn't a legitimate pres.

And of course the Rs will try to rig the election. Not that the Ds are angels, but the R's are so much better at it and in recent history, more ruthless.

 

[dilute micro]

You were kidding so much that you defended it when I picked you up on it.

You're off again aren't you. I'm surprised you've not told us to go off and study American colonial history before posting on the thread yet.

You're not too sharp. I took issue that some article tries to downplay it while not really saying anything. I didn't even bother with you saying it was "republican claims". Democrats are onto ACORN as well, some. For your sake I'll put 4 when I'm kidding and talking to you from now on. That way you'll know.

 

[CyberRose]

The story in the NYT says that new voters are being deregistered by error, not a deliberate action. They say this is affecting Obama supporters more than McCain is because Obama had a massive registration drive, so more new voters that registered were Obama supporters rather than McCain supporters. I still don't see how one party rather than another has the power to deregister voters. I know in 2000 Jeb was the governor of Florida so I suppose that's one way they could have done it, but surely if this is goin on in Republican held areas surely it'd be goin on in Democrat held areas as well?

 

[onemonkey]

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jav5JY_UfAE

 

[ohmyliver]

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Land Shark/128

oh and

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/22/voter_supression_guide/index.html

 

[TomPaine]

Anyone see the fornt page of CNN today?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/22/rigging.election/index.html

Interview with a guy who went down for helping to screw over the Dems at the last election. Apparently a couple of senior repubs paid him to jam the Democrats phone line in New Hampshire.

Is it me, or is the media really whipping it up over the vote fraud thing this year?

TomPaine

 

[laptop]

surely it'd be goin on in Democrat held areas as well?

You have to think about the specifics.

1: elections turn on a small, sometimes tiny, margin of the electorate. In the US most voters are registered as Dem or Rep (so they can vote in the primary elections that select the parties' candidates).

2: all such efforts to fix the electorate are based on the assumption - almost certainly borne out by the evidence - that Rep voters are more likely to be white, not to be poor, to pay mortgages rather than rent, to be older and to move house less often than Dems.

3: So it's easier to deter Dem voters by challenging them with white cops at polling booths; and

4: It's easier to deregister Dem voters by nit-picking their proof of address, for example.

5: In summary: it's a class thing.

 

[Darios]

I have decided on getting a lawyer, I'll try and post the letter to a site and link it, the thing that bothers me is that this certainly seems to take a very narrow view of individuals rights and a very wide view of states rights in regards to the U.S. Constitution. Here I thought the Constitution protected individual citizens from having their federal rights (voting in a federal election) being curtailed by a state law.

Cluster - have you reported this to Brad Blog?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

That would be a start wouldn't it? Never be allowed though, there's one law for the US and another for everyone else.

But what if the Republicans got to the international observers and bribed them too?

 

[Steve Booth]

Opinion polls

Maybe they can get in international observers, like they do for elections in Haiti, etc.

Does anybody have an opinion or information about the way that opinion polls are possibly rigged in order to influence the voting? In some countries, opinion polls are banned close to elections times, and I think this is not a bad idea.

Something else which may well prove a factor - posters on here have alluded to people being disallowed / deregistered for class and race issues; is the way that race could be a factor in skewing the polls. I think, if I remember correctly, this showed up in some of the primaries. People who are racist give false opinions to the pollsters, perhaps saying they are 'don't knows' when they really intend to vote for McCain against Obama, for example.

This might be a factor in the eventual result.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Personally, I don't think you people have been watching enough conspiracy movies. If you had, you'd know that there was no hope of thwarting the nefarious plot, unless Kiefer Sutherland or Denzel Washington happen to stumble across the plot, in which case they'll get it sorted in short order, with twin .45s blazing.

 

[laptop]

Does anybody have an opinion or information about the way that opinion polls are possibly rigged in order to influence the voting?

That'd almost certainly be harder than rigging the count, wouldn't it?

Who'd have to keep quiet about it?

Count: few hundred election supevisors in key counties - either political appointees or elected on a party slate.

Polls: many hundred employees of a dozen or so independent capitalist polling organisations, which compete with each other and make their living by being right.

In some countries, opinion polls are banned close to elections times, and I think this is not a bad idea.

That'd be mostly to stop the effect on turnout of people seeing one side or the other as a shoo-in.

Your other points are dealt with at length in the thread, which you have apparently merely dropped into without reading to... to do what?

 

[newharper]

A richer voter can afford to wait 3 hours to vote; a poor voter has to get to work.

Morning-early afternoon, November 2, 2004: Long Lines in Some Heavily Democratic Precincts in Colombus, Ohio



In some heavily democratic Columbus, Ohio precincts, people wait 2-7 hours in long lines to cast their votes because of a shortage of voting machines. Machines delivered the previous day were distributed unevenly throughout the county, with a greater concentration (machine to registered voter) being placed in the higher-income suburbs (See November 1, 2004). 51 machines remain in a warehouse (See Afternoon November 2, 2004). [Columbus Dispatch, 12/11/2004; Free Press, 12/16/2004] After the elections, statistics show that the voter-to-machine ratio was higher in Columbus than in its surrounding suburbs where income levels are higher. In the affluent Republican stronghold of Upper Arlington not one of its 34 precincts had a voting machine which cast more than 200 votes. Only one machine, in ward 6F, came close to the maximum. It was used by 194 voters. However, in the Democratic city of Columbus, there were 34 polling machines which logged on more than 200 votes per machine and 42 machines that were over 190 votes per machine. In another words, in Columbus, 17 percent of the city’s machines were operating at 90-100 percent over the optimum capacity while in Upper Arlington the figure was 3 percent. The high voter ratios in Columbus were due to a combination of increased voter participation and fewer voting machines. In Columbus, despite increased voter registration in the city, 139, or 29 percent, of the 472 precincts had fewer machines than in the 2000 presidential election. In some precincts, the number of machines was reduced by as many as five. This contrasted sharply with Upper Arlington, where only two precincts had fewer machines. In one of those precincts, voter registration had declined by 25 percent.

http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=4197

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 Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots14. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House15.


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"It was terrible," says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. "People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened."


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Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen," Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. "You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb."

[Works Cited

Note From the Authors on Sources and Commentary

1 Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory — Kerry Won — Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.

2 The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.

3 United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.

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207 Tokaji's blog, Election Law at Moritz, ''McConnell's Voter ID Amendment,'' May 22, 2006.

208 United States District Court Northern District of Georgia, Rome Division

P

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen/10?commentPage=2#rate

 

[newharper]

Oh and his latest effort on the present election.

On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

that's New Mexico btw.

In state after state, Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics - are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

Personally I think he's wrong, the majority will be too big , but they won't give up trying.

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich - a principal architect of today's Republican Party - scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome - good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Ironically, the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida - the same corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place. Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000 voters, most of them African-Americans, because their names resembled those of persons convicted of a crime. The state eventually acknowledged that the purges were improper - two years after the election.



Rather than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them. Maez, the elections supervisor in New Mexico, says he was the victim of faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state. Hector Balderas, the state auditor, was also purged from the voter list. The nation's youngest elected Hispanic official, Balderas hails from Mora County, one of the poorest in the state, which had the highest rate of voters forced to cast provisional ballots. "As a strategic consideration," he notes, "there are those that benefit from chaos" at the ballot box.



All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to the states on "list maintenance" methods.

I believe the standard reaction is ORLY.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23638322/block_the_vote

There is loads more of it, but i guess it just proves how wicked the Dem's are, all those balots thrown out must prove that.

That said, they are not above defending themselves, and only goes to prove that American Democracy is the best that money can buy, and should be forcibly exported to every country on the planet.

 

[clusterflux]

Cluster - have you reported this to Brad Blog?

I don't think anyone is actively trying to keep me from voting. I had my say when it mattered. When Al Gore lost the presidency, this planet took a turn towards a drastically different future. There is no way to reclaim this future, that turn was not taken and the road we are on now goes in a different direction. I know John Kerry and George Bush are members of the same club. Hey, collecting human skulls and practicing mock human sacrifices is pretty much the definition of "collegiate high jinks." I don't really judge the individual by party affiliation. You see how they act, the feelings they exhibit in certain situations and you can get insight into their value system.

I don't want to be divisive or alarmist. The problem I have had is due to a difference in ideology. There are many people in the republican party who seem to want a national referendum on states rights. I will note for people in other countries that the U.S of A. had just such a referendum in the latter part of the 1800s. States rights lost. This is the reason that the republicans gave when they explained why no help was sent to New Orleans. Under their ideology the state had to ask for help, the federal government could not legally give help without the state asking for it. Though it was dismissed as an excuse by an administration that was inept, it is important to note that states have passed laws that challenge Supreme Court decisions and federal law at an ever increasing rate. There is a "personhood" Amendment to the Colorado State Constitution (48) that would make a fertilized egg a person.

This is a moral problem for me, I think I will just register because I would be a lousy plaintiff. There is a huge ballot in Colorado, its two pages. What Colorado is doing with its registration requirements is a subtle expansion of states rights, allowing a state to restrict a citizens right to vote in a federal election. I am not offered a federal ballot.

 

[dilute micro]

I will note for people in other countries that the U.S of A. had just such a referendum in the latter part of the 1800s. States rights lost.

Extortion is not a 'referendum' but referendum sounds better in history books. Kicking States out of the US until they agree to an overhauling and creation of a new centralized government is not 'freedom and democracy'.

 

[clusterflux]

Extortion is not a 'referendum' but referendum sounds better in history books. Kicking States out of the US until they agree to an overhauling and creation of a new centralized government is not 'freedom and democracy'.

Now this is interesting. I had used the word referendum as a joke, I was referring to the Civil War. When were states ever kicked out of the US? Exactly what is US? I am guessing you are referring to a tax situation in the United States of America that occurred during the late 1800s? I keep reading your post and I am wondering if you understood what I posted.

 

[Barking_Mad]

Just to go back a little bit, to 2006. The first minute alone is bad enough......

 

[dilute micro]

Now this is interesting. I had used the word referendum as a joke, I was referring to the Civil War. When were states ever kicked out of the US? Exactly what is US? I am guessing you are referring to a tax situation in the United States of America that occurred during the late 1800s? I keep reading your post and I am wondering if you understood what I posted.

I was thinking of after the war in 1866. I didn't know you were joking. But yeah after passing the 13th amendment the 14th failed to pass so every member that voted against it was expelled from congress and wasn't allowed back until their state had ratified it. Even some of the states that had voted for it retracted their vote - Ohio, Oregon and New Jersey. New Jersey had this to say about it:

"Joint Resolutions withdrawing the consent of this State to the proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, entitled article fourteen and rescinding the Joint Resolution, approved September eleventh, Anno Domini eighteen hundred and sixty-six, whereby it was resolved that said proposed Amendment was ratified by the Legislature of this State."....

“That it being necessary, by the Constitution, that every amendment to the same be proposed by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress, the authors of said proposition, for the purpose of securing the assent of the required majority, determined to, and did, exclude from the said two Houses eighty representatives from eleven States of the Union, upon the pretense that there were no such States in the Union; but finding that two-thirds of the remainder of said houses could not be brought to assent to the said proposition they deliberately formed and carried out the design of mutilating the integrity of the United States Senate, and without any pretext or justification, other than the possession of the power, without the right, and in palpable violation of the Constitution, ejected a member of their own body, representing this state and thus denied to New Jersey its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

 

[HarryinOz]

of course they will. fucks.

well said...and to be honest I wouldn't be surprised at ANYTHING the Republican Party or it's supporters do.

Putting Palin in as a future Vice Presidential candidate told me all I had to know about their honesty and integrity. fucks.