Wednesday, October 15, 2008

on perfecting the art of keeping people who have been foreclosed on and other undesirables away from the voting booth (cont'd)

Encouraging signs everywhere... but nobody has had the balls to establish a poll tax?

* In Colorado and New Mexico there are not enough voting booths or machines for Election Day.
* Students in Virginia are receiving probing questionnaires from voting officials falsely implying they don't have the right to vote there.
* In Ohio alone, more than 600,000 newly-registered voters are threatened with purging.
* There are reports of sometimes-illegal mass voter roll purges in Michigan, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, Colorado and other states. Several states are even purging voter rolls of people who are "Bob" on driver's licenses and "Robert" on voter registration forms.
* Officials in Indiana are avoiding setting up polling places in areas of the state heavily populated by minorities.
* The Republican Party in Michigan planned to challenge the registrations of every voter whose home had been foreclosed on recently.
* ACORN, which has been held out as a bogeyman for voter fraud (though only 26 TOTAL cases of voter fraud were prosecuted nationwide from 2002 - 2005), has bad registration rates below the California Republican Party's and a lawsuit alleging fraud in 2004 was dismissed by a judge for lack of merit.
* And, of course, there are ongoing worries across the country about electronic voting machines.

3 comments:

Smiff said...

Longest 16 years of our lives...

Obama better have at least a 15 point lead in the polls going in.

Smiff said...

In fairness though, we never know when these elctions are going to be so we can prepare for them. It's not like there are election days on the calendar or anything.

wait, that's England and Canada...

Fungster said...

Maggie Thatcher had the balls to (try to) establish a poll tax. Look where it got her.

To add to Smiff's list - Italy, Israel, Japan, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that we're probably one of the only countries to have a rigid election schedule. In other countries you have to have one BY a certain date, but it usually held beforehand. Like in Canada, the guy thought if he had the election now, mebbe he could get a majority in parliament. In Italy they have coalition governments that fail when one of the coalition parties pulls out for some reason, then you have to have elections. It's where you have the executive branch pulled from the legislative one. Here they're completely separate - once you pull a guy to the executive he's no longer a legislator.