Monday, October 25, 2004
Voter Disenfranchisement: The Sequel
From
the St Petersburg Times in
Election
chief warns of absentee scam
People posing as election officials are visiting residents
of several counties and offering to take absentee ballots.
By Stephen Hegarty
Pasco elections officials have a warning for the county's
absentee voters: Don't give your ballot to a stranger claiming
to be from the elections office.
They're
not who they say they are.
"The people who are soliciting your ballots in this manner
are not elections officials," Pasco Elections Supervisor
Kurt Browning warned Thursday. The warning came after a phone
call from a west
"We've had a bunch of them - 100 at least," said Bob
Sweat, elections supervisor for
From Democracy Now!'s segment "Suppression, Fraud and Breakdown: Voting Problems Emerge in States Across the Country" (25 Oct 2004):
AMY
GOODMAN: Can you talk, Jon Greenbaum
[director of Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers'
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law], about
JON GREENBAUM: Well as I mentioned before, we
have already found some problems. We have a hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
And people are calling in to the hotline and telling us about
problems that they're having when they're trying to vote in Broward
County, including waiting in long lines because machines are down,
including machines that don't appear to have been properly set
up in advance, including machines that weren't tested prior to
being put out in the field. It's very troubling. Because once
again, we have a situation where it's hard to have full confidence
that people are going to be able to participate in the way they
should be able to participate in the system.
From "Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," by Andrew Gumbel of The lndependent (24 Oct 2004):
After the last fiasco everyone from President Bush down vowed to fix the system
and ensure another
Secondly, the Bush administration
dragged its feet about enacting funding its own new election laws.
As a result, most states won't have their electoral procedures
fully updated and coordinated until the next presidential election
in 2008. That, in turn, is opening up furious arguments about
the ill-defined rules for provisional ballots, absentee ballots,
ID card requirements at polling stations and other seemingly esoteric
bureaucratic niceties that could have a huge impact on turnout
- especially among the poorer, less educated classes who have
traditionally been ignored, if not excluded, by the two major
parties.
Thirdly, the political leadership
allowed itself to be deluded into thinking that the dysfunctions
of the
For background on the 2000 election failure, see Robert Greenwald's film, Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, and Greg Palast's reporting of voter disenfranchisement.
Endorsement Tally
Editor and Publisher's latest endorsement tally (25 Oct 2004):
John
F. Kerry
128 newspapers total
16,898,024 daily circulation
George W. Bush
105 newspapers total
10,903,849 daily circulation
From the Washington Post's endorsement of Kerry for president:
On many other issues, Mr. Kerry has the better approach. He has a workable plan
to provide health insurance to more Americans; the 45 million
uninsured represent a shameful abdication that appears not to
have concerned Mr. Bush one whit. Where Mr. Bush ignored the dangers
of climate change and favored industry at the expense of clean
air and water, Mr. Kerry is a longtime and thoughtful champion
of environmental protection. Mr. Bush played politics with the
Constitution, as Mr. Kerry would not, by endorsing an amendment
to ban gay marriage. Mr. Kerry has pledged to follow the Geneva
Conventions abroad and respect civil liberties at home. A Kerry
judiciary -- and the next president is likely to make a significant
mark on the Supreme Court -- would be more hospitable to civil
rights, abortion rights and the right to privacy.
--Washington
Post