You may be too young to remember the 60s, when the dead clawed their way out of Chicago cemeteries so they could vote for Mayor Daley then rampaged the countryside in search of fresh brain meat as depicted in the documentary Dawn of the Dead. Well it only took a few decades for more cadavers to pop up on voter rolls, as they did in Miami back in the 2000 presidential election. But those politically active corpses were just the edge of the unbearable nightmare of that election and the morass voting has become. I've been following the "process" since 2000 turned my state into a national joke and 2008 looks to be the most conflicted election yet.
I wanted to put together a comprehensive narrative of current voting issues but time is running short and fresh news accounts of voting problems are hitting hard and fast. So here's a more tidy run down of voting issues I've come across this season:
- For a great account of the voter disenfranchisement, loose data matching standards and abominable polling equipment used in the 2000 election the first thing to read is Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It includes an interesting bit about optical scan machines that could be switched to accept incomplete ballots when it would normally alert the voter that they need to fix their ballot, I have no idea if that's been fixed. Palast is an investigative journalist with UK's Guardian newspaper and was one of the first people to really dig out the cause of the 2000 Florida election debacle. Also HBO's Recount aired back in May takes a dramatized look at all circumstances surrounding the eventual litigious battle for the presidency back then and it is a long (2 hours!) but highly recommended pick.
- In 2004 and onwards Palast and other have been warning about "voter caging", an illegal practice in which political operatives send a meaningless letter with a "do not forward" label to someone's home to check whether or not they live there and if it gets returned they take it to the polls and challenge the voter's eligibility. In 2007 Palast announced he had uncovered Karl Rove's e-mails detailing plans to do this in the 2006 and 2008 elections and he warned that 4.7 million votes could be stolen in the 2008 election.
- The high levels of foreclosures due to the popped housing bubble and the flailing economy is being taken advantage of in Michigan where the Republican Party is planing to use caging to challenge voters at the polls.
- AlterNet has reported that three states (Kansas, Michigan and Louisiana) are removing voters from their rolls by checking their personal information against the same kind of shitty databases used to send out junk mail. This was the same sort of data used to disenfranchise people with similar personal info as felons in Florida in 2000. This year in Florida we're doing something resembling 2000 with the "no match no vote" law where newly registered voters get their information checked against other state databases and if there's a conflict, even a clerical error they are removed from the voter rolls. It's been said that about 15,000 registrants will be denied a vote because of clerical errors alone.
- Sequoia touch screen voting machines can be broken into using hacked voting cards in just seven minutes. Sequoia was also part of the 2000 debacle as Dan Rather exposed in his Discovery HD series Dan Rather Reports. Back then the paper stock they used to print the cards used for punch card voting was lowered in quality meaning that some of the chads would hang because the paper was too thick. Hey Sequoia, stop sucking.
- Oh wait, I'm not done with Sequoia yet. They didn't supply Colorado with enough absentee ballots so 11,000 people won't be able to vote absentee in Denver. "Sequoia: Trust us to fuck up horribly."
- Back in 2006 there were electronic voting machines that would reset with the push of a yellow button on the back allowing someone to vote multiple times. The defense for the machines was that they would make a very loud beep when the button gets pressed. They were manufactured by Sequoia... wait HOW THE FUCK IS THIS COMPANY STILL IN BUSINESS?!
- The nonpartisan group Election Protection is sending lawyers all over the country to observe polling places. They're also running a hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE for any voting questions or issues to report. Both major political parties are making similar efforts.
- There are widespread reports of "vote flipping", where touchscreen voting machines mark the wrong candidate when a voter makes their selection. Here's a video of it happening in West Virginia, even after recalibrating the touchscreen the machine still selects the wrong candidate but the elections official brushes it off. The Simpsons parodied this problem in this week's Treehouse of Horrors episode.
- Meanwhile the regular racist/asshole tactics of passing out fliers, spreading rumors, etc. about false voting information (wrong days for voting, threats of police presence and arrests at polls and so on) are an even bigger problem this year. The reports are sporadic but some are really egregious. In California the state Republican Party (or an impostor) has been sending non-Republican voters fake registration cards identifying the recipients as Republicans. The fake cards were sent with "do not forward" marks meaning they could also be used for voter caging.
- In Georgia a newly registered voter was sent a letter from her election office giving her two weeks to prove her citizenship (even though she was born in the United States) and it didn't arrive until after those two weeks were up. "Elise Shore, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said letters like those sent to Berry appear to violate two federal laws against voter purging within 90 days of the election." Way to go, Georgia.
- Democracy Now! did a comprehensive feature last week with two prominent bloggers who focus on voting issues.
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