The Tribune sez that voter intimidation and suppressing the vote are longtime traditions in Florida. So, relax - it’s just some boys having fun, is all.
Poll watchers’ plans to challenge voter credentials Tuesday may read like some ugly new threat to the democratic process, but at least some historians say it’s just business as usual - particularly in Florida.
“Voter intimidation is a tradition in Florida so long- standing that it must date back at least to the 1830s,'’ said Cantor Brown Jr., a Florida A&M University history professor.
“Our elections typically have been tumultuous. It’s more the rule than the exception.'’
The SP Times has a little more helpful take on the whole situation.
Hoping to ease rising concern over voter challenges, state elections officials on Friday released new guidelines for handling such challenges without delaying other voters.
The four-page memo from state Elections Director Dawn Roberts was an attempt to clarify a 109-year-old election law that in recent days has generated widespread anxiety about whether it would be used to deter voters.
The memo emphasizes that voter challenges must be resolved without delaying other voters.
It says that even if a challenge is successful, the voter must be given the option to file a provisional ballot. And it reaffirms that inclusion on a controversial state felon list is not sufficient evidence to sustain a challenge.
……
State law allows each political party and candidate to post a single preapproved poll watcher at each precinct. They must be registered to vote in that county, and they cannot be a candidate or law enforcement officer.
While historically there to gauge voter turnout, this year some are expected to challenge voters.
Under state law, they must do so in a sworn affidavit. Election workers on site are then charged with deciding if the challenge if valid.
Public records show officials in Hillsborough County have approved 806 watchers; Pinellas, 616; Pasco, 120; and Citrus, 77. Hernando numbers were not available. Miami-Dade expects more than 2,325. Jacksonville’s Duval has 959 signed up.
Roberts’ memo recommended supervisors designate areas in each precinct where a challenge might be resolved, away from the table where other voters are checking in. It also spelled out that the poll watchers’ challenge must be substantiated by evidence.
The memo also said that inclusion in the state’s flawed felon voter database is not sufficient evidence. Hood discarded the list in July after critics found multiple flaws in the data.
If a challenge is successful, the would-be voter must be offered the chance to cast a provisional ballot, the memo said. That would allow a voter to appeal the precinct workers’ decision before the county canvassing board, which reviews all provisional ballots before they can be counted.
Browning said it’s naive to believe such guidelines, even if strictly followed, will maintain decorum.
“That sounds good, but you’re in a polling place and your right to vote has just been challenged, what are you going to do?” Browning said. “Are you going to sit back while others decide your fate.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re going to get ticked. You may yell and stammer around the place and have your hands in the air and maybe use profanity. That alone is going to be disruptive.”
Such concerns prompted Pinellas County Elections Supervisor Deborah Clark, even before Roberts’ memo, to add a note at the top of a form that poll watchers will use to file challenges. It notes that it is a third-degree felony to falsely affirm an oath in election matters.
“I just want people to know that if they make this allegation, it’s serious,” Clark said. “If they willingly make it falsely, it’s a felony of the third-degree.”
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UPDATE - the party party has a related piece. (RIGHT click and “save link as” or follow the first link to stream.)
BlogWood readers are aware of the GOP challenges to registered voters in Ohio and Florida.
Early details indicated that Repugs were mailing literature to voters in minority precincts and compiling lists of returned mail in order to challenge those voters who were unable to get mail at their registered address. According to the GOP, a returned letter is proof that fraud is taking place.
Now, we learn that in Ohio, and quite possibly elsewhere, the letters the GOP sent were registered mail - the kind you have to accept and sign for. So, if anyone willfully refused a registered letter from the GOP, or if anyone was not home and didn’t bother to trek down to the post office to retrieve said letter, they were put on a challenge list.
In Ohio, the state party had local representatives swear out affidavits to the effect that the voters on the challenge list were not eligible to vote. Thankfully, challenged voters showed up at a recent hearing and raised hell, and this particular strategy may just land some Rethugs in jail where they belong.
When Catherine Herold received mail from the Ohio Republican Party earlier this year, she refused it.
The longtime Barberton Democrat wanted no part of the mailing and figured that by refusing it, the GOP would have to pay the return postage.
What she didn’t count on was the returned mail being used to challenge the validity of her voter registration.
Herold,who is assistant to the senior vice president and provost at the University of Akron,was one of 976 Summit County voters whose registrations were challenged last week by local Republicans on behalf of the state party.
She went to the Board of Elections on Thursday morning to defend her right to vote and found herself among an angry mob — people who had to take time off work to defend their right to vote.
After hearing some of the protests, the board voted unanimously to dismiss all 976 challenges.
The move, ironically, came from Republican board member Joseph Hutchinson and was seconded by Republican Alex Arshinkoff after they determined that the four local Republicans who made the challenges had no evidence to back up their claims.
The group whose right to vote was at stake Thursday was diverse — old and young, black and white, professional, blue collar, veterans, immigrants, and students — and many were assisted by volunteer attorneys for the Ohio Voter Protection Coalition.
No further challenge
In addition to dismissing the challenges, the elections board ordered that none of those voters whose registrations were called into question could be challenged again at the polls.
The board was giving each a letter to present at the polls should their registrations be challenged there.
“I’m 62 years old, I’ve been voting for 40 years…. I think it’s appalling. It’s scare tactics,'’ Herold said after her hearing.
Herold said she moved in January, but changed her address with the board of elections and has voted twice since then — in the March primary and in the August special election.
But returning the Republican literature landed her on the “challenged'’ list.
Many of the challenged voters — initially 35,000 statewide — were targeted because cards sent to them were returned to local boards of election as undeliverable.
Herold was angry when she was notified that her right to vote was being challenged.
“I felt that my voracity was being challenged, that my honor was being challenged. They basically were saying that I lied about where I lived. I resented that.'’
The challengers, all older longtime Republicans — Barbara Miller, Howard Calhoun, Madge Doerler and Louis Wray — were subpoenaed by the elections board and were present at the hearings. Akron attorney Jack Morrison, a Republican, volunteered to represent the four.
Democratic board member Russ Pry suggested that the four could be subject to criminal prosecution for essentially making false claims on the challenge forms. The form states that making a false claim is subject to prosecution as a fifth-degree felony.
On Morrison’s advice, Miller then refused to take part in any hearings after Herold’s, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Wray filed a challenge against 25-year-old Barbara Jean DeWilde of Stow, but testified that he had no personal knowledge that DeWilde didn’t live at her Stow address, other than information he received from Summit County Republican Party headquarters.
DeWilde called the challenge “a mockery of America’s free election process.'’
Immigrant responds
Twinsburg resident Errol Horam’s registration was challenged twice.
An immigrant from Jamaica, Horam, 55, said he came to the United States because “it is the greatest democracy on the face of the earth.'’
“I am disappointed in the Republican Party,'’ Horam said as he left the hearing room.
“I’m really disappointed that they are trampling on people’s rights and democracy and depriving them of their right to vote.'’
The angry voters had the Republicans on the defensive.
“Why’d you do it?'’ one challenged voter shouted out at Calhoun. “Who the hell are you?'’ the man asked.
“What the hell do you care?'’ replied Calhoun, an attorney.
……
Bennett on Thursday defended the GOP’s challenge of voter registrations, saying that efforts by Democrats that registered the likes of Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy to vote warranted it. However, he said GOP attorneys — other than just Morrison — should have been at the hearing to represent the four party members who signed the challenges.
“I don’t know what happened. I’m still looking into that,'’ he said.
……
Pry and elections board member Wayne Jones said after the hearing that they intend to contact the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the challenges.
“You don’t mess with somebody’s right to vote,'’ Jones said. He believes the effort to challenge legitimate voters is proof that Republicans are running scared in Ohio.
……
“There was no evidence,'’ Hutchinson said of the challenges.
Yeah, like someone’s gonna show up on election day and claim to be Dick Tracy?
Rethugs are panicking, and for good reason. If minority votes are counted, Kerry will easily win. Florida’s looking good, too, with Kerry holding a commanding lead in the Miami area that may be too much for Bush to overcome in the rest of the state.
The Herald poll shows Sen. John Kerry winning Miami-Dade County with 54.3 percent of the vote to 41.5 for Bush. Four percent are undecided.
Splitting those undecided voters down the middle, Kerry goes to 56 percent, Bush to 43 and Ralph Nader will end up with less than 1 percent.
If Kerry wins Miami-Dade County 56 to 43, then the likelihood of him winning Florida is very high. Here’s why:
In 2000, Al Gore beat Bush by almost 40,000 votes in Miami-Dade County.
BIG NUMBERS
According to the Herald poll, done by Zogby International, Kerry is positioned to win Miami-Dade by anywhere from 90,000 to 100,000 votes.
A margin that large in Florida’s most populous county would be hard for Bush to make up across the rest of the state.
Now I realize if the poll’s margin of error were to fall in the president’s favor, Kerry would beat Bush, 53 to 46 percent (instead of 56-43). But even then, because of new voters, Kerry would still walk away with 50,000 more votes than Bush.
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(via Florida Politics)
OrlandoSentinel
More than 2 million Floridians will have cast their ballots before a single precinct opens at 7 a.m. Tuesday if the early and absentee voting blitz holds its current pace.
That is more than a third of all people who voted in the 2000 presidential election and almost 20 percent of the state’s 11.4 million registered voters.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in the 15 years that I’ve been here,” said Sharon L. Harrington, Lee County supervisor of elections. “Just think what it’s going to be like on Election Day if it’s like this for early voting.”
With five days left to vote before Tuesday, about 1.4 million people already have made their choice.
At least 718,000 had taken advantage of Florida’s new early-voting system by Wednesday, according to a survey by the Orlando Sentinel of 64 of the state’s 67 counties, including the most populated areas. At that pace, almost 1.1 million people will have cast ballots at early-voting sites by the end of Monday.
In addition, about 1.5 million absentee ballots have been mailed to voters in 63 counties, with more than 707,000 already completed and returned. That number could swell to 1.1 million if roughly three-quarters of the absentee ballots mailed out are returned, as election supervisors expect.
About 700,000 people voted absentee in the 2000 election.
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Remember the racist and highly discredited Florida voter purge list? Once it was found to have been stripped of GOP trending Hispanic voters, it was finally dropped by the state. Well, the state backed down and stopped insisting that individual counties use the list to purge their rolls, but the use of the list was not banned - just made voluntary.
Now, state GOP officials are making a big stink over what they say are ineligible ex-felons who have already voted or who have registered and plan to vote. They are threatening to bring in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate what they claim is an emerging case of fraud.
The fraud in this case is being perpetrated by the GOP, however, as they are using the discredited purge list, a list that even Jeb! was forced to acknowledge should not be used, to selectively disenfranchise and intimidate voters who, as a group, tend to vote Democratic.
Even if the list is not used to openly challenge potential voters, the notion that the FDLE might be involved in investigating voting is chilling to many. However, the plan seems to be to use this list to challenge voters at the polls, thus gumming up the works, since in Florida, a single challenge, even a spurious one, can bring precinct operations to a screeching halt, thus increasing lines and frustration, and causing many voters to give up and leave.
Here’s the SP Times.
The Florida Republican Party said Thursday that more than 900 felons already have voted illegally or requested absentee ballots, triggering another controversy over the party’s aggressive efforts to identify Floridians who might be unqualified to vote.
Using two controversial and flawed state databases, Republicans also said they identified an additional 13,568 felons expected to vote by Election Day, based on their participation in the 2000 or 2002 elections or their recent registration as a new voter.
The list of 921 felons who have already voted includes 65 names from Hillsborough County; 36 from Pinellas County; 11 from Hernando; three from Citrus; and one from Pasco. The party plans to give all its information to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation.
“We believe this is simply the tip of the iceberg and there could be potentially additional felons who have registered,” said Mindy Tucker Fletcher, spokesman for the Florida Republican Party.
But within hours of the Republicans’ announcement came indications that the GOP list may suffer some of the same problems that caused Secretary of State Glenda Hood to scrap her controversial list of 47,763 suspected felon voters in July.
Reporters for the St. Petersburg Times quickly found two Tampa Bay area individuals on the GOP list who say they have had their voting rights restored.
Records show Neal D. Bolinger, 57, of St. Petersburg had his rights restored in 1974, two years after his conviction for grand larceny, and has been voting ever since.
He used an absentee ballot last week to vote straight Republican.
It’s the second time in four years his name has been flagged. He had to convince Pinellas County election officials in 2000 that he was qualified.
“If every four years I come up on the list and have to have myself reinstated, that will become a problem, and I’ll have to start shaking some trees,” he said.
Tampa resident Jeffrey Arnold, 44, said he received his clemency more than a dozen years ago and has been voting ever since. The exact status of Arnold and others could not be confirmed Thursday by the Times.
Fletcher acknowledges the GOP’s list started with flawed data.
Besides the state’s controversial felon voting list, it relied on a Florida Parole Commission clemency list, updated through Oct.14, that has proven inaccurate in the past because it does not include many felons whose rights were restored under Gov. Reubin Askew in the 1970s.
“We felt it was important to see if supervisors (of elections) had done their jobs and cleaned their list when some admitted they hadn’t,” Fletcher said. “We wanted to see if the law was being broken across the state systematically.”
But some supervisors countered that the list came from the same database Hood had ordered them not to use.
“Why would they use a list that is determined to have errors?” asked Pinellas supervisor Deborah Clark. “If their real objective is to keep ineligible voters from casting ballots, why didn’t they give the list to supervisor of elections right away? No one from the Republican Party has contacted me.”
Hillsborough Supervisor Buddy Johnson sounded a similar theme.
“I don’t have the same information,” he said. “I’m not removing anyone off any voter list until I have ascertained that they are in fact a felon.”
(ed. note - this is Jeb!’s “Buddy,” having been appointed by the Gov., and if Buddy sees flaws in these methods, then they are seriously wrong.)
Democrats and civil rights advocates charged that Thursday’s announcement was a Republican maneuver aimed at suppressing Tuesday’s vote and Sen. John Kerry’s odds at winning Florida’s 27 electoral votes.
The mere threat of an FDLE investigation into questionable cases could chill turnout among qualified voters, they contend.
“This is just one more attempt to intimidate, harass and disenfranchise voters,” Florida Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox said.
The potential impact of the Republican effort is unclear, since there is no mechanism before Election Day to challenge votes that have been cast.
“You can’t take a vote back out of the box,” said Florida Deputy Secretary of State Alia Faraj.
But the state GOP has not ruled out using the information on the remaining 13,568 suspected felons to challenge voters at the polls on Election Day, Fletcher said.
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A writer for Rolling Stone decided it might be fun to volunteer for the Bush campaign in Orlando. He was a dedicated worker, and probably helped Dubya gain a few votes, but I doubt the Bush campaign is very happy about this article.
In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.
Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff’s deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas — like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. “We’d save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses,” he said. ” ‘Cause you know if they got wounded…”
“You could just shoot them,” I said.
“Exactly — pow! Just shoot ‘em dead, right in the ground.”
He went on.
“We’d just have a big breeding farm in Colorado,” he said. “Course, it’d be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You’d have to have a special security force to maintain ‘em.”
“That’s where folks like us would come in,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said.
Folks like us. I was getting the hang of it.
In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn’t vote. He didn’t make any promises.
In mid-July a girlfriend came down from New York to visit me. I recruited her to help me with an idea I’d had to at least temporarily diversify my office environment. We decided that she would pose as a reporter for Vibe magazine, call our offices and ask whoever answered the phone if she could interview our “black volunteers.”
“Penny” got my officemate Ben Adrian on the phone, and he instituted a frantic search that lasted several days. We thought at first that we might have a black professor from the University of Central Florida (sixteen miles away) on our volunteer list, but he turned out not to be available. Then Rhyan Metzler, the local Republican Party operative, gave us the number of an elderly man in Sarasota named Johnny Hunter.
As the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for the Republican Party of the State of Florida, Johnny was used to being called to this sort of duty. On the phone with “Penny,” he explained that his job involved traveling around the state to meet people. “Wherever they need me,” he said, “that’s where I be rolling to.” Finally, Ben came through with someone more local. He managed to persuade a thirty-seven-year-old Promise Keeper Christian named Lorin Jones, a phlegmatic fellow who was recovering from two brushes with congestive heart failure, to come in for an interview.
We scheduled it, but “Penny” never showed up. I wanted to be there for what I knew would be an excruciatingly awkward situation; the lone black volunteer, dragged into the office to show off to the media, surrounded by a bunch of nervously small-talking white Republicans waiting for the no-show journalist.
Exactly this situation materialized. The bespectacled Lorin sat surrounded by me, Ben and a few other folks from the campaign, and treated this anxious clock-watching crowd to a lesson in the vagaries of black urban existence: “My dad was a drinker,” he said. “He cared about the bottle more than he loved us. But what my mom did was, she worked — she was there in the afternoon; she wanted to see what we were doing in school…. ”
“Gee,” mumbled Ben. “I can’t imagine the strength…. I’d like to meet her.”
“I know what it’s like to have a parent who’ll put a belt on my butt,” Lorin continued.
Nervous silence. Nods.
A few minutes later, “Penny” called to cancel, citing car trouble. Lorin hung in there for a few minutes. Our older volunteer coordinator, Don Madden, came over to chat; the two of them apparently went to neighboring schools in California. Don’s school, Don said, was great at basketball, but, he said, winking at Lorin, “You were probably the only guys who could have beaten us.”
Lorin laughed uncomfortably. “We were OK,” he said. “We were pretty good. Our college was pretty good at basketball.”
Then another staffer came over to say hi. He knew Lorin from past campaigns and asked if Lorin was planning on coming in to do phone banking. Lorin answered that he wasn’t, that he was busy setting up a school-supplies giveaway charity event in his neighborhood. The staffer laughed.
“Oh, come on,” he said jokingly. “I know how you people don’t like to work.” Lorin, who was halfway out the door, stopped at this. His smile disappeared. For a moment, he was genuinely pissed off. “We don’t like to work?” he said. “That’s all I do is work to make you white Republicans look good.”
The staffer, a jovial guy who I normally liked quite a bit, said nothing and simply slapped Lorin on the back, laughed and helped him out the door.
“Good old Lorin,” he said, going back to his office.
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The GOP is blatantly attempting to suppress the minority vote in Florida and other battleground states. Their strategy seems to boil down to gumming up the works on election day in minority precincts - slowing the process to a crawl so that less people are willing or able to vote.
Blatant cheating implies desperation, which is confirmed by a new Republican poll.
.Hmmm. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio has just finished a survey of 12 battleground states and finds Bush and Kerry tied with 47% of the vote apiece. But when he weights for minority turnout based on the 2000 exit polls, Kerry is ahead 49.2%-45.7%. And when he further updates the weighting to take into account the most recent census results, Kerry is ahead 49.9%-44.7%.
As Fabrizio blandly puts it, “It is clear that minority turnout is a wildcard in this race and represents a huge upside for Sen. Kerry and a considerable challenge for the President’s campaign.” More accurately, if Fabrizio is right “ that Kerry is ahead by 5% overall in the battleground states” Kerry is a sure winner on November 2.
Original press release (pdf) is here.
What this poll is saying is that if minorities turn out in the same percentages (or greater) than they did in 2000, there is no way that Bush can win. It wont even be close - unless the GOP can cheat their way past a 5 point margin of victory.
Protect the rights of voters: volunteer NOW.
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Bob Harris
UPDATE: Salon reports that, despite most media accounts, Rehnquist may be gravely ill:
Numerous medical studies only mention tracheotomy — in which surgeons cut a hole into a patient’s windpipe to aid breathing — as a treatment for a rare form of thyroid cancer called anaplastic carcinoma. According to the University of Virginia Health Center, “anaplastic carcinoma is an extremely serious and aggressive thyroid cancer which often results in the death of the patient … within several months of diagnosis.”
And from the Los Angeles Times:
The most dangerous form is anaplastic… “one of the most malignant types of cancer known to humans,” said Dr. Yuri Nikiforov, a pathologist and thyroid expert at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine… Fatality rates top 95 percent in the first year after diagnosis…
A tracheotomy indicates that the tumor threatened to obstruct Rehnquist’s windpipe, and that the tumor is fast-growing, according to several outside thyroid specialists. “At his age, having had a tracheotomy, the first thing that comes to mind is… anaplastic thyroid cancer,” said Dr. Peter Singer, chief of clinical endocrinology at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.
Make no mistake: we are likely about to decide the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation.
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Florida and Ohio are running neck and neck in the vote suppression game. Both states have actively sought to disqualify thousands of new registrations on flimsy grounds. Florida was just given the OK to do so by a judge.
We’ve recently heard of they have already been caught playing illegal games with voter registrations, so I think it’s highly likely that they may have created many faulty registrations themselves. This serves to gum up the process as well as giving them the “proof” that they need to justify their intimidating tactics.
They plan to put “Poll Watchers” in certain precincts (I have no doubt that, coincidentally, most precincts staffed with GOP watchers will be in poor and minority neighborhoods.) to challenge certain voters. Now, the way the system works in Florida, just one or two challenges, even if they are without merit, can shut down the entire precinct, as each poorly trained poll worker must weigh in with an opinion as the whether or not the challenged voter should be allowed to cast a ballot.
Working people will not have time to wait in line forever. They will get discouraged, or just have to get back to work, and they will leave the line. Every lost vote is a small victory for the GOP.
Election Protection Volunteer provides on way that you may be able to help.
TBO.com.
The Republican Party said Tuesday that it may equip its Florida poll watchers with lists of voters whose registrations appear fraudulent, then use a little- known section of state law to try blocking them from voting as they arrive at the polls.
Democrats quickly denounced the unprecedented tactic but did not rule out the possibility that they, too, may file eligibility challenges next week.
With both sides amassing armies of lawyers, the prospect of the fight working its way into neighborhood polling stations is frightening county elections supervisors because the arcane procedure is so unwieldy it could shut down entire stations each time it is exercised.
……
(Florida Republican Party adviser Mindy) Tucker Fletcher would not identify which voters the Republicans believe have fraudulently registered to vote, but in comments this week she specifically complained of felons and voters with false addresses on the voting rolls.
The Republicans have compiled a list of voters that likely provided faulty addresses.
Tucker Fletcher said the party conducted widespread mailings to newly registered voters of all parties and created a database of the name and address on mailings that were returned by the post office. She would not say whether that list would be used in any potential challenges at the polls of voting rights.
The British Broadcasting Corp. reported Tuesday that it had obtained a portion of that database, which lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville.
Tucker Fletcher said the partial list obtained by the BBC “is not going to be used in any way to challenge voters.'’
Uh, would that denial have anything to do with the fact that the Jacksonville list may well be illegal, since it looks to have been compiled using race as a factor?
(back to the TBO.com article)
Under the state’s challenging provision, observers must file an affidavit detailing their cause for suspicion. The voter then is notified and asked to fill out an affidavit of his own.
Browning said, “At this point, that voter is going to be incredibly, incredibly ticked off.'’
Voting in the entire polling place is then suspended as all poll workers present are required to convene to take a vote on whether the voter should be allowed to cast a ballot. Majority rules.
If a majority of poll workers - who have received no more than 20 minutes of training on the procedure - decide the voter should not vote, a provisional ballot is provided to the voter that will be sealed in a secrecy envelope and considered by the county’s canvassing board in the days after the election.
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said he had never encountered a challenge in 16 years. Browning said he had encountered a challenge only once in his 24- year career.
Matt Miller, a spokesman for Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign, said, “All the Republicans are able to talk about are, No. 1, scare voters from the polls and, No. 2, raise questions about the election.'’
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TAPPED expresses almost exactly the thoughts I was having this morning, thus saving me the trouble of actually having to write anything.
First, the GOP, using what appear to qualify as illegal methods, has attempted to mislead thousands of Democratic-leaning voters in Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, into thinking they’d be registered but are not. (And Ed Gillespie, whose own outfit is funding these efforts via Sproul & Associates and God knows what other firms and consultants, is alleging Democratic fraud in precisely those states! Black is white. Up is down.) Consequently, those thousands of people are going to show up at polls and probably run into a lot of confusion and paperwork and problems. At the same time, Republican secretaries of state and election officials in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere are pushing interpretations of election statutes that further muddy the waters for those who do get to vote.
Having done as much as possible to create the conditions for a confusing election, the GOP is getting ready to cast the inevitable results of that confusion — people turning up in the wrong precincts, people who’ve moved from the neighborhood they originally registered and are trying to vote wherever they live now, and so forth — as symptoms of outright election fraud. On Election Day, the GOP will challenge as many votes as they can at the polls, on whatever pretext is handy. They’ve already said they will. And then, if they’re behind at the end of the day, GOP officials will start alleging massive voter fraud in Ohio, Florida, and elsewhere, whatever the facts on the ground are.
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Remember the flap about the superfluous “citizenship checkbox on Florida voter registration forms? Basically, the state says that a new voter must both sign a pledge that affirms citizenship and check the little box on a different part of the form.
The state wanted to disqualify thousands of new voter registration forms (in the name of combating fraud). A judge just ruled the state can go ahead and throw out these new registrations.
Funny how Repugs deride that bureaucracy thing, except when they embrace it.Ruling allows Florida to reject incomplete voter registrations
Florida election officials will not be required to process incomplete voter registration forms for the presidential election, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King said the three prospective voters for whom the lawsuit was filed did not have the legal standing to pursue the case, which was backed by the AFL-CIO.
But he gave the union a chance to file a new version of the lawsuit next month with people who meet the standard.
That leaves the AFL-CIO and the Advancement Project, a social action group, on the losing side of an attempt to force election officials to accept incomplete registration forms before the Nov. 2 election.
The forms were from people who signed to affirm their eligibility, but failed to provide an identification number, such as from a driver’s license or a Social Security card, or check boxes affirming their citizenship, mental capacity and felony status.
Applicants filling out registration cards are required to sign a form, affirming that they meet eligibility requirements, but applicants must also check separate boxes on the form.
Attorneys with the Washington-based Advancement Project said the plaintiffs would file an appeal by Friday. The group argued that the rejections disqualified more than 14,000 people across the state, with a disparate effect on minorities. Nearly 45 percent of the challenged forms in one county, Duval, came from blacks.
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