Monday, September 27, 2004
Pulling out the Stops (4:44 pm)
As In These Times reported last month, several Republican Secretaries of State are working hard to block new, young or minority voters from the polls. These efforts seem to have grown more fevered as Democratic get-out-the vote drives rack up new registrants.
Take Ohio, where Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is trying to enforce an outdated law requiring that voter registration applications be submitted on 80 lb. stock. Thousands of already-submitted registrations could be delayed until after the election as a result, according to a post on Daily Kos.
In at least one county, board of elections officials are ignoring Blackwell’s request to send out new applications to those voters who submitted registrations on sub-par bond. “We don’t have a micrometer at each desk to check the weight of the paper,” said Michael Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County election Board.
The Ohio law, which was meant to ensure that voters??? signatures would hold up over time for verification purposes, has been rendered moot by the fact that the applications are now scanned for preservation. A more relevant law in this instance might be
Section 1971 of the U.S. Code, which deals with voting rights:
No person acting under color of law shall??.deny the right of any individual to vote in any election because of an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting, if such error or omission is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law to vote in such election.
posted by Jessica Clark
Reader Comments
How can we believe anything at all that the media - print and broadcast tells us?
Now, I watched the debate made my own assessment as to which man was more credible, but the trickling of information following the debate painted a completely different result and those amazing polls are all over the map.
Bush has an abysmal record and isn’t running on it but away from it except for his efforts on the war on terrorism which remarkably the majority of those polled give him very high marks for his wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, using wrong intelligence and telling us the wrong story.
Although many believe that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do, the administration continues to argue that regardless of the absence of WMD and any proof of ties to al Qaeda - as one analyst said: “Iraq is the beachhead” in the war on terrorism.
The administration is still trying to suggest that dissent over the war is giving aid and encouragement to our enemies and apparently is coordinating their assertions with those “swift boat veterans for truth” who have a new ad out with two wives of former POW’s claiming that Kerry’s protesting against the war was treasonous and his opposition to this war is also anti-American.
It’s totally disgusting and a shameful distortion of Kerry’s position but money can do what it wants to and if money wants to define the sky as being red, the time can be bought to convince enough people that it is indeed red!
How can we have any reasonable hope of Bush being revealed for what he and his administration is all about if when he is actually side by side with his opponent and made to look ridiculous on the same TV’s that we see the disastrous footage and information coming out of Iraq, he’s still rated as being credible! It just flies in the face of reason! I can not, no matter how hard I attempt to reason what is really going on based on this polling data.
Recalling what Joe Klien stated in the recent Time magazine article that many respondents in the polls refuse to even answer questions therefore are the polls that credible; but that doesn’t give me that much comfort either.
If any other media outlet had made those mistakes in judgement as the FOX
reported had they would have been excoriated by that ‘Fair and balanced” FOX news station!
I hope that legal efforts are being made in Ohio to use Section 1971 of the US Code to force the Ohio Secretary of State to accept the voter registration cards presented on other the 80 lb paper. This is a travesty of democracy in the lowest slimiest form.
posted by Gregg Alf on 9-29-04 at 2:16 PM