Voting concerns for the upcoming election

[sauronsfinger]

A CNN investigation shows that the whole ACORN voter fraud business is looking more and more "like a fraud perpetuated against ACORN".

Article and video of the report
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/10/18/cnn ... act-check/

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Just for some balance, here are some conservative sites linking to the original report of, yes, Drew Griffin of CNN:

CNN's Drew Griffin dares to tell the truth about ACORN and Obama

CNN: ACORN fraud and ties to Obama

Here is Griffin's next report:

Another Drew Griffin report on ACORN

It is interesting to see that in Griffin's latest report where he backs away from his earlier reports by adopting the position that it is unlikely that this would cause fraudulent voting, the sole argument that he makes is the same one that some have made here: that there would need to be a coordinated fake identification effort as well. But, like the folks who have made that argument here, he is ignoring the fact that other than a few states like Indiana, there is no requirement to present identification to vote. One thing that comes through very clearly in his reports as a whole is just how extensive the problems with ACORN's registrations are. Do I think that it is likely that these registration problem will lead to fraudulent votes? No, I can't say that. Do I think that it is possible that it will happen? Absolutely. And that is enough for me to be concerned about it. Not the Sarah Palin/John McCain "this is the biggest voting fraud in history and it shows that Barack Obama is trying to destroy democracy" kind of concern. But I'm not going to let either their conservative rhetoric or the liberal rhetoric of sites like thinkprogress or dailykos dictate what I think of this issue.

As for the idea that ACORN is the victim of fraud here, that is bunk. At the very least, they have willfully allowed this to happen by failing to have proper oversight of their workers. That much is more than abundantly clear from watching the Griffin reports, despite his statement to the contrary.

[sauronsfinger]

V - if you were in charge of this effort for ACORN, just how would you implement what you describe as "proper oversight of their workers"?

[vison]

I get more and more confused. ACORN registers voters, right? And ACORN has to submit all registrations, right? And ACORN flags registrations that look "iffy", right?

On to voting day. Would a poll clerk or whatever you call it down in the States, let Mickey Mouse vote?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Difficult to answer, sf, because I have never been involved in that type of thing. But I would do whatever it took to ensure that the endemic problems (which began in previous elections, so it should not be a surprise to ACORN), were eliminated. In all likelihood, an effort to vet the workers would solve most of the problems. But if it took not hiring people to do the work and only using committed volunteers, that's what I have done.

From a purely practical point of view, ACORN has likely done more harm to Obama's campaign than good.

Edit: vison, one thing that was made in clear in those CNN reports is that ACORN has only flagged a small percentage of the problem registrations that have been caught as iffy. And, of course, no one knows how many problem registrations have not been caught. That is why I refer to a tip of the iceburg, because my experience has been when these many problems are discovered, it means that there are far more problems.

[Holbytla]

I have a SIL who works part time registering voters. I haven't had a chance to talk to her yet, but she may be able to shed some light on this.

I have two issues with this subject. One is that it is difficult figuring out who to believe and what is partisan bull.

The other is knowing whether or not this is what happens in every other election or is this worse than ever.

Regardless of who is at fault and what the outcome really is, it is clear the process is in need of being revamped.

[sauronsfinger]

There are two types of signature drives. the first is the one carried out by motivated persons who believe in the worth of what they are doing. This could be in gathering signatures to put their candidate on the ballot if they do not automatically qualify, or in getting a proposition on the ballot, or in registering voters they feel will help their candidate. These persons do the work for free and it is in their interest to make sure that only legit signatures make it on their petitions.

The second is carried out by paid persons who are doing this to make money. Their sole concern is how much they will make at the end of the day.

V- you say these people should be properly vetted. I think that is a good idea and would not object. But how do you realisticaly do that? Lets face it.... petition signature gatherer or voter signer upper are not exactly growth industries which create full time careers. These jobs are by their very nature transient and attract persons who are less than you may otherwise hope for.

So do we get rid of the paid people altogether? Know that in doing so you may also doom many ballot propositions and they many never make it to the ballot.

I really see this as a matter of common sense. Here is what you have said about this problem

Do I think that it is likely that these registration problem will lead to fraudulent votes? No, I can't say that. Do I think that it is possible that it will happen? Absolutely. And that is enough for me to be concerned about it.

In most things, the most obvious and simplest explaination is the one that usually fits. To me, this is a really simple situation. Signature gatherers are trying to put extra money in their pocket and will defraud the people paying them to gain that extra money. That would seem to explain the vast majority of all this.

Having been involved in political campaigns, I shudder to think of how complicated and involved a real effort would have to be to get significant numbers of phony voters to the polls. It would take a well planned and well financed conspiracy and lots of people to pull this off to the point where it yields any tangible results which help your Party or candidate.

There is no evidence that such a conspiracy or plan exists in any form.

[Primula Baggins]

Oregon outlawed paid signature gatherers for initiatives a few years back, and that cleaned up the process considerably. Maybe there should be similar laws for voter registration.

[River]

On to voting day. Would a poll clerk or whatever you call it down in the States, let Mickey Mouse vote?

If some dude walks in with a valid id that says he is Mickey Mouse, yes. And you know, it's entirely possible that there is a guy named Mickey Mouse in the US, either because his last name is Mouse and his parents were cruel or because he's a bit weird and had it legally changed. We've got some odd ducks on this side of the border.

[sauronsfinger]

True story: I worked my way through college from 1967 -71 working as a night auditor and desk clerk in a hotel. One day I had a reservation for DONALD DUCK. I figured it was what we used to call "a hot sheet reservation" and did not give it a second thought. In the middle of the night, a person comes in to claim the reservation. Its a man about 50 years old which means he was born in the 1920's before the cartoon character was a household name. The man gives me his American Express card and drivers license and yes indeed - he was DONALD DUCK.

And I imagine he votes too.

[vison]

Well, off and on over the years I worked as an Enumerator, going door to door registering voters. I think I did it 6 times over maybe 35 years or so. We had "enumerations" before every Federal election and before the referendum on the Meech Lake Accord.

It's not done that way any more, we had a large reform of voter registration and I think you Americans should send a study group up here to find out how we did it. I suggest that Voronwë, yovargas, Primula, Wampus, sauronsfinger and a few others would be perfect for the job. We could go to Whistler for the meeting and invite a few Deputy Ministers to speak . . .

In a rural area like this, a fraudulent registration would not be very likely. It's usually obvious that Joe Blow is Joe Blow, living at 4444 Nutbar Drive. Renters were not and are not common here. So the job was fairly straightforward. It might not have been if the enumerator had been some street person from Vancouver hired and dumped off at the highway, though.

On the other hand, nothing on earth would have stopped me from sitting at home and making up fraudulent registrations. And if people lied to me, I had no real way of knowing they were lying. I had to accept what they said, it wasn't my responsibility to vet them.

And then, over the same period, I worked as District Returning Officer in 5 or 6 elections and for the Meech Lake Accord referendum. Not once did we ever have a fraudulent registration turn up. We did, however, register voters right at the poll, under certain circumstances.

There is an ongoing argument every election about "the homeless" and other "disenfranchised" voters and the assumption is that all those people would vote "left". Yet, in fact, this last election, the ridings with the largest number of those sorts of voters had extremely low turnouts. The lowest in history. While thousands were newly registered, very very few even bothered to vote.

[WampusCat]

vison, I volunteer for your study group. It's my civic duty.

Fraudulent registrations are a problem, but I agree that they are unlikely to cause a serious problem on Election Day. If someone were planning some election hanky-panky, it would be easier to discourage real voters from voting and more effective to tamper with the voting machines.

I've heard of dirty tricks where calls were made to potential voters telling them (falsely) that the polling place had changed. Or telling them that if they hadn't voted in the past two elections, they were ineligible to vote.

And I assume that it is only a matter of time until a computer hacker figures out how to interfere with the vote tallying process.

[sauronsfinger]

There are already reports of voting machines switching votes in West Virginia of some early voters.

http://wvgazette.com/News/200810170676

a sample

At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.
"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

This is not good.

[Cerin]

RollingStone

Here is an excellent (imo) and no doubt highly biased look at the possibility that the various voter suppression tactics the GOP is systematically employing will turn the election this year:

Some quotes from the article:

On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives <snip> are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

But from the start, HAVA (Help America Vote Act) was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico."

Since 2004, the Bush administration and more than a dozen states have taken steps to impede voter registration. Among the worst offenders is Florida, where the Republican-dominated legislature created hefty fines — up to $5,000 per violation — for groups that fail to meet deadlines for turning in voter-application forms. Facing potentially huge penalties for trivial administrative errors, the League of Women Voters abandoned its voter-registration drives in Florida. A court order eventually forced the legislature to reduce the maximum penalty to $1,000. But even so, said former League president Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, the reduced fines "create an unfair tax on democracy." The state has also failed to uphold a federal law requiring that low-income voters be offered an opportunity to register when they apply for food stamps or other public assistance. As a result, the annual number of such registrations has plummeted from more than 120,000 in the Clinton years to barely 10,000 today.

The Help America Vote Act doesn't just disenfranchise new registrants; it also targets veteran voters. In the past, bipartisan county election boards maintained voter records. But HAVA requires that records be centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state — partisan officials — who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible. Ironically, the new rules imitate the centralized system in Florida — the same corrupt operation that inspired passage of HAVA in the first place. Prior to the 2000 election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and her predecessor, both Republicans, tried to purge 57,000 voters, most of them African-Americans, because their names resembled those of persons convicted of a crime. The state eventually acknowledged that the purges were improper — two years after the election.

Rather than end Florida-style purges, however, HAVA has nationalized them. Maez, the elections supervisor in New Mexico, says he was the victim of faulty list management by a private contractor hired by the state. Hector Balderas, the state auditor, was also purged from the voter list. The nation's youngest elected Hispanic official, Balderas hails from Mora County, one of the poorest in the state, which had the highest rate of voters forced to cast provisional ballots. "As a strategic consideration," he notes, "there are those that benefit from chaos" at the ballot box.

All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to the states on "list maintenance" methods.

Even intrepid voters who manage to cast a ballot may still find their vote discounted. In 2004, election officials discarded at least 1 million votes nationwide after classifying them as "spoiled" because blank spaces, stray marks or tears made them indecipherable to voting machines. The losses hit hardest among minorities in low-income precincts, who are often forced to vote on antiquated machines. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its investigation of the 2000 returns from Florida, found that African-Americans were nearly 10 times more likely than whites to have their ballots rejected, a ratio that holds nationwide.

In 2004, an estimated 3 million voters who showed up at the polls were refused regular ballots because their registration was challenged on a technicality. Instead, these voters were handed "provisional" ballots, a fail-safe measure mandated by HAVA to enable officials to review disputed votes. But for many officials, resolving disputes means tossing ballots in the trash. In 2004, a third of all provisional ballots — as many as 1 million votes — were simply thrown away at the discretion of election officials.

I submit that it isn't that hard to imagine mass chaos on election day, as millions of Americans find they are suddenly ineligible to vote.

[Primula Baggins]

This is why the Obama campaign, and I presume McCain's as well, is pushing people to vote early. But I agree it's scary. Millions of votes could be simply thrown away.

Ob. ACORN ref.: There is probably a lot to look into there, too.

[Dave_LF]

For what it's worth, I've moved between states since the last presidential election and to a new address within the same state since the primaries. I've already voted, and I didn't have any trouble. Of course, I voted in the Republican primary this year rather than the pointless Democratic one, so maybe that kept me off of the purge lists.

[TheEllipticalDisillusion]

Dave, maybe the solution is everyone register republican, but vote democrat. They won't purge their own lists, eh?

[vison]

Dave, maybe the solution is everyone register republican, but vote democrat. They won't purge their own lists, eh?

I like the way you think! That is great advice.

[halplm]

Or maybe, we could just make it so everyone has to prove citizenship... and has to dip a thumb in purple ink that doesn't fade for at least a day....

Although, I'm sure that would disenfranchise the poor, or the illegals... I'm not sure how it works...

[Primula Baggins]

It wouldn't work in Oregon, or for any absentee voting.

Hal, your hinting and innuendo is getting really, really tiresome. Some advice: Stand up straight and say what you mean. Otherwise it's easy to assume you have no evidence for anything you say.