The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #114174   Message #2481298
Posted By: Amos
31-Oct-08 - 08:51 PM
Thread Name: BS: Notes on the Presidential Campaign
Subject: RE: BS: Notes on the Presidential Campaign
"...First and foremost, Republicans are actively seeking to suppress the voter turnout among the youth and minorities and poor people likely to support Obama.

In Indiana, for example, Republicans filed a lawsuit to block early voting in and around the struggling industrial city of Gary. Republicans lost the suit, but they are appealing.

Republicans are sending private investigators to intimidate lower-class Democratic voters in New Mexico who were legitimately registered by ACORN and other grassroots organizations. (Please see related postings exposing the fraudulent swiftboat-style attacks on ACORN to distract public scrutiny of the Republican vote scams.)

Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), voter ID laws or being erratically enforced around the country. Some (not all) Republican election officials have been accused of requiring government-issued photo IDs from all voters, which impacts those in poverty as well as legal immigrants who often lack the means to obtain birth records and other documents needed for photo IDs.

While Ohio now allows voters to prove their identity with any array of documents, for example, Republican dominated states like Kansas and Missouri are enforcing the strictest possible interpretation of the law in urban areas likely to vote Democratic.

Another tactic is removing American citizens from the voter registries for dubious reasons. Here in Colorado, for example, as reported by the New York Times, more than 37,000 names were purged from the registration database by the Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman, who critics contend should have resigned his post from the conflict-of-interest when he won the Republican nomination to run for congress. The Colorado court of appeals on October 30 ordered these voter registrations restored, fortunately.

Also here in Colorado, as another example, Republicans last month told students at liberal Colorado College (in conservative Colorado Springs) that students could not register to vote if their parents live out of state, which as untrue.

And right here in predominantly Democratic Denver, Republican-owned Sequoia voting systems company failed to deliver to the post office more than 10,000 mail-in ballots while telling city election officials that all of the expected 21,000 ballots had been mailed. (This incident represents only one of the required mailings.) Sequoia now admits they made a "technical" error, and the ballots have been mailed to waiting voters.

Elsewhere around the country, as you can learn with a simple Web search, we're seeing Republican voting officials being accused of disenfranchising voters in Democratic districts by not printing enough paper ballots, not assigning enough voting machines, or even reducing the number of polling places....

(Huffington Post)